the brilliantly leaping gazelle

It hasn’t been a great few days for England in Europe.

That that statement is something of an understatement is, in itself, something of an understatement.

The tumultuous events of the last few days are proof not only of Roy Hodgson’s lack of tactical nous, but on a vastly more serious point, concerning a vastly more serious matter, the law of unintended consequences.  Or to put it another way everything now is a bit Donald Rumsfeld:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.

Our political leaders have no idea what they might be which is possibly why they aren’t providing any leadership. Actually, that isn’t true. As far as providing stable leadership for the country, providing reassurance to our citizens, foreign governments and foreign investors goes, they’ve provided as much reassurance as a split condom. But they’ve been less tardy about their own careers. Whilst the rest of us face a future which is at best very uncertain, politicians of both parties have thought that this is the right time to either resign, call for someone else to resign, and ask themselves that if that someone does resign will they seek to replace them?

The media are, of course fascinated by all of this ridiculousness and think the rest of us are too. Of course they do! They inhabit the same incestuously narcissistic bubble they do. Quite a few of them probably went to school with each other. Some are even married to each other! However, most people have other things to worry about right now, and their fascination with this is of the ‘how deeply inappropriate and pathetic it is’ variety. I mean, what with pound falling to a thirty year low and the UK losing it’s AAA credit rating – something not even the global financial crisis precipitated – and share s losing their value, the only thing increasing is uncertainty.

One thing that isn’t uncertain however is how ruthless the E.U  is going to be with us when we negotiate our exit. Mindful of widespread popular discontent of the E.U within Europe – France,  Germany, Netherlands to name but three – they will want to send a stark message to anyone else thinking of leaving. Think of us as the husband, who in a drunken rage has assaulted his wife yet again and she, sick of all his apologies and promises that it won’t happen again, has changed the locks on the house, taken all the money out of their joint bank account and into hers, taken out a restraining order on him, made it impossible to see his children – who because of the way he treated their mother, don’t want to see him anyway, told his employer and all his friends how abusive he is…basically she’s going to make him pay. The UK is that guy, forever condemned to regret.

One of the most depressingly childlike aspects of the E.U referendum has been how some of those on the losing side – those who wanted to remain – have behaved. Resembling nothing less than truculent children who’s been told that they can’t get their own way, they’ve thrown their toys out of the pram, in the hope that if they crate enough of a rumpus, they’ll eventually get their own way. They were on the losing side and they’re not happy. Which is fine. I too voted for the side that ended up losing side and I too am not happy. But I accept it. Which is as it should be.

What is not fine, nor a dignified or mature response to a defeat, is to demand the game be played again, in this instance taking the form of an online petition signed by over two million people, demanding that there be another referendum.

What the people signing the petition calling for the referendum to be run again are forgetting is the following. Firstly, and most importantly, it was the settled will of the majority, democratically expressed. In a referendum there’s a simple yes or no question and inherent in that is the very real possibility that the answer might not be the one you want. But that’s life. Sometimes it sucks. Secondly, the misguided belief that signing an online petition serves any useful purpose whatsoever. The power of social media to effect any meaningful change, is, I would contend, exaggerated, especially by those who use social media. (If you disagree with my assertion, leave me a comment below giving examples of social media effecting social meaningful change.)

The largest demonstration in British history was when two million of us – I was one of them – took to the streets of London to protest about the impending war in Iraq.

It was also a global protest – there were three million on the streets of Rome and anything between 10 and 30 million in cities around the world – and it completely failed. The British march, and public opinion (a poll that weekend put opposition to a war at 52% with only 29% in favour) was dismissed by most MPs and Blair’s government: 29 days later, the invasion of Iraq began.

And what did that achieve? Aside from proving that some people demonstrate in a way that doesn’t contravene the Highway Code, nothing. And my third point is that simply by virtue of enough people sharing your point of view, that doesn’t in itself make it any the less facile. Religion? Santa Claus? Homoeopathy? Just because you think you’re right doesn’t make it so.

