Day 6739: Polls Apart

Friday:


It is three weeks since the European Elections changed everything and there’s really only one story in town. It’s just not the one you think it is.

With 3 MEPS Lib Dems topped the poll in London

Obviously, the news cycles are dominated by the Conservatory leadership. After all, Game of Thrones is over now, and the audience needs a new hit of blood, guts and sexposition…

But whether the idiot in the clown-car is now a shoe in for the Iron Throne or might still get removed by an unexpected twist, what’s less obvious is that the entire debate is framed by the real confrontation: Liberals versus Fascists.

Liberals. Standing up to the Fascists. Who’d have guessed?!

Brexit has always, always been about choosing whether we are a closed off, inward-looking Little England trying to recapture a past that never was, or an outward, embracing, forward-facing Great Britain working with the family of nations for a freer fairer future.

The failure of Theresa Maybe Not to get a Brexit that was Brexity enough for the Mogglodytes meant we got to take part in the HUGE democratic exercise that is the European Elections.

Which lead to the ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE comeback of Nigel Farrago and his Kippers 2.0. No policies. Just an overweening ego and a betrayal narrative.

(“oh but we all know what Nigel stands for” – well on the evidence, stealing his constituents’ money to spend on propaganda so he can continue to not do his job and fail to defend Britain’s interests. How’s THAT for a betrayal narrative?”)

What was less predictable – in the sense that it was predicted by absolutely no one up to and including Professor Sir Not-Richard Curtis while he was reporting the actual actual figures on local election night and still saying “well this is going to be a good night for the Greens” as the Lib Dems soared passed 700 gains – was that the Liberal Democrats would be the clear opposition.

Liberals. Standing up to the Fascists. Who’d have guessed?!

A simple, clear message. “Stop Brexit”. We changed our story, and changed the national story.

We stood up for our values. Liberal , not “centrist”. No more standing in the middle, apologetically getting hit by cars coming in either direction. Taking a stand – like we did on Iraq, like we did on I.D. cards. Not necessarily the popular choice, or the easy choice. But the right choice.

And that was all it took, for us to win London. To break Nasty Nige’s claims to be the “winner”.

Parties that favour Remain outnumbered the Quitlings on election night, and a big big part of that is the Liberal Democrats. We might not quite have managed to form a Remain Alliance, but together the Liberal voices and Green voices and Scottish and Welsh Voices are more and better than the Brexit Party.

Liberals. Standing up to the Fascists. Who’d have guessed?!


So the polls – I mean never mind the polls, but the actual vote on Euro-election night put us second, beating Hard Labour’s wilting rose and the Conservatory’s burning tree; the actual votes in Peterborough show us quadrupling our vote in Brexit central – but since then polls have shown us well up, including one having us tops.

What can all this mean?

It means two things. First, there is no limit to what we can achieve, and there should be no limit to the ambitions of our next leader, whoever SHE is.

(What? What! Oh go on, vote for Jo!)

But second it means we must embrace that clear Liberal message. When we speak with our fluffy hearts, when we are clear, when we are Liberal we win.

This country needs healing. So much. And we will offer hope for everyone. But we cannot try to offer something that will satisfy everyone. We cannot try to straddle that divide. Look at what happened to Labour. They said they were trying to bring the country together. They were – rightly – seen as trying to say one thing to Remainers and the opposite to Quitlings. If you speak with two faces, soon people start to think of you as two-faced.

The nearest comparison is Northern Ireland. It’s a bit artificial, because there are artificial rules there that mean you have to have Unionist and Nationalist power-sharing. But when the brakes were taken off after the Good Friday agreement, the votes didn’t go to the middle of the road Parties, they went to the ones who said what they meant.

That’s happening in the rest of Britain. Liberal Democrats on the one side. Brexits on the other. No longer right and left. Right and Wrong.

Liberals. Standing up to the Fascists. Who’d have guessed?!

If there was a time when the gulf could have been crossed, it was in the weeks after the Referendum, when a Prime Minister of vision could have brought together people from different sides to find a solution that saw us leave but remain close. It would have cost a bit for both sides, but Remainers would have been soothed, and Quitters would have had their departure.

