Never in my life have I been so happy, nay ecstatic, to be wrong. Along with so many others, including Nigel Farage, the bookies and the pollsters, I thought the cause was lost. Two propaganda juggernauts, those of HMG and the EU, had been rolling for months, and they seemed unstoppable.
Now I’d like to apologise to the English people for underestimating them. Their innate common sense has seen through the scaremongering lies.
I do mean English rather than British, for the Celtic fringe, besides Wales, supported Remain. Scotland in particular craves staying in, in the misapprehension that the EU’s shattered finances will stretch to picking up the bill currently being footed by the English taxpayer.
Scotland’s politics is aptronymically fishy, meaning it lives up to its leaders’ surnames, Sturgeon and Salmond. Now they’re demanding another separatist referendum, but they’re in for a letdown.
Should they get what they want, the EU will welcome them with open arms but tight fists. They’ll greet the Scots with the same message the Russian PM recently delivered to starving pensioners: Hang on and stay cheerful, but we have no money.
Another excellent result is that we can now say good riddance to Dave, whose photograph should adorn the dictionary next to the word ‘spiv’. His resignation speech was supposed to be dignified, but instead sounded pathetic.
Yet, as far as Dave is concerned, it demonstrated that there’s a silver lining to his referendum cloud. Dave may have lost his job, but he has regained the Eton-Oxford vowels he no longer has to suppress for political gain. Felicitations, old boy, your gain is ours as well. Now off you go, to all those speech-circuit millions. Say hello to Tony for me, will you?
Like any outgoing PM, Dave listed his achievements, in the descending order of importance. Characteristically, he mentioned his subversive campaign for homomarriage above any economic achievements.
One doubts he’s bright enough to see that his push for destroying the institution of marriage might have cost him this referendum. Much of the Leave success has to be due to so many intuitive Tories loathing Dave personally, a feeling doubtless caused largely by his shoving homomarriage down their throats.
People will believe scaremongering only if they respect the scaremonger. Otherwise they’re more likely to be annoyed, and I’m glad the English vindicated this observation.
Also pathetic was the coverage of the historic turnaround on Sky News, a daily dose of which I have to swallow on my France sojourns. One announcer betrayed his true feelings by rounding off the 48.1 per cent Remain vote to 49 per cent. Another screamed at Chris Grayling, one of the Leave leaders, that, contrary to his predictions, the markets are punishing us for the vote.
“I never predicted anything of the sort,” replied Grayling. “We always said there would be some initial turbulence, but it won’t last.”
Indeed, only an economic illiterate would have expected the markets to take such a momentous shift lying down. Traders hate cataclysms and normally respond with panic. Predictably both the shares and the pound plunged the morning after, but by lunchtime they recouped half of their losses.
Our Chancellor threatened a punitive budget if Brexit won, but he’s unlikely to stick around long enough to deliver it. Like Cameron, Osborne unwisely bet his political career on the cause of destroying our constitution. However, it has hung on, which means he won’t.
He predicted the Brexit aftermath to be ‘the first DIY recession in history’, displaying both ignorance of economics and moral turpitude.
It was ignorance because every recession is DIY. Economic upheavals aren’t force majeure. They may be metaphorically described as tectonic shifts, but in reality they’re always man-made, caused by human folly. It was turpitude because it’s conceivable that by DIY Osborne meant that he himself would cause a recession by punishing the people for their wrong choice.
The word ‘punishment’ is very much in the air all over Europe, along with more pleasing words, such as ‘contagion’ and ‘domino effect’. The federasts are running scared, and few sights are more delightful to behold.
Nigel Farage predicted that the EU was moribund whatever the referendum result. That might have been so, but there’s no doubt that the Leave vote makes this rewarding outcome more likely.
Nearly half the people in France, Italy and Holland want to leave the EU and many more (60 per cent in France, for example) have negative feelings about this vile contrivance. Demands for referenda are heard all over the continent, and this kind of fermentation can’t be kept in the bottle indefinitely.
Even the Germans are fed up with sharing their earned wealth with those who haven’t earned it, and Merkel’s political longevity is far from assured. One just hopes that all those Eurocrats, 6,000 of whom get higher salaries than the British PM, have invested their ill-gotten wealth wisely.
I don’t know if Johnson at No 10 and Gove at No 11 will be better than the outgoing duo. But at least they will have got there in the wake of a great victory. Congratulations to them and all those who have fought for it so valiantly and tirelessly. Let’s rejoice.