And so it goes. As the Maybot skulks off into the ‘worst Prime Minister in British history’ cabinet with all the centrists feeling sad for her because she cried about herself, former child of the corn, Boris Johnson becomes our new ignoble leader. Thanks everyone who voted Tory in ’17, you absolute cocks.
Meanwhile Farage has re-emerged like some cartoon rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, pulling votes away from the Tories at an impressive pace for a party with absolutely no position on anything at all. Not even the one thing they stand for is really a position. It’s a none position. Positions are for losers, man. Too complicated.
That one thing they don’t stand for is quite a spanner in the works though and to save the hypocritical, cruel, venal, varsity club that is the Tory Party, almost all of the would-be prime ministerial mentals were banging the no deal drum in the hope of dragging those Brexit Party votes back into the fold. Boris was the first out of the slum, declaring, before poor Theresa had even dried her eyes, that we’d be leaving the EU on Halloween ‘Deal or No Deal’. And as shockingly depressing as it all is, it makes sense for him to do so. ‘A’ sense anyway, from his point of view. He was relying on about 160,000 Conservative Party members (average age around 60) to hand him the keys and they’re massively in favour of leaving the EU and not far behind in favour of a no deal Brexit. So if you were running to lead the present party of government you’d be a fool not to hold a position that appealed to them. If Boris had another position then those members and a whole lot of other Tory voters will do as expected and desert the party for Farage’s new none position party, whose sole none position is to not not leave the EU under no circumstances. They’re literally championing a No Deal exit and they’re being joined by anyone who feels aggrieved at just how complicated real life actually is, like a halfwit hoover.
I’m not a fan of the EU. I voted to Remain, though at the last minute and largely because I was concerned about who’d be negotiating the exit. But one thing that seems pretty clear about leaving is that doing it without any deal at all is a disaster waiting to happen. At least, a disaster for anyone other than hedge fund managers and those with offshore accounts. Unless they have Diabetes, then it’s probably bad for them too. So why on earth do so many people seem to be in favour of it? Well, I have a theory.
Things are complicated. And people don’t like things that are complicated. They have to learn about stuff and bring to bear certain critical faculties they’re not used to using because our education system isn’t that interested in that sort of thing. When we’re confronted with the complicated we like to draw conclusions from what we do know which (sorry to say) isn’t much for a lot of people. This stuff we know doesn’t even have to be directly related to the thing we’re (not) thinking about.
When we think about something our thoughts make inferences and connections that we may or may not be conscious of, which is why learning, critical thinking and culture is important. It’s far from a guarantee that everyone will agree or that they won’t get things wrong, but it’s surely true that the more you know, the more there is for your mind to refer to? The more you know there is to know, the less likely to make assumptions and be rigid and it seems to me our culture’s not been cultivating culture for a long while now. Most people’s cultural swimming pool is about the size of a tin bath in an alley.
So when they’re faced with something as complicated as Brexit a soundbite like ‘Deal or No Deal’ sounds comfortingly simple. And comfortingly familiar, because that phrase has been in the popular consciousness of the population for a while now thanks to waistcoated, faun impersonator Noel Edmonds.
Everyone (over the age of 20, at least) knows of the TV show Deal or No Deal even though it’s not on television anymore. It was one of daytime TVs most successful shows for years and while the phrase acts as a familiarity gateway into the show, the format of it fits well with a simplistic view of what Brexit is.
In case you’ve forgotten, in the show contestants are given a number of closed boxes with different values of cash in them. The value ranges from 1p to £250,000 and once a box is opened that value is taken out of the running of what the contestant can win at the end of the process. The hope of the contestant is that they open the boxes with the small values, which increases the likelihood that there’ll be a big number in the last box, which is what they win. To counter this a banker, unseen and only speaking through Noel via telephone, offers contestants a deal to stop opening the boxes. If the chance of it being a big number in the final box increases the banker’s deal increases and the contestant has the choice of accepting the banker’s offer or risking leaving with 50p.
It made for tense television despite the entire thing being based entirely on randomness. There was no skill necessary. No knowledge needed. It was chance and nothing more. Which didn’t stop people thinking there was some skill involved. A great article by Jon Ronson in 2006 describes the strange cult like atmosphere around the show. The contestant opening the boxes was selected from a group who were all, for a period of time, closeted (imprisoned) in a hotel where paranoia and suspicion crept into their interactions. Many of them had systems they’d made up, convincing themselves they could calculate which boxes had high or low numbers in them. All of this was presided over by the enigmatic Edmonds, like some light entertainment Jim Jones. It probably didn’t help that Edmonds, in turn, holds his own whacky, new age beliefs about asking the universe to give you what you want by painting prayers on your fingernails or whatever. This doesn’t seem, to me, a million miles away from the mind set of many of the No Dealers in our current situation.
But ultimately the show worked because, despite the randomness, there was drama between some, usually witless fool who was ‘us’ in opposition to the shady, never seen banker, whose aim was to thwart the contestant from getting away with the big bucks. Isn’t that always their aim? The gatekeepers of an impenetrably complex world that’s always trying to fuck us over for some inexplicable reason we barely understand. We can never put a face to them. We can never understand their methods. We know one thing and one thing only through the haze of complexity and bureaucracy – they’re against us.
Don’t do it Barry!! No Deal!! No Deal!! Open the box!! Open the box for us!! There might be something better on the other side.
Now, I’m aware that accepting this as an influencing factor in people’s assessment of Brexit requires acknowledging that a large amount of the population might be staggeringly ignorant and stupid. It’s patronising, maybe. Snobbish, possibly. Pessimistic, guilty. But to paraphrase an old George Carlin joke; consider how stupid the average person is, then realise that half of us are even stupider than that. I’d suggest it’s more frightening to consider that so many people have actually thought about it in an informed way and still come to the same conclusion.
Of course, you don’t need to know the intricate workings of the institutions of the EU or our own parliament to be able to get a reasonable sense of what’s going on. Today, in particular, as a clown ascends to the highest position in our land, I’ve been doing some inferring and connecting in my own tin bath. While I was scrambling around trying to grab a hold of the slippery soap I remembered an old saying. A saying originally published in 1500 by Desiderius Erasmus, though it was most likely a common saying back then (I Googled it). I’m pretty sure even Mr Blobby’s heard of this one, it’s as simple and familiar as a daytime TV quiz.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
TONGUE 