Anxiety

The syndrome known as “Brexit anxiety” is now so common that a team of psychotherapists from the Existential Academy is offering free sessions to help people avoid “being sucked into a vortex of gloom and doom”. Unfortunately only continental Europeans living in the UK qualify, so the rest of us will just have to pretend we like living in a vortex.

Brexiteer

It was clever of pro-Brexit people to call themselves “Brexiteers”, borrowing the swashbuckling, adventuresome associations of “buccaneeer”. By contrast, “Remainers” were boring old stick-in-the-muds, and were subsequently relabelled “Remoaners” by those who had spent literally decades moaning about the EU.

Control

Brexit, intones the prime minister without fail, will enable us to “take back control over our money, laws, and borders”. That will be a relief after so many years in which the pound was controlled by Germany, all our laws were written by drunken Belgians, and we employed absolutely no one in the section of the Home Office called Border Force. See also: sovereignty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris Johnson during the Brexit Battle Bus tour of the UK. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Dividend

The famous “Brexit dividend” is a made-up pile of money that Theresa May announced would be spent on the NHS, in order to appease the people within the cabinet who had so energetically lied about a £350m-a-week bonanza for health. Such an increase, May explained in her response to Boris Johnson’s resignation letter, would be possible once “vast sums of taxpayers’ money” were no longer sent to the EU. Those “vast sums” amount to just over 1% of the total government budget. But don’t get too excited, as the vast 1% saving is very likely to be wiped out by a larger fall in tax revenues post-Brexit. Most probably, then, the Brexit dividend will be one of those strange beasts termed a negative dividend, sometimes also called a loss.

Experts

Michael Gove is sad that his opinion on experts is often quoted out of context so as to make him appear an anti-rational imbecile. What he said was that “people in this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong”. He was responding to the observation that the IFS, CBI, NHS and TUC had all said that Brexit would be bad, but none of these names are acronyms, because they are not pronounced as words; they are instead initialisms. As you were, then: imbecile it is.

May’s favoured Brexit will be ‘smooth and orderly’ – no one, presumably, is in favour of a rough Brexit

Frictionless

Initially we desired to continue having “frictionless” trade with the EU, until this aspiration was clarified (ie, reversed) to become “as frictionless as possible”, which means not frictionless, until May said once again that it would be “frictionless”, using magical technology that doesn’t exist yet in order to remove the need for physical border checks. It is in fact notoriously hard to escape friction, and only really possible in space, which is probably where we will end up drawing the Irish border.

Global Britain

In his first newspaper column since his resignation, Johnson waxed poetastical once more on his vision of a post-Brexit “Global Britain”, rather than the old Britain that never traded with any countries other than those in the EU, and that almost nobody could find on a globe. Soon, he enthused, we can “go back out in the world in a way we had perhaps forgotten”, which certainly goes some way to explaining his performance as foreign secretary.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Which do you choose, the hard or soft option’? … the Pet Shop Boys. Photograph: Pelle Crepin/Publicity image from music company

Hard Brexit

As the Pet Shop Boys presciently asked: which do you choose, the hard or soft option? The metaphor of a “hard Brexit” appealed to soft-fleshed types who dream of being manly and thrusting, while a “soft Brexit” still sounds altogether too submissive. Having newly discovered a concern for hygiene, Tory rebels now say they want a “clean Brexit”, not the filthy, presumably French kind.

Independence Day

June 23, the date of the 2016 referendum, is now celebrated as “Independence Day” by the hardest of Brexiters. This is odd since, in the film Independence Day, London, New York City, Paris and Berlin are all destroyed by aliens. To add insult to injury, during the second invasion in Independence Day: Resurgence, the rebuilt London is destroyed again. It’s almost as if it’s a metaphor for the prospective harm to the public purse after the City loses its passporting rights for financial services across the EU.

Jobs-first Brexit

A jobs-first Brexit, as officially promised by the Labour party, is rather like a cake-first diet, or guns‑first pacifism.

Killing, a

On the night of the referendum, hedge funds laid huge bets that sterling would crash, on the basis of private exit polling that indicated a leave result. They made hundreds of millions of dollars, so at least someone enjoyed a Brexit dividend (qv).

Liberty is when, without European regulations, British companies will be free to manufacture flammable sofas

Liberty

Liberty is the prize after the best possible Brexit, when we will no longer be subject to European regulations, the vast majority of which we voted for or actively designed ourselves, and British companies will instead be perfectly free to manufacture flammable sofas. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence that the insurance company Liberty Special Markets last year announced that it was moving its headquarters out of Britain, to Luxembourg.

Mandate

There is no mandate (from the Latin for command or instruction) for any particular kind of Brexit; similarly, if the referendum result had been broadly in favour of dogs, there would be no mandate for making a whippet rather than a lurcher prime minister. Claims that there is a mandate to reduce immigration or leave the customs union are similarly baseless, since no such topics were mentioned on the ballot paper. Owing to the impossibility of knowing the will of the people (qv), some now want to have a “people’s vote”. No one can be bothered with having a second referendum, but what kind of anti-democratic poltroon would deny a vote to “the people” on the final deal, ie a second referendum?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Theresa May at Chequers with Donald Trump, who has said that her latest Brexit plan would kill off any trade deal with the US. Photograph: Jack Taylor/AFP/Getty Images

No deal

No deal is better than a bad deal, May keeps insisting nonsensically, but the problem goes deeper: if you call everything a “deal”, like Donald Trump, you imply that complex international negotiations are no harder than haggling over a carpet. A treaty, on the other hand, sounds like it would be a lot more work, which is perhaps why David Davis eventually resigned.

