I see you glaring at Andrew Marr, the baffled and angry expression on your face forever that of a man who’s just found a clown shitting in his allotment. It’s getting boring, all this, isn’t it? You’ve been making yourself perfectly unclear for months, walking a tightrope over eggshells on an overburdened camel’s back. It’s been a long game of feeding May enough rope to hang herself but it turns out she doesn’t even know how to tie the fucking knot needed to end it all. She’s mangled Brexit more effectively than I mangle metaphors and now? Now at the 11th hour the national mood seems to finally be that Something Must Be Done. What luck, then, that you’re just the man to potentially maybe look at all the options including possibly thinking about doing something about it at some point either sooner or later in the future.
It’s absolutely baffling that anyone would want any more clarity than that, isn’t it, Jeremy Corbyn?
What a time to be a politician, juggling the polarised opinion-balls of a country so divided that you could drive a bus covered in lies through the middle of it. Labour’s membership is now so committed to the idea of a second referendum that it risks finding itself totally at odds with some of the Brexit-voting heartlands they’d need to win any kind of general election. It’s been labelled a ‘People’s Vote’ without irony, as if the first one circumvented the people entirely, a classically Orwellian piece of doublespeak that seeks to mute the opinions of millions. Yes, the Leave campaign cheated like Wayne Rooney at a Calendar Girls cast reunion. Yes, Aaron Banks is as crooked as a pig’s dick on a sloping roof. It doesn’t seem to have made that much of a difference to the direct polling between Leave and Remain, so maybe we should try and shift the debate away from “you were too thick to realise you were conned, so your vote doesn’t count” to something a bit less inflammatory. If we can’t any second vote risks going exactly the same way as the first, with everyone’s heels dug in so far they’d pop an MP’s testicle if they belonged to a dominatrix.
May called a general election the last time because she was convinced she could make it a single-issue vote, and instead Labour pressed her on all the despicable domestic bullshit that disillusioned so many voters in the first place. Like it or not, it’s looking like that may not work this time. Addressing the inequality that in part led to the Brexit vote is a fair and decent principle, but without being in a position to renegotiate or delay the process it’s closing the stable door after the horse has bolted and galloped off to tell Brussels to fuck off. There’s no shifting of focus left to do – there’s absolutely no getting away from Brexit now it’s looming. It’s just over two months away and we are in the ludicrous position of it still being possible for anything to happen. Theresa May has managed the whole thing like a lesbian in a threesome with two power tops – she’s present for no good reason and unable to satisfy anyone, while the only thing the other two want is for the opposing side to get fucked.
That she has the brass neck to call it a “betrayal of democracy” to do anything other than ram through a bodged deal with a 22% approval rating is only impressive for its brazenness. Her idea of Brexit commands about as much popular support as R Kelly’s interpretation of feminism. No Deal remains an untested hypothesis that doesn’t command the public support the arch-Brexiteers would have us believe. The very threat of a second referendum is raising the fever of the country. We’re already at the point where a bunch of numpties feel emboldened enough to put on their My First Criminal Charges vest and cross the mile-thick line between genuine protest and intimidation and harassment. Thugs and fascists should never be allowed to dictate the political course of the country, but they’re the extreme edge of a very thick wedge of voters who will desert Labour in their droves if the situation isn’t handled carefully.
And you, Jeremy Corbyn? You’re left threading the needle, trying to find that one impossible outcome that satisfies everyone. Not just the members but the electorate, Leave and Remain alike. On top of that, you need Labour to come out of it all in a position whereby they can actually enact the kind of meaningful shift away from neoliberalism that you’ve been dreaming of for all these years. The consumerism, the greed, the complete lack of awareness of the finite nature of the universe’s resources. Only you understand, Jeremy Corbyn. Only you.
Keir Starmer sat in the lotus position and consulted the stone, didn’t he? His face whipped back and forth, his mind racing. He went forward in time to view alternate futures. To see all the possible outcomes of the coming conflict.
He saw fourteen million, six hundred and five. How many did you win, Jeremy Corbyn? Win in such a way that the divisions were fixed, the country united at the end of it all? Just how difficult a task is such a result?
There can be only one outcome. Dread it, run from it, Brexit arrives all the same.
I see you raise your fingers, Jeremy Corbyn, and I hear the snap.
I see Nigel Farage lift a pint to his mouth, only for his jaw to crumble to ash and drift away to nothing. I see him look at the glass as his hand collapses and it falls to the floor. I see Boris Johnson stumbling after Anna Soubry, leaving her confused and terrified as he hits the floor and explodes into dust.
I hear the screaming in the House of Commons, Jeremy Corbyn. I see David Davis pleading in David Lammy’s arms that he doesn’t want to go. I see him grab frantically at Lammy’s chest as he crumbles into nothing.
I see you, Jeremy Corbyn, standing to face the rising sun over your allotment. The Mad Vegan. You did it. You killed 52% of the universe and all it cost you was everything.
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be. It should be much easier to convince everyone that far-left governments aren’t authoritarian or oppressive now all your opponents are dead. Let’s go get the railways back!
I see you, Jeremy Corbyn. I fucking see you.
