Fuck the Establishment(?)

This may be premature.

Pundits around the time of the referendum reflected on their own views-caught up in the cacophony of jeers and woops they knew which side they were (mostly) on, and they wept. They wept into their manuals of how to perceive public opinion – the opinion wich they thought they embodied since the 1880’s.

The answer was, as any child punished for a trivial act will recognise, that their entire way of living was the one at fault -the establishment.

So the establishment was the one to blame! What an easy excuse it was, too. We simply didn’t understand, or at least listen. We didn’t do what the hoy-poloi wanted.

So why then are roughly 42% of the nation choosing to vote for an old Etonian to carry out their wish to smash the establishment?

While there are probably a number of small-c conservatives still on side for Johnson, this reflects a watermark more for the liberal democrats, suffering reverses of every kind as their traditional base (well educated and pays attention to the news) flock to the only other party that offers a way out- the only rational way out of this bind.

Bismark, the iron chancellor of Germanyonce remarked that ‘while there is horseracing in Britain, there can never be socialism’, reflecting that while we might seek higher wages or better work, it is only so we can join the class in which we look up to now.

Britain as a country has had continuity governance for almost a thousand years- we belong to classes, and it shows. If you clamour for greatness, you are not born with it. If you do not appear to give a fiddle, you were born a leader.

And this is the truth of brexit – the country does not, in fact, want to hurt the establishment. We only wish to ‘better’ ourselves so that we may reach what our forebears failed to: a higher class.

And so, people vote for Johnson. Not because they see him as a means to an end: but as an end unto himself.
The man who promised prosperity where there was none to be found. A freedom from beer and circuses, and a progression into black-tie and caviar.

Because despite the criticism often leveled against online cultures and video games, the escapism that is truly dangerous is the one we have always practiced.

It is an insidious belief. We might all want to believe in freedom being the ultimate goal of this process. But this means the freedom to buy into the party- not freedom of access.

And anyone who has spent a lump sum of over £100,000 on the privelage of attending a tennis match with Theresa May, or a lavish dinner with David Cameron will tell you – the price of entry into elite fantasies is simply not worth the copper.