Morons of Brexit

Being that we are a year away from Brexit, as a blogger one is semi-obliged to mark the occasion, but then since everybody else will doubtlessly feel obliged to fill space I figure I won't add to the problem by generating more pointless noise. Instead I thought I would outline what I have to put up with which might explain my current attitude to, well, just about everybody.

To start with I need reiterate where I'm coming from. I am of the view that the EU sucks the big one. Call it what you want but ultimately it's just another government and one even less democratic than the one in London. We should therefore not be content to suffer this. We should leave the EU - but we have to have something to put in place of membership.

In this we must be mindful that the sovereignty as imagined by Brexiters doesn't exist and there is no mode of Brexit that delivers any of the promises made by Vote Leave or Brexiters in general. That much is a demonstrable fact as outlined over the last two years on this very blog.

So what what, of itself, does Brexit improve? Well, nothing. EU membership is merely a symptom of a glacial political decay in London, which has in recent years and months begun to accelerate exponentially and Brexit merely affords us a window to do something about it.

But this is why I do not find common cause with my fellow Brexiters. There are three basic types of Brexier. There are those who think Brexit is the answer to all our problems and the EU is the cause of them. I cannot even begin to bridge the gap between me and those people. There's just no conversation to be had there that doesn't end with me banging my head on the desk.

Then there are the Brexiters who can only see Brexit in binary terms and anything other than a complete severance of all relations with the EU is a betrayal of Brexit. These tend to be the morons who read Spiked Online, who on the face of it seem intelligent enough to grasp the mechanics of Brexit - but in practice prove to be no more sentient than the average Brexit knuckle-scraper - only they'll quote John Stuart Mill at you for completely tangential reasons as a means of establishing their superiority - and to disguise the fact that they don't wish to be sullied with things like details.

Then there is the somewhat more reasonable type who can at least acknowledge that we need a negotiated exit but believe all the answers to all the questions can be resolved by "creative thinking" without regard to planet earth and the rule of law. Some seem to think that Brexit also means the EU stops existing altogether and we can go back to year zero like the last forty years didn't happen. I could make progress with those such individuals if only there were an eternity to go through the issues with them individually.

Then there are London Brexiters who manage to combine all the toxicity of the above but are imbued with an unshakeable view that the entire leave movement revolves around Vote Leave and denizens of London Tory circle-jerkery - with no concept of anything existing outside London, how much damage they're doing, or precisely how stupid they are.

I am told if only I was a bit nicer and didn't go out of my way to alienate these people then they would be a bit more receptive to my message - but we have been over this time and again. It doesn't matter how well argued or well referenced an argument is. It does not make a dent on well worn tribal narratives. I am, therefore, doubling down on my attempts to alienate as many people as possible just to see if there is anybody sane left at the end of the process.

As it happens it tends to be the non-obsessive remainers who are most receptive to what I write and even though they are not necessarily my target audience it is nice to know the effort is appreciated by someone. But then it's not just Brexiters who inhabit the moron column. Remainers have become super-unhinged this week.

Remain-world is an increasingly weird place where, according to them, we are all brainwashed by a bizarre combination of a red bus, Russian bots, big data directed marketing and spooky algorithms. We could not possibly have arrived independently at the conclusion that the EU blows goats.

Like the ultra-Brexiters, there is no possibility of sane or honest dialogue. There is now a multi-million pound "Stop Brexit" industry that chases after every parked car and believes absolutely anything it is told no matter how absurd. They are now the mirror universe Ukip. Lord Adonis is the new Nigel Farage.

What's super-moronic about this bunch is the apparent view that we should "stop Brexit to fix Britain", and though by my own admission Brexit of itself accomplishes bugger all, even if we could sweep it all under the rug we would be unleashing all kinds of hell. The least clever idea of all the options.

Worse still, Twitter has become so polarised that anybody sane has tuned out of Brexit completely - and I don't blame them because my own sanity is hanging from a thread - and many would argue I have already gone three-sheets-to-the-wind mental. They might not be wrong.

In fact, it probably is me who is the deficient one here and probably the biggest moron of all. Anyone with any sense would have moved on to do something more productive than argue with any of them. Politics is one field where the accumulation of knowledge is wasted energy and is in fact a career disability.

Every day it gets harder to say something original about Brexit and the only thing that keeps it in the public eye is the occasional manufactured outrage - which is increasingly jumping the shark and heavily dependent on recycled material. I have now seen every permutation of every stupid argument and every form of self-deception and mental contortion there is.

That is not to say that there isn't further debate to be had but we cannot expect a seismic change in tone until we have formally left the EU and trade talks begin. After which we can expect a new mutation of moronics - where the dishonest meets the profoundly stupid. Having left the EU there will be those on both sides seeking to push their preferred outcomes, each in respect of their own dogmas rather than what represents the best settlement for the UK.

Top of the moron mountain, though, is still our media; the Pestons, Marrs and Kuenssbergs of this world who clutter up Sunday morning television - who only carry an air of competence by way of on-screen comparators - a bizarre subspecies of moron that we elect for reasons that completely escape me. Though Westminster is a veritable moronathon it still doesn't compete with our media which seems to exist solely for the purpose of misinforming politicians who listen to nobody else but the media.

I can, therefore, conclude that my existence as a Brexit blogger is possibly one of the most futile pursuits known to man. The only man I know of with a more bleak destiny is the driver of Elon Musk's roadster coasting toward the abyss of deep space - and being but a mere mannequin he still knows more about Brexit than our entire establishment combined. At this point I wouldn't mind his job but no swap would be on offer because he sure as shit wouldn't want mine.