HO HO HO

Brexit started with a nasty rash of jin­go­ism and xeno­pho­bia: Swedes in the street were told to ‘go back where they came from’; Span­ish doc­tors were asked (by their reg­u­lar pa­tients) when they were leav­ing the coun­try; Poles were beaten up at ran­dom, and so on. Then the lies and shenani­gans be­hind the Brexit cam­paigns came to light, when it turned out that the UK’s fi­nan­cial con­tri­bu­tions to the EU were not going to be in­jected into the Na­tional Health Ser­vice as promised; that vot­ers in the Brexit ref­er­en­dum had been tar­geted using in­for­ma­tion lifted off Face­book by a shady Cana­dian sub­sidiary of the now de­funct (and dis­cred­ited) US firm Cam­bridge An­a­lyt­ica; that the leader of the Leave.​EU cam­paign, Arron Banks, had fun­nelled an il­le­gal £8,000,000 into it from the Isle of Man, an off­shore tax haven. On top of which, large num­bers of Eu­ro­pean work­ers in es­sen­tial ser­vices such as health and pubs have moved to more for­eigner-friendly climes; the pound ster­ling is worth 14% less since the ref­er­en­dum; nine bil­lion pounds were pulled out of funds in­vested in British com­pa­nies in 2018; some of the biggest banks on the planet have started to move staff out of Lon­don (usu­ally to Frank­furt or Dublin) and sev­eral major EU com­pa­nies with plants and in­vest­ment in the UK are also get­ting ready to jump ship; the lat­est re­ports re­veal that Britain is on the brink of a fi­nan­cial cri­sis sim­i­lar to that of the 2009 crash, only this time it would suf­fer on its pa­tri­otic tod. (All fig­ures are from the Guardian, The In­de­pen­dent and the Fi­nan­cial Times).

And then there are the cu­ri­ous in­di­vid­u­als spear­head­ing a hard Brexit, such as the for­mer for­eign sec­re­tary and painfully un­funny, self-made buf­foon, Boris John­son, who now takes his ad­vice from the Amer­i­can neo-Fas­cist (sorry, ‘alt-right’) one-time Trump ad­viser, Steve Ban­non; or the ever so pro-Brexit Con­ser­v­a­tive MP, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who be­longs to some­thing called the Cor­ner­stone Group, whose motto is, wait for it, ‘Faith, Flag and Fam­ily’ (and who looks un­can­nily like the pitch­fork wield­ing farmer in Grant Wood’s ‘Amer­i­can Gothic’); bring­ing up the rear end, we have Tommy Robin­son, a gen­tle­men who used to be­long to the thug-lov­ing Eng­lish De­fence League (and the even righter-wing British Na­tional Party) and who, in De­cem­ber of last year, led a major pro-Brexit demo.

Watch­ing all of this un­con­sciously comic, con­sciously du­plic­i­tous tau­rine ex­cre­ment being de­posited in the media for nigh on two and a half years re­minded this Anglo-Cata­lan res­i­dent of the ex­cru­ci­at­ing mix of laugh­ter and hor­ror that we feel when view­ing the black­est mo­ments in good cringe com­edy; for ex­am­ple, the ‘Fawlty Tow­ers’ episode called ‘The Ger­mans’, in which a men­tally dis­turbed Basil Fawlty im­i­tates Hitler in front of a group of weep­ing Ger­man guests. And talk­ing of Mr Fawlty, if he’d been around for the Brexit ref­er­en­dum, we all know which way he’d have voted.