Shake it all about

I wasn’t going to Blog. I really wasn’t.

I wasn’t going to get involved with the doom mongering and the ‘Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got in in for me!’

I wasn’t going to mention how smug some of the ‘Leaver/Brexit’ campaigners have acted and I certainly wasn’t going to mention the bile that’s being spewed by some of the ‘Remainers’ about how HMS UK is on fire and sinking and it’s all due to a deluded racist minority who managed to raise their normally dragging knuckles high enough off the floor to fill their ballot form in with a pen that they’d bought from home so MI5 couldn’t rub out their pencil mark and put it in the box that was less inclusive… The box that had taken us one step away from Global Citizenship and membership of the Justice League and the United Federation of Planets.

I wasn’t going to launch into the ‘How the Baby-Boomers have destroyed the future of the Millennials with their Death-dealing spikey Nazi Jackboots of Death’ debate. And I certainly wasn’t going to point out that our polling system is based on anonymity and the age-distribution figures that are being bandied about are from a YouGov telephone poll of 1,652 people over 2 days who just happened to be at home when the market researchers called (So, Students and pensioners) and are therefore, not massively representative.

And I certainly wasn’t going to put the Jackie Chan meme WTF meme at the bottom of every Facebook status that said ‘I am so upset by the UK giving up on the EU and just unilaterally leaving – which I (the original poster not me) think is a proper dick move, that I am going to give up on the UK and unilaterally leave.’

Neither was I going to answer anything slowly explained to me by a hobby-economist with ‘So, is that a fact or is that just a guess.’ Or ask a weekend-politico to ‘Prove it to me or show me some clear evidence.’

What I might have said, if I had blogged, would probably have been something like:

I agree that a lot of the leave campaigners have lied to confuse the weak, and that many of the remainers are only upset because they can finally see their personal gravy-train rolling to a halt.  I have no idea whether our long, drawn-out exit from the EU is going to be good or bad for the UK in the long term. No-one does, people can offer their opinions and go through their detailed forecasts and I’ll acknowledge that some of the things they forecast will be right – but just as much won’t be.

You can argue for the difficulty or otherwise of renegotiating trade deals, you can tell me how hard whoever the Prime Minister will be in October will have to fight tooth and nail for our rights once Article 50 is triggered, and I’ll nod, and I’ll agree because I know that whatever challenges we face in the future, they’ll be overcome by people who’ve had to realise, like it or not that we’re on our own that we are the Captains of our future now. There’s no EU safety-net for those who believe there ever was.  Our government will have to work harder because they’re our last line of political defense now, no running off crying to Brussels when a bigger country has stolen our dinner-money and poked us in the eye.

The only thing any of us can be sure of is that: if you took the time to vote yesterday, got off the sofa, turned off Jeremy Kyle and made a cross in a box, you did the right thing – Whatever box you ticked… Congratulations.