The Conservative party say that they’re going to introduce innovative technological solutions to the Irish border question, but they can’t even introduce an app for their conference without buggering it up. The app was so poorly designed that it allowed anyone to log in as members of the Cabinet and see all their personal contact details. But it’s not all bad, at least it’s the first time ever that the Tories have been accessible to the public.
The conference isn’t really a conference of course. It’s essentially a public relations exercise in which assorted Conservative figures will get up and give speeches pretending that the party isn’t being torn apart by ideologically driven right wing zealots. But they can’t even manage that convincingly. There is absolutely nothing that the Conservative party can do to heal the gaping wounds and come up with a coherent policy on the Brexit which that same Conservative party only inflicted on the UK in the first place in a hauf-airsed attempt to deal with its own internal divisions. It was as though the Conservatives had an issue with an itchy skin rash on their leg, so they cut both their legs off and we’re now all drowning in the blood. Then having done so, they decided that Brexit was really an internal party matter, and did their best to sideline that parliament whose absolute sovereignty they claimed they were defending.
Both the hard line Brexists and the remainers within the Tory party have enough support amongst Conservative MPs to hold Theresa May hostage, but neither of them have enough support in order to get something through Parliament. The result is confusion and stalemate. The UK is staring at the biggest peacetime crisis it has ever faced in the past 100 years, and yet none of the UK parties have any clue about how to get out of the mess that they themselves created.
Meanwhile in another of her sofa soft interviews on the tellybox, Ruth Davidson has said that if there were to be another Brexit referendum she’d vote remain. So she’s prepared to countenance another referendum, just not another Scottish one. Thanks for clearing that up Ruth. It only confirms something that many of us have known for some time, that you’re only willing to consider referendums if you believe you can be on the winning side of them. But Ruth did find time in her busy schedule of self-promotion to send a Tweet about the presents that Theresa May had given her for her new baby, including a copy of Theresa’s favourite book, Swallows and Amazons. It’s a romanticised little England story of privileged middle class brats fighting amongst themselves on a small fantasy island while they subsist on corned beef and patronise and ignore the local working class people who actually do all the hard work. At least now we know where Theresa May got her Brexit negotiation strategy from.
Theresa’s big idea is to hold a Festival of Brexit Britain and has already pledged £120 million to pay for it. This is the closest that they have to a Brexit plan, a celebration of Little Britain. It’s typical of the Tories that they look back to a romanticised vision of a past that never existed. Most of us would prefer to have a future where we didn’t have to worry about our government warning us about shortages of medicines and food. This Brextival is the political equivalent of one of those mothers slapping their wean during a wet and grey weekend in some dreary seaside resort in the 1950s, shouting at the kid to be happy and enjoy itself.
The Prime Minister wants to hold this Brexfest in 2022, we’re told it’s to celebrate 70 years since the Festival of Britain in 1951. This is the level of numeracy that brought us Brexit in the first place. It’s also the 100th anniversary of the British partition of Ireland, and now the UK government is going to hold a festival to celebrate partitioning Ireland again. Which only shows just how little British governments consider the sensitivities and needs of everywhere in the UK that isn’t the Home Counties.
Everyone attending the Brextival will be given a free pair of rose tinted spectacles. It will be like the Hunger Games, but with Morris dancing and held in a closed down Pontins in Grimsby while contestants beat one another to death with Dyson vacuum cleaners. It will be like the Wicker Man but without the big bonfire because no one can afford the heating bill. Just to get everyone in the spirit of the postwar Festival of Britain, there will be a lottery for ration books. At least the catering should be easy to organise, even for the serial incompetents in the Conservative government. There will be plenty of gammon, but apart from that no food. You can bet there will be plenty of red white and blue bunting and flegs, and Theresa May telling us about the evils of identity politics.
Some people on social media have compared the Brextival to The Last of Us. But that’s unfair. One of them is filled with aggressive and vicious brain dead creatures who destroy all that is decent and human at the slightest provocation in an authoritarian nation where only the strong and the rich have a chance of survival, and the other’s a video game.
Despite the utter confusion, civil warfare, and mutual recriminations in which the Conservatives are mired, despite their flights of British nationalist delusion, they’re still ahead of Labour in the opinion polls. The Conservatives are the political equivalent of a one armed boxer who’s blindfolded, drunk, and has cramp in one leg, and the Labour party still can’t land a blow. Labour in Scotland is consuming itself in the Kezia Dugdale civil war, which is turning into a proxy for the fight between Corbynistas and the old guard, and Labour in the rest of the UK is desperately trying to avoid having any position on Brexit in order to placate both the Leavers in working class constituencies in Northern England, and the Remainers amongst the youth and in the big cities. The result is that they’re pleasing no one.
And this political wasteland of a UK is what Theresa May wants to celebrate with a Brextival. Scotland can’t fix the self-inflicted mess in which the UK finds itself. It is not the job of Scotland to make a futile attempt to save the rest of the UK from itself, and to destroy ourselves in the process. Scotland desperately needs a Festival of Exit Britain of its own. We can celebrate by having a referendum and voting to leave. Let’s get on with organising it.
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