There is still much dispute as to precisely what it was that persuaded 17.4 million Britons to vote for Brexit last year. Some may have done it to regain Britain’s sovereignty, some to curb immigration, some because they realised correctly that everyone on the Remain side of the argument from one-hit-wonder gobshite Bob Geldof to that preening renter of overpriced desert islands Richard Branson was a weapons-grade, copper-bottomed tick.
But here’s one thing of which we can be pretty sure: nobody voted Brexit – the biggest public vote in favour of anything in UK history – in order to get more of the same old, same old.
Brexit was, perhaps more than anything, a cri de coeur from the silent majority who had been ignored for too long. It sprung from the same impulse that saw Donald Trump win the U.S. presidency – what political economist (and friend to the Donald) Ted Malloch has argued is a paradigm shift in global politics.
If you had to sum up that impulse in a phrase, it would go something like “Enough of this shit, already.”
Sure we might differ on our preferred solutions, but we’re all agreed what the general problem is. For too long a remote, democratically unaccountable, smug, corrupt, self-serving liberal elite has been making all the rules and all the running, while the rest of us just feel poorer, less fairly treated and more constrained by stupid, politically correct rules, regulations, and taxes in a failing system which wastes lots of our money yet gives us little in return.
The good news is that, against the odds, we won Brexit.
The bad news is that in Britain we’ve still ended up with the same old, same old bunch of tossers at the top.
In the immediate aftermath of the extraordinary palace coup in July last year, where the losing faction of the Conservative party who’d voted Remain somehow managed to slime their way into all the key positions of government – Remainer Theresa May as Prime Minister, Remainer Philip Hammond as Chancellor, Remainer Amber Rudd as Home Secretary – I dashed off a despairing piece called “Brexit won the battle: But now we’ve lost the war.”
Later I wondered whether I’d gone slightly over the top. (Something, as you know, I’m always careful to avoid.) After all, Theresa May seemed to be making all the right noises – “Brexit means Brexit” and so on.
But after yesterday’s budget, I’m disappointed to learn that I was right all along…
Read the rest at Breitbart.
