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Brexit Bites

Mate, I really don’t care. The issue of Brexit was settled almost two years ago. We have ten years from the point at which we leave the European Union to negotiate a free trade agreement. Your next ten years are irrelevant. I was not prepared to end up with absolutely the most harmful outcome imaginable. If they don’t support and help Theresa May to get a deal, there is the risk of having somebody much, much more aggressive. You’re deluded if you think you’ll be able to blame the debacle just on them. I’m beginning to think I may have voted the wrong way.

I have given up on you. The UK is in a trap of its own making. The UK thinks everything has to change on the EU’s side so that everything can stay the same for the UK. Brexit is like a restaurant with a magical menu offering free food. What did they miss, the parents and grandparents who were reading ... of solidarity, partnership, friendship and kindness? This is what solidarity and freedom look like. A bunch of Old Etonian conmen think they know better. Brexit’s complexity is excruciating, but its simplicity is devastating.

We are now at a point where reality starts to bite on all sides.

As posted to Metafilter.

25 May 2018 · Politics

If you read one link out of all of them, read the last one, by Sir Ivan Rogers, the senior civil servant Theresa May fired when he told her what she didn’t want to hear, which was not to trigger Article 50 before we were ready. His speech a couple of days ago got a lot of attention.

If the construction isn’t obvious: the first paragraph has quotes from Brexiters of different stripes, linking mainly to their critics; the second paragraph quotes are from remainers and onlookers. Most of the quotes in the first paragraph are linked to articles dramatically at odds with them, but containing them. I was trying to capture the cognitive dissonance that many on the pro-Brexit side seem to be experiencing.

Meanwhile, I occasionally re-read my blog posts from June 2016, pre- and post-referendum, and still agree with every word of them. 48% of us, living as Cassandra. We now have almost two years of evidence of what a confidence boost Brexit has been for all the overt and covert racists this country has to offer, and how demoralising it is for people of non-British background who live here, whether recent immigrants, long-term immigrants, or descendants of immigrants. I will bitterly oppose it right up to 29 March 2019 and, if we don’t rescind Article 50 in time, until my dying breath, because of the incipient white nationalism it has unleashed.

Added by Rory on 26 May 2018.