Brexit Britain is now the only argument on Earth for rising sea levels
The rest of the world will look at what happened this week in parliament and want to put the UK out of its misery
So many people have been branded traitors in the past year of Brexit that many of us now have traitor fatigue. But everyone should salute Ukip leader Gerard Batten for totally revitalising the genre this week by calling the Queen a traitor. Gerard, a sort of radicalised Just For Men box, wrote to Her Majesty to ask her to prorogue parliament to save Brexit. He also took the opportunity to inform Queen Elizabeth II that she had committed treason when she signed the Maastricht treaty.
“To presume to convey rights on or to impose duties on Your Majesty was, and remains, unlawful and treasonous under the bill of rights and the coronation oath,” wrote the Ukip leader, whose treatment for low-budget legal drama Better Call Gerard is thought not to have tempted the networks. “Your Majesty’s ministers were gravely in error and wrongly advised you.”
Don’t try to follow this reasoning; just let it coat you like three really hard sprays of Brut Musk. I think it’s fair to say that it wasn’t drafted for Gerard by his new spad, Tommy Robinson, given it relies on legal expertise outside the area of mortgage fraud. But even with help from a lawyer, it still reads like the sort of letter Raoul Moat might have written in the storm drain.
Then again, this level of up-against-it madness is increasingly widespread. Did you watch Tuesday’s Brexit amendments shitshow live from parliament? The vast majority didn’t, yet MPs do seem to think their ratings are somewhere north of Bodyguard’s. These days, they are forever standing up to inquire rhetorically how they might look “to those watching at home”.
Outside on Westminster’s College Green, a tented media village-cum-field hospital provides pundits with 24-hour opportunities to be sassily wrong. Looked at in the round, Brexit is easily the most expensive show on television, watched only by people who detest it. For that money, I really expect CGI dragons, sentient sex robots or the ever-present possibility that Jeremy Clarkson might implode in a high-velocity fireball. Instead, Wednesday offered the trade secretary, Liam Fox, in an anorak, explaining that how parliament acts now is important “for future referendums”. FUTURE REFERENDUMS? I mean, no one more than me is looking forward to the Tokyo Drift version of this franchise, but I wonder if in some ways we’d just be chasing this first high.
And so to the performance of our entire political class. The UK is now the only argument on Earth in favour of rising sea levels. If our economy does go tits-up after Brexit, we could recoup some money in the form of sponsorship by Exxon or the plastics industry. We could become the first country to be propped up by petrochemicals lobbyists as an argument for everyone using MORE of their product. Accelerate freely to put Britain out of its misery.
Speaking of Mother Earth, meanwhile, it does feel time to accept that, like Los Angeles, the Conservative party is built on a faultline. LA has San Andreas; the Tories have Europe. (Calculating 20 years ago that LA had been destroyed 138 times in novels and films, the writer Mike Davis described it as “a Book of the Apocalypse theme park” – a description I would also apply to the annual Conservative party conference.) Over the past few decades, extraordinary amounts of energy and ingenuity have been expended to keep the Tory party together, despite these seismically challenged foundations. Quite how long the fragile ecology can hold before the big one hits is unclear.
But if you had to condense the past couple of years into a movie trailer, you’d surely get something that starts out suggesting a romantic comedy, before the voiceover kicks into a much pacier and more urgent register, and swiftly descends into the demented disaster movie genre. “How far would YOU go to keep the Conservative party from splitting?” it would begin breezily. “Would you offer people a choice one crazy summer? Would you call half your country citizens of nowhere? Would you deport people with British children who have lived here for 24 years? Would you start saying things like, ‘there will be adequate food’?
“Would you declare it was worth running the car industry down because ‘these things happen’? Would you demand Ireland leave the EU because you’ve shat the bed? Would you watch people be warned of essential medicine shortages? Would you tell schools that they’ll have to be flexibleover food standards? Would you refuse to rule out deaths from drug shortages? Would you write some insane column wanking over rationing cookbooks for a war you were born after? Would you stockpile trauma packsout of concerns over risk to life? Would you –”
STOP. Christ… what are we even watching? Is The Rock in this one? He’d better be, because any minute now the freeway’s going to collapse and the only way out is him slinging us over his shoulder and physically carrying us to safety. We have reached the stage in our national journey where we must rely on the kindness of strangers in torn tank tops.
Theresa May, meanwhile, has reached the stage in her journey of realising she needs Labour. I liked that she and Jeremy Corbyn prefaced their talks on Wednesday by trading leaden insults during prime minister’s questions, allowing us to manage our expectations and realise the meeting itself would be an acting-regional-manager version of the Reichenbach Falls. It’s an encouraging prospect: talks between Siri’s 2009 beta version and a man whose USP is not having changed his mind since the mid Mesolithic era. There were no flies on the wall, unfortunately, as they all took the decision to plough suicidally into the lightbulbs.
It’s hard not to be inspired by a Labour leader whose Brexit approach is “How much will I, personally, be blamed for this?” Pretty sure everyone is now clear that Brexit belongs to the Tories, but Corbyn’s level of uninterest in the results of that does arguably tarnish the halo. Perhaps the 30-year papers will reveal May used their pow-wow to quote Mean Girls at him. “God, at least me and Regina George know we’re mean! You try to act like you’re so innocent!”
As when they found the billion pounds for the DUP, the government hasn’t got money for fripperies such as alleviating rampant homelessness, but they’ve always got a little something squirrelled away when it matters. Or as Labour members being offered investment in their constituencies might put it: don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s a rainy day. Until now, the government has preferred to operate on that old proverb: give a man a food bank, and you feed him for a day. Force him to build his own food banks, and you feed resentment for a lifetime. May’s appealing new tactic is to buy off Labour by promising money for former coalmining areas. No rush, no rush.
No rush on any of it, really. Parliament is allowing prearranged half-term holidays to go ahead, which is good news for ski-booked MPs who regard Europe as something you might slide down on the way to a long lunch. Any senior Brexiteers remaining can continue their practice of telling TV cameras that they expect the EU to cave at the last minute. Keep saying your plan out loud, brainiacs – what’s the worst that could happen?
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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février 01, 2019
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