Finally, Britain stands on the brink of Brexit victory.
No, I don’t mean Boris Johnson’s new deal, which may or may not prevail.
I mean that the British people’s fury with the shenanigans of the liberal elite has reached such a pitch that nothing — neither the police nor our rule-makers nor our bent, parti-pris judiciary — is capable of stopping us prevailing in the end.
For evidence, look no further than the glorious scenes at Canning Town Station in East London this week, when a sickly-looking pair of Extinction Rebellion milquetoasts were yanked from on top of a Tube train carriage by angry commuters and told exactly where they could shove their green revolution.
We don’t yet know the names of the heroes who acted in this way when the authorities stood impotently on the sidelines. (Let’s hope that the police don’t because they’ll probably arrest them).
We do, however, know the identity of at least one of the tofu-munching gimps who thought it would be a good idea to stop thousands of commuters getting to work that morning by preventing their transport from leaving the station.
His name is Mark Ovland and he’s a Buddhist teacher.
No, wait, scrub that. He’s even more useless than that. Mark Ovland is an ex-Buddhist teacher.
Ovland used to have a non-job.
Now he has given up even his non-job to become a full time climate protestor, which isn’t so much of a non-job as an anti-job: it doesn’t merely fail to add much to the economy, like his Buddhist teaching non-job did; it actively steals from the economy by preventing people from earning a living and creating value and trying to give their kids a better future.
But what does any of this have to do with Brexit?
It has EVERYTHING to do with Brexit.
The clash between hard-working, honest, decent wage-earners on the one hand, and work-shy, pampered, over-“educated”, lefty eco-activist parasites on the other is the embodiment of the clash of cultures which led to Brexit.
If you had to draw a Venn diagram of Extinction Rebellion supporters and people who voted Remain, you wouldn’t get two overlapping circles — you’d get one circle with both pretty much sitting on top of each other.
Extinction Rebellion is Remain; Remain is Extinction Rebellion.
That’s because Remain was never really about Britain’s membership of the European Union any more than Extinction Rebellion is really about saving the planet.
What they’re both really about is an attitude, a state of mind, which is best summed up by a brilliant article I urge you to read by Russell Taylor called ‘The Real Origins of Brexit’.
In his long-read diatribe, Taylor describes the rise and rise of the class I sometimes describe — borrowing from ST Coleridge — as ‘the clerisy.’
The clerisy is that entitled, educated, middle-class liberal elite which has become increasingly dominant in Britain and elsewhere — the U.S., for example, suffers exactly same problem — since the turn of the Millennium.
This liberal elite is at once a parasite and an oppressor. Not only does it feel that it is owed a generous living, regardless of what it actually contributes to the economy. But it also believes that by dint of its education it has the right to tell the rest of the population how it should behave, talk, even think.
One of the things that these liberal elites have in common across the West is their passionate belief in bigger government.
They have to believe in bigger government because their livings often depend on it.
Here’s Taylor describing how it works:
Whereas blue collar trades were increasingly seen as gauche and retrograde, professions that utilised certified planners and pontificators assumed an air of sophistication. Before long, even businesses were overloaded with backroom meddlers cooking up problems to solve, enforcing government regulations and mimicking its paternalistic attitudes. The country was soon awash with ambitious mediocrities, enforcing compliance, ensuring diversity, drawing up guidelines, and doing other such ‘work’ that added sweet F.A. to the bottom line.
The creative sector benefited, too, from the notion that the brightest and the best shouldn’t be subject to the vagaries of the free market or the vulgarity of popular demand. If an artist considered his work worthy of an audience, then funding would be provided whether that audience existed or not. It was a similar story for experts in any field ostensibly concerned with the disadvantaged. Money and power would be transferred their way, without the consent of the paying public.
Extinction Rebellion, though it professes to be anti-Establishment, embodies the left-liberal values of the current Establishment hegemony.
That’s why rarely, if ever, will you hear anyone in government criticising Extinction Rebellion’s ideology, only its methods.
Then again, as one Conservative Brexiteer once told me, you can only fight a war on so many fronts. “Of course I know the whole climate change thing is bollocks,” he said – or words to that effect. “But I can only marshal my forces for one major battle at a time and that battle right now is Brexit.”
That’s how politicians have to think, it’s the nature of politics. Even the great Donald Trump has to play by these rules: look, for example, at how he has chickened out of having a red-team/blue-team scientific debate on global warming.
Happily, though, ordinary people are not constrained by such rules. There comes a point where they simply say to themselves:
“Sod this for a game of soldiers. I really don’t care whether what I’m about to do is wise or expedient or even legal, come to that. I’m just sick to the back teeth of what’s happening to my country. It’s wrong. It feels wrong. And if the system that is supposed to look after the interests of decent, law-abiding, productive citizens will no long protect the interests of decent, law-abiding, productive citizens then I guess I’ll have to take the law into my own hands.”
Which is exactly what happened at Canning Town Station in the East of London this week.
For months, on and off, Extinction Rebellion activists have been playing havoc with the lives of ordinary people who thought the law was supposed to protect them and their livelihoods from the kind of direct action that Extinction Rebellion and its apologists keep reassuring us is peaceful and in our best interests.
Grudging tolerance has gradually given way to a simmering sense of injustice: “How can it be”, ordinary folk have started to wonder, “that these privileged wanktards with their pointless degrees in Environmental Sciences and Advanced Poi are free to build pyramids at Oxford Circus and block Westminster Bridge when if I tried it I’d get myself chucked in jail?”
That simmering sense of injustice is now erupting into acts of rebellion — real rebellion, not Extinction Rebellion’s state-protected faux-rebellion — like the one in Canning Town Station.
Something very similar is happening with people’s feelings about Brexit: “How can it be right that we live in democracy which refuses to honour a popular vote? Surely honouring a popular vote is the most basic requirement. And if it doesn’t do that, then democracy has failed and we need to start looking at other ways of making our feelings known.”
My take home from all this isn’t that it’s all about to kick off and that Britain is about to erupt in gilets-jaunes type violence.
Rather, it’s simply that the longer Brexit has been delayed by the corrupt, failing Establishment, the more we Brexiteers have become aware that we are the majority, that we’re the ones with both justice and common sense on our side, and that we’re not going to take no for an answer.
The liberal-left Establishment, of course, would love to spin it differently.
I thought it was hilarious, for example, the way the liberal-left media tried to pretend that the Canning Town incident was somehow a “shocking” act of violence:
But this kind of spin is all they have left in their depleted armoury.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, whatever nonsense the Remain Establishment has got planned to try to undermine Boris Johnson’s Brexit plan, the Remainers are fighting against the tide of history.
Even if Boris’s plan doesn’t get through Parliament, the direction of travel is clear: the despicable globalists are on the way out and the populists are on the ascendant.
We’re winning: the good, decent, sensible, value-creating, hard-working, straight-talking, pub-bantering, piss-taking real people are on the verge of trouncing the politically correct, social-justice-worshipping, humourless, economy-draining, finger-wagging, parasitical nonentities who’ve been ruling the roost these last few years.
We’ve had enough of the Jolyon Maughams and the Gary Linekers and the John Bercows and the Mark Ovlands pratting around on top of our train carriages and preventing us from going where we want to go.
The Brexit train is about to leave the station. And it’ll take more than a bunch of posturing, prancing gimps to stop us.