What's there really left to say, you rightly ask...and especially from someone (such as this writer) who's neither British/English - or, for that matter, even a descendant of the Brits (or Welsh, Scots, (Northern) Irish) - nor has ever lived in any part of the United Kingdom or has any realistic likelihood of ever doing so...? A fair enough question...and like any 'good' politician, I'll completely evade it - at least for now...
To Be Continued (i.e. the body of this blogpost)
Wednesday morning (as P.M May gives her speech, following unprecedented seven-hour caucus meeting with her colleagues over this vexed issue):
As I've written in two recent blogposts, any attempt to conflate the Brexit vote/*intention of the British public (sure, not by an overwhelming margin, but a *decisive 'verdict' nonetheless) into anything remotely equating the underlying sentiment delivering that referendum outcome with the awful, tragic events in God's Own on the afternoon of March 15th 2019...
is shameful, reprehensible, a slur and slander upon the good name and character of the British.
And this (March 24th, I believe) Newshub news bulletin did...in not so unveiled or oblique and indirect a fashion either...pretty much listing the British decision to Brexit as one of a number of 'equivalent' things happening across the globe, and especially Westerndom, that, ipso facto - supposedly, allegedly - made conditions 'favourable' for the horrific massacre that occurred here.
That's all I'd like to say in that regard, except to rhetorically ask, am I at all surprised they did so? No, hardly - given their track record (and that of certain mainstream New Zealand broadcasters generally, whether TV or radio)...and to also suggest that far greater considerations lay at the heart of the decision of/by many or even most - if not in fact the vast majority of British 'Leave' voters who delivered that referendum outcome...than merely **some primeval, blindly nationalistic, Anglophile or even white supremacist, urge to close the doors of the United Kingdom to all comers, especially those of a darker skin complexion or from a potentially problematic Middle Eastern background...
Indeed, such English notables/acting celebrities as John Rhys-Jones and John Cleese, no less, have - at least at times (I haven't heard about Cleese of late) - been outspoken in their support of leaving the European Union (as per Brexit)...and neither, may I point out, has done so in keeping with the stereotypical (purely racist, anti-immigrant, 'let's keep Britain for the British', 'dog whistle politics') caricature of Brexiters so often and tiresomely dragged out by Bremainers...
Yes, to those like Cleese (Basil Faulty in another life) and Rhys-Jones (Gimli in 'Lord of the Rings'), Great Britain has a proud, if uncelebrated, history and historical tradition in which the words sovereignty and self-determination actually mean something...other than being mere slogans repetitiously trotted out and tediously spouted ad nauseum, by politicians and their spin-meisters...
To return to my earlier point (vis-vis the UK's 'Brexit' being carelessly cited as an instance of white supremacy/Islamophobia), as I've already written elsewhere this is one particular 'bugbear' I've every intention of taking all the way to our Broadcasting Standards Authority...if and when, that is - as the legislation, I understand, requires - I fail, after first approaching the particular broadcaster concerned, to get a satisfactory response/answer to/resolution of my concerns...
And what about the increasingly vocal demand for a so-called peoples' vote? A proposal understandably being pushed and pushed and pushed by folk like (long-serving U K Prime Minister) Tony Blair - and doubtless his equally vocal predecessor, former P M (and Margaret Thatcher's successor) John Major - highly dissatisfied with, even arguably aggrieved by, the pro-Brexit result of the 2016 referendum...
'Scuse me? What was the June 23rd referendum if not a 'peoples' vote'?
Or is it rather a(n all too typical) case of it being a truly democratic - as in 'peoples' - vote when it just so happens to go the way one wants it too...democracy being truly seen to be done only when one gets the result/outcome one was hoping to get... 'Scuse me again, but isn't that precisely the sort of gerrymandered outcome we Westerners have been giving the self-appointed elites bearing rule over vast swathes of the globe a bad press and hard time about for decade upon decade?
