Saturday 2 June 2018

Brexit is a moral responsibility


The UK still does not have anything approaching a workable Brexit plan. The government doesn't really know what it wants and no preparations have been made for any outcome. Even if May accepts the NI backstop it will need infrastructure at Holyhead.

That we are this late in the game and still have nothing even close to a legal draft of an NI settlement gives you some idea as to how dysfunctional UK governance has become. They couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery.

Notionally when you have a clan of incompetents making a mess of things we chuck them out and put new politicians in. Except that the opposition couldn't run a bath. There is no possibility of them getting to grips with Brexit. It is beyond their capability.

What this tells you is that our politics is not equipped to handle any sort of meaningful change. The system largely runs on autopilot with civil servants limiting the damage politicians can do. It's amazing it functions as well as it does.

The system as we know it can just about keep the lights on but that is the most it can do. Institutionally it has not been tasked with anything transformative in decades. Consequently Westminster has become a very expensive zoo.

On all the serious things from agriculture to internet governance, the EU instructs them and they tinker around the edges. This is why they have time to indulge themselves in in virtue signalling nonsense.

And though you may look on in dismay at how Brexit is being handled Brexit is not the element that created this dysfunction, it has merely exposed it. This is what it's like all the time. This is why politics is gradually failing.

This is why we need Brexit to happen. There are those who want to stop Brexit because of the chaos it will cause but what they actually mean is they don't want the inconvenience and expense of having to address our political dysfunction.

They say "We need to stop Brexit so we can focus on things like the NHS" but the NHS is a mess for the same reason Brexit is a mess. Our politics is in a state of deadlock underpinned by the economic status quo. All it can do is gradually degrade.

I see the Brexit vote as a torpedo hitting HMS Westminster amidships and now we are watching it capsize. Reversing the Brexit vote would simply be to patch the hole without pumping out the water. You might buy a few more years of fragile stability but that's all.

But on a more serious level we can't afford politicians using public finances as electoral bribes or for their madcap white elephants. We can't afford any more climate virtue signalling and we can't tolerate more tax rises through our utility bills. We can't afford them.

This is a social issue too. We cannot have the Sadiq Khans and Chuka Ummunas bleating about anything other than what matters. They want to ban burger adverts on the tube while London kids are sticking each other with Rambo knives.

We have a Labour front bench more interested in transgender toilets than rape gangs. We have a Tory party more interested in taxing food than solving the housing crisis. This is pre-2008 crash politics - when there was cheap money and they had not a care in the world.

Put simply our politics is not capable of tackling grown up issues. They will fiddle while Kensington burns. And while we are on that subject, Grenfell is totemic for a number of reasons...

We saw overcrowding from illegals, compensation fraud, and systemic failings that should not happen in a first world developed economy. It tells us everything we need to know about the state of British people and the state of our governance.

And this is why I have grown to despise the ultra remainers. They would have it that the status quo was fine and we were a progressive wealthy country and really the only problem is "austerity". But Grenfell shows us the problems run far deeper.

Grenfell shone a torch on the perverse something-for-nothing culture of welfarism, the parasitism of subcontracting, and the absolute dysfunction of our immigration and housing system.

And if we had voted to remain in the EU Westminster would seek to sweep it all under the rug and carry on with business as usual. This we cannot afford. There is no business as usual. We have reached, to coin a phrase, a boiling point.

Our crass parade of virtue signalling morons will not suffice for politics anymore. The centre cannot hold. We cannot have a preening class of hypocritical low grade intellectual pygmies finger wagging at us. We're not the problem. THEY are.

Remainers continue to deploy economic arguments about how Brexit will hit GDP. But whose GDP is it anyway? Not mine or yours. They don't care about us just so long as a single (largely useless) metric keeps growing.

Minor increments in GDP do not translate into wealth, health and prosperity - and even if it did, it is no substitute for good governance and perpetual growth cannot address the sickness in the soul of the country.

There's an old saying "for things to stay the same, everything must change". I feel we are at that point where if we want to preserve civil society as we know it then we must reclaim politics and have this all out. If we shrink from that responsibility then we are finished.

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