I don't understand why remain and the current MPs are accepting the result of this referendum.
They could say leave campaign incited racial hatred or used brain washing or anything they wanted to claim the vote wasn't fair and therefore needs to be redone.
As Austria just has done.
If only it were that simple. The problem is two fold.
Firstly there referendum unleashed a legitimacy in the eyes of many. You can't just go and say that people are brainwashed because they won't believe it! They know 'the truth' and to tell them they don't is to suggest they were 'stupid' for being brainwashed. They are not stupid though. Nor are they ignorant. They just not necessarily aware of it and I think its more appropriate to say that they were vulnerable to it - because of where they are in society - because they want to believe as it provides apparent answers to their problems and because it makes them feel empowered and it gives them hope of something better in the future. This is not just something you can 'take away', without violent protest.
Secondly, you need to consider who wanted Brexit and who pushed for it. It was the far right, the parts of the capitalist elite and the far left. Trouble is that this is the same capitalist elite that also have power. They can now exploit what's happened for their own benefit, discarding the agendas of the right and left as much as they can. I'm not sure that Arron Banks, will do that however, so I suspect we are on something of a collision course here. Meanwhile I think there's a bunch of us stuck in the middle rather open mouthed at it all going WTF is going on here? What the bloody hell happened?
You can't just put things back in the box. Things are different. Those things can be manipulated to suit various agendas and purposes though
There is an article in the Guardian today, that shines a bit of a light on parts of this:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/01/brexit-britain-elites-run-amok
This thread has been wonderful in discussing the party leadership battles and how things are moving in government, but as we get on, we sometimes slide into danger of rehashing the referendum, which will drag this thread into the possibility of being like the hundred other threads on MN that just argue about whether or not the referendum was valid and should be redone. I hope that we can resist that temptation.
This thread is not about rehashing the referendum to me. Its about asking people to have a look around at ALL the political manipulation that's going on, and looking at how much accountability and democracy there actually is.
At the moment there is a certain expose of the inner workings of that - it is being displayed by various groups and parties. There is a chance, if only a brief one, to open a few eyes to it and we need to seize that as much as anyone else out there is going to exploit the situation. I'm far from a revolutionary type (I tend to see revolutionary forces as a destructive rather than constructive force even if that's what comes out of the ashes and favour evolutionary change) but I fear that if we sit as merely spectators to this circus, without having some input to the process now ongoing, we'll end up shat on one way or another.
For me its about 'the search for the truth' in all this. Not telling you what the truth is. Just getting people to start looking and asking questions as that's where accountability lies. Its how you go about having a counter weight to manipulation. Which we are all vulnerable to.
The reason it feel a bit dystopic nightmare at the moment, is precisely because its gone dystopic nightmare with huge parts of our political narrative that could be lifted straight out of George Orwell's 1984.
However we do not live under the control of Big Brother and Oceania (which is how the referendum leave campaign tried to frame it in many ways as something quite literal) and at the same time likes of Arron Banks are trying to manipulate by using the same methods that they are professing to be fighting against.
Indeed 1984, is a protest against political manipulation.
I have a copy of the book, and it has an introduction written by someone called Ben Pimlott, whoever he his. Its a comment on what 1984 was about. The final two paragraphs are as follows:
The novel can be seen as an account of the forces that endanger liberty and of the need to resist them. Most of these forces can be summed up in a single word: lies. The author offers a political choice - between the protection of truth, and a slide into expedient falsehood for the benefit of rulers and the exploitation of the ruled, in whom genuine feeling and ultimate hope reside.
Thus the novel is above all subversive, a protest against the tricks played by governments. It is a volley against the authoritarian in every personality, a polemic against orthodoxy, an anarchistic blast against every unquestioning conformist. 'It is intolerable to us,' says the evil O'Brien 'that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be'. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a great novel and a great tract because of the clarity of its call, and it will endure because its message is a permanent one: erroneous thought is the stuff of freedom.
Personally, I struggle with Nineteen Eighty-Four I find it somewhat difficult and hard to access. It makes me go cross eyed reading it. (To a degree that's the entire point though). I think its messages need to be listened to right now though.
We do not have a healthy political system. It is rotten to the core. No party is exempt from that. Orwell's criticisms can be applied all over the place right now. Its not balanced. It does not properly represent so many voices in the way that it should do.
We need to start taking note of this, and fast, because this dystopian nightmare will worsen unless we do so and wake up to the tug of war going on between various forces and how they are all trying to frame the new order of things in the UK.
Think of it like this: the 23rd June threw all the political jigsaw pieces up in the air. Right now we are all scrabbling around trying to pick up those pieces. How quickly you can grab those bits and put them all together will shape our future - we should not leave it in the hands of the political establishment who currently appear to have lost the plot - nor should we hand that future straight over to someone like Arron Banks who is perhaps also having a shot at grabbing that power from the political establishment.
I just think, we need a bit of a rallying call for 'the truth'*: which I'm sure is also going to include some painful home truths along the way about ourselves.
*'the truth' being a bit of a misnomer as there is no 'one truth'. There are many truths and the truth may differ for different people. Whilst you might think it is, a lie is not the opposite to the truth. A lie is a deliberate deception, often a distortion of the truth so it looks a lot like the truth. The subtly in this difference is important.
Sorry. I appear to have gone all serious and a bit too over intellectual. Its not my intent. This really needs to be as accessible to everyone as possible rather than being an 'idea for the educated' (as indeed that in fact plays into some of the narratives being written at the moment).
I'm just fucked off, trying to make sense of it all and tried to express it in a way that makes sense in my own head, never mind anyone else's, by ranting into a computer which possibly isn't the best way to do it!
This needs to start ringing and resonating with people if appeals to emotion are the order of the day. I'm not quite sure how to do that, though I think humour is possibly the best 'weapon of choice'. If only to stop me from going nuts and crying about it all.
I just hope someone 'gets' it can translate the message into a way that is more inclusive and universal.
(Ok, I'll shut up now).