As for all those - predominantly Conservative Party - MPs who've been prepared, often at the cost of a lucrative cabinet position and/or even remaining a member of their parliamentary party (whether Brexit- or Bremain-leaning - as the case may well be), to 'cross the floor' (of Parliament) and vote against the express wishes of their own party leaders and/or 'whips'...
...good on them for thus maintaining the long-cherished and hallowed, Westminster tradition of personal independence from one's political/parliamentary party...whatever the cost...to maintain that rarest of intangible things these days, a personal conviction...
...thus showing that Great Britain's fine tradition of unfettered free-thinking is still well and truly alive and well at the very heart and soul of British democracy...unlike some of her former colonies, sad to say...
And what a letdown Labour's one-time unorthodox, renegade, 'contrarian' leader Jeremy Corbyn has proven throughout the whole, never-ending, long drawn-out political crisis... Admittedly inclined to support his particular brand of politics - minus the distinctly unsavoury, though, admittedly, arguable, *****anti-Semitic tinge it has taken over recent times - he has signally failed to take the sort of statesmanlike, Churchillian stand/stance that say *****Hilary Benn, son of the British Left's one and only, now deceased, best ever illustration of true national leadership material, *****Tony Benn, has been seen as taking...
He has played a most dishonourable role throughout the admittedly labyrinthine post-Brexit process, failing to hold to his own, initial, indeed longtime, anti-European Union instincts...giving in - bit by bit, a little here, a little there, on-again, off-again - to his party's youthful staunchly pro-Bremaining brigade...till he has come to the position of finally embracing a second referendum...which, of course, would ultimately achieve nothing, only a never-ending impasse...and by so doing evincing his own lack of understanding of what true, ground-level, grassroots, participatory democracy is all about...
Not unlike Theresa May and the great bulk of 'her' MPs, moreover, and as some professor on the daily New York-based broadcast, Democracy Now, said only yesterday (or the day before), JC and his party want to "keep all the advantages/benefits of the European Union/Common Market without any of the disadvantages", something a beloved, could-have-been stepdad, Richard Welch (cited in my Endnotes) so memorably impressed upon my teenage mind in that classic idiom of 'wanting one's cake and eating it too'...
In ending let me simply rehash the well-known catchcry of P M May in the following way...When Nine to Noon host Kathryn Ryan caught up with her regular economics correspondent Rod Oram yesterday, he told her (as a British-born kiwi) of his preference that the present situation in the U K ultimately lead to a "meltdown" and realignment of the Conservative Party...thus giving the thumbs-down to the brexiting plans of its current leadership...
Ryan concluded by reiterating May's frequent 'unanswerable' assertion vis-a-vis simply abandoning Brexit altogether: "That would not be keeping faith with [the majority of Britons] who voted for Brexit."
I couldn't have put it any better... It's called democracy, folks - last I heard, a time-honoured tradition of the British people/s...and far as things stand, a system of government, however deficient - as Winston Churchill so unforgettably put it on one occasion - not likely to be abandoned anytime soon.
*And to those - seemingly innumerable commentators (both here in Aotearoa-New Zealand, and moreover especially in 'the Old Country') - who've ever maintained, like all good, true democrats always do (i.e. vis-a-vis any electoral results, whether party political or referenda) they don't happen to find pleasing or agreeable, that the people simply didn't or couldn't understand the question put...
...hey, you tell me how difficult or complicated or potentially problematic - confusing, baffling, perplexing, convoluted, bamboozling or the like - this question is: should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
Yep, that's it, folks...the whole shebang...i.e. 'the agreed referendum question' (according to Wikipedia's lengthy 'Brexit' entry), in other words that put to U K voters on June 23rd, 2016... Which might seem bleedin' obvious, as plain as ye proverbial mud - not!...and easy enough for anyone to ascertain, with a modicum of trouble or effort...
So why do I bother here, seemingly ad nauseum, to pedantically belabour the point? For this reason: you'd surely think anti-Brexit commentators and political pundits were/are living in an alternate universe - yes, in the very cybersphere of fake news that such tend to accuse everyone else of inhabiting - the way they now, post-referendum and with more than the usual share of sour grapes not to mention venom dripping out of their mouths, talk about that very referendum...as if the wording were somehow vague or confusing - hard for ye dumbskull masses to understand...
