Brexit Is A F*cking Catastrophe
Watching the Brexit disaster unfold in Britain is a little like watching a frog slowly boil itself to death.
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by Ben Cohen
Brexit is a complete and utter mess. We’re now days away from falling off a cliff edge with catastrophic consequences. Enough is enough. It’s time to take this out of the hands of politicians and put it back to the people.
- Saddiq Khan, Mayor of London
Watching the Brexit disaster unfold in Britain is a little like watching a frog boil itself to death. The frog is in great discomfort, yet he continues to sit in the water as the heat increases. The other frogs implore him to stop as the water is now close to scalding, yet the frog appears to believes it is his fate to be cooked to death.
In a notable deviation to this metaphor, the frog’s water was never a warm bath to begin with. It was blistering cauldron from the get go, and a suicidal venture with only one obvious outcome.
As it stands, Britain is more likely than ever to crash out of the EU with no deal — a self inflicted wound of truly astonishing proportions. The rest of the world watches as Britain teeters on the edge of wrecking its economy and destroying the future of its citizens for generations to come. And for no reason whatsoever.
The political system in Britain is being torn apart as it attempts to find a solution to this madness. The parties cannot come together because they are each ridden with infighting and so ideologically opposed they cannot agree on the basis of reality itself. The Tory Party has been hijacked by militant Brexiters who believe Britain can afford to exit the EU with no deal (it can’t), while the Labour Party has failed spectacularly under Jeremy Corbyn to present an alternative to Brexit. Corbyn has been disastrous in opposition and refused, up until recently, even entertain a clearly needed second vote on the deals going forward. He has missed every opportunity to make the hapless May government pay for its recklessness, and continues marching his party towards irrelevance.
The country’s faith in the government’s leadership has basically collapsed, leaving a threadbare Theresa May staggering from one disaster to the next, surviving only because the opposition is so awful. May ploughs through the shambolic negotiations with the EU and the vicious factionalism in her own party with a deluded, grim doggedness that only she seems to believe is noble.
May is determined to get the deal she spent months negotiating with the EU through Parliament and has now successfully maneuvered the nation into a position where there are basically two options: her deal, or no deal. The problem is, literally no one wants her deal. It has been voted down in Parliament twice by historic proportions, along with other amendments proposing Britain remain in the customs union. Members of Parliament have also voted overwhelmingly to stop a “hard Brexit”, voted to keep May’s government in power, and voted to stop another referendum. If this makes no sense, then do not worry. It doesn’t.
The EU has now stepped in with a hard deadline of May 22nd, and told the UK that Parliament either accepts May’s deal, or face crashing out with nothing. In response to this, May’s government has pledged that if deal is rejected for a third time, it will allow parliament a vote on the way forward with several unknown options. The EU has said that if May’s deal is rejected, then the deadline for the UK to make a decision will be pushed forward to April 12th — a frighteningly close date that leaves little time to craft a new deal. Given Parliament has shown a total inability to vote on anything coherently, no one knows what this will lead to or whether May’s government will accept the outcome. It is also unclear whether May can continue as Prime Minister if her deal is voted down again. A leadership contest within the Tory Party would take weeks making Brexit negotiations even more difficult.
To put it bluntly, this is a complete and utter catastrophe. There are no positive outcomes here — only outcomes that are awful or slightly less awful. May’s deal is terrible by any reasonable standard. Crashing out of the EU is unthinkable. A second referendum or canceling Brexit altogether would undermine the public’s faith in democracy and would likely lead to huge political upheaval. It is a shitty situation made worse by truly shitty leadership. Theresa May is calculating that MPs will finally come to understand that her deal is the only sensible way forward, but history has shown this almost certainly won’t happen. That leaves the nation so close to disaster only a miracle will pull Britons out of it.
For those who believe the original referendum was woefully thought out and subjected to grotesque disinformation campaigns by radical anti-Europe organizations (both domestic and foreign), a second referendum with a series of meaningful options seems like the least awful path forward. It is fraught with danger, but the chance to stay in the EU or craft a deal that doesn’t destroy the nation’s economy has to be better than the alternatives. Militant Brexiters get to vote again to leave the EU, while the rest of the country at least has a clear understanding of what they are voting for.
Britons must be given the chance to save themselves from this madness, because there are no viable alternatives left.
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It's their own fucking fault. Britian and its Anglo-Saxon class have always felt arrogant and morally superior to everyone else and felt they were above their European neighbors for centuries, spreading their arrogance over to other countries around the world by invading and conquering them. This whole Brexit shit was initiated because of that attitude, and now it's about to smash them hard and cripple them. Maybe this will finally teach them some long due humility. And let this be a lesson to the United States of America. Drop your own attitude or else pay the price.