Brexit nerves

I don't blog about politics much, but this is an exceptional situation. When I write this it's 12 days to go to the brexit day. And still nobody knows what will happen. What sort of a country is this? A country in which a prime minister calls a referendum to take the wind out of the sails of a rival party; not because he thinks it's good for the party. And then he is so convinced it will go the way he wants it to go he doesn't bother setting boundaries on the vote; any decent person would have said the referendum would only be acted on if the turnout would be above a certain level, and when the difference between the two sides would be a certain size. But no. It didn't go the way he wanted and he skedaddled.

Then Westminster knew it had no idea how to implement the referendum result, but in spite of that called article 50 which only allowed for two years to sort this rather difficult situation out.

The new prime minister then thought that although the referedunm had only asked about brexit; not about any specifics of it, and the outcome had been rather close to 50-50, it would be a good idea to let the agenda be set by the most extremist brexiters. That doesn't leave you much room for negotiations. And it didn't. A deal came out only she found palatable.

Then the issue was to get something through parliament. Parliament really really didn't like her deal. But she wouldn't budge; she claimed the people had spoken and everything but her deal would be betrayal. And another referendum would be betrayal too. Really? The electorate had no idea how the negotiations would go. It would have been quite reasonable to let it decide whether it liked how things had panned out. Apparently that is morally wrong. The people had spoken! Yes, and they had by a minute margin voted for brexit. How that would be an encouragement to try to deliver an extreme brexit is beyond me. But Theresa May appears to be psychic and apparently, what the electorate wants is exactly the sort of brexit her deal would result in. How convenient!

Asking the electorate again after two years in which a lot happened is betrayal, but having the most resoundingly defeated deal in history be voted on again a few weeks later, and then again a week later, and possibly a week after that again, is not betrayal at all. No, of course it isn't. Such shameless manipulation. I don't know how people can live with themselves if they behave that way. But then again, we are talking about the woman who, in her time as home secretary, wanted to withdraw human rights from people she didn't like. And who let the whole country go to pot with rampant homelessness, councils seeing their budgets cut by many tens of percents, and the NHS on the verge of collapse, but effortlessly found a billion pounds to buy power from a bunch of intolerant Northern Irish. My goodness.

And this is the government where the newer home secretary botched Universal Credit, and claimed it was very important that working would always pay; in itself not a problematic idea, but this is the country where there is the national minimum wage, and the living wage. A country that explicitly admits you can't live on minimum wage and then makes sure that state support for those unable to work is less than something you already can't live on. Dearie me.

And in this cartoonesque society that is pretty much a two-party state, the opposition seems unable to do anything other than equivocate, dislike jews, and get in its own way. I am ashamed of this country! I love it on a small scale. Wales is good to me! But on a national level I've never lived in anything like this complete mess. Can we send all of Westminster on a course of organising piss-ups in a brewery? And start again with a new bunch? On the basis of probability, any new batch of people can't be as incompetent as what we have now. And I can't vote them out.

Phew. Rant over I suppose. Even though the situation still is that nobody knows wat is happening although a humongous event could be happening within two weeks. Which is ridiculous! I clearly needed to get something off my chest. And I'll keep my fingers crossed for the coming few weeks...