In God's Own, or what (pre-March 15th, 2019) once was, we've a little billboard rejoinder which responds beautifully and ever so succinctly to that 'learned supposition': yeah, right! Or, in language less suitable to polite or mixed company, b...s...!
Hey, again, you decide, but for me anyhow - and to quote pretty well word for word (with grammatical reconstruction whenever and wherever necessary) that great discerner of the human condition and things bleedingly obvious - CJ of 'The Rise and Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin' fame: '[Most of us] didn't get where [we are] today by not knowing [good, basic, grammatical construction and wording] when [we] see it!!!' Nuff Said!
*For in politics 'a miss is (surely) as good as a mile' - just ask Al Gore - and 4 percentage points, equating (if I recall correctly, and my memory's not too bad, if I do say so myself) to well over a million votes separating the two sides of the referendum question, is surely not something to be sniffed at, much less able to be effectively challenged in order to secure a recount...
...and indeed, had it not been for another awful act of homegrown terror, immediately pre-referendum, (by another racially-motivated white supremacist, incidentally), the margin of victory, according to opinion polling, was giving every indication of being much more significant, say in the region of 55:45.
And sure, constitutional experts and their endless horde of after-the-fact (invariably emphatically anti-Brexit) acolytes have since bemoaned the absence of a 'clearcut' numerical 'mandate' for such a major constitutional change...but methinks, **all too predictably, the selfsame folk, back in the 70s and 80s, were not in the least demanding such - e g a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio in favour - when the United Kingdom entered what was then known as the European Communities - which, with the process of time, was transmogrified from one entity into another and eventually became known as the European Union...
Admittedly, as I discovered from Wikipedia's lengthy entry thereupon this evening, the decision of the British to enter the 'European Communities' (as the collective European arrangement was then known) was indeed by a substantial margin (of 2:1 in favour) so I'll freely concede that that does appear to blunt my argument in that respect at least...And yet...(as my very next sentence reminds us)
Everybody is oh so wise after the fact, aren't they, and anyhow, ***those were the rules of the game... as only too clearly understood by the British people themselves...when they voted in the referendum...
**Intriguingly, though I've little doubt you'll never hear this in any typically partisan reportage thereabouts, ***Wikipedia ('The Free Encyclopedia'), in its Brexit entry, under the major subheading of 'Voter Demographics and Trends', carries this interesting 'fact': 'Support for leaving was linked with "poor economic outcome of the individual or area level" and with "self-reported opposition to immigration, but not with exposure to immigration."
Huh? Surely that doesn't fit in with the narrative with which strident Bremain-supporters have since littered the political landscape? No indeed, but that surely shouldn't surprise anyone very much, eh...
***Itself 'accused' - or at least carrying the needed caveat or disclaimer - at the outset of its coverage therein, of being subject to some criticism from some sides of the debate (I'm assuming Brexiters and Brexit sympathizers) for presumably - again, reading between the lines - presenting biased coverage.
***But again oh so typically some folk have attempted and are still trying to revisit the matter after the fact...and hence New Zealand's own much-respected Professor of Constitutional Law, Bill Hodge - in interview, if I heard aright (and the voice sounded identical), yesterday aft with RNZ National's Jesse Mulligan - proposed as much...and echoed renewed calls for a ****'peoples' vote' in the U K now to effectively bring an end to the matter...
...except that that would itself only endlessly prolong it, opening up yet another can of worms...
****See (above) for my own assessment of this so-called Peoples' Vote (and no, as you can well gather, I don't take any prisoners!)
****For some, but by no means all, of those claiming he's been displaying such a proclivity are themselves doubtless guilty of just such tendencies themselves on other issues...and equally typically, the very people also so keen to brand Trump et al with that very slur are themselves often prominent in the ongoing battle, even war, to have the nation of Israel effectively labelled Public Enemy #1...
