#Brexit: He traded his kingdom for horse shit

The truth is expendable

Probably there is much to be said of the EU Referendum results that have commenced the divorce of the UK from the European Union.

Throughout the campaign, it was difficult for me to elicit from all the talking points, the propaganda, the debates and outright lies that made up the interaction with the public what was fact from fiction, understatement from exaggeration, fear-mongering from bare-faced reality and snake-oil remedies from wild assumptions.

However, what it more or less confirmed to me was the need to redefine Modern Democracy as “The government of the sentimentally cajoled, by charismatic confidence tricksters for untrammelled vested interests.”

Appealing to emotions

Worse still was the fact that literally all expert opinion was rubbished, dismissed, debunked or excoriated as fallacies were deployed with soundbite efficiency, completely ignoring any semblance of objectivity, truth, data or fact.

They appealed to our basest instincts and excited such raw passions that one young mother of two and an elected representative of a Yorkshire constituency was shot, stabbed and killed by a mental incompetent fuelled by the hateful rhetoric that had pervaded the discourse. Pandora’s box was opened and every kind of poisonous view let lose without compunction.

The most potent fallacy in the #Brexit debate was the appeal to emotion on the matter of immigration, it became the focal point by which a 0.5% increase in our population was made to look like a 5% influx of undesirables taking liberties and abusing the hospitality of our generosity that we had reached breaking point.

A reckless gamble

Prime Minister David Cameron, took a political gamble and with hindsight he had no chance against the charismatic buffoonery of Boris Johnson and the caddish affability of Nigel Farage. He is to be consigned to the scrapheap of history as the man under whose watch the United Kingdom faced an existential crisis of disintegration and ostracism from its closest partners.

He had lost his deft touch, in another statesmanlike setting, he would have put in some hurdles beyond a simple majority, this was the lowest threshold possible and on a 52% - 48% share in favour of #Brexit, we are in the realm of uncertainty, in uncharted waters, subject to avoidable but understandable turmoil, turbulence and volatility, unsure of what the future holds and this is supposed to be our Independence Day.

At the very least, a higher percentage threshold should have been met, the four-country lock suggested by Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland should have been in the mixed, ensuring unanimity of all regions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, before we agree to #Brexit and the 16-17-year-old cohort should have been allowed to vote.

Not that this might have changed the result, but whatever victory for whichever side would have been hard fought for and more than well-deserved. Worse than Shakespearean Richard III, David Cameron did not trade his kingdom for a horse, but for horse shit.

For now, the country is split down the middle, he has resigned, the pound was in freefall, the stock market took a battering along with bourses of our allies and the leader of the opposition faces a vote of no confidence.

We’ll suffer for this

Europe has also gone shrill and strident, the next meeting of the heads of government does not have the United Kingdom as an invitee, we have more than tough times ahead, we are most likely going to be harshly dealt with to ensure the referendum we just concluded does not become an excitable contagion to others.

Never, has a nation had the voice to express itself and squandered it on irrational fear of the other considering it has a not too distant history of dominating over 25% of the world in its heyday. The Great British Empire which was at its height just a century ago has collapsed upon itself with a whimper, and whilst in 1982, Margaret Thatcher put the Great back in Britain after the Falklands war, in 2016, David Cameron has welded the Little to England in our march out of the door from Europe.

The consequences of #Brexit will be more far-reaching than we have ever contemplated, and the people who promised us the world if we #Brexit probably only have loads of sorrow, tears, pain, sweat and blood to offer.

Welcome to the new world.