Oh god, not him!

 

 

 

There is surely nothing more engineered to foster confidence about the Brexit talks than to see the charlatan Gove (the love child of a defrocked pixie and a gobby goblin) skuttling his elven way to Brussels to – to do what exactly?  To add his five pennyworths of facile, slimy lies to the morass of doublespeak that is the British ‘position’ in what should be negotiations?   

     God help us all when that chubby cheeked cheat speaks for Britain!  Still, I suppose Gove can use his White Queen trick of believing five impossible things before breakfast to encourage his verbiage (conveniently forgetting his previous belief that Johnson was supremely unfit to become prime minister) and marching forward to defend the indefensible.

     I felt physically sick when, on the news this evening, I heard that the British Government had offered up as a bargaining chip to bring the discussion to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion the offer not to behave illegally!  How jolly decent of them because, of course, an Englishman’s word is his bond, unless it isn’t.   

     How the EU side can stop themselves from treating the shambles of the British position with anything other than contempt, I really do not know.

    

Let’s face it, at this stage of the “Never ending, stor-ree!” (just thought that I would throw in a reference to the true earworm that music is) the only thing motivating the British side is not, emphatically not, Britain.  Our negotiators couldn’t give a toss for the country and the bulk of the people in it.  Fishermen, the population of Northern Ireland, businesses, imports and exports, areas of deprivation, they have all been thrown off the bus – you know the one that the liars’ liar Johnson paints for recreation – and the members of Johnson’s third or fourth rate cabinet merely look to their wealth as they crunch over the bones of the suckers who ever thought that they might be of concern to them.

     The Conservative Party, as we are regularly told, is one of the most successful political parties in the western world, and it has got its power and its longevity by a callous disregard for anything other than its own survival.  If they do good, like the 1944 Education Act, it is almost by mistake, and they certainly did not reward the architect of that act, RAB Butler with leadership of the party when the time came to choose.

     Johnson, the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister, does not have the intellectual or moral worth to be able to sustain the role.  He has got to where he is today by systematically lying and showing utter disregard to anyone and anything other than himself and his ambition.

     His empty rhetoric way wow blue rinsed ladies of various Conservative Associations, but it doesn’t work when practical things have to be decided on the basis of that rhetoric.  Johnson has no interest in the rules and regulations that govern institutions, he is, as virtually everyone has pointed out, not a details man.  Unfortunately (for us) he has become prime minister at a time when a details man is exactly what is needed.  Rhetoric kills – look at the number of Covid deaths in the UK.  Rhetoric destroys – look at industry still desperately asking the government for leadership and information about what is going to happen in a few weeks’ time.

     “Get Brexit Done!” – the perfect meaningless jingle for Johnson, allowing him to sound dynamic while the empty platitude played well with people who wanted simplicity in an almost terminally complex situation.

     Now we are in the final days when all the detail that Johnson hates so much is everything.  Rhetoric has to be written down in legalistic words where there is no wriggle room for gaudy metaphor and inept simile.

     Johnson’s shoddy, corrupt government now has come to the crux of negotiations.  Real things have to be decided and the only, the absolutely only (I know that is tautology, but I feel it fits here) thing that is motivating Johnson is what he can get away with.

     He will, as he always has done in the past, junk anything and anyone to get what he wants.  His situation is desperate: No Deal will be a financial disaster, and even his most stupefied followers will have to own and admit it eventually; a thin deal will please nobody as everyone will feel hard done by; a generous deal will be regarded by the Brexit fanatics as an act of treason.  There is nothing that Johnson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy everybody.  Perhaps there is nothing that Jonson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy anybody.  And he is going to have to own it.  And he will not be able to do that.

     I can imagine somebody doing the sums (Johnson is far too lazy to do them himself, and besides he doesn’t really know who is in his party anyway) and trying to work out which deal would be the less disastrous.  And the disaster will not be related to the people of Britain it will be directly linked to the fortunes of the Conservative Party.  Politics, not logic or faith or economics or fairness or justice, is going to determine what we get from the “oven ready” deal that has taken four long years to cook.

     And unless Johnson uses the “Long Covid Symptoms” to fabricate himself a get out of parliament card, then he is going to have to own the disaster of his making in years more of his narcissistic premiership, when we will continue to pay the price.

