Please note: The United Kingdom has not left the EU. It is by no means certain that the United Kingdom will ever leave the EU.

As we now move into a new week, I felt I should go more deeply into the difficulties which face this country as it struggles to understand and act on what happened last Thursday. I do hope people won’t mistake my necessarily pessimistic thoughts for desires. I want Britain to leave the EU. I have wanted this for about 20 years, since the end of the Cold War exposed it as the key national issue of our time.

But as I warned some months back, here

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/02/the-eu-is-our-own-hotel-california-we-can-check-out-but-well-never-leave.html , a referendum was a daft way to try to get out. And it may well not get us out.

Sure, the EU is playing tough and stand-offish now (but that, I guess, is just to try to scare us) .Unless its leadership is a good deal more stupid than I think it is, it will soon be seeking a compromise which will keep us in.

And the Bad Losers Alliance, with its petition for a second referendum and its emotional whimpering about how everything has been ruined and it’s not fair and so forth, and its media claque acting as if we’ve more or less gone Nazi overnight, is softening the ground for just such a development.

I am oddly reminded by present events of Winston Churchill’s weary comment on the resurgence of the Irish Question as soon as the First World War ended

'The whole map of Europe has been changed ... but as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again.'

Similarly, after the greatest political convulsion of my adult life, the people in the media who decide what is important about politics have once again returned to the subject which has, I do not understate, obsessed them: the battle between Jeremy Corbyn and the Shadow Cabinet. Dreary steeples indeed.



When I was invited on to the BBC TV news channel on Friday afternoon,

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/06/ph-interviewed-on-eub-referendum-result.html

it quickly became clear that this, the Corbyn matter, was what they really wanted to talk about . I boggled. Here we were, facing a huge constitutional, diplomatic and political crisis. The markets, though not in the free-fall alleged by the panic-mongers of the Bad Losers Alliance (see above), were certainly pretty volatile.

The Prime Minister had resigned that morning. His Party was exposed as utterly divided, cloven from the nave to the chaps by discord. It was and is seriously proposing to leave the country to drift till October before picking a new leader ( see below for an analysis of why this is so disgraceful) .

A majority of the electorate, in a high turnout had specifically endorse a policy rejected and indeed sneered at for decades by both major political parties, plus the BBC and most of the media, the civil service and the whole establishment. They had done so after a fair fight, in which the other side had flung millions of pounds and a great deal of frightening propaganda at them.

* By the way, please note this little-noticed fact. Only after the vote was over did the Russian tyrant, Vladimir Putin, issue a statement objecting to the way in which our Prime Minister had tried to drag him into the campaign, claiming he wanted a British exit. President Putin's dignified and diplomatically proper response can be read here http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/06/25/vladimir-putin-slams-david-cameron-over-eu-referendum/. It’s an interesting contrast with the naked intervention in our internal affairs, including actual threats, by the President of the United States. I note this because it may help some people understand my objection to the ceaseless characterisation of Russia as an aggressive, interfering and menacing power. No doubt Russia often behaves badly. But it is not unique in doing so, and there are many weapons other than tanks which great powers may use to try to get their way.***

And in the midst of all this the BBC wanted to talk about Jeremy Corbyn, and the presenter was clearly perturbed and discombobulated when I sought to talk about the future of the country instead. She was also puzzled. Surely Mr Corbyn was the main topic? Not for me.

This odd, faintly unhinged preoccupation is also noticeable among the battalion of establishment political commentators, who also seem to have little else to talk about. I say it is unhinged because it is a failure of proportion, for me the first sign that someone is losing touch with reality, probably deliberately.

The reason for this obsession is that one of the main functions of modern political journalism is to act as a sort of thought police. Anyone who strays from the 'centre' (an apparently objective term for a subjective opinion) is mocked, belittled, subjected to scandal and exposure, pictured looking foolish or eating messily, accused of ‘gaffes’ and ceaselessly the subject of stories about how he or she is being plotted against and is weak.

This supposed ‘centre’ can loosely be described as Blairism, a set of ideas which I won’t spend much time defining here because my readers have a pretty good idea of what they are – egalitarian, socially and morally liberal, opposed to the concepts of individual responsibility and national sovereignty alike. It is absolutely committed to membership of the EU. They are certainly not the 'centre' of anything, deriving as they do from the radical Eurocommunism (Communism adapted for the modern world, in the light of and learning from the failure of the USSR) which escaped into the Western mainstream at the end of the Cold War.

Mr Corbyn offends against this because he still openly defines himself as a socialist, something which the Eurocommunists are deliberately careful not to do. He is also, from the Blairite or Eurocommunist point of view, a foolish throwback, as he has not cured himself of the 19th century socialist interest in state ownership and trade union power. And he has the usual embarrassing baggage of sympathies with various unappealing Latin American leftists. Deep down, this package makes him hugely suspicious of the Blairites, because he can see that supranational bodies such as the EU will favour the big corporations he despises against the attempts of left-wing governments (such as he dreams of heading), and that the destruction of national sovereignty means the extinction of his dreams. Only a proud and independent Britain could ever implement his desired programme. So, as Dominic Lawson rightly wrote a few weeks ago in the Sunday Times, he is like a paraded hostage, frantically signalling to those who watch him on TV, through demeanour and body language, that the things that come out of his mouth about the EU are not in fact his real sentiments.

