Reply to post: Re: Brexshit plane is crash-landing!

Re: Brexshit plane is crash-landing!

Loyal Commentard,

I believe this is the first time I've ever typed the neologism "remoaner". And it's as stupid as "brexshit". You're welcome to trawl through my back catalogue of comments and prove me wrong - but I try to be all fluffy and polite online. In general preferring to stoop no lower than sarcasm. Oh and bad puns...

I've used "remainer" and "leaver" as shorthand to describe groups of people. But I try not to indulge in this childish culture war stuff. It's incredibly depressing.

You're right about the pot meet kettle thing though. There's a small group of arseholes on both sides of the argument - who like to ramp up the rhetoric and the childish name calling. And then use the other side doing it back as an excuse for their own. And it's toxic to democracy (and polite discussion) where it takes hold outside tiny cliques. The internet has made it worse, I suspect because the noisy shouty idiots are the ones who post the most comments.

Hence you get the fools on the left of Labour calling members of their own party "red Tory scum" - and making their own side of the internal party debate look awful. And of course, a whole bunch of their voters did just fuck off and vote Tory - partly because they thought those people genuinely represent the whole left of Labour. And of course their justification was people calling them loony lefties. And so it goes on - but somehow it's never people's fault they're being rude - it's always because somebody else did it first.

Also, if you really do think that Brexit will be a total disaster and should have been stopped, calling the people who voted for it stupid, racist and gammons probably wasn't the best way to persuade them to change their minds and vote your way.

Oh and as a final point, I'm a soft leaver, who would have been perfectly happy to stay in the Single Market. Something that was still well possible until the middle of last year. But that required the more committed remain supporters to be willing to consider compromise - rather than risking everything on reversing the referendum result.

It now looks like the minority of people who wanted us to leave with a minimal trade deal will be the ones getting their way - because the "soft leavers" and the "soft remainers" (the people who don't particularly like the EU but thought it was too risky to leave) were so put off by the posturing of the more hardcore remain types that they ended up going that way because it looked like the only way out of the logjam. So how's that polarisation and shouting worked out for you?

Finally to quote a remain columnist in the Grauniad yesterday, Rafael Behr:

On we went, rubbishing the idea that Brexit was a bounty of freedom, sovereignty and control, irritating more than we converted, until Boris Johnson came along to lift the siege. By December, the liberation he could realistically offer voters wasn’t from Europe any more, it was from the argument encircling them. It was from us, the remainers.

Johnson’s winning formula was to downgrade the promise of Brexit from reward to relief, which was easier to deliver and still sounded marvellous. His opponents complain that the “Boris” brand of optimism is fraudulent, but that doesn’t matter when it is unrivalled in the market.