the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I was going to write about something else else today entirely, but just before I opened WordPress, I made the cardinal sin of thinking ‘Oh, I may as well see what the Guardian is going on about today.’

Big mistake.

Because befouling my eyes was the headline,

More than half of voters now want Britain to forge closer ties with the EU, poll reveals
Dramatic reversal in public opinion seen even in those constituencies that recorded the highest votes to leave

Which if true, would indeed be a source of some great alarm inside No.10.

But it was bollocks.

‘The Guardian’ had commissioned a survey which just happened to add yet more increasingly spurious credibility to an already spurious proposition, namely that suggests most people regretted voting to leave the EU. Maybe within the circles that Guardian journalists live, possibly, and maybe equally possibly businesses, but most people, I would hope are more pragmatic and having accepted the decision, now want to move on and make the best of it.

But that doesn’t suit ‘The Guardians’ both insulting and patronising narrative, which grows ever more unhinged the further we get from the vote itself. In trying to come with reasons why people voted to leave, they assert that people were lied to and because of that they din’t know what they were voting for. In their alternative reality, every political party in the history of ever has always told the electorate the truth order to get elected. The underlying assumption underpinning all of this nonsense is that everyone who voted to remain, and most especially Guardian readers, were totally au-fait with the nuances and detail of what EU membership meant for the UK.

Again, bollocks.

Most people who voted to remain could cite five, maybe six reasons why they voted the way they did, but once you took away utterly self-serving reasons for doing so – my son may want to work in Barcelona, I travel to Europe a lot, that sort of thing – basically one was left with reasons that basically boiled down to an abiding wish to be anything other than English. Well not the sort of English who didn’t see themselves as Europeans first, anyway.

Back to the survey.

One wonders if ‘The Guardian’ would have given it quite so much prominence, if they’d publish it all in fact, if it proved the very opposite to what they’d hoped? And how many people were surveyed? 10,000 we’re told. I’m sure that the methodology was this and that, that it allowed for this and weighted (whatever that means) for that, but still, 10,000 people. Considerably less than the 130,000 Conservative members who voted the last but one Tory leadership election, and which ‘The Guardian repeatedly criticised as being unrepresentative but then they weren’t expressing a view that ‘The Guardian’ didn’t agreed with, were they?

It makes me think of ‘Bullseye’, perhaps the most sadistic gameshow of the 1980’s. Ostensibly a darts based game-show (yes children, that was a thing), contestants would compete to win prizes. So far, so normal, yes? But ‘Bullseye’s’ evil genius lay in the fact that when the pair, who had made it through to the final would lose, would be then be shown exactly what they’d lost. “Here’s what you could have won.”, would announce host Jim Bowen, as he showed a couple from Nottingham a speedboat.

That’s what I thought of when I saw that story. Under almost any other circumstance, ‘The Guardian’ would be criticising those in positions of power for ignoring the democratic will of the people, in pursuit of their own narrow-minded beliefs. They constantly print articles that seek to blame all of Britain’s woes on Brexit and if they can’t do that, then shoehorn a Brexit blaming narrative wherever they can.

Oh, I should add that I voted to remain, but then, democracy, losers consent, Britain not being a dictatorship, tolerance of opinion….