But instead, the Quitlings went berserk. Seizing their waffer-thin victory, cobbled together by promising a different Brexit to almost every different voter, and claiming that it was a mandate for whatever mad scheme entered their heads: abolish human rights – will of the people, Empire 2.0 – will of the people! Denounce the judges – will of the people., General Election to Crush the Saboteurs – will of the pe… oh fluff, look how that collision with reality worked out.

Last week, there was research showing that the soon-to-be-former Prime Monster’s three years of promising No Deal because it’s better than a Bad Deal right up to the point of sitting down and being show just how very much WORSE it was has not been completely successful in bringing the country back together either.

In fact, if you want to piss off 90% of the people, just pick a Brexit. Any Brexit.

TMPM’s catalogue of cluelessness has hardened opinions all round so much so that each different Brexit tribe is now so utterly convinced of their own deluded version of Brexit (no migration Brexit, sovereignty Brexit, take back our laws Brexit, Singapore on Stilts Brexit, Red White and Blue Brexit, In Out Shake it All About Brexit and every other Magic Unicorn Brexit) and utterly so convinced that any other Brexit would be a BETRAYAL™ that they would all rather we Remain than get the WRONG BREXIT™.

And the 48%, who might well have accepted with a few British grumbles that they lost in 2016, are more pissed than ever that they’ve not only not been listened to, and called traitors up and down the country by that fatuous fag-smoking former banker in the affected Barbour Jacket, that they are now more than willing to say, you know what, we were actually bloody RIGHT in that Referendum and we damn well don’t want to put up with this Brexit nonsense any more.

Everything has changed.

The old parties tried to ride Farrage’s tiger and it’s turned on them and eaten them.

There is only one path to healing.

And that is Stop Brexit. Bollocks to Brexit. We are better than this. And when we say so, we win.

Liberals. Standing up to the Fascists. Damn right. And about time too!

Day 6676: Europe: The Final Countdown. Again.

Friday:

Happy STILL IN the European Union Day. Again. They come around so quickly, don’t they!

People keep asking me “What is going to happen about Brexit?”

To which the correct answer is “How should I know, I’m a stuffed elephant!”

But let’s give it a go.

There was exactly ONE moment when Brexit could happen, and that was 23:00 on 29 March 2019.

And it didn’t.

Entirely thanks to the ineptitude of Brexiters in and formerly-in the Cabinet demanding more unicorns and less reality in their Brexit and through the religious intransigence of Brexiters outside the Cabinet insisting that this Brexit wasn’t Brexity enough, they missed the exit.

This is undeniably good news.

Parliament, and to an extent even the Prime Monster, have looked twice into the ABYSS of “no deal” and said “no thank you very much, matey” to the death and disaster that likely would follow.

So what do we do instead.

Well, Parliament is already off on its Easter hols…

No, that’s super UNFAIR – they’ve all been working absurdly hard to try and agree on nothing, and taking time away from the bubble might clear heads and let some fresh thoughts in.

But still, this extension actually takes all the pressure OFF The Prime Monster to get her agreement signed. And equally OFF of MPs to come to any agreement for it or any other deal.

And we have seen for the last six months that if there is an option to kick the can down the road, Mrs May will punt it into the longest deepest grass she can find.

Which unfortunately gives them all time to think about doing something else instead.

The WORST that could happen would be European Parliament Elections AND a General Election AND a referendum.

So you can bet that that’s EXACTLY what’s going to happen.

With the Conservatory Party visibly self-destructing before our button eyes, it will not be long before they do something… rather rash.

Pundits saying that the Prime Monster is safe until December because of the rules of the 1922 Committee… are overlooking that the 1922 Committee can just change the rules. We’ve already had the suggestion of “Indicative Votes of No Confidence”, which would be just as lethal as the real thing if lost.

Of course, Mrs May is a past master of seeming to promise to go, only to indefinitely defer the deadline – before the 2022 election, once the agreement is passed, when the stars are right. However, the even-by-their-standards frothingly outraged reaction of her Party to having to fight the European elections suggests time is very much reaching its fullness and the appropriates of her juncture is fast approaching.

The time limit that the Prime Monster has set herself is the 30th of June, though a calamitous showing at the now-inevitable Euro elections could truncate her tenure even further.

And to be fair, not a moment too soon. She has been absolutely the worst Prime Monster since, er, the last one, who is really to blame for all this mess. But Mrs May should have gone after the unnecessary election that she lost and only the unique combination of personal mulishness and no one else wanting to be left holding the ticking timebomb let her stay. Alas for Theresa, proving that she would rather defer Brexit forever than be holding it at the moment of detonation has removed her last purpose, that of fall guy.

