Brexit offers many opportunities for the Labour Party
It is certainly strange to be feeling disappointed that the Labour Party has a similar policy stance to the Tory Party when Jeremy Corbyn is leader. I voted for Corbyn precisely to avoid this feeling. If I wanted to be realistic about what the voters wanted, I would have supported Andy Burnham. I voted for a serial rebel, because I did not want to see Labour compromising. Now the preferred politicians of the Morning Star and the Daily Mail have little difference between them on the biggest issue of today. If Douglas Adams had submitted this as a novel, it would have been rejected as too surreal.
John McDonnell has said that Brexit offers many opportunities. It's worth remembering that crashing your car into a brick wall offers you the opportunity to get a better one, but most people just head down to their local Ford dealership. Although the British public has spoken - and their chosen direction is into the brick wall. Driving safely is apparently what metropolitan liberals do, and in 2017 no-one wants to be seen publicly shopping in Waitrose or being nice to another human being. So with that in mind let's take McDonnell at face value.
Brexit offers us the opportunity to get the economy we want. Everything is up for grabs and Britain is clearly too dependent on financial services and desperately needs to diversify its economy, so that the new jobs created are not just at companies that find inventive ways for the very poor to do for money what rich millennials’ parents used to do for free. (This, by the way, is not sarcasm, it's an actual Silicon Valley business strategy.)
No-one is more excited than me about giving a bloody nose to the cunts who do coke in the toilet of the Liverpool Street Station Wetherspoons. However, after every financial crisis we end up ever more dependent on an unstable financial sector and then banks get less apologetic. If you think that the slow crushing of prosperity that Brexit will bring is going to be felt in the square mile then remember we have a Tory government who would sell Newcastle to Kim Jong-Un to test his nuclear weapons before they contemplate inconveniencing the City of London. We always end up worse off and they always end up richer.
Let's not forget that the Tories back up plan for Brexit (if acting like an impatient child for some reason doesn't land a brilliant deal from the EU27) is to turn Britain into a low tax, low regulation, neoliberal hell hole to lure in the money of the most greedy and unscrupulous people in Europe. In essence we will be like Monaco with rubbish weather. Or Switzerland with rubbish trains. Or Singapore with rubbish. What everyone who does not work in financial services, the sex industry, the coke supply industry, or north of Watford is supposed to do in these circumstance is unclear. Certainly do not think about being a nurse or a teacher or anything useful and (formerly) supplied by the government, as the Tories will be rushing to deliver as much austerity as possible so that they can offer dodgy back handlers to any company that threatens to relocate to mainland Europe.
Brexit also offers the opportunity for Britain to regain sovereignty of its laws, this will surely be of benefit to a future Labour government. Never mind that we have a Tory government right now that treats the Human Rights Act as an inconvenience that stops us driving nails through the fingers of people we do not like. Leaving the EU will offer any future Tory government the ability to do whatever they like with workers', environmental and human rights.
The Tories are salivating at the prospect of bringing back child labour (you need to start on that CV early in today's competitive job market), drilling for shale glass in the Lake District (can anything that doesn't make money for big business be truly beautiful) and throwing benefit claimants who don't look for work into the Thames (only a metropolitan liberal who lives in East London, cycles to work and drinks vegan beer would disagree with this). Unless we were looking at very long period of uninterrupted Labour rule, I would be very wary about leaving the comforting, regulated embrace of the EU.
While Brexit offers a great opportunity to regain the sovereignty of the UK, it also offers a great opportunity to destroy it. After Wales and Cornwall have become Mad Max-esque hellscapes following the withdrawal of EU assistance grants, we have the prospect of Scotland leaving the union and the creation of a hard border between Northern and the Republic of Ireland. Of course the proposed Tory solution to the latter is to treat Northern Ireland as if it is in the Republic, which will definitely go down well with the Protestants and Unionists there. We may be able to rip Britain away from the tyranny of the EU, but we are very likely to rip the country apart in the process.
Supporting Brexit also offers Labour the opportunity to reconnect with its base, because what voters up and down country really want is to hear a Labour leader talk awkwardly about immigration. It went well for Ed Miliband and I for one am looking forward to more conversations with Green Party members about why our leader’s so keen on controls on immigration, while trying to silence that nagging bit at the back of my brain telling me that this is not right. All the time we will be accused of betraying the two thirds of Labour voters who voted remain, and being accused of being Britain hating, Brexit traitors by UKIP regardless of how much we hug the flag and try to stop people coming here to contribute to our economy by doing jobs that British people turn their noises up at.
Finally Brexit offers the opportunity to make a strong statement about the Britain we want. It's a great opportunity to tell the world that we are a closed and xenophobic island with a hugely exaggerated sense of a self-importance, and who would not be want to sign trade deals with such a nation? Never mind that we have no experience of negotiating trade deals for the last 40 years, our closest ally thinks that the point of a deal is to come out massively better off than the other side and that many of the other countries we want to do deals with want Britain to relax our visa laws, something that the reasonable Brexit voters will certainly be opened minded to as they are so keen to put national interest ahead of their small minded prejudices.
Only a metropolitan liberal who grows ironic facial hair, attends music festivals in Eastern Europe and wants to buried wrapped in old copies of the Guardian (it's more environmentally friendly) would have reservations about tearing up 40 years of law and rewriting them in 30 seconds while primarily considering whether the Daily Mail will like the result.
With all the opportunities for radical change what is there to worry about? Anyone who says otherwise is just a Remoaner who hates Britain. I'm not worried. I'm not even going to wear my seatbelt when I voluntarily crash my car into this wall. To do otherwise is to talk down Britain.