Loathe the Brexiteers as I do (and especially the smug, arrogant, deluded fantasists on the Tory backbenches who seem to
think that the rest of the world will give Britain whatever it wants simply
because we’re so brilliant), I can’t join in with the desperate hope that the
Referendum is going to be reversed. I know people make themselves feel better
by sharing stories suggesting that might be a possibility (and perhaps it is);
but simply overturning what happened in June won’t make the divisions in this
country go away. A great part of the population of the UK has felt ignored and marginalised
and has expressed that in pathological ways, and some of them will have been my
parishioners who I have a responsibility for: those opinions won’t magically
dissipate if we somehow stay in the EU after all, and in fact may well
intensify as the poor (mainly) have their wishes trampled over by the well-off
yet again, and are told once more that they are ignorant and unacceptable. We
have a problem, a problem which isn’t essentially to do with the EU. Even
behind what seems to be brutal and nasty opposition to ‘immigrants’ lies
genuine resentment about change, inequality and powerlessness. We still need to
deal with this, don’t we? The only alternative is just force, that one side
‘wins’ and enforces what it wants. Is that really the way forward? The Civil
War option? And if it is, what do people who think of themselves as ‘liberal’
make of it?
If the vote does get reversed, it won’t be any kind of
triumph. The defeat has already happened. I still haven't worked out what, as rector of Swanvale Halt, I might do to mitigate it.
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