 

I put that bad feeling that you have just read down to the fact that I got to the swimming pool an hour early this morning.  Today was ¡Fiesta! and tomorrow will be an extra day of holiday so instead of opening at 7 am it will open at 8.  An extra hour in bed?  Not really, I am programmed to get up, or at least get ready to get up, at 6.15 am, and if I say in bed longer I feel that I am cheating and I do not get any real benefit.  It is easier to get up at the normal time and do neglected housework to make the time feel valuable, and to give myself a warm glow of self-satisfaction!

     But today I forgot about the holiday and so I had to come back home and do neglected housework etc etc and complete the Guardian Quick Crossword, rather than fill in a single clue and then leave it for later after the swim.

 

 [Yes, I know this image is not upright, but it's too late and I'm too tired to re-jig it]

My catalogue raisonné continues apace with items of little value, but some interest, filling the pages.  Compiling the catalogue is forcing me to look again at some things that I have ignored for years.  For example, I have decided to list a copy of The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde.  This is a volume printed in 1912 with a soft brown suede cover stamped with an interesting Art Nouveau flower design and with the title stamped in gold.  It is not particularly valuable, but it was bought by my father to give to my aunt who in turn gave it to me a quarter of a century later after my father’s death. 

     The suede is rotting and has an unpleasant feel to it, the binding is unravelling, the pages yellowing – and yet, it is important to me.  There is always something about reading the actual pages that people important to you have read before you, whose hands have held the volume in the way that you are holding it.

     Yes, I realize that this is Romantic nonsense, but it doesn’t make the oddly satisfying feeling I have when I handle the book any less real to me.

     A worthy addition to the catalogue!  And it takes my mind off other things.

 

 

 

Haven't we been here before?

HERE WE GO AGAIN: DAY 1, New ‘Lockdown’, FRIDAY.

 

 

 

It’s just as well that I went to the Opera on my birthday as I have just been informed via email that the next opera performance due on the 24^th of November, has been ‘postponed’ – as it is a concert performance of a juvenile Mozart opera composed when he was 14, I cannot say that I am devastated by the delay!  I am prepared to do some YouTube musical ‘homework’ to make its three-and-a-half hours of straight singing tolerable, as I find that even a slight acquaintanceship with the music of operas, I don’t know gives me a partial key to their enjoyment in performance! 

     At least there are always tunes in Mozart, and I do remember that I had a much-played record of music by Mozart written when he was in London at the age of 12, and that was intimidatingly excellent, so an opera composed after two long years of extra maturity from that music does demand attention! 

     After all, given Mozart’s short life, a Mozartian Year must be very different from those lived by mere musical mortals who tum-ti-tum along to the tunes!   

     The State of Emergency in Spain has been extended into next year in Parliament, so we are now in the ‘New new-normal’ as the restrictions get more and different.  At present we are under curfew (10pm-6am) with bars and restaurants closed.  As of today, those restrictions stay in place, but other closures have been added which include larger stores, shopping centres, places of entertainment like Opera Houses, and gymnasia, which includes my swimming pool.  There are further restrictions on movement with heightened restrictions during the weekend.

     This morning, for example, I could not go for my usual swim, but I was able to go for my normal bike ride which extends the length of the paso along the coast of Castelldefels.  At the southern limit of the city it actually extends into the jurisdiction of Sitges.  There was no problem about that today, but on Saturday and Sunday I will be restricted from completing the final length as Sitges will be out of bounds. 

     We also live on the ‘border’ with Gava to the north and tomorrow the stretch of the paseo along the Gava coast will also be out of bounds.  In the previous lockdowns there were police stationed at the invisible borders of our town to enforce the ban. 

     There will also be police on the approach roads to the beach part of Castelldefels as the weekends are usually the time when people from Barcelona city come to visit.  Gava and Castelldefels are the coastal resorts of choice for the city dwellers and the police are going to have their work cut out if they are going to try and stop all of the visitors that we are likely to have.

     Obviously, all this inconvenience is designed to stop the spread of the virus, but all of the measures are going to be pointless if the general population doesn’t get behind the restrictions.

     Since February we have been subject to a bewildering array of instructions, some of which seem to be ‘arbitrary’ to put it mildly.  We are constantly told that proximity is the most important factor in the spread of Covid and yet schools are still open.  Buses are still running, as is the Metro and the train system.  Shops have limits, but most shops now do not have dedicated assistants restricting entry. 

