This Hasn't Gone Away

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.