Opinion

Tom Kelly: Brexit is bad, but people face much worse in real life every day

Brexit is the least of some people's worries
Brexit is the least of some people's worries Brexit is the least of some people's worries

HEADING towards Westminster on Saturday I was conscious that much of the Brexit debate has been conducted with a ferocity that would suggest it’s a matter of life and death. It is not.

Brexit presents a range of serious, unique, unnecessary issues, problems, anxieties and economic concerns. But people won’t die because of it (Unless dissident republicans and the lunatic fringes of loyalism use Brexit for their own nefarious ways).

Other people who live real lives outside of the insular world of politics and chicanery face much worse everyday.

Alighting from the Jubilee Line, tourists mixed with Remain protesters.

Just beyond the exit stalls not one but seven bodies lay strewn across the ground.

Destitute, ignored but not invisible.

Neither the tourists nor the protestors took much notice. Nor did the police or the underground staff. Human flotsam. Twenty first century mudlarks.

Looking at the human wreckage in a London underground beside Parliament, I could not help but think that the threat of Brexit has not broken Britain. Ten consecutive years of Tory government combined with eight years of Boris Johnson as Mayor of London have smashed it.

The current crop of Tories believe there is no such thing as society.

Even Mrs May believed if you are citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere. Little wonder so many are displaced within Britain without any sense of belonging.

Tory politicians live in a world of self absorption and selfishness. Labour in Utopia.

Looking at the bodies brutalised by life, I also remembered that Sunday would be the twelfth anniversary since the savage killing of Paul Quinn from south Armagh.

Justice still eludes the Quinn family in the same way that concern and compassion eludes the forgotten on the streets of London.

It is hard to believe that MPs, Lords and Ladies emerge from the Westminster tube every day on their way to Parliament but seem blinded to the misery around them. No wonder commentators talk about a ‘Westminster bubble’.

Not that the Remain protesters whose banners proclaimed justice and fairness for everything from seals to the melting icebergs stopped to look either.

To the sole person awake, I gave a Costa coffee card with credit. Then I too walked on.

Westminster, despite its crumbling infrastructure, is an opulent place. Staff treat MPs and Lords/Baronesses with a deference not foreign in Downtown Abbey.

At the weekend Parliament was rife with gossip and intrigue. Psephologists ground down the numbers. Tory whips were grinding their teeth.

Labour members were like the bewildered in a Maze. The Scot Nationalists remained all William Wallace. The Lib Democrats are righteous (Maybe that’s self righteous).

The DUP was in reverse gear. Like many a British Prime Minister before him, Johnson is now a Lundy.

Even the DUP's infamous fondness of the half crown could not lure them.

Johnson gave no public commitments. So they could not bank the potential bung of a bridge!

Parliament was besieged by tens of thousands of Remain protesters.

There was a fairly pathetic group of four pro-leave protesters near Whitehall. Brave souls.

Whatever happens with Brexit, Johnson will remain toxic in London. In the rest of the country that's maybe a different story.

MPs weren’t happy to be back in Westminster. In fact some were downright grumpy. But there was fatigue too. They have been here before.

Parliament is clear on what it does not want but no clearer on what it wants. The general public may clarify that issue in the general election or a People’s Vote.

At the end of the day, Remainers, the obdurate, the ditherers and the DUP were rescued by the most unlikely of heroes - a Bilbo Baggins type.

The quirky, cerebral Don Quixote of Westminster, Sir Oliver Letwin - a man who was once reported as saying he would beg before sending his children to a state school.

As Jimmy Greaves might say: “It’s a funny old game!”