     The “if this, then why not that” approach to instructions is making following them difficult, and the shameful dinner of 150 politicians and the assorted Good and Great, is a calculated spit in the face of the ordinary joe trying to follow the rules where for us gatherings of more than 6, and closed bars and restaurants are the norm.  The Minister for Health was one of the attendees at this rule-breaking gathering, giving yet another example of “One rule for us another for them” approach to governing.  And yet, with breath-taking hypocrisy these discredited chancer politicians still appear on the TV and in Parliament giving voice to rules that they do not follow themselves.

 

I’ve now been told, or rather I’ve been “I thinked” by Toni that my bike ride tomorrow on Saturday is OK because I am going to adjoining municipality and that is allowed.  But certainty?  None.  I will try it out tomorrow and when I am stopped by the police, I will know the limits to my activity.

     As I didn’t have a swim this morning, I went out on a second bike ride taking the Gava paseo as my route.  It was pleasantly empty with only a few hardy walkers and riders.  One even hardier gentleman was sunbathing on the beach.  The sun is out, but there is a sea breeze that tells you that you are in the month of October, and towards the end of that month as well.  But ‘Bravo!’ for a stronger determination that even I have to keep summer alive – my continued wearing of T-shirt, shorts and sandals seems positively overdressed compared to the nakedness of the beach devotee!

 

The situation in the UK appears to be getting even worse than it is here.  The piecemeal tiered approach is more geared to commercial concerns than human ones; the projections for British deaths over the winter is horrific; the government is a sick joke.  But perhaps I am being unfair.  My country of Wales seems to have taken difficult but hopefully effective drastic measures, as have the other constituent nations of the UK, with the signal exception of England.  I fear that Johnson and his third-raters in the Conservative Party put politics and survival of their ‘brand’ above the human cost of failed policies.  And just to make my cynical misery complete the fiscal here in Spain has archived or shelved any criminal action against the ex-king in relation to his shady dealing and less than honest behaviour.  It makes you weep.  That same disgraced ex-king once famously proclaimed that, “Justice is the same for everybody!”  How hollow that sounds today as he skulks away in some undemocratic eastern kingdom.  What a shower of shits our ‘ruling’ classes are!

 

Still, any day at the end of October in which anyone can even think about divesting themselves of clothing and sunbathing next to the Med, has to be positive. 

     Long live the sun!

Indifferent day, indifferent thoughts

         

An odd day today, it is not warm, but it certainly isn’t cold.  It is overcast and the Med has a North Sea look with waves that are much larger than usual, though there is no wind and few hits of a storm.  The sea is an almost monochrome grey-blue and when I was riding along the paseo there was a sea mist which blended horizon and water and where the cold white breaking waves looked almost theatrical in their contrast with the surrounding drabness.  It looked bleakly beautiful and there were isolated figures on the beach which gave a cinematographic look to my vistas from the saddle of the bike and it was easy to enjoy the visuals because there was no cold cost of being out in the bleakness, when it wasn’t really bleak!

     As the restaurants and cafes are closed the emptiness of the streets echoes the deserted beach.  On an inclement day one can imagine oneself back to the strict lockdown of March or April.  As I typed that a solitary magpie swooped over the trees that I can see from my desk on the third floor.  Is that an example of the pathetic fallacy: linking a harbinger of bad luck with lockdown?  Or does it always have to be the weather?  If it is the weather, then the slightly other-worldly climate at the moment is doing its bit!

 

Toni and I have been bewailing the lack of restaurants and the fact that we cannot go out for a menu del dia, I bring that up because of the vote by the Conservative Party in refusing to continue the provision of free school meals during the holidays.   

     I made the mistake of reading what some of the Nasty Party’s adherents said in justifying their decision and I was transported back to the unregenerate days of Dickensian blaming the poor for their situation and not wanting to mollycoddle them so that they would be too weak to make the effort to improve their position by their own efforts.

     I have never, ever been a Conservative voter, and the last member of that benighted party for whom I had even a scintilla of respect was Iain Macleod (hated by the even further right wing of the Conservative Party as being “too clever by half”) and he had the good grace to die a month into Heath’s government so that he wasn’t further tainted by the steady descent to contemptibility that had started with Home.  I think that my ‘respect’ for him was coloured by the fact that I was very young and he seemed like an intellectual threat to the comfortable leftish-wing politics that the young teenage me adopted.