I actually have this notion of Theresa May that, should she be ousted either by some confected 1922 Committee mechanism internal to the Tory Party or by a Parliamentary vote of no confidence in her government… she will still be Prime Minister long enough to send a Revoke letter to the EU.

It would be a final act of petty revenge, but she’d finally be doing the right thing for all the wrong reasons.

And she would tell us, from her Downing Street podium, that – entirely correctly – she was justified in this by the House having repeatedly voted down no deal and there simply being no time to reach agreement to do anything else.

She could literally save the country to spite the ERG.

But alas, that’s really too bold, to daringly pro-active for the Theresa we’ve come to know.

Most like she’ll just slink away to her field of wheat. Or what blasted heath is left of it.


So the Conservatories will need a new lunatic to take over the asylum. And the chances are they will replace the current one with the egomaniac second only to Mr Balloon in the annals of BLAME, Boris Johnson.

Not to say they won’t move heaven and earth – more like hell and earth – to stop him getting to the final two, because if he goes before the members he will win on a manifesto of bluster blubber and betrayal.

The alternatives though are not many. Either one of the swivel-eyed band of Mogglodytes, possibly Moggy himself. If Johnson gets it, he’ll split the party in a week. If one of the ERG lot get it, they’ll split the party in under a day.

Or there are the “moderates” – the deeply unlovely betrayer of human rights, Sajid Javid or the incarnation of the Banality of Evil, Jeremy the former Hulture Secretary. Either or both hoping to play the “John Major” of this scenario – winning from out of the bland – though neither have the shining charisma or raw sexual magnetism of a John Major. And that’s saying something. They are tainted with the Remain vote, though, for all the effort they’ve put into being more right-wing-than-thou. (Which, actually, was Mr Major’s problem too – he had to out-Thatcher Thatcher, hence all the insanity from railway privatisation to Back to Bedsocks, but that was last century's Tory tragedy.)

Obviously it would be a LOT better for all of us if they decided to look for fresh blood (no, not in the Zombie Apocalypse sense) and went to a fresher face, who could actually negotiate with Europe and build a national consensus again… no, I don’t see it happening either.

They’re going to pick another loony.

And then between two and twenty of the centreerists of the Dominic Grieve flavour will cross to the TIGgers (now renamed ChUKles) and the government will fall. In fact, a SMART Tory leader would jump before pushed, calling an immediate election rather than be humiliated into one.

Which would leave us with Boris Johnson versus Jeremy Corbyn. Which Johnson would win.

That’s not to underestimate Mr Corbyn. But against a robot with a manifesto that promised a death tax on her own core vote, Mr Corbyn still only managed to drag back Labour’s performance to really very awful. He’s not going to win back the forty seats in Scotland from the SNP that he needs to be anywhere like in contention for a majority. And his equivocation on supporting a People’s Vote or a Revoke Article 50 mean he’s frittered away a lot of the goodwill of the young people who believed Magic Grandpa was playing Seven-dimensional chess to stop Brexit.


The first thing to remember is that TMPM doesn’t actually HAVE a “deal” as such at all.

What she’s got is a Withdrawal Agreement, an acknowledgement of what we need to do to settle our existing obligations – mainly pensions for UK civil servants and MEPs, and projects that we signed up to and that went ahead on the understanding we were going to contribute – so we can settle our bills on the way out the door.

The Johnsonian notion that we can walk away from the Withdrawal and let the EU “go whistle” is obviously nonsense on stilts.

The first thing we would do after quitting with “no deal” is to go to Europe to sort out our customs, defence, security, common air-travel, fisheries etc etc agreements…

And the SECOND thing we would have to do is eat copious HUMBLE PIE as they wave the Withdrawal Agreement at us with an air of “What about paying for those dumplings you had, then?”

The real “deal” is the Future Trading Relationship, whether we are in the Single Market, in the Customs Union, in a Free Trade agreement or in the DO-DO of a no deal scenario.

“No deal” is the utter severance that is yearned for by the ardent Brextremists who laugh off the fears of “experts” and warmly welcome the notion of “trading under World Trade Organisation terms”.

This is because they do not know – or care – what that really means. Or worse, they do know and plan to make a killing by shorting the pound against the collapsing British economy. What it means is tariffs, schedules and border checks. Oh my.

