Over the next few months and years Brexit will play out and impact virtually every aspect of life in this country. The ramifications are unknowable. The people who have spent a lifetime campaigning for it never thought it through but they convinced enough of our fellow citizens to throw caution to the wind and vote to leave the EU. Some things may be better - I can't think what things they might be but I'm prepared to accept that some people, a small number, will be happy about Brexit.
However, I am sure the great majority will not. Change is never easy. As human beings we are naturally averse to it but Brexit will bring about a lot of changes over a relatively short time and most of them will make life worse for most people - in my opinion. There will eventually be blame to be apportioned. The Brexiteers will never accept any of it, so who will it be heaped upon in the rabid pro-Brexit press?
The EU will take the brunt. Liam Fox laid the foundation for what is to come at the Tory party conference when he said, "The process is being made harder than it has to be but the blame for that doesn't lie on this side of the Channel, the blame for that lies on the unwillingness of the European Union to get into the second stage of negotiations". The longer the delay in moving on to discuss future trade, the "more difficult" it is for everybody to get to a deal on the timetable the UK wants - by Brexit day in March 2019, he said (HERE).
We already know that civil servants are coming in for criticism (HERE), for being too faint hearted about it all. Brexiteers were never good at the details but when serious but innocent people, the messengers with bad news, begin to go through the fine print and find it is going to be a lot harder, take much longer, cost more and leave us poorer they can expect a lot of opprobrium.
Next it will be the government ministers, not the Brexiteers of course but the remainers like May, Hammond, Green and so on. They will be accused of tainting the purity of Brexit and of never really believing in it. Even of sabotaging it. They will be like fire brigade officers attacked by the arsonists as they try to quench their fires.
The remoaners will be guilty of talking down the country, of creating the wrong atmosphere.
Exporters who fail to grasp the opportunities of Brexit will face severe criticism. Anybody who is not keen on swapping Dusseldorf for Delhi or Paris for Patagonia in winter will be labelled a wrecker like those in Stalinist Russia who failed to meet production targets.
In fact we will all be accused of betraying the Brexiteers. They had the vision and the spirit to see what Brexit could have been but we let them down. It wasn't them. It was us. We were just not good enough.
Update 13th October: Ian Dunt writes the politics blog and has a nice post (HERE) about the Brexiteers search for traitors and non believers, those who will take the blame when things go wrong. Phillip Hammond, the Chancellor, is in their sights at the moment.
Update 13th October: Ian Dunt writes the politics blog and has a nice post (HERE) about the Brexiteers search for traitors and non believers, those who will take the blame when things go wrong. Phillip Hammond, the Chancellor, is in their sights at the moment.
