Better with time? I think not!

The days pass, but the result of the (insert your own derogatory epithet) referendum gets no easier to accept.

Let’s face it: this was an exercise in democracy and one side convincingly won. Not my side admittedly, but there was a distinct majority and that is something that I have to accept. Or do I?

The Leave side made it perfectly clear that if the majority to Stay was less than 60/40 they would continue to campaign for another vote etc etc etc. I see no reason that my efforts should not match theirs, especially as the ramifications of Leave as a reality seem to be increasingly disastrous.

What worries me is that the discussion about what to do about Brexit veers disturbingly close to anti-democratic populism. The people, we are told by the Remainers were too stupid to know what they were really voting for and we have to reform the vote so that it becomes the opposite from what was voted for. Though I am more than enthusiastic to have the vote overturned, I find it difficult to see how this can be done without compromising the principles by which I have lived. Any ideas, this side of totalitarianism gratefully received!

The more you think about such concerns as medical research and development; regional development; educational exchange; cultural exchange; workplace rights; continental justice, and on and on, the more you realize that 40 years of cooperation and implementation cannot be easily rearranged in a couple of years. Brexit is simple insanity. Perhaps we can have the leaders of the Leave campaign sectioned? Though that would be just protecting future voters, it would do nothing for what they have already done!

In the speeded up political life that goes for normality nowadays, we have had the sight of at least two of The Donkey Drivers of the Apocalypse fading into the wastelands of public opprobrium: Boris has fled the limelight, with ghastly face, with the realization that the horror that he had created was well outside the limits of the restricted attention span. The Knife Wielding Gove – more bludgeon than stiletto – appears to be too much even for the notoriously ruthless Conservative Party to accept and, with any luck, that goggle-eyed ideologue will sink down further than the justice department and shrivel in the sunshine of popular hatred. And his hag-like queen as well, with any luck.

What I find totally unacceptable is that the Conservative Party, having trashed the future of the United Kingdom through the cynical manipulations of Cameron who used the whole country as a bargaining counter for his own party-political purposes together with the antics of The Four Donkey Drivers of the Apocalypse – now get to decide who the future Prime Minister is. In fact, of course, it is not even Conservative voters who decide; in fact it might not even be the members of the Conservative Party who decide if May is elected by a landslide of MPs. It will merely be the inept political moaners who fomented this crisis in the first place. The phrase ‘coming home to roost’ seems not to apply to that bunch of right wing wreckers – and I might add that those last three words did not form the first phrase that came to mind to describe them.

And the Labour Party. It is a truism that the thing that the Left does without peer is internecine warfare. At a time when the Labour Party ought to be making the sort of headway that makes punching through a wet Echo hard work, it is spending all its energy in ripping itself apart. I have to admit, even for the Labour Party, the present ability to implode, explode, melt-down, fragment, cannibalise, shred, destroy, vaporize and flush itself down the toilet simultaneously is impressive and unprecedented in my observation of the British political scene. I weep.

Brexit is, quite simply, an absurd future to look forward to, and Something Must Be Done – short of cynically changing the democratic will of the people. I’m a retired English teacher studying Art History, what do I know of the practicalities of political life? A bloody sight more than my political masters given the last few months.

If politics is the art of the possible, then it should be possible for a way to be worked out that allows the British people to stop shooting themselves in the foot before they progress to the brain.

I live in hope and look towards our highly paid and educated leaders to find a way that puts the welfare of the people first rather than petty party political concerns.

Fond hope I fear.