Tariffs are actually the LEAST of our worries. The Government laid out its plans for a lot of zero INBOUND tariffs, which might seem good for people buying things, but they cannot fix the OUTBOUND tariffs that will make selling things to other countries HARDER, and with zero tariffs in place give us nothing to negotiate with when we try to change that. Disgraced former Defence Secretary Fantastic Dr Fox will remain a useless adornment to the government. So it’s not all bad news.

The schedules, though, are a very complicated set of lists and quotas that say how much of a thing we can import at a low tariff rate, how much has to be at a high rate, or how much we cannot import at all. Britain’s are all tied up with Europe’s, so expect a big fight over what our share of the EU schedule actually is. Which will obviously be helped HUGELY by having just TICKED OFF the rest of the EU by not agreeing the Withdrawal Agreement.

But the border checks are the MOST complicated, because under WTO rules you need to prove where the things you are taking across a border came from. And not just the whole finished product, but all the bits that made it up. And all the raw materials that the bits were made from first. And you have to stop lorries and boats and planes and check the paperworks. Which takes a LONG time. At the moment, in the Single Market, we get a lorry though the port of Dover every TEN SECONDS. Just how much of a delay do you think it will need to be before those lorries start backing up along the M20? Hello carpark-Kent. Hello food shortages and soon food riots. Hello people starting to DIE from lack of medicines.

And of course any country in the World – including the twenty-seven we’ve just magnificently flicked the V’s at; including Argentina who still want the Falklands – can start a trade dispute with you. Several already have, including the biggest economies in the World, China and our supposed best buds the Americans (make that trade deal great again, the Donald). You need teams of "experts" to provide "evidence" and agree "compromise" - all the things the Quitlings hate. Your free trade quickly gets very sticky, tying you up in knots for years.

One thing we DO know about Boris, though, is that he DOESN’T LIKE HARD WORK. Work like fiddly negotiations or difficult compromises or learning a brief when a woman’s life depends on it.

So why not try this for a Boris lark. He arrives in Downing Street victorious and announces, with another turning on a dime volte-face, that Britain clearly needs to choose its destiny again and there will be another referendum. He will rise magisterially above the fray. And with that vanishes inside Number Ten to make away with the silver and the secretaries.

And with one voice the nation cries:

JUST MAKE IT STOP

And so the nightmare is over. As long as Boris remembers to send the Revoke letter.

Brexit is dead. Or undead. At least until Halloween.

Now we just have to find a way to undo all the massive harms they’ve done getting us to this absolutely dead end.

Meanwhile, here is some Dr Woo…

Day 6058: Brexit - Optimism Bias for the Win

Wednesday

As a fluffy elephant, I’ve noticed you monkeys are in the habit of being bang-up sure things are going to turn out well. Even when they’re not.

It’s called OPTIMISM BIAS.

It CAN be useful. Having evolved the ability to imagine the FUTURE, you’d all be plunged into clinical depression without it.

(And I’m not making this up: people with low optimism bias tend to suffer with depression.)

But it also leads to assuming that WARNING SIGNS don’t apply to you:

Government Health Warning – I won’t get cancer.
Speed limits – I’m a safe driver!
Brexit cliff-edge ahead – Project Fear!!!!


So, a year into this Brexit shambles, and with the government making an art form of “masterly inactivity”, leaving things till WAY after the last minute, some Quitlings* are taking “nothing is happening” as a SIGN that really – really! – things are working out OK after all.

(*© @HickeyWriter)

This, as they say, is FINE.

originally from K.C. Green’s Gunshow comic #648

The leading lights (in the moth to flame sense) of the Vote Leave campaign are of necessity becoming adept at PIVOTING their arguments.

“a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way” (farrage) was swiftly transformed into “the will of the people”.

“No one is talking about leaving the Single Market” (hannan) has become “Everyone knew we would leave the Single Market”.

And now “We will be better off” is being rebranded as “We all knew there would be a period of adjustment” with a view to ending up at “Everyone accepted there was a price worth paying” (especially since we expect our kids to be paying it long after we’re gone).

This is particularly evident with this YouGov polling in the Indepretendent

“71 per cent of over-65s would accept a big economic hit – and half are willing for family members to lose their jobs”

That is – notice – RETIRED Quitlings saying they “accept” one of their family who is still working to PAY FOR THEIR BADWORD can lose their job to satisfy their ideological fix.