    So, in 2020 there is no character in the present government with even a shadow of the moral, intellectual and political nous of the late Iain Macleod and everything that they do and say increases my contempt for them.  Where are the people with the moral standing (!) of a John Profumo (!) in this cabinet of Political Caligaris?  The third-rate chancers that make up the U-turning incompetents that govern the UK make me ashamed to be British. 

     The USA, UK, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, as well as many others around the world are forming a distasteful group of countries that seem more and more distant from any ideals of democracy and decency that I understand to be motivators for decent political government.   

     At least the people of the USA have the opportunity to dump Trump and return to some sort of joined-up thinking, whereas we have YEARS of Johnson and his rabble before he can be cast into the infamy of history.

     How many people SO FAR have been killed by the incompetence of Johnson’s government?  Given the Conservatives’ atrocious handling of the pandemic, what chance is there that the looming disaster of Brexit is going to be overseen with compassion, understanding and efficiency? 

     How many more hungry children will it take for Conservatives to act with simple humanity?

       Look to the history of the Conservative Party for your answer.

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 71 – Monday, 25th May

I am still shaken by just how poor a defence Johnson mounted to justify the high-handedness of his arrogant aide.  When even the Daily Mail asks, “What planet do they think they are on!” as a reference to the incredible (literally!) insulting justification for Cummings’ rule breaking, joined with the sickeningly unedifying spectacle of supine ministers docilely toeing the Save The Dom cabinet line, you realize that you are witnessing a government imploding.

     Perhaps I should have said ‘seemingly imploding’ because I do not underestimate the ability of the Conservative Party to survive ‘fatal’ mistakes and misjudgements.  It is undeniable that Johnson is a lessened leader, I don’t say ‘character’ because that is clearly impossible, and if it becomes clear to him that his status is diminished then he will do what any narcissist does when self-worth is threatened: lash out and to hell with the collateral damage.

     Let us never forget that Johnson’s espousal of Brexit was quintessentially narcissistic: he was convinced by his own rhetoric, comparing and contrasting two pieces of his own writing to see which one would afford him greater possibilities for self-advancement.  I don’t know what the opposite of a Damascene Conversion would be to cover his case, but there was no blinding light from an all-powerful deity, but rather a greedy acceptance of his own perceived omnipotence fuelling his ludicrously inflated ego and presented as reason and logic and, god help duty, dedication and us!

     The front pages of the newspapers cannot make easy reading for Johnson, but they don’t make easy reading for the rest of the Conservative Party either.  Most MPs are concerned about their seats; anything that looses them public support is not to be tolerated – and these MPs postbags must be filled with howls of outrage about the preferential treatment of a member of the establishment as opposed to the PBI, or rather Plebs as they think of us.

     You can take the over-entitled git out of the Bullingdon Club, but the sense of them-and-us never leaves.  Johnson is a perfect example of the born into privilege and milking it for all it’s worth with the minimum of effort sort of the undeserving rich.  He is also a bully, a liar, malicious and, as the ‘defence’ of Cummings has clearly shown, a coward.  And cowards in power are dangerous.  As we are finding out every day.

     Unless Johnson takes visible control of the government then even his comfortable majority will not be enough to protect him from the Men in Suits whose only raison d’etre is to preserve power, and to whom Johnson is only a momentary blip on the time line of their sequestration of political dominance.

The fall out from the pathetic defence of Cummings, where we are expected to believe in a sort of Schrodinger’s Lockdown that does and does not allow free movement at the same time, continues.  Johnson’s cringe-makingly inept performance has had the surprising result of uniting all sections of society and all political parties in fully justified revulsion.  Except of course for the ‘usual suspects’ of Brexit insanity, though even some members of the ERG have called for Cummings’ head!  We truly live in strange times!

     As a last resort, Cummings himself is to make a public statement and take questions.  I suppose if Cummings can supress his natural revulsion for the carping criticism of the ‘lesser breeds without the law’ by whom he thinks he is surrounded, then a person of his obvious intelligence and manipulative skills would be the sort of man to carry it off.  But he really will have to out-Houdini Houdini to get away with it and I hope The Daily Mirror and The Guardian hacks have got their linguistic scalpels out and ready to dissect everything that l’éminence désordonée has to say. 

