Humbug.

This was all quite obvious, wasn’t it?

Driving through a storm for money isn’t something most of us would even consider, but it’s an occupation carried out to the bitter end by some known as storm-catchers in the US.
Driving through the heart of the darkness, they aren’t aware of where every rain-drop might turn up, but they must know from moment to moment of where to swerve or be dashed up on the road as dare-devil jam.

And as with brexit, we have no ideawhere the road has gone or why we didn’t follow Toto out of the passenger-window at the first sign of trouble. Lucky bastard.

So, a couple of obvious storm clouds from the past three months;

• Hunt would never have become leader in a sundae of Sunday’s. Continuity only works if the tracks are straight, and, well i’m sure you can finish the analogy.
• The DUP and ERG was always going to soften its position given the reality of the so-called solutions given by the conservative party*.
• The rhetoric would escalate if no deal were in sight. This much was obvious at Christmas of last year, and has only been worsened with the irrational state and pure hubris of politics at the moment. Now we face the devils choice- a no deal poverty-bonanza, a Faustian deal, or riotous remain. That is what happens when politicians- like Hindeburg post the first world war- choose a stab in the back myth to save their pride.

So what do I think is going to happen?

The deal the PM proposes is hamstrung by his previous rhetoric, but potentially saved by his actions. He has recently put forward a deal to the EU leaders which will probably be rejected out of hand, even if it doesn’t appear to in plain sight.
In this case, his first recourse will probably be to bring Theresa May’s deal back in repackaged fashion.
This may pass, but barely, since brinkmaship is the art of phrasing events to such extremes that we consider something we thought was unthinkable in more relaxed terms- but this time with the rebelious DUP and ERG brought to heel- perhaps also with labour-leavers seeing it as a box that BoJo has erected around them with ’31st of October’ rhetoric. But this would scrape the whips reserves to almost nill and inevitably precipitate a general election.
To quote Satre’s ‘Nausea’, when commenting on a bedside conversion, the character was asked how they could be so good at arguing. He replies; ‘I did not argue. I made him fear hell!’

So what happens if none of that comes to pass?
Bring on the British-Weimar’s demise. We will have been stabbed in the back, perhaps with the same revolutionary intent (if not actions) and zeal seen in post-war Germany. There will be a loss of law and order- even temporarily- in some parts of the country as people lose faith in the established way of politics.
This could come from either side- remainer youths unable to believe the law was followable given a no deal in defiance of the Benn act. Or from leavers, upset they didn’t get their way.
Either way, irresponsible politicians are to blame, and in particular one party is to blame the most.

But if we do brexit then there is hope that we will face up to our problems as an economy- low productivity, stagflation, shrinkflation and all that comes with it forcing us to renew out societal pledge to education and self improvement we have neglected in times of economic ease.

And if we do remain at the end of a second referendum, then this will be resented. But this wil also present a pivotal moment, when a (assumedly Labour) government would have to give a satisfactory reason to why wages, living standards and life-chances are dropping, and offer an alternative- something I believe they are on track to do (but only if they stop seeing through the lens of workers vs capitalists and start seeing in terms of labour empowerment complimenting capital efficacy).

The option of outright remain presents a non-serious threat but does disclose a potential snowball of democratic misuse.
What happens if leave/remain parties win the majority of seats but not the majority of votes? For all the disasterous after-effects of Cameron, the tragic demise of alternatives to FPTP is the most dangerous. For the public won’t see in these terms in this event. They will want to find a new type of politics; strength, charisma, and most worryingly- bloodshed.

*in all fairness, the technological solution could work, in the same way gun control in America could work or the installation of a proletarian state could work– only with the proviso the EU/nation of America/whole globe would insitute the changes.
The advent of crypto currencies brings potential for forge-proof signatures that can tell you the life-cycle of the product with a simple bar-code refering to a block-chain. Any deviations in this chain would be red flags of forgery and directly scrutinisable. This isn’t a far-off concept, there is a reason people put their faith (and more strongly, money) into abstract value metrics such as crypto currencies, and that’s because the unit (if not the value) is secure, infinitely more than rippable paper money and fairly more than putting it into a bank that may go bust. But it is outlandish to suggest we could have these changes in just NI or even the island of Ireland without border-checks of a sort elsewhere or of wide-spread systemic changes to the way we see transfer of goods and services.
So it is possible, but naive of reality. Typical Cummings, really.