Nice.

But in spite of being thrown under the bus by Generation Baby Boom(and Bust)er, we still see responses of DENIAL from people who are just too OPTIMISTIC to see the warning signs.

Millie says: “So far there has not been any damage, quite the opposite.”

Ross adds: “Who says the economy will be ruined?? I'm not seeing a problem.”

It’s the sort of thing that might provoke an EPIC RANT… oh look, here’s Daddy Richard:

No damage? Not noticed anything?

Do you notice your electricity price?

British Gas are putting up prices by 12%. You can link that directly to the fall in the £, because energy is priced in $ so our costs have shot up.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40787555

Do you notice your food?

Those “great” trade deals on the table – well, it appears accepting American food hygiene standards means washing chicken in bleach because they don’t have the animal welfare standards that Europe does, and just try to kill all the bugs at the end of the process.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4742712/Why-chickens-washed-chlorine.html

Do you notice your holidays?

People going on holiday seeing four hour delays to enter Europe. That’s just a taster for what happens when we close our borders. That “taking back control” goes both ways.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4748182/EU-border-checks-leave-UK-tourists-queuing-FOUR-hours.html

Do you notice the big picture?

Growth is down to a puny 0.3% - we’ve gone from the strongest economy in Europe to the weakest. So much for Europe “holding Britain back”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40726833

Thousands maybe tens of thousands of jobs going from the city to Paris and Frankfurt. Oh they’re only bankers. But highly paid bankers who contribute a lot in taxes to paying for our services.
https://www.neweurope.eu/article/negotiations-not-banks-leaving-london/
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-latest-jobs-jp-morgan-us-bank-moving-staff-eu-a7836366.html

The Chancellor has a £25 billion hole in his budget. (says independent IFS report) That’s bigger than £350 million a week… no sign of that for the NHS yet either by the way.
http://news.sky.com/story/hammond-facing-25bn-budget-black-hole-ifs-study-10649553

Do you notice the NHS is in crisis?

40,000 shortfall in numbers of nurses because – surprise – the nurses from Europe took those people saying “go home” seriously.
http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/12/nhs-facing-major-crisis-after-brexit-leaves-hospitals-40000-nurses-short-6704236/

Do you notice that no one knows how to solve the problem of the border with Ireland?

Because it’s impossible. You simply cannot have a hard border with the EU and soft border with the Republic at the same time because the Iris border IS the EU border.
https://www.irishcentral.com/homepage/brexit-border-battle-about-to-change-irish-british-relationship-forever

Expecting the Irish to implement expensive and dubious electronic tracking to make it easy for us to leave, or worse telling the Irish that we will put British customs points in their ports (as though there hasn’t been 300+ years of conflict over exactly that sort of behaviour) is not approaching a solution. It’s making things worse.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-40750999

Speaking as someone who was in Manchester when the Arndale was blown up AND in Canary Wharf the day THAT was blown up, I’d really like us not to mess up the peace process.

Did you notice that our power and influence in the world has evaporated?

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/uk-defeated-in-united-nations-vote-on-ownership-of-chagos-islands-a3571901.html
We lost that vote because the EU members who we have just rebuffed all abstained.

Did you notice Cornwall got shafted?

Don’t count on those promises that subsidies would be replaced like-for-like. Leave-voting Cornwall was getting £60 million in EU regional development fund money. They asked the government to guarantee it would be replaced. The government just flat refused to say that they’d be making sure regions didn’t lose out when we leave Europe.

George Osbourne was promising money to Cornwall in his last budget saying “when the South West votes blue, their voice is heard”. Maybe not so much these days.

And if they’ll do that to Cornwall…

Did you notice that the government just FORGOT Gibraltar?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4370054/Spain-handed-right-BLOCK-Gibraltar-Brexit-deal.html


And last, do you notice anyone, anyone at all taking charge?

http://news.sky.com/story/cabinet-rift-over-free-movement-deal-post-brexit-10967163

We’ve wasted a year, had a pointless general election that left the country even more confused and divided. And the Prime Minister’s gone on a walking holiday – or taken a hike – while the Cabinet are all fighting each other.

This is a total disaster. An utter dog’s breakfast of a Brexit.

REALLY what is your excuse for not noticing?

