For Whom the Bell Tolls

A number of Brexiteers want Big Ben and numerous church bells to be rung to celebrate the UK leaving the EU. If this is meant to be in support of the nation coming together, then it's the most crass, juvenile and triumphalist action imaginable when less than half of the country actually supports leaving. You don't bring the country together by adding insult to injury. It's nothing more than a political stunt.

Knowing that the government stood a very good chance of losing a 2nd referendum, Boris tactically chose to invoke a General Election, where a minority can still win the day through the first past the post system. The idiots leading the Labour and LibDem parties accepted the challenge, rather than continuing to push for a 2nd referendum, which they stood a much better chance of winning. As it transpired, 43.6% of the electorate voted for Boris - less than half the electorate. Boris won because, for many, the fear of Corbyn, after a successful Tory smear campaign, was greater than the fear of Brexit.

It was a democratic vote, even if a rather underhand method of securing a victory, so we have to accept the result as those are the rules of the game, but to then rub the majority's nose in that victory is certainly not going to bring the country together - it will widen the divide even further over an issue, the cost of which is already standing at £130bn - very nearly the cost of all our EU contributions over the last 47 years, and climbing. 

Ringing church bells is something that's done as a national celebration when the entire country is together, but not all of us will be celebrating this example of national self-harm and hubris caused by weaponised ignorance in support of vulture capitalism. Most will be mourning the UK's dramatic fall in global standing, respect and reputation and worrying about their job prospects on the shifting sands of our new, diminished position in a world where rampant greed is the cause of many of our ills and regional and then global cooperation and regulation is the only remedy. Nationalistic neoliberalism is the enemy, as it has been many times is the past - it is not the solution.

"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.