#Brexit and #Climate Change – a painful epiphany #saddleworthmoorfire

Explaining why I haven’t yet done the paperwork to get my Irish citizenship (to which I am entitled through my mum’s mum), I found myself saying to a new colleague

‘it’s because I hope – and I know it won’t happen – but I am still hoping for it – that the ‘British Establishment’ will collectively say “yeah, 52% of you voted for it to be the 1950s again, but it CAN’T be the 1950s again, and keeping on this path will destroy everything that you unthinkingly expect to be ‘normal.’ So we’re not doing it. We’ll have another referendum and now enough old idiots have died, and the young can vote in greater numbers, it will come out 52% to 48% the other way.”

And as I said this, hearing how absurd my hopes of averting disaster were by saying them out loud, I simultaneously  realised that Brexit is simply climate change in microcosm.  It’s an impending disaster (in this case with a firmer deadline) that in theory could have been made slightly less intolerable.  But rather than preparing for it – our lords and masters (and mistresses, hullo Mrs May) have pissed away all the available time in ridiculous verbiage, blame games and frankly delusional thinking.  And that goes not just at the international level, the national level, but down unto the local, with the laughable ‘Manchester Climate Change Agency’ and similar spineless follies.

I cannot tell you how glad I am to be pushing fifty.  There is a monumental shit storm coming.  I keep saying it, but this – the second half of the twenty-first century is going to make the first half of the twentieth look like a golden age of peace, love and understanding.