The Weather and the state of the roads

If you’ve read the last post, you’ll know Mrs Dim and I took Tiny Weasel back to the UK for a couple of weeks, stopping off in Paris for a few days. Since we’re a talky family around our own dinner table, we warned Tiny Weasel that she ought to be a little more circumspect with her views in front of her UK elders. Mrs Dim offered Jane Austen’s advice “Stick to the weather and the state of the roads.”

Much the same advice is given to writers, actors, and artists of all stripes on social media, but only when those concerned don’t agree with the statements made. “Stay in your lane”, the Right Wing folks shout at Chris Evans (Captain America, if you prefer), but they cheer James Woods for presenting the opposite sentiment.

The general thought is that you should avoid alienating your potential audience/market by expressing political opinions that may upset people. The problem with that is, these days you have fans of concentration camps and forced exportation on one side, and fans of universal healthcare and free education on the other. I don’t WANT the good opinion of people who support or excuse Trump, thank you.

And so I come to the news from the UK. Boris Johnson falls into the role of Prime Minister, despite demonstrable incompetence and outright falsehood. He and his friends lied, over and again during the Brexit campaign, then they lied again by denying that they lied. Now he’s marching about, shouting that he’s going to “deliver Brexit”, as if he knows some secret that was denied to the government up to this point (a government he was part of while it failed to deliver Brexit.)

Part of me is curious. I genuinely believe that Boris and his cronies know that Brexit is a ruinously bad idea, and that they have been making money and influence off the chaos that the vote produced – Boris is, after all, Prime Minister now. He’s in an excellent position to hand out favours to his mates. I don’t think he wants to preside over the fall of the UK, so he’ll find some way to weasel out of the break with the EU. Most importantly, he’ll find someone else to blame for it.

If anyone actually reads this post, some may feel they have to point out the wretched “17 million” figure as proof that Brexit is the will of the majority. once again, I’ll just say that there was a 4% majority out of the people who were eligible to vote AND voted at the time. That’s not the whole population, it’s not even the whole voting population. And just the day after people were saying they hadn’t understood what they were voting on. Coupled with the lies told by the Leave campaign, it’s clear the referendum itself was no mandate for change. In two years, there’s been no clear plan for how to proceed, and Boris has given no sign that he actually has any PLAN beyond his usual nonsense bluster.

Though my family and I are safe in Canada, my parents still live in the UK, and as older citizens I worry for them. With his Etonian, profit-oriented, selfish worldview, Boris inspires no confidence that he can understand the problems of regular citizens, let alone have any compassion for them.

Jeremy Hunt would not have been any better, but appointing Boris is almost as big a mistake as Brexit itself.