By David Futrelle
Some days I just can’t stand the thought of immersing myself in raw hate long enough to produce a post. Today was one of those days, so instead of the usual stuff I thought I’d offer you all a sort of crash course in Brexit, the ongoing political disaster that’s sort of the UK’s equivalent to us Americans (or at least a minority of us) voting Trump into office.
Your professor in Brexit Studies will be Scottish comedian Janey Godley, perhaps best known for the time she showed up outside of Donald Trump’s Scottish golf course, welcoming the then-candidate with a handmade sign calling him a name that is extremely bad here in the US but which in Scotland is apparently used in roughly every other sentence. (See the photo above for a hint as to what that word might be.)
Anyway, Godley is no more a fan of Brexit than she is of Trump, and so she had prepared a series of videos in which she does her own voiceovers for news clips related to the ongoing political wrangling over the impending geopolitical disaster that is already tearing UK politics apart.
I can only understand about half of what she’s saying, but the videos are weird and hilarious and probably more informative than the original news clips, even though I’m beginning to suspect that they may not be completely accurate representations of what is going on, what with all the references to flute-playing, houseplant-eating, and holidays in Torremolinos.
Here are a few of them, in rough chronological order, starting last December and taking the story up to the extremely nerve-wracking present moment. I don’t know all of the various characters involved here but three that come up again and again in these videos are British Prime Minister Big Theresa May (obviously), Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, and right-wing politico Arlene Foster from Northern Ireland. Hopefully some of the Scots who read this blog can wade in and explain some of the references the rest of us might be missing.
You can find a bunch more like these on the #janeygodleyvoiceover hashtag on Twitter.
She also did this one starring a couple of wee dogs.
And… to bring us back to the more traditional subject matter on this blog, here’s a little commentary she did recently after discovering the existence of MGTOWs.
If there are any MGTOWs reading this, and you’re thinking of taking up her suggestion of going to live on an island with other MGTOWs and a bunch of sex dolls, I have some specific islands I’d like to suggest.
Back to the regular stuff tomorrow!
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So we have this: Scavenger capitalists on the Right want Brexit so they can profit by it. Lefties want Brexit as an opportunity to enact collectivist economic policies that are much harder to follow inside the EU. Hordes of xenophobes and racists want Brexit for obvious reasons. None of them seem to be taking seriously enough the vexed question of the Irish border, which has to be kept open as part of the Good Friday Agreement which cooled off the Troubles. It also needs keeping open as part of the common travel area the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom have always maintained among themselves. But it will now also be the United Kingdom’s border with the European Union. And ‘control of our borders with an end to free movement of people across them’ was the way Brexit was sold to those who voted for it.
The Irish border has the potential to cause the Troubles to kick off again, or even (and I hope it doesn’t,) a nasty little border war.
Then there’s Spain getting itchy over the sovereignty of Gibraltar – a Spanish warship harassed shipping in Gibraltarian waters a few days to a week ago, which was not widely reported, probably for fear of setting off the sabre – rattlers.
It looks like we could be well and truly fucked.
I honestly have very little hope for the future. But if I were forced to find a silver lining in the Brexit cloud, I’d say:
1. Brexit has exposed quite staggering levels of incompetence in the Tory government. Labour have largely failed to capitalise on this so far, because they’re incapable of hitting an open goal. But in a post-Brexit general election, I hope that voters remember who owned the process from start to finish, and how monumentally they bungled it, and reward them with a defeat of historic proportions.
2. We’ll be so fucked that a Labour government could have a mandate for genuinely radical change.
3. This country suffers from an inflated sense of our importance, partly as a legacy of empire. If our post-Brexit fuckedness leads to us developing a more accurate understanding of our place in the world… well, that’s something, right?
Welp, that answers my question.