Life goes on. For millions of households across Britain it is the daily routine of the usual pleasures and frustrations. Feed the kids, walk the dogs. What’s on at the cinema this weekend? How’s my team doing in the league? My boss is being a pain. Where should we go on holiday this year? Ouch, I need to make a dentist appointment. Life, then, as it has always been. Except that always in the background is an irritating whining noise that can’t quite be ignored and constantly demands attention. It could be the phone has not been properly hung up, or the refrigerator door alarm. But it’s not anything you can so easily fix. It’s Brexit. It is 940 odd days since Britain narrowly voted to leave the European Union and exactly 190 days since I returned to the UK after a ten year sabbatical in Abu Dhabi from the reality of life in the mother country.
It is to find a country weary of the whole business. Brexit is like a persistent winter cough that won’t go away. It’s an endless grey day, filled with damp and drizzle. It’s like being trapped at a dinner party next to a trainspotting enthusiast. Except that it’s actually worse than that. Brexit – for or against – has become a slow poison, an energy-draining toxin that is eroding belief in the political process and all politicians in general. The House of Commons, the legislative body for the UK, has simply lost the plot. On the right is a vision for Britain that most thought had van ished with the last gunboat, led by a gang of harrumphing overgrown public (ie privately educated) posh schoolboys who somehow managed to harness the support of some of the country’s most deprived communities to take the country out of the EU. The love affair between the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg (Eton, Trinity College, Oxford) and the voters of Oldham (Britain’s most deprived town, where 65 per cent voted leave) is the most peculiar since the scholarly American playwright Arthur Miller led Hollywood blonde bombshell Marilyn Monroe up the aisle. On the left, Britain’s official opposition, the Labour Party, has literally no policy on Brexit. Its grizzled semi-detached neo-Marxist leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has long been against the EU as a capitalist plot to crush the workers, but can’t admit it because his young supporters want to stay.
Much of the parliamentary Labour party is against leaving the EU, but also can’t admit it because so many of their constituents voted to leave. The result has reduced the opposition to a series of pointless stunts, like this week’s vote of no confidence in the government, aimed at embarrassing the Conservatives, but ultimately doomed to failure.
In the middle is a splintering of opinion that varies from a fresh referendum called the “People’s Vote” (because the last one was restricted to cats?) to something called Norway Plus Plus. Or is it Plus Plus Plus?
"How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?", General de Gaulle once asked of France. Substitute “solutions to Brexit” for cheese and you have the House of Commons today, but infinitely less appetising. Some people are loving Brexit, though. For the British media, the issue has become an obsession. Every morning, the country’s flagship news programme, BBC Radio 4's Today show begins at 6am with a three-hour bombardment of Brexit developments that rivals the First Battle of the Somme in its intensity, and achieves just as little in terms of territorial gains.
Outside the Houses of Parliament, on College Green, the small public park that also borders Westminster Abbey, broadcasters have set up a kind of media Glastonbury to follow events, accompanied by a throng of assorted attention-deficit disorder drum-banging loonies dressed either in Union Jacks or the blue and gold stars of the EU. If they are all loving Brexit, I can tell you no-one else is. Opinion polls show that the country is almost exactly as divided on the issue of in or out of the EU as it was in 2016. What the polls don’t seem to reveal is how heartily sick the average Briton is of the whole business. On the rare occasions when the media step away from Westminster to engage with what might be called the average voter, the view is rather different. Among the political elite and what is sometimes called the “chattering classes” (liberal intellectuals inside the London bubble), the consensus is that Prime Minister Theresa May is an incompetent failure who needs to go as soon as possible. In the country there seems to be a rising view that this is a woman trying her best, in spite of the best efforts of her colleagues. “I don’t like her to be fair, but I feel like she is under a lot of pressure so she shouldn’t be hated on as much as she is,” one 17-year-old student told a reporter recently.
thenational.ae