Only an idiot would try to write anything today about the epic mess currently unfolding in British politics. You’d barely get to the end of typing a sentence before events had rendered it obsolete. But there’s one thing we’d really like to know, which bewilderingly nobody is mentioning.
The primary root cause of Brexit was idiots complaining about immigration. The core supposed aim of leaving, no matter what anyone said, was to reduce the number of foreign people coming to live and work in the UK. The issue of immigration regularly topped polls of what voters were most concerned about, and a 2017 study showed it was the biggest factor in the Leave vote.
But yesterday the UK government, after two and a half years of quite spectacularly inept negotiation, produced for the approval of the electorate a Brexit deal which did precisely NOTHING about immigration, and nobody in the media even mentioned it.
Don’t get us wrong – we’re happy that the hatred of foreigners last seen from the No campaign in the independence referendum has apparently fallen off the news agenda. We couldn’t be more pleased. We just don’t understand why.
After all, it’s not as if the people who wanted Brexit suddenly LIKE foreigners.
And the proposed deal would mean no policed UK/EU land border in Ireland, which means that anyone from the EU could perfectly legally come to the Republic, stroll unchallenged across the border into the UK, and from there onto the mainland, since there was no proposed pseudo-border in the Irish Sea either. As an initial access route it sure beats clinging to the underside of a lorry all the way from Romania to Dover.
So the UK would have snarling dogs, barbed wire, minefields and riot police all over its front lawn (facing Calais, which the newly-departed Brexit minister recently discovered is in a foreign country across a sea), but would be leaving its back door unlocked, unguarded and swinging open in the breeze next to a 50-foot-high billboard saying “COME RIGHT IN, JOHNNY FOREIGN!”
(Although of course, as a concession to Brexiters and a demonstration of the government’s serious concern and joined-up policy-making, it’d be an incredibly racist one trying to make the would-be immigrants feel unwelcome, and the ports would be patrolled by Theresa May’s patented ImmiVans telling them to sod off again.)
And we’re just perplexed that nobody at all seems to be making any fuss about that. Because hardcore Brexiters and the UK’s right-wing press hating foreign people was just about the last thing in the world that we still regarded as a fixed point of certainty, and now there’s literally nothing happening in UK politics that we understand.
