Brexit and the bravehearts
So the date is near and the signs are unmistakable. House sales have stagnated along with house prices. The Sterling is forever stuck in a zone of weakness. Shoppers are staying home. Supermarket shelves are showing the inflation and the Bank of England is trying hard not to see it. Unemployment is at an all-time low and too many shops are displaying 'Now Hiring' signs on the door, but none of that looks like good news. Though everyone has gone on holiday, and newspapers are living off the anti-semitism of Corbyn and Islamophobia of Boris Johnson, this is a summer of waiting in Britain: The Brexit curtain is about to - and inevitably - fall soon.
But there are people in Britain for whom this is a summer of hope. For Theresa May, who loves the limbo, and indeed is its creator, knows that this is the best state to live in. For the two people who would want to see her gone, it is a time for optimism: For Boris Johnson, this would be the time to be unhinged and get back to empire building in some unspecified planet; for Mr Corbyn, it would be to get back to the comfort of re-nationalisation, an unfulfilled tryst with nostalgia.
Indeed, there are realists, who put money on Brexit and shifted their businesses to Monaco. That tiny minority, who always ran Britain, did have their cake after having eaten it: Just that they didn't notice that it was someone else's. They are trans-national in the true sense of the word: They belong to the nation of money, preferably crypto, rather than live with the inconvenience of being under a government. Brexit, for them, is finally breaking up the tax-grabbing state that cosied the scroungers - with the ironic sweetness of being achieved through a vote! They know they shorted a nation and won.
There are others, like the Indian immigrants, celebrating. For them, Brexit would reaffirm the special Master-Servant relationship that Britain has with India. It will be open doors for Indians again, in some unspecified future. In fact, they feel Britain's vulnerability and sees this as a good thing: Britain out of Europe should have nowhere to go but to the Commonwealth. They are the only ones who love the Sterling still, and indeed, all those lovely houses, whose prices, in Rupees, have gone down though they must be going up! Brexit is really the occasion of nostalgia - how they like to be the slave again! - and of getting rid of the Poles and the Lithuanians.
These are Brexit Bravehearts, looking forward to a very special winter. Every warning sign, for them, is just an elaborate Project Fear: They say we had Brexit and the sky hasn't fallen, and therefore, when we really have Brexit, it wouldn't! But one must give up on trying to make meaning of when everyone is pursuing their own little agenda while making all of it sound like a great patriotic project. Patriotism has always been, as Dr Johnson understood it much before it pervaded everything, the last refuge of the scoundrel.
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