The answer to Daddy’s question is these people are EMOTIONALLY invested in their vote.

FACTS that say this was a BAD CHOICE are personally HURTFUL.

Nearly HALF of Leave voters say that DO NOT WANT to pay a price for leaving.

Offer them something for nothing; give them nothing for something

The only way to square that circle is to avoid the evidence altogether.

So they protect themselves from getting hurt by NOT NOTICING.

It’s an EXPLANATION. But not an EXCUSE.

Democracy – REAL Democracy – requires active and, more importantly, INFORMED participation.

But people don't WANT to be informed. As we've seen, people don't LIKE facts when the facts are painful. So they get NEW facts that agree with their decisions. That's why most people are so widlly MISinformed about Europe and the EU.

You would think journalism as a profession would seek to correct this, wouldn't you

That's why the referendum we were given was a SHAM, bodged together as a fix-all for the Conservatory Party by Mr Balloon, and now taken as an excuse to escalate her personal grudge against the European Court of Justice by Mrs Mayhem.

If we are going to fix this – and MY optimism bias says we CAN fix this – we are going to need to turn our arguments around, show people that the BETTER Way is now clearly to make up with Europe, retake our place IN the community with our FRIENDS.

We need to win the OPTIMISM and then we will WIN.

Day 5882: The Prophecy

Tuesday:


This is a version of my entry to the “Britain in 2030” essay competition run by “Your Liberal Britain”. But because of their 500-word limit you lucky readers get about 50% more stuff!

Congratulations to winner, Lee Howgate, and all the runners up.

Now… I feel a vision coming on…

It is 2030 and Tim Farron’s Liberal Democrat-led government is seeking re-election after a remarkable if turbulent five years.

Sal Brinton, elected as presiding officer of the new Senate of the Commonwealth of British States and Nations, reflects on the three outstanding achievements of the Lib Dem Prime Minister.

First is the rescue of the economy from the disastrous protectionist experiment – the so-called “Trump Slump”. Freedom to trade and travel across 35 countries of the European Union has seen a flourishing of new ideas and new jobs. The young people who had felt their future torn away by “Brexit” rediscovered a new global sprit of Britain. The older generation have remembered that they actually liked going to Europe. True, the end of the pound was a high price to pay for readmission, and the process nearly foundered because of it, but the huge boost given to the economy by joining the Euro at such an advantageous rate has left many wondering at the “Project Fear” scare stories of the discredited Brexiteers.

Second was the healing brought about through the “Big British Conversation”, inspired by the way that new members of the Liberal Democrats in 2015 came up with new ways for the Party to review its goals and policies, which was the starting point for the constitutional reforms. For the first time people across Britain had felt that their ideas were being listened to, that they were in control of the outcome. Not everyone got what they wanted, but almost everyone felt the outcome was fair enough. The conversation has even been such a success that Ambassador Clegg is now being asked to help the Union roll out a similar process to rebuild the institutions of Europe.

Agreeing the framework for government devolution, instead of the haphazard approach that had resulted in a wildly differing powers from Scotland’s Parliament to London’s Mayor, gave people back the feeling they were all of equal importance to the country. Regional identities such as Cornwall, Wessex, Mercia, Yorkshire and Northumbria re-emerged when, after years of nationalist demands for an English identity, it turned out that there wasn’t one.

No one had expected Prince William to decline the throne, but no one was surprised when Kate Middleton-Windsor beat Tony Blair by a landslide to become our first elected Queen. Sean Bean had modestly laughed off moves to make him hereditary King of the North.

The axis of politics had shifted, from the old, backward-looking workers v capital left-right of the Twentieth Century, to the Twenty-First Century “Outward or Inward” of Liberal Internationalists versus Protectionists. The old two-party system had finally admitted it couldn’t cope, leading at long last to fair votes. While the right-wing Tories struggled on in alliance with former-Faragists in the newly-merged United Kingdom Conservative Party, some places saw up to four candidates competing for the label True Labour. Jeremy Corbyn remains leader of one of them. No one is sure which.

(As for Mr Farage, he was unable to take up the peerage offered him in the resignation honours of the last Tory Prime Minister as the House of Lords was abolished while he was still away on a six-month junket in America.)

Third, and in many ways most important, are the foundations laid for a future of opportunity.

