Voting for Christmas

OK, let's get this out of the way: if you voted to leave, just pour petrol over yourself and strike a match.  Yeah, I know, I'm a sore loser.  But only because I'm exasperated by the sight, yet again, of people voting against their own interests.  It perplexes me that, in England and Wales at least, many of the areas which voted to leave were those who have benefitted most from EU grants and funding over the past few decades.  Turkeys voting for Christmas come to mind.  They don't seem to have thought this through, do they?  Sure, voting to leave the EU was sticking it to the establishment which has marginalised you and done nothing to stem the economic decline of these areas,  But the trouble is that by doing so, you've also just cut off the only major source of funding you had.  Yeah, that'll show those establishment bastards, won't it?

By contrast, many of the strongest bastions of the remain vote were here in the south where, by and large, we've not received so much EU money.  Clearly, here in the south we're far more altruistic than those northern bastards, who now deserve everything they get, (or don't get in terms of EU funding).  Well, parts of the south.  Crapchester voted to leave, despite my best efforts of spraying the word 'Murderers' across as many of their posters as possible.  However, I have a new found respect for the people of Winchester, Guildford, Reading, Alton and other local remain majority areas.  (I was in Alton for work yesterday morning - it was such a contrast to Crapchester, which had wall-to-wall leave posters. I didn't see a single leave poster in Alton - it was all remain.  Perhaps I should move there as they are clearly more on my wavelength than Crapchester). 

But to return to the point, sure, I'm a sore loser.  But I think that I'm entitled to be - the entire leave strategy was predicated upon lies and the narrowing of the 'debate' to immigration, playing on people's worse prejudices.  Besides, I've had to put up with decades of the anti-EU brigade whingeing away when they were in the minority, so fair's fair, I say.  Now it's my turn.  But really, my biggest concern is that so many people I know who voted leave simply don't seem to grasp the potential long term consequences for the UK of leaving the EU.  Quite apart from the economic risks, (sterling and shares have already taken a battering), there are the constitutional risks, with the break up of the Union, via a second Scottish independence vote now a very real possibility.  Then there's the small matter of the vote having effectively delivered the governance of the UK into the hands of an extreme right wing elite - and I don't mean Nigel Farage and the other UKIP clowns.  Indeed, I strongly suspect that Farage could be finished politically - he's served his purpose and now the really dangerous right wingers like Gove, Johnson and Redwood will have no further use for him.  No, it's that latter group - people dedicated to the dismantling of the NHS and waht's left of the public sector, who are the really dangerous ones - they now have the upper hand in the Tory party.

As for David Cameron - shed no tears for this political opportunist. He was the architect of his own downfall - too spineless to stand up to the right wing of his party, he instead pledged to give them a completely unnecessary referendum in return for their compliance during the last election.  As for me - where now?  I've been on the losing end of two political contests in a year.  I'm tired.  Tired of arguing with idiots, (yes, that's right, I think leave voters and Tory voters are idiots, I'm allowed to).  Tired of seeing reason thrown out of the window.  Tired of seeing debate descend into hate mongering.  Tired of seeing right wing extremists being treated as somehow acceptable by the mdia.  Tired of seeing intolerance on the rise.  Tired of seeing everything good about this country denigrated and destroyed.  Tired of seeing turkeys voting for Christmas.  But now isn't the time to give up.  Now is the time to regroup our forces and take up the battle again.  That said, I think I might spend some time here focusing on the pop culture stuff for a while.  It's probably the only way of staying sane.  OK, I'm now going to watch a trashy European movie with subtitles,  Before they ban them.