Listen, I know everyone is sick of hearing and talking about Brexit. I’m sick of it too. In fact I’m mad that my brain thought up a few ideas for this article and then decided to do the whole thing, because now I have to think and talk about Brexit for even longer. I dread the day in 15 years’ time when my child comes home from school crying because their classmate called Brexit is bullying them in their banana-bending lessons. I’ll get flashbacks to that grim feeling of being politically hungover on the 24th of June 2016 and Bob Geldgof yelling at Nigel Farage on a boat.
However, Article 50 has now been triggered in what is a devastating self-own of historic proportions, the tragic hilarity of which I believe is something that cannot be ignored, and hence I must take to the keyboard forthwith. Make no mistake, this is not a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of Brexit. Please do not tweet me reasons as to why we shouldn’t be made to bail Greece out or about how you have developed a complex algorithm to predict the exact date Britain would’ve been under Sharia Law if we didn’t leave the EU. I know there are a number of valid reasons for not being in the EU, but I voted remain, and as far as I’m concerned this Brexit has the logic of a lobotomised monkey. So let’s just rip all this Brexit business to shreds a bit, shall we?
‘Article 50 has now been triggered in what is a devastating self-own of historic proportions’
To really get our teeth into the slapstick comedy sketch that’s being labelled a political power-move by several old sentient flannels we have to cast our minds back to the days before the referendum. Particularly that big red bus. The one that proposed we could take the £350 million we give to the EU each week and pump it into the NHS instead. I can see the mindset of xenophobes everywhere upon viewing this glorious bus: “immigrants can come here easily because of the EU, which we pay to be a member of. Immigrants are ruining the NHS. If we stop being in the EU we get rid of the membership charge, and no more immigrants will come to steal our health. We’ll be up to our eyeballs in fake hips and the blood of youth!” And then they strolled into the polling station with the biggest erection they’ve had this millennium.
Of course, that whole bus promise turned out to be a lie. Seriously, though, who trusts a bus on anything financial? You don’t have change for a tenner but you’re promising me £350 million a week? Come off it, mate. But, in true Brexit Britain fashion, we must pretend that nothing is wrong. Everything is fine and we should all sit around eating crumpets and drinking tea and talking about how jolly sovereign we are now. We’ll probably put a big statue of the bus right next to Nelson’s column, a bastion of independence and a hopeful symbol of the day we took back control from those meddling kids over in Brussels. I’ll be taking my future child on holiday in Spain when, oh no, that kid Brexit from my child’s class is at the same resort as us, and his dad has a tattoo of the bus on his chest.
Those pre-referendum days were very different to the hellish self-flagellating Britain we find ourselves in now. The entire world watches as our nation accidentally chops its finger off, but then keeps chopping off more fingers as if we did it on purpose. What must have been going through May’s mind as she wrote that letter to trigger Article 50? And all on the whim of a load of leave voters, the majority of whom have probably died since June.
‘What must have been going through May’s mind as she wrote that letter to trigger Article 50?’
One of my favourite parts of #Post50Britain (that’s something I’m trying to get going) is this fixation on getting blue passports. Because imagine if we do end up getting blue passports. The right will be in rapturous celebration. This whole Brexit thing was a huge success! None of that purple-ish kinda burgundy colour, we’ve got blue ones! Praise be to Saint George! At what point, however, did we take back control? Isn’t that what this whole thing was all about? Some mystical concept of sovereignty that’s going to permeate our British air and fill us with child-like joy, a concept which is beautifully ironic coming from a country that once owned a third of the globe. The bar has been shifted so low that now we’re meant to celebrate the particular hue of our travel documents? We are brilliantly pathetic.
The crème de la crème, however, of #Post50Britain is the fact that we’re now going to war with Spain. Two days away from the EU, and we started a war with a European country. What are we like, eh? Some bloke called Lord Howard went on the news and said that Spain can’t take Gibraltar from us, because look what happened when someone tried to take the bloody Falklands 35 years ago. And Theresa May would do the same because that’s our island full of monkeys, and we need those monkeys to lobotomise and then devise political strategy with. So now we’re all being conscripted, and I wish good luck to you all on the front lines. We’ve basically done the international equivalent of getting kicked out of a club and then shouting to the bouncer that we could knock his lights out, but what we don’t realise is that we’ve wet ourselves and no taxis will take us home.
I haven’t exactly laid out a positive view of a European Union-less Britain here, but I am deciding to find hope in the fact that maybe one day we can reverse all this. We’ll grovel on our hands and knees, throw our blue passports into the sea, exile that kid called Brexit and his questionably inked father, and beg the EU to let us back in. Of course, Brexit could turn out fine. Maybe we’ll be economically better off, the NHS will be less strained, there’ll be leave voters and remain voters running in slow motion toward each other in a field on a tranquil summer’s day. If that happens I will erase all evidence of this article and gorge on a lifetime supply of dry humble pie. But until then, I would like to enjoy my time spent at the back of the Brexit bus as it careens off a cliff by delivering my smuggest “I told you so” in history.