     I keep checking in with The Guardian on my phone to find out the time because I do not want to miss a word.  I have just found out that his statement will take place at 4pm UK time, 5pm my time.  I will be there, don’t let me down Radio 4!

All Brexit Eve

Loping towards the burning fires fuelled with the broken hopes of gullible voters, the knuckle dragging denizens of comfortable wealth look towards their warm future with undisguised relish as they realize that, once again, the people who could have made a difference have, once again, voted against their own interests and allowed the arrogant, the privileged, the entitled and the callous to do what they do best: gloat.

As with virtually all aspects of Brexit, the idea that today is the eve of something tangible is actually as diaphanous as the reality that the Liars’ Liar paraded during the election campaign.  There will be no real Brexit tomorrow.  Things will go on going on and little will actually be settled.  The only actualite will be the issuing of a “celebratory” 50p piece (without the Oxford comma) which at least gives we Remainers something concrete to spurn!

Meanwhile, whatever the tousled-haired tosser says, the interminably sad saga of Brexit goes on.  And on.  And on.  He might be able to ban the word itself from the discourse of government, but Brexit is yet to be achieved.

Amazingly (or not, if you have been following the tortuous and torturing progress of the Conservative Party throwing the country under the bus [the one with 350m quid on its side] to persevere its existence) we still do not actually know what has really been decided and we still have no confidence that we will depart with a comprehensive deal.

At least in Spain we Brits think that we have some sort of deal which allows us to sleep at night, with pension and healthcare taken care of – unless things fall apart, and we do eventually crash out finally and catastrophically.  For we people, Brits living in Europe (or rather The Rest of Europe as Britain has decided that it is not part of the continent on whose shelf it is perched) we have another eleven months of uncertainty as we see our futures in the hands of the third-rate chancers that now govern us, being used as bargaining chips in what will surely turn out to be a depressingly one sided negotiation.

I don’t want this to turn into yet another Moan from somebody who has still not come to terms with the result – though it is difficult (if not impossible) to get the sense of unreality out of one’s mind.  The British electorate have done what they have done, for whatever reasons and we have to accept that the system by which we are governed allows this travesty to happen.

It would be easy to roam around Cassandra-like bemoaning the horrible reality, but one has to try and fine something positive to take from the debacle.

I once asked my mother whether she had considered that Britain could have lost when she was living through World War Two and she replied that she never, for one moment, ever considered the prospect of defeat.  I pointed out that there were times when the situation of Britain looked dire and the German military machine looked unstoppable.  She accepted that there had been bad times, but, as she put it, “I always knew that we would muddle through!  Eventually.”

You could, of course look at that sort of attitude as one of self-delusion – but she was right.

I have often thought about my mother’s attitude during the bleaker times of the on-going process of Brexit and thought that the British do seem to have a sort of ability to “muddle through” and “make the best of it” no matter how negative things look.

I do not wish my country ill.  I want the country to prosper.  I want a decent NHS and education and transport.  I want full employment and so on.  I have absolutely no desire to see my country come to harm just so that I can point towards the architects of the chaos and say, “I told you so!”  That petty triumph will mean the defeat of so many who are less able to defend themselves than the comfortable hypocrites of the Conservative Party as they carefully move their wealth off-shore or to EU states so that they can buttress themselves against the storm that the self-inflicted harm of Brexit could bring.

We might have made things more difficult for ourselves, but those are the obstacles that we have to surmount.  And I am sure that we will.  We will find a way to play our part in the continent of which we are, self-evidently, a crucial part.  But, just like Universal Credit, a reasonable idea badly administered will have casualties.  People will die, as they have done as a result of IDS’s botched fiasco.  But the casualties need to be limited.

I feel resentment and anger about what is going to be done in my name.  But resentment and anger are negative and the division that has and will rip the country apart must, somehow be overcome if we all are to prosper.

I will be nauseated by any celebration of the dark day that Brexit signifies, but more important than my disgust is my willingness to work to mitigate the effects of the policy and to remember that a country is composed of more than Guardian readers. And listeners to Radio 4. 

And that is something that I will have to accept.  All societies are plural and diverse.  Let us hope that the obvious talent and enterprise of our country can show a way to bring us together.

I wait to be convinced.

Goodbye to all that

 

Who would have thought that Prime Minister of the (presently) United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would turn out to be such a fire-brand radical.  Those of us who thought of her as merely the malicious bitch of the “zero tolerance” policy which continues to poison the workings of the Home Office, could not have imagined that her mindless destructiveness in support of the continuance of the hopelessly divided and self-regarding Conservative Party would espouse the most left-wing anti-imperialist views about the destruction of empire! 

