When trying to understand Brexit, it is important to realise that the UK thinks it’s better than everyone else. You see, we used to have an Empire, where we did barbaric things under the guise of “we’re in charge”, profit and nationalism.
Because of that empire we have a sense of self importance, we feel we gave the world everything and that we’re owed a huge debt. In actual fact we have a huge chip on our shoulder.
So, when the British are told that someone else is stealing their bread they react in anger, especially if they’re told that the bread thief is foreign. This is what happened with the EU. Continual chipping away at and undermining the relationship we have with the bloc with lies and half truths by the right-wing media which has too much power in the UK. Make them believe that someone else is stealing their bread and you can continue to hide the fact that you’re the bread thief.
Brexit has been driven by three major players.
The first is Nigel Farage, the man is draped in hypocrisy. First off, the pronunciation of his name. The true English version of his name is ridge FarRIDGE. However, the man himself use the French pronunciation, FarAGE. Secondly, he’s married to an immigrant, a German woman. His daughters have German passports and post-Brexit will have the right to live and work anywhere inside the EU. It’s not totally clear what motivates Farage. He dehumanises immigrants but I don’t think he himself fears them like a normal fascist does. I feel he uses others hatred of foreigners for his own gain, like his good friend Donald Trump does. Similar to what the media does, Farage points to immigrants, makes them all think that they’re stealing from you and whilst you’re looking over there at them I’ll take this £10 from your wallet.
The second is Jacob Rees-Mogg. If you were to cut him in half he would bleed the British Empire. He’s steeped in aristocracy, inherited millions from his father, lives in a palace, has six children and still refers to his ‘nanny’ with a kind fondness. What JRM wants is to lower the wage of the average worker so that they’ll be willing to work for peanuts. He’s moved a lot of his money to Ireland so that he can benefit from low taxes and since the referendum has earned and estimated £7m. JRM is the young boy, Michael, from the film Mary Poppins if he’d grown up to be a rich, self opinionated moron. If you wanted a personification of The British Empire then JRM is your man.
The third character in this whole charade is Boris Johnson. Former mayor of London, charlatan of the people and wannabe PM. This guy really is a clown. He’s been on both sides of the EU curtain. Right now he’s anti-Europe but if he thought he campaigning to stay as part of the bloc would benefit him in anyway then he would. I can say this with the confidence that I am right because that’s exactly what he did. BJ thought long and hard about which side to campaign for in the build up to the referendum. He wrote two letters, one of which he intended to publish in the Daily Telegraph, one for remain and one for leave. Ultimately he opted for leave but only because he didn’t think that it’d happen. He thought that remain would win so that he could be the champion of leave. This was then supposed to be the tidal wave that would deliver him to 10 Downing Street. There are two pictures that you could use to sum up Brexit and both contain the lovable, funny, charismatic leader, Boris Johnson; but please, call him Boris. It makes him seem more likeable. One picture is during the campaign itself. Possibly the most famous picture of the whole referendum. Johnson was the leader of the official Leave.eu campaign and they commissioned a bus which, on the side, contained the words “We send £350m to the EU, let’s fund our NHS instead”. It was, of course, a lie. First of all the amount of money the UK sends to the EU is far less than £350m. To go into the ins and outs of this is difficult but what sums this up best is when it came to the House of Commons to vote on the “£350m” that we’ll save from the EU being spent on the NHS Boris Johnson voted against it. Why is this man still a politician?
The second picture that sums up the Brexit referendum is not actually anything to do with the EU but comes from when Johnson was mayor, during the London Olympics. The Olympic park had a zip-wire for people to ride across. Johnson had a ride but got stuck in the middle and needed a man up a ladder to get him down. And that’s Johnson in a nutshell. A man in a high position, nobody’s quite sure how he got there, everyone’s laughing at him but no-one can get him down.” That’s why Brexit happened; three men appealing to the inner-Empire of each British citizen. This is how fascism starts, telling people that they more entitled to something than someone else. Convince them that those “other people” want to steal what they have and you can easily push through something like Brexit. No-one really has a clue how it’ll work, what’ll happen or how their lives will be after it happens but if Farage, Johnson and Rees-Mogg do their job properly you can get the people screaming for something that’ll make them all richer while the people will be screwed.