Empty shop shelves, lorries piling up and a collapsing economy are all consequences of Boris Johnson's botched Brexit deal. However, do the vast majority of Brexiteers actually care?
If you’re not a supermarket manager, a delivery retailer, or a business owner that worked within the European Single Market then why would you care? A shopper can simply go to another shop and is it really such a bad thing that a billion-pound business like Amazon might struggle to meet delivery demands? So what if some businesses have to plough through more red tape? It sounds selfish but ignorance is exactly what continues to drive the Brexit bandwagon forward.
Of course, these issues will affect working people indirectly. The cost of food will increase because of a shortage of certain products. Amazon’s struggles will force the consumer to opt for a more expensive delivery service or the company themselves will have to hike up their delivery costs. Businesses going bust will have negative effects on the economy and the government’s levelling-up budget will shrink.
Still, it might not be too easy for Brexiteers to join the dots of chaos. The Brexit ideology remains immensely powerful and slander will not start to stick for some time. Couple that with the fact that we are in a global pandemic and you have the perfect alibi for Brexit.
Farcical
The Brexit vote was seen as a working-class win against the middle-classes and the establishment. We are here, we will let you know that we are here and we will not be ignored. It is the greatest symbolic victory for those who had continually felt ignored by their political leaders.
Brexit’s utopian vision has never really taken off and it looks a million miles away from ever doing so. However, the reality is that we have only actually been Brexit Britain for a grand total of eight months. High profile Brexiteers did declare that reaping the benefits of sovereignty would take a long period of time.
It would be foolish to bang the remain drum so soon after finally composing that January Brexit deal. Remainers will point to the shortcomings that have been highlighted and they will, quite rightly, vent their utter disbelief at what is happening to England. You cannot justify Brexit by pointing at statistics and facts because they paint a horrific picture of the situation.
Being a Brexiteer is a state of mind and it’s difficult to separate somebody from that mindset. If an individual vehemently backs a motion without truly understanding why, they are voting based on a feeling of strong emotion. It’s incredibly difficult to detach somebody from a strong emotive mindset.
Football fans follow their team all over the country and, if they lose, it can ruin a person’s weekend. It seems silly to combust over the actions of 22 people kicking a football across a field but that’s the spirit of football. It’s more than just a game for many. Ask a passionate football fan why they get so emotional over something they cannot control and they won’t know what to reply. Sport is meta, not literal.
People need to stop looking at Brexit on the surface level. Remain would not comfortably walk a second-referendum, like some people suggest, because the tribalist mindset of the Brexiteer will not be so easily flattened. It took years of fighting to get to this point and it will take years of hardship before attitudes begin to genuinely change.
Nonetheless, it is the responsibility of mainstream media to call out the shortcomings of this Brexit deal. The media is a very powerful tool that helps to forge perceptions and change perceptions. Certain channels seem reluctant to call out the flaws of the current Brexit deal because they are afraid of upsetting Brexiteers. This is barbaric. You call a poo a poo!
We live in a populist present, where the truth is a distant second to a convenient lie. One of the worst things about modern day politics is the ease at which competency is neglected. If you can’t do something just say that you can enough times and it will sort itself out. This is what happens when politicians are not properly scrutinised and held to account.
Echo chambers
Twitter is saturated full of righteous Remainers who believe that we should have a second referendum tomorrow. While common sense and statistics suggest we would be better in the EU, this is not the reality that we live in anymore.
Hopefully, the government can turn around this shambles and we can slowly build towards the sunlit uplands that had been promised for Vote Leave.
We should all want Brexit to succeed because we won’t be returning to the EU in the near future. Approximately half of our country do not want to go back into the organisation and the organisation themselves will not be rolling out the red carpet for us any time soon. Present signs are bleak, future hope is minimal, but we have to hope that some contingency plans can be reached over the coming months and years.
Our relationship with the EU is in tatters and it will only begin to heal over time. Finding a way back into the custom's union, whilst retaining the principles of Brexit, would be a sensible long-term ambition for any government. Leaving it in the first place, despite it not being a requirement of Brexit, was genuinely unfathomable.
However, any such return would be years away and we need to have some innovative collaboration from the government to rectify these self-inflicted wounds. Hope, like levels of fuel, is in rather short supply! What we do know is that this present decade is going to be hugely challenging for a lot of people.
