TOMORROW marks the start of a new year. It’s a time when most of us start out optimistic. We resolve to lose weight, take more exercise, drink less, pray more or simply make more ‘me time’.
Invariably by the start of February the new year looks as familiar as the old one as our resolutions recede faster than Wayne Rooney’s hairline.
Politically speaking 2018 was a basket case. The American president has turned the White House into a pantomime. British politics is a complete farce. And in Northern Ireland plus ça change.
To paraphrase Colm Toibin’s remarks about Sam Beckett’s house in Clare Street, Dublin, if Stormont was to have a blue plaque erected it would read ‘This is where politicians did nothing much'.
Brexit has brought the UK, Ireland and the EU to paralysis. Hundreds and hundreds of years of collective diplomacy has been car-crashed into the Brexit wall.
There has been a complete and utter failure of statecraft.
One of factors that drew me towards politics in the 1980s was the belief in the ability to change things through party activism. Activism based on fact and integrity.
Politics was, after all, the art of the possible.
But it’s now clear that it is only the art of the possible when those elected have the ability to see what is possible.
When a parliament is taken over by the extremes, those on the fringes, the charlatans and the deceivers, the result is a loss of direction, authority and stability.
The 2016 referendum was marginally won based on an illogical fear of uncontrollable immigration, narrow ‘British’ nationalism/imperialism, the frustrations of English white working and lower middle class citizens, and the peddling of downright lies and perpetuation of false myths about the EU.
It wasn’t an act of national self harm as some say because two of the four nations within the UK rejected it; it was the largest con-trick ever pulled off since Bernie Madoff orchestrated a $65 billion rip-off Ponzi scheme.
Madoff was eventually found out. He got sentenced to 150 years. The proponents of Brexit are now being found out. Unfortunately for us they won’t spend a single day in prison. Though Lord Sugar thinks they should.
What drives the Rees-Moggs and his ilk towards the recklessness of a no deal Brexit is the uncertainty it creates and in times of uncertainty those with money make money.
The Tory right and what’s left of UKIP envisage a mythical Britain where those they regard as the great unwashed, the people who live off benefits, will be forced into low paid jobs that migrant workers currently undertake.
They are not creating an aspirational UK but one of permanent serfdom for the poor.
Occasionally they will herald the one-in-a-thousand breakthrough when the son of an Asian bus driver can become a minister.
The mad, bad and delusional are now in control in the UK - despite their numbers within parliament being a minority. UK farmers, food producers and manufacturers worry with good reason.
Those right-wing recalcitrant apologists for Brexit cheerleaders despise and mock the liberal, tolerant and compromising approach of those in the centre ground.
They build up false and simplistic arguments to suggest that the will of the people is clear - when it is anything but.
Similar type writers and media outlets existed in the 1930s and they heralded the rise of fascism and nazism, much as their modern day counterparts relish the rise populism.
Even today it’s often repeated that Mussolini got the trains to run on time. No mention of the human cost of doing so.
Such defenders of hard-line Brexiters are like Lady Hester in ‘Tea with Mussolini’ - they tend to be older, have an inflated view of their own and British relevance, and live in rarified worlds miles away culturally, mentally and physically from borders, divided communities and struggling businesses. They believe like the late Denis Norden “It will be alright on the night”.
In that they may be right but for the wrong reasons.
Whether Mrs May’s deal or a variation of it goes through parliament, a settlement will be reached between the UK and the EU and it will be one based on compromise.
History has shown that turbulent societies from Greek and Roman times right through to the upheavals of the two World Wars and the Cold War, have an ability to re-calibrate themselves back from the brink.
That’s the optimism which I carry forward into 2019.