And when more people disagree with you than agree with you, one should accept it. It would take a miracle to convince me that religion is anything than other than fairy tales for grown-ups, but many others believe in it and I accept that. They’re wrong, but I accept that they’re wrong. That kind of mature thinking is sadly lacking in those that have signed the petition. They do however have an example, one where a referendum on Europe resulted in an outcome some didn’t want and therefore it was held again;

Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty in a June 2001 referendum. A second referendum on the Treaty is planned for end of October or beginning of November.

And whilst I’m about it, the news that;

Nicola Sturgeon is to lobby EU member states directly for support in ensuring that Scotland can remain part of the bloc, after Scots voted emphatically against Brexit on Thursday.

After Scotland voted 62% to 38% to stay in the EU, she said she planned to begin immediate discussions with the European commission to “protect Scotland’s relationship with the EU and our place in the single market”.

The first minister made the announcement after an emergency cabinet meeting on Saturday morning. She also said she would establish an advisory body of financial, legal and diplomatic experts who can advise her government on its options for retaining EU membership after Thursday’s UK-wide vote, by 52% to 48%, to leave the EU.

Overlooks the fact Scotland isn’t an independent country. They had their own referendum and voted to stay part of the United Kingdom. That’ s a fact. People may not like it, but then many people don’t like many things. And because it was the will of the majority of Scottish people opted to remain part of the United Kingdom, it therefore follows that any decision made by all the peoples of the United Kingdom is binding. Otherwise it becomes a bit of a pick n mix democracy.

And we don’t want our democracy to go the same way as Woolworths, do we?

The more I think about it, the more I’ve come to realise who the real villains were in the E.U referendum, the one’s who really stitched up the country like a kipper are. (Although how or even why you’d want to stitch up a kipper in the first place is beyond me. I’m not even sure why it’s a saying. It just is.)

It isn’t the politicians, who with their false claims and scaremongering heaped a lot of heat and very little light on a very complex issue. As ‘The Guardian’ reported only this morning;

But within hours of the result on Friday morning, the Ukip leader, Nigel Farage, had distanced himself from the claim that £350m of EU contributions could instead be spent on the NHS, while the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan said free movement could result in similar levels of immigration after Brexit.

Hannan said: “Frankly, if people watching think that they have voted and there is now going to be zero immigration from the EU, they are going to be disappointed.”

His comments came after the leave camp made voters’ concerns about the impact of immigration on jobs, infrastructure and the NHS a key part of their campaigning.

There had been no suggestions of changing the status of any EU nationals in Britain, Hannan told the BBC, adding that no one had said this might be the case in the event of a leave victory.

“All we are asking for is some control over roughly who comes in and roughly in what numbers.”

This cynical contempt only confirms what I’ve long suspected. Not only did the leaders of the Leave campaign want to leave the E.U, they were quite happy to leave clarity out of the campaign as well.

Neither was it the fault of the majority of leave voters. They voted leave for a variety of reasons to be sure, but if those reasons weren’t challenged, whose fault is that? Theirs? If I was living in a poor, deprived town in the North of England, where my children had no future other than debt and death, where I survived on increasingly meagre benefits and everyone I knew was in the same boat, then I’d vote leave. I’d think that the economic benefits of being in the E.U hadn’t reached me. If I found it hard to get a doctors appointment, or my child’s class size was so big that it had a detrimental effect on their education or when my local council’s spending priorities had become targeted in area’s I instinctively considered a waste of money, then I wouldn’t be in favour of increased migration. Not if it meant putting additional strain on an infrastructure already finding it difficult to cope. Their concerns weren’t racist, they were real. They weren’t bigoted, they felt blighted.

If their vote was a misguided one, if they wanted to express their anger at the Westminster elites without realizing they’ll hardest hit by voting to leave Europe, again, is it their fault? Or those who didn’t spell out the very real and very immediate – and unforeseen consequences?