But of course taking an anti-Israeli stance on Israel's extremely problematic conduct vis-a-vis its 'homelands' on the West Bank and its ongoing skirmishes (and far worse) with folk, not only militants, in the Gaza Strip - in my view the issue of Jerusalem, and, for that matter, the Golan Heights, is another matter entirely (for another time and day - and blogpost!)...
...well, it's just like saying that every single occasion one particular nation has any beef with another it's tantamount to being anti-that particular nationality, race and/or ethnicity...and that's of course wholly absurd and even laughable...and why, incidentally, I believe the only way the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict will ever be resolved is through America electing a Jew who is not - reflexively, automatically - ever and always pro-Israel...
...and last I heard, such a person is making yet another bid for America's and the world's 'top job'...
*****Not that I agree with Hilary Benn, M.P., but I freely concede he's trying to take/play a nonpartisan, constructive stand/role in proceedings, unlike so many seemingly...- and incidentally his father, Tony (about whom, shortly after his death at the ripe old age of 88, I did two blogposts awhile ago) himself is part of a grand tradition - ******in the British Labour Party, no less - of staunch opposition to the European Union; though his nominal (Christian name) modern-day counterpart, ex-P.M. Blair, has arguably long since sold out to the Europeans...even being well in the running at one stage for the EU's top job, evidently; leading some - biblically literate folk, that is - to posit (and not without fair justification) that he could well be the leader of a future United States of Europe...
******Indeed, only this very (3/4) afternoon, upon Wikipedia ('Brexit') I've discovered a whole lot more about *******just how Eurosceptic, nay, positively Europhobic, British Labour once was - and increasingly -from the early seventies into the early eighties...before at length, due to electoral disfavour, resiling from this one-time staunch as stance...-don't they say you (can) learn something (new) each and every day of your life!
*******And apparently not just among its high-profile left-wing or left-leaning parliamentarians such as Tony Benn, Michael Foot, Jeremy Corbyn or Bryan Gould...
EndNotes: -typically written ('yesterday' April 2nd) before the main body of this saga, but so be it...
So what sparks my interest in things British, such as its politics, and especially the whole Brexit 'conundrum'? Many and various things, truth be told, *'f'r instance'...
Let's just say I've ever been - as a political junkie since my earliest days (I mean early teens, anyhow) - a keen observer of both kiwi and, especially Western (Oz's, America's, Great Britain's) politics...and I've often thought it'd **have been nice to **have met someone nice and ultimately relocated there...
*Yes, I'm well aware that that's not proper English, but it's one of my many (latter-day) grammatical and spelling idiosyncrasies...
**'Have (been)' being the operative word/idea, as time's rapidly passed me by, and that's the only way I'd ever be able to live in any part of the U K - unlike a nephew of mine, who sojourned a little while (around 2008-2012, I believe) in Wales...which probably explains his older brothers' antipathy to the idea of the Brexit, seeing as they no longer would be able to seamlessly either move there - by dint of their family's Dutch connections - or even stay awhile/for very long, (once they grow out of their 20s anyhow)...
However, following her divorce from my Dad (or rather, vica-versa) in my pre-teens, my Mum could well have remarried (within a fairly short space) and the fellow in question hailed from WW11 London and the Blitz there...and had as good a cockney accent as you'd ever come by, I'd wager...
Of course, despite my American (and way back when, Danish and Swedish - and perhaps with a fair bit of German thrown in for good measure) pedigree, growing up ***not in the U S of A but in Aotearoa-New Zealand the non-indigenous kiwi heritage that was bequeathed to me by dint of my homeland meant things British/English played a major part in my childhood 'enculturation'...
...foremost among which were naturally enough the fantastic British comedy/'sitcoms'/sci-fi shows (and comicbooks) that plastered the walls of my childhood imagination...
***Which - growing up in America, that is - in the 1960s and 1970s, would've actually suited me, I reckon, to a t...