But today, after her capitulation to fellow minority politician leader, Prime Minister Sanchez of Spain, she has signed away the concept of nationality as it relates to an overseas possession.  Gibraltar, whatever the mendacious May says about it, has now lost its British character as it becomes in future subject to a foreign country deciding aspects of its existence.

Let us not forget, too, the fact that Northern Ireland and Scotland also voted for Remain and the Brexit self-harm is making these countries’ futures inside the laughably “united” Kingdom more precarious.  Whatever happens now, the divisions inside the country are not lines of demarcation but gigantic fissures that no amount of mealy mouthed platitudes from a letter to the British people by a desperate and increasingly irrelevant “Prime” Minister of nowhere will be able to bridge.

It is supremely ironic that the party of Empire and National Unity, a party in whose title is the concept of conserving what is excellent in the past, has turned out to be the modern wreckers of the institutions that they formerly maintained they existed to serve.  They have placed party politics above national interest and, including the most fanatical of doctrinaire Brexiteers, they know and have admitted that the country is going to be worse off with Brexit, a price they say is worth paying for the freedom and liberty for our country to advance into the unicorn filled grassy uplands of future long-term prosperity. 

 

As someone rightly said, in the long-term we are all dead, and in the medium to short term most of us do not have the millions safely stashed away in European funds, like the ever-odious Rees-Mogg, to make the difficult times ahead just a little more manageable.

Realizing that Brexit is a disaster is not rocket science and there are politicians on all sides who know this.  I do not paint the whole of the Conservative Party in one colour, there are people in the party who must be desperately worried that their party is going to be accused of national destruction in the future, and they know that the present policy is not one that will benefit the people of Great Britain – to say nothing of Northern Ireland.  I also know that there are Brexiteers in the Labour party, some, like fox-hunting Kate Hoey (who to me seems to have no place in the party) and others who, with some justification, are deeply suspicious about the workings of the EU.  But, as with democracy (a questionable quality in many aspects of EU governance) so with the EU, it is not ideal, but it is better than the alternatives. 

 

And remember, my father and grandfather fought in World Wars, both started in Europe, and I am of the generation that has not had to suffer that obscenity.  Unity in Europe has been tenuous enough and has not eliminated wars on the continent, but the situation is not going to be made better by a major country in Europe withdrawing to its insular boarders.

Today the minsters of the EU will sign the “agreement” and then May will have to go, metaphorical begging bowl in hand, to try and get support for a document that does not seem to settle any of the major questions that make leaving the EU so problematical.  It has been suggested that May has already been stooping to dangling knighthoods in front of those MPs who might be tempted to change sides and support this insupportable agreement.  The next few weeks are going to be catastrophically unedifying - and those are two words that I have never had occasion to put together before.

I am fed up with being a citizen of a country that is now regarded with bemused contempt by those who have bothered to look at our mare’s nest of a national situation.  I am fed up with having to try and explain why my country is doing things that are absurdly out of kilter with rational thought.  And I am fed up with my situation as a British Citizen living in an EU country being used by MY government as a negotiating chip in a no-win game at MY expense.

It is at times like these that I wish I could use the “Delete all and insert” approach of General Body meetings in my University, where one motion could be amended to its opposite by the “Delete all and insert” gambit.  The trouble is for that to work today for the absurdity of Brexit, there would need to be an addition to those four words – the word “forget” between “all” and “and”, so that the revised amendment would be “Delete all, forget, and insert”.

In real life, unfortunately, amendments like that don’t work.  However absurd and dangerous Brexit actually is, we seem to be stumbling, blindly towards our doom.  And even if, by some miracle, we were able to reverse the absurdity, there would still be the corrosive memory of what has been said and done during these two years of governmental paralysis.

Whatever happens, Britain has changed and there is no going back.  My only hope in the chaos that I foresee in the near future, is that something positive will be salvaged by politicians who finally realize that their responsibility is to the country and not to their parties.  Hoping for politicians to “do the right thing” is, clearly, desperation! 

 

But, I am an eternal, if cynical, optimist and the historical precedent of the Conservative Party of Peel and the Repeal of the Corn Laws shows the way!

Do your duty!