No the real villains were those who didn’t vote. There was a turnout of 72.2%. Which means that 27.8% didn’t vote. How that figure is calculated I don’t know. I mean is it people who were registered to vote but didn’t, or those that weren’t registered in the first place? Either way, the result is the same. I hope that what they had to do instead of voting was more important than deciding our countries future.

I hope they’re happy because I’m not.

Yesterday after the polling stations closed, I suggested that the closer one was to being able to vote for the first time, the greater value of that vote. My reasoning benefited from – in my opinion at least –  both simple clarity and irrefutable logic. Namely, the younger one is, the longer one has to live with the consequences. So therefore, older people with less life expectancy, will have less time to regret their misguided actions.

Because I think it’s a mistake. For one simple reason: the environment.

Both sides have issued dire warnings about what or won’t happen to trade, how much better or worse off we’ll be, both as individuals and as a country. It’s all a bit shallow. I mean, I understand that this is important, but is being  better or worse off really be uppermost in the mind when flood waters are streaming through one house, after days of torrential rain. Really?

Pollution, global warming, rising sea levels, water shortages, all these things and many more don’t respect national boundaries. Equally, when these become major problems most of us will be dead. We won’t care.

But the young will. And their children even moreso. And it will only get worse. Yes it will!

As the website Politico reports;

British voters were heavily split based on age and location in Thursday’s EU referendum, with those aged 49 and under favouring Remain, polling indicates.

Youths strongly favored Remain, with 75 percent of Brits 24 and younger reporting they voted for Britain to stay in the European Union, according to a YouGov poll.

A majority of people age 25-49 also backed Remain, on 56 percent, while older voters preferred Leave, the poll shows.

(However, polls have been wrong. Spectacularly so at the 2015 General Electiont)

Isn’t democracy great?  Makes one glad to be British doesn’t it?

The polling stations have just closed for the European Referendum. The nation has voted and there will, of course, be the usual guff from either side, that no matter what the result, the real winner is democracy.

I disagree.

Democracy has been ill served, traduced and bastardised by this referendum.

Not because it’s happening in the first place – although that plays a part. Mention of parts puts me in mind of Nigel Farrage and I must own to a slight degree of sympathy for Nigel Farrage, something I hope I never have need to write again. This referendum is largely down to him and UKIP, helping to feed growing discontent amongst Conservative MP’s, leaving David Cameron feeling very threatened. And his reward for all that work? To be sidelined. To be a bit player. He’s like a footballer, who having picked up the ball in his own penalty area, dribbling past opposition players all the way down the length of the pitch, only to pass in the opposition penalty area and for someone else to score. He’s a bit like the political equivalent of Ryan Giggs’; except for the fact he’s never had a long affair with his brothers wife. And that Giggs’ is far more talented.

And not because both campaigns of the focused largely on economics – although that too plays, seemingly blind to the fact that concerns over how this will affect Britain’s place in the global financial market are a negligee issue to most people. If you’re a hedge fund manager, then yes, it might be. But most people manage their hedge with a trimmer. And not because of the shameless partisan reporting of the mainstream media. In print, newspapers have done their proprietors bidding – all of them who are anti the E.U. – by over the years running a succession of negative stories about Europe. A gradual corrosive undermining of the trust of their readers. The broadcasters haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory either, prostrating themselves before the altar of lead story exclusives, at the expense of meaningful explanation

No what really annoys me about this referendum is that everyone’s vote is of equal worth. It shouldn’t be. To my way of thinking, the closer they is to voting age, the more the result will affect them and so consequently their vote should count for have more worth. And it follows therefore the older one is, the less the result will affect them and their vote should be worth less. Not worthless. So if one is aged between 18 – 30, they should have full vote, a whole one. People aged between 30 – 50 to get half a vote, those aged between 50 – 80 get a quarter of a vote, and those over 80 well lets give them an eighth.

