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Why stop at Brexit: workers should decide everything

TESS DELANEY argues that the EU referendum was an admission that politicians could not do their jobs — so why let them try to regain their credibility now?

WHEN the Brexit referendum happened, I was living in a caravan on a windy hillside. I took no notice of the news and hadn’t for ages. I had been trying to ignore the world, politics and society in general and not take any notice.

I didn’t know what they were asking. I was born in 1972, so have no recollection of the vote that got us in, although I’ve heard plenty about it since. But at that time, the referendum time, all I could think was: why the frick are you asking me?

It seemed absurd that the finest political minds in the country (sic) couldn’t come up with a solution and decide what to do. So they thought to themselves, here’s a good idea: let’s ask all the people who are living in caravans on hillsides, or working 55 hours a week on site, or bringing up kids single handedly and all the rest of the population who have no idea what the hell it is you want us to say.

I didn’t vote, because I didn’t know what the hell I was voting for. Everyone told me what they were voting, but nobody seemed to really know why.

They muttered and mumbled recognisable headlines and soundbites, but everyone seemed as lost as I was, although not everyone seemed to want to admit it. Everyone was an expert except me. After the event, it seemed like a major big deal, so I started looking into things and paying attention.

You’d listen to one presenter and think that you’d been convinced one way. Then you’d listen to the next presenter and by the end of that show you’d been brought round to a different point of view. It made me realise why I’d never got involved in the first place.

The more I listened, the more I became a believer in Remain. I’d listened to what I thought were all the arguments and made a decision thus. But I did see that when the Labour Party started talking about not honouring the referendum result that it was heading for trouble.

I also thought, however, that it was just trying to save the public from themselves because they had got it wrong. Then I thought Corbyn was just trying to please everyone. I didn’t know what to think, so I thunk all of the things.

However, it has now become apparent to me, that though Brexit is being done in the worst way imaginable, it was something that we had to do to, for one simple reason.

We can’t overhaul our society if there are other countries imposing their imperialist rules onto us to deal with as well as our own. We can’t replace capitalism with socialism if we don’t do Brexit.

As we can see, it wouldn’t have mattered if Corbyn had won. He didn’t because his own party bailed on him — but if he had, the Establishment would never have let him have socialism in this capitalist state. The only way to get socialism, real, proper socialism, is to evict the ruling classes and do it properly.

The voices that had convinced me that Remain was the way forward seemed so eloquent and the leavers seemed so, well, ineloquent, that I believed the rhetoric without seeing behind the fine words.

And that was deliberate. That was a deliberate game played by the media to convince those of us who felt we knew nothing to continue feeling thick.

These voices on the wireless convince you because they sound so switched on and knowledgeable. There was a reason that the only real voice the media would allow to discuss Brexit The Good in public was Nigel Farage.

No-one let us see the left version of Brexit. It wasn’t on your car stereo like the BBC and LBC.

The worker classes, by their nature, are workers. They have little care for the ins-and-outs of politics. They’re busy working. They pay politicians to do that work for them.

In the case of Brexit, the politicians weren’t capable, so they asked the brickies to do their jobs for them and the brickies said leave and the politicians went, oh you weren’t supposed to say that and the brickies went, well, we just did. So honour it.

And Labour didn’t honour it and Johnson did and that’s why the Tories are in power now, making a complete debacle of Covid-19.

And the “educated” media are still showing us their version of why everyone is wrong and Farage is in the channel daily with his camera and the status quo is retained, in that, the whole country is arguing. About everything. Covid-19, masks, Brexit — still.

And the sad fact is, if the politicians in charge of us had any tiny clue what they were doing, it wouldn’t be like this. This goes to prove that what we really need in Parliament are brickies and hippies who live on windy hillsides and people who actually just need to work, to live and want everyone and everything to stop pissing about.

The ones who the politicians have admitted have all the answers when they themselves didn’t. The ones who would jump at a real socialist society, because that’s the real dissatisfaction and they’re just trying to distract us with the details.

So, political heavyweights, or should I say, incompetent fools, now that you have everyone paying attention, move aside and let the hippies and brickies do it.

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