IS BREXIT A CULT? By Mel Cooper

A REMAINER BEING PERSUADED TO VOTE FOR BORIS

IS BREXIT A CULT? By Mel Cooper  - 26 July 2019 - Oxford, UK

  

For me subscribing to Brexit is like falling for that other cult, Scientology. It’s a pseudo religion and it promises to solve all your problems. It was also set up cynically to generate power and money for L. Ron Hubbard. Does anyone ever question about Boris Johnson or the others what is in it for them? About time someone did.

Like Scientologist and orthodox religious fanatics, Brexiteers also demonise anyone who does not join the cult or who tries to question the cult in any way. The trouble with all Brexit supporters is that they do not question the soundbites. Getting back control? Of what? We have control. We control our money and send 1.5% max of our annual budget to the EU for good and sufficient reasons, that include getting rebates and access to a pot of money that has done far more for farmers in this country, and the infrastructure, and several other institutions, and also medical and other kinds of research, than an economically illiterate Conservative party that was warned ages ago that they were cutting too much and not paying enough attention to borrowing cheap money to kick start various aspects of the economy. We needed a New Deal style FDR leader, not that intellectually challenged David Cameron with his sense of entitlement.

Speaking of which, for me the new Boris-Brexit Cabinet smells very much of trying to reintroduce Feudalism into the world, with themselves as the Feudal Lords. Which makes all the rest of us the peasants that will serve them. And there is no point in trying to talk to the subscribers to the Cult of Brexit because they will not listen any more than the Spanish Inquisition could question its own beliefs that burning people at the stake was good for their souls. They are that far gone!

And I blame Jeremy Corbyn and Seumas Milne and the Labour élite Stalinists just as much. Apart from anything else, does it not occur to Brexiteers and the Labour Party that it is bad for the country that there is no vocal, strong opposition? That no one is really questioning the basic premise that this farrago is really the Will of the People? If you vote for Conservatives you get, guess what, Brexit. Vote for Labour and you are going to get, guess what, Brexit. What a choice!? One day when history looks back on all this they will rate Brexiteers with the anti-Deyfusards and the Fascists. Not the Nazis. So far I cannot see that anyone has genocidal ambitions. But Donald Trump does run concentration camps near the Mexican border and it is all always someone else’s fault and his attack on those four women of colour in the US Congress is racist and he does hold Hitler style rallies, so I am not too sanguine about that. And we have done pretty well with Theresa May’s Hostile Environment and demonizing various groups for all the woes of the UK.

I just met an economist friend in the park while walking the dogs. He is about 35, very bright, and from Brazil originally. His wife is from France. France pays the second largest amount of money into the EU coffers and we pay the third largest. Guess what? France wishes it were paying more because our contribution is based upon our wealth and if we paid more that would mean we are generating more wealth. So why are Brexiteers moaning that the UK pays the third largest amount into the EU? I guess because they are incapable of reasoning.

Meantime, my friend and I are everything that the Conservative current grandees seem to hate. We are immigrants. Imagine, being non-pure British! It’s therefore all our fault. Makes you feel proud to have taken out British citizenship?

Anyway, as a young and thriving economist he cannot believe what the UK is doing to itself and cannot figure out any reason why. And that is more or less what most of the rest of the world that bothers to think at all is also wondering about. Perhaps it is down to this: that we had 45 years of peace and prosperity in the EU and so it was time for the cycle of bigotry and racism and xenophobia to reappear. I agree that the EU has its flaws. But you aren’t going to fix them by abandoning everything about it that is good, sane and working so well for us. And I am getting tired of having to “respect” the biggest act of stupidity this country has perpetrated since it thought it was okay to give Hitler the Sudetenland. I cannot believe this is truly the Will of the People. Eventually there will be blowback. But the sad thing is that everyone else, who can see with clarity what a lot of nonsense this all is, is going to have to suffer too. And it is happening all over the world. It seems to be the Zeitgeist.

So I guess it does have something to do with an ineradicable flaw in human nature that causes us to throw the toys out of the pram like frustrated children every generation of two. And we start by believing in false prophets of a new cult who tell us that Brexit will give us back our sovereignty when, in fact, we have our sovereignty but have merely pooled it. And when we get it back free and clear? We can start diluting it like crazy to satisfy the needs and whims of the USA and other nations with which we will have to do individual trade deals and a small island located just off the shores of a united Europe that has ten times more population to trade with.