I feel very strongly that those with more to gain or lose whatever the result should have more say.

But democracy is the winner?

When a man you’ve never met before invites you on to a couch, asks you to take your top off, then proceeds to stand behind you whilst warming up some lubricant in his hands are you:

a) In a bathhouse in San Francisco in the mid 1970’s? or are you,

2   b) In a banned ‘Impulse’ advert?

or,

3 c) Are you getting physiotherapy?

It was to my utmost disappointment that it was c) and not a) because this experience of physiotherapy was rather like anal sex; enjoyable to begin with but all too soon it becomes a pain in the rse. I had gone to see a muscular skeletal physiotherapist in the hope that it might provide me with some much needed relief from my trapped nerve. It gave me no reduction whatsoever when he observed that I’d one of the worst cases of trapped nerve root pain he’d ever seen. Because a few minutes earlier he’d asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. This brought to mind the moment in the day to day when discussing a wholly fictitious event Spartacus Mills was asked by the incomparable Chris Morris if he could sum up a constitutional crisis in a word. When Spartacus replies in the negative Morris asked him if he could sum it up in a sound?

As I’ve noted in my blog last week trying to describe the pain one feels to another person makes about as much sense as trying to explain the properties of water to a chimpanzee! I said that given that I’ve got an remarkably high pain threshold, (I once continued playing tennis with a fractured wrist.),  our understanding of what a six out of ten on his wholly fallacious rating scheme was unlikely to correspond with mine. Nor did I tell him that he was causing my irritation threshold to plummet rapidly

Neither did I judge it my best interests to share with him my screaming insight that physiotherapists are nothing more than sadists with qualifications. This was occasioned by the physiotherapist prodding my upper left shoulder back with all gingerness of someone searching for landmines by hand. So when in reply to a “Does it hurt when I press here?” I replied quite immediately and volubly that it did one might have thought he would have avoided repeating the movement that had caused me so much pain.

But no!

Instead, he repeatedly and with some choice words of “I know this must really hurt!”, he continued inflicting pain upon me and I thought that only a sadist would not only inflict pain upon someone but tell them whilst they were doing it that it must really hurt! This continued in a variety of interesting positions until the session was near an end. I thought my ordeal was over. How wrong I was! Did I want to be taped up or have acupuncture?

Given that I consider acupuncture to be nothing more than a highly effective way of divorcing the gullible from their money I replied in the negative. However, given my speech impediment he just heard “No”. The nuances of my acerbic wit being lost on him. Mind you he was Australian so…

I plumped for the taping option although I wasn’t quite sure what it entailed. That naivety was as short-lived as a chocolate éclair at a health farm.           All too soon I understood that taping involved my left arm and my left shoulder blade being taped up in a way that prevented the muscles on my left side exacerbating or contributing to any movement that might be ill advised. In other words I looked as if I was awaiting collection by DHL! Or had been involved in some vanilla S&M. Suffice to say I felt like pants!

A bit of a heavy handed segue I know. But we’ve all been there; the sudden realisation that in a couple of hours you’ll be undressing in front of a complete stranger and that you’ll need some clean underwear on. You look in your underwear drawer and you see only various shades of off-white staring back at you. In my drawer there is a pair of thermal long johns which not only are new they also are as white as snow on a country field, whereas my pants are as white as snow by the roadsides! One thinks of excuses to explain your rather cavalier attitude to underwear hygiene but you console yourself that at least your pants don’t have any skid marks. Then you realise that if that the best you can muster as a defence is “At least they don’t have skid marks!” then one has indeed sunk to a new low!

Nonetheless, despite all of the above I’m seeing him again next Tuesday for more of the same, being from the school of ‘If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t doing you any good’ Think about it. When did you last have a cough medicine you would drink for pleasure?

Aside, that is from NyQuil…