Today, the Secretary of State for Sustainable Development Sarah Olney is at the ceremony to break ground on the first of four new fusion reactors, while Environment Secretary Liz Leffman cuts the ribbon on the latest tidal lagoon power plant and is able to announce that the Zero Carbon Britain target has been achieved. Health Secretary Norman Lamb will welcome the completion of the National Health and Care Service, and Home Secretary Caroline Lucas is widely praised for the latest figures that show implementing Liberal Democrat reforms to the drugs law has both cut crime and the number of people sent to prison.

On the World stage, Foreign Secretary Alistair Carmichael is at the United Nations getting them to agree to establishing no-fly zones and safe havens that will protect civilians threatened with war. He was right to resist calls to join further American military adventures, and instead we have pioneered the use of drone aircraft for delivering humanitarian aid not bombs. Meanwhile our forces in the Joint European Defence Initiative, led by Lord Ashdown, have now participated in four UN Peacekeeping Actions and rescued more than a million refugees from the Mediterranean.

Britain is getting back to work. British-made Jaguar-Tesla self-driving electric autocars are driving themselves to France, Germany, Italy and Poland. West Country Hemp is already established as a world leading brand. ARM holdings has bought out the remains of Apple, and are planning to launch a “retro” ZX iPhone. British and international cast and crew are filming Star Wars Episode XII at Elstree. People are working fewer hours but producing more, and Chancellor Ed Balls (International Labour) will announce the increase of the Citizens’ Income, sharing the growth in GDP.

We will build our success on openness to bold new ideas, to sharing our wealth, and on being part of the ever-wider family. This is now a Liberal Britain.

Alas, it’s only just over a month later, and this already seems shockingly naïve. The notion that we might somehow swerve and avoid the worst of Brexit and Trump Presidency has been shown to be hollow in the light of Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech setting out her 12-point plan for a hard-as-nails cliff-edge Brexit and a first fortnight from the new Administration in Washington that has seen a blizzard of executive orders and Constitution-baiting and plumbed new depths of deceit, from illusory crowd sizes to invisible walls to imaginary massacres.

Theresa May makes her plans if not clearer at least fractionally less opaque – and they are plans for a cold and cheerless tax haven Britain, lowest common denominator Britain without social care and a rundown NHS, where the Fat Cats can protect their assets and the just about managing just about can’t.

Now firmly in the claws of the Brextreemists, they drag her further and further to the exploitation right, seeming almost gleefully to desire the failure of our exit negotiations so they can go buccaneeringly alone, quite wilfully ignorant to the fact that we can’t just “adopt WTO tariffs” without the agreement of the WTO’s 169 members, one of whom is the EU.

And our non-opposition Opposition of Jeremy Corbyn is three-line-whipping his Labour rabble to support the Tories as Theresa takes her suicide-leap into the arms of the odious Trump.

And as Boris “punishment beatings” Johnson tells us that it trivialises the holocaust to compare Theresa’s fawning love-in with the man who has placed an actual White Supremacist in charge of America’s security with the rise to power of the 30’s iteration of Fascism, satire lies weeping and bleeding.

So what use is a fluffy little homespun future, when all about us the darkness gathers and the very worst of human spirit is in ascendance? All the use in the world, if it gives you hope.

Find hope where you can.

History sometime rhymes in odd ways. After the Scottish Independence Referendum, the Nationalists were galvanised and swept to stunning victories in Holyrood and Westminster elections. I think a lot of people assumed the EU Referendum would be the same. Except the SNP lost that Referendum, whereas the Farragist Nationalists won on Brexit. And as in Scotland, oddly rhyming, it is the losing side that is now winning.

Support is coming back to the Liberal Democrats. Sometimes in very surprising places. We understand the big swings to the Gold Party in Remain areas like Witney and sensationally Richmond Park, but there are some even bigger swings in those Labour/Leave heartlands of Sunderland and Rotherham. This cannot just be a surge of Remainiac votes; there’s got to be some change of mind behind this.

Perhaps what united and energised the people in Scotland wasn’t crude “nationalism”; it was a sense of a bright future ripped away.

Perhaps what’s behind this change of mind, is a sense that this is not the change people voted for.

Find hope where you can.

Stay strong, my fluffy lovelies, stay safe. Resist the urge to fight hate with hate. Though the darkness closes around us, there is still a hope of light. We will build that Liberal Britain. One day.