The Blairites return the favour. They can’t stand him. But as we know they can’t easily get rid of him either, and if they do, they can't replace him with one of their own. Mr Corbyn doesn’t owe his election to them but to the Party members, who are also Europhiles but love Mr Corbyn’s old-fashioned positions so much, and reasonably enjoy his principled and unflinching political style ( as I do too) that they don’t care.

The mystery is this - what are the Blairites still doing in Jeremy Corbyn’s party anyway? They were elected on the wrong ticket. They have fulfilled the great 1990s dream of forcing the Tories to agree with them, and have belatedly discovered that the same Tories are better than they are at raising money, and at winning elections. It could be a decade before the Tories lose an election, if then. The billionaires are all on the Tory side and likely to stay there. Labour have also been cut off at the knees by the destruction of their party in Scotland, which was all their own fault, as they thought that devolution would defuse the Nationalists, when in fact it was the making of them. This loss, combined with a general weakening of Labour in the South of England, means Labour has little prospect of wining a majority ever again.

They know in their hearts they can’t win. They must also know that they can’t get rid of Mr Corbyn, unless they accept John McDonnell instead, which would be just the same if not worse form the Blairite point of view.

The whole lot of them, no more than professional career politicians, would be much happier in the Cameron Tory Party. But the mad irrational tribalism of British politics prevents them from doing this without being denounced as traitors (to what, exactly?) or ‘defectors’, as if they had gone over from one opposing ideology to another.

So, in yet another illustration of Kissinger’s Law, that the fighting is bitterest where the stakes are smallest, they occupy their long-honed political skills in undermining their own leader. This is a task in which they can probably never succeed, but they have come to enjoy it in the absence of any other purposeful activity. And the pitiful flock of political reporters, who can’t stand Corbyn because he won’t conform, are happy to join in. It's s much better than actually finding out what is happening to the country, or asking why the Tories plan to spend three months picking a new leader when they could do so in a week .



I’d got used to this Corbyn-obsessive rubbish, but for this to be the dominant strand of political coverage, three days after the momentous vote, is simply absurd .

Take this problem, for instance. Though the Remainers claim in tones of squeaky panic that we are in an economic meltdown, we have a lame duck caretaker Prime Minister and an even lamer duck Chancellor. We are expected to put up with this till October while the Tory Party rambles through its leadership process.

Surely this is a time for swift and decisive ‘action this day’. The Tory Party can act much faster than this, and actually did so in October 2003 after the media-sponsored coup against Ian Duncan Smith (the model for the current campaign against Mr Corbyn) removed IDS from office on 29th October.

Eight days later, on 6th November, Michael Howard was declared the new leader. All his rivals withdrew in the interests of unity and peace. There was no election among MPs, and the Party Board decided there was equally no need to ask the party membership what they thought. As far as I know, the rules are the same now as they were then. All we need is for Theresa May and that other chap to recognise that they have no hope, and that the country needs a new prime minister pronto, and Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson can be in Downing Street, chairing his first Cabinet, by Friday.

No doubt this was an urgent matter back in 2003, the security and continuity of the Tory Party being an important thing, at least to its members, if not to me. But surely the prosperity and integrity of the country are more important.

If ambitious rivals can stifle their ambitions for the higher good to save their party, how much more they should do so for the sake of the country. Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson plainly has a mandate, as he is the most recognisable Conservative in Britain, has just headed the most thumpingly successful political campaign in modern British history, is personally identified with it, has held major office as Mayor of London, has in fact conducted himself during the campaign in a sober and restrained manner despite great provocation. So there is an unanswerable argument for handing him the crown – a far more unanswerable one than there was for doing the same to Michael Howard in 2003.

Why is this not happening? Do the supporters of the EU truly accept their defeat? I think not. Do the EU high command themselves think and hope that the force and power of the referendum can be lost in the swamps and bogs of compromise and manoeuvre which now stretch for months ahead? I should have thought so. A leading Labour MP, David Lammy, is already calling for Parliament to frustrate the referendum. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/brexit-result-latest-david-lammy-mp-eu-referendum-result-parliament-twitter-statement-stop-this-a7102931.html . I teased him about this on Twitter, recalling Bertolt Brecht’s 1953 joke that, the people having failed the elite, the elite needed to elect a new people.

But Matthew Parris, in his Saturday Times column (behind a paywall) , mused similarly but more subtly about how few MPs actually support a British exit form the EU, and especially a British exist from the Single Market, which may well be the sticking point as the referendum made no mention of the single market. Then we have that petition calling for a second referendum which everyone is now saying has no force. Of course it hasn’t, now. But it could help the pro-EU faction later, when the referendum is months ago, the Leave campaign has long ago been dissolved and disbanded, ‘normality’ has returned and the EU has abandoned its current hard cop mode and begun trying to charm us.

That’s why we mustn’t let ‘normality’ return. ‘ll be explaining how we can act, soon.