Orderly

May’s favoured Brexit will be “smooth and orderly”. No one, presumably, is in favour of a rough Brexit, like a rough sea; still less would anyone dream of a disorderly Brexit. Other things that are routinely called “orderly” are evacuations from buildings, military retreats and other ignominious withdrawals.

Project Fear

Warnings that Brexit would be bad for Britain were christened “Project Fear” by leavers, who now feel vindicated because we haven’t yet plunged into the third world war. People sometimes triumphantly bring up the Y2K bug in this context, which is revealing, since that problem was solved by huge amounts of internationally co-ordinated computing labour. Meanwhile, just as “fake news” now means any news Trump doesn’t like, so “Project Fear” now means any true news about how badly things are already going.

As ​Boris ​Johnson found as a journalist inventing nonexistent EU regulations, there is no cost to being a rule-faker

Queue, back of

Barack Obama said that a post‑Brexit Britain would not immediately enjoy a dramatic financial bonanza from shipping megatons of American chlorinated chicken to its shores, but would be at “the back of the queue” for trade agreements. His successor, Trump, told the Sun that May’s latest Brexit plan would kill off any agreement, before rambling comfortingly that one was “absolutely possible”. This made many people nostalgic for the time when we were just at the back of the queue, rather than lost in a miasma of bullshit.

Rule-taker

The worst Brexit, we hear, would leave us a “rule-taker rather than a rule-maker”. The reason we were told we needed to leave the EU in the first place was that we were bound by diktats from Brussels; yet now it is haplessly acknowledged that we had been a rule-maker all along (see Liberty). As Johnson discovered during his time as a journalist inventing nonexistent EU regulations, there is no cost to being a rule-faker.

Sovereignty

For some, Brexit was really about “sovereignty”, a sovereignty that Brexit itself proved we had always retained, or we wouldn’t have been able to leave. A clever new twist was offered by Andrew Marr recently, who said it would be only “fake sovereignty” if, post-Brexit, Parliament decided to keep a European regulation because not doing so would hurt trade. In the same way, I have only fake sovereignty over my own person if, when deciding whether or not to jump off a cliff, I am dissuaded by the prospect of injury or death. According to this serious new analysis, the only true sovereignty is that which encourages us to do the stupidest possible things.

Traitors

The Brexit-supporting press uses hysterically Leninist terms of abuse for judges and others who pedantically insist on law and process: they are “saboteurs”, or “enemies of the people”, or “quislings”, or “traitors”. The Telegraph recently announced solemnly that many in its readership think May is a “traitor”, to which one can only offer that venerable newspaper commiserations on the quality of its present readers.

Unelected

Brexiters claimed it to be intolerable that we were ruled by “unelected” Brussels bureaucrats, although the EU’s legislative body, the European parliament, is directly elected, while the European Council is populated by elected ministers from member states. Nigel Farage has failed seven times to be elected to the House of Commons.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A stupid person’s idea of a clever person’ … Jacob Rees-Mogg hails a taxi in Whitehall, London. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

Vassalage

Jacob Rees-Mogg said that May’s Chequers plan was “the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200”, although the new Global Britain (qv) will not actually be a “vassal state” in the sense of that term long used in international politics – obliged to pay tribute to its protector in the form of cash and military assistance – nor will we have to pay the EU rent to live on these islands, like feudal vassals. Like many a stupid person’s idea of a clever person, however, Rees-Mogg is adept at using obscure words in the wrong sense.

Will of the people

The “will of the people” is fake news. In the referendum, 27% of the population voted for Brexit; slightly fewer voted for remain; and no one knows or apparently cares what the other near-half of the country wants. But this political fiction has proved useful in the past. As Mussolini explained in his 1932 pamphlet, the Doctrine of Fascism, liberalism became useless, and fascism necessary, “when the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people”.

Spare a thought for the xylophonist, who like all travelling musicians, will have a harder time after Brexit

Xylophonist

Spare a thought for the humble banger of tuned wooden bars, who like all travelling musicians will have a much harder time after Brexit ends free movement. As the composer Howard Goodall has pointed out, the increased bureaucracy, delay and fees for British musicians who regularly work in mainland Europe will “in effect choke off much of their livelihood”. Who will be left to blast out “Rule Britannia” on massed brass to entertain all the truck drivers stuck at Dover?

Youth

When all else is lost, one can at least hope for a “youthquake”, of the kind that some said helped Jeremy Corbyn at the last general election, before we learned that youth turnout was actually lower than overall turnout. Happily, the Grim Reaper has not yet lost his job thanks to Brexit, so optimists forecast that as older Brexit-voting people die off and Europhile youngsters come of age, there will soon be a majority for remain after all. If we make Instagram-powered elections a thing, they might even vote.

Zuckerberg

For a man who runs a social network, Mark Zuckerberg is quite shy and retiring. He has refused repeatedly to appear before the select committee for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport to answer questions about possible connections between Russian intelligence, Cambridge Analytica and the Brexit campaign. In response to the continuing omniscandal over this as well as the Trump election, Facebook has said that fake news comes from both the left and right, and banning it “would be contrary to the basic principles of free speech”, ie Facebook’s profits. Zuckerberg’s own “mission” for Facebook, proudly declared last year, is to “bring the world closer together”. Isn’t he doing well?