Yes, it did look toe-curlingly dreadful
Parliament Square was a knuckle-dragging carnival of irredeemable stupidity
What makes Britain’s independence day different from those that have gone before it that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants
Tom Peck
Political Sketch Writer
There they were, all gathered in one place. Not quite midnight’s children but 11 o’clock’s toddlers. Here, at the long-awaited end of dry January, was a once-proud nation coming together to wet its little trousers.
Do the ghosts of revolutions past haunt the hallowed days of now? Could you hear the hooves of Simon Bolivar’s horse galloping up Whitehall?
Was that the sound of the workers singing the “Marseillaise” as Lenin’s sealed train rolled into the District and Circle line platform at Westminster station? Could that have been Haile Selassie, raising the standard of the Lion of Judah over the exit door of Caffe Nero?
Were they here, bright eyes fixed on the horizon of history, listening to the same old wearied drivel from the Wetherspoons guy? Did they actually turn up to this, the Night of a Thousand Swans and Angels? Did they see The Dawn of the Moon Under Water? (Historians take note: other potential sobriquets can be found on the “Pub Locator” tab of jdwetherspoon.com.)
Mahatma Gandhi really was here, as was Nelson Mandela, albeit both cast in bronze and standing as ever on the perimeter of Parliament Square.
One man – topless of course – even injured his elbow on Madiba’s outstretched hand as he rose with carefree haste to exalt the soaring oratory of The Apprentice’s Michelle Dewberry. About the builder of the rainbow nation’s feet were three discarded cans of Strongbow Dark Fruit. No long walk to freedom is complete without a quick dash to Tesco Metro.
What on earth would those men have made of the occasion? Actual Great Britain, the cradle of empire once, roaring its pissy breath into the night air in phoney celebration of regaining an independence it had never lost?
Brexit celebrations in Parliament Square
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Of course, now is the time that we must come together as a nation. We must start the healing. The grievances of yesteryear must be set aside. But there is also, somewhere in the recesses of my mind, some half-remembered obligation for a writer to have the courage to tell the truth. So it is with a genuine sense of sorrow that I must report that on Friday 31 January, between the hours of 9pm and 11pm, Westminster’s Parliament Square played host to a static, knuckle dragging carnival of the irredeemably stupid.
Shirtless men clambered over the statue of Churchill. For some bizarre reason, part of the warm-up act involved playing parts of an old Michael Cockerell documentary on Britain’s history with the EU. “F*** off John Major, you c***!” shouted one man when the former prime minister appeared on screen. “He should be hanging by his f****** neck!” the same man shouted at Tony Blair.
(Later, they cheered arch Leave campaigner Tony Benn, then booed Jeremy Corbyn. That will have cut Magic Grandpa to the bone.)
They absolutely revelled in it. It wasn’t merely that a singalong to “Rule Britannia”, with the words appearing on a giant screen, was infinitely beyond them. (“The azure what? Az-u main? What’s this? I don’t know thi – RULE BRITANNIA! BRITANNIA RULES THE WAVES!” Entirely verbatim quote, that one).
At one point, when they tried to get the crowd to join in with “Land of Hope and Glory”, the three on-stage singers were so poor that the crowd refused to join in in protest.
Nigel Farage was there, obviously, calling it “the greatest moment in our nation’s modern history.”
Well if it was the greatest moment in our nation’s modern history, it is a matter of public record that the best Farage could find to help him usher it in was a very strange man called Dominic Frisby, singing a very strange song called “17 Million F*** Offs.”
The list of people “the British told to f*** off” was long indeed.
“The IMF, the treasury, Tony Blair, John Major, Femi Weirdo, Jess Philips, George Osborne.” It went on and on and on. By the time it got to the end, the 17 million f*** offs may even have found themselves outnumbered. Whether, in fact the IMF, the Treasury, Tony Blair and absolutely everybody else will, in the end, turn out to have been right, and this lot wrong, is as close to a certainty as anything in politics can possibly be.
But for now, we must go through the motions. Dance the dance. By the time the final countdown came you could scarcely get on to Whitehall. There were thousands there. Not many thousands, but thousands certainly.
I’ve listened back now to the sound on my dictaphone that records Britain’s moment of liberation and it goes exactly like this: “Ten! Nine! Eight! Seven! Six! Five! Four! Three! Two! One! FREEDOM!!!! YEAAAASSSS!!!! F****** FREEDOM!!!! WE F****** DID IT!!! F****** FREEDOM!!! F****** DO ONE!! F****** DO ONE!!!!”
Leave voters mark Brexit with raucous celebration in Parliament Square
It seems as worthy a catch phrase of the moment as anything else. F****** do one! Who exactly? Absolutely everyone. It doesn’t matter. Just f****** do one. Put that, as they say, on the side of the bus.
Of course, what makes Britain’s independence day different from most, though not all, that have gone before it is that its prize is a freedom nobody else wants. When a Tunisian fruit and vegetable stallholder set himself on fire in January 2011, he lit a blaze of hope that ripped through the Middle East and north Africa.
When Britain set itself on fire three and a half years ago, the very best that can be hoped for is that someone, somewhere made £250 sending the footage to You’ve Been Framed.
We have become the first country to throw off the yoke of an oppressor whom nobody else considers themselves oppressed by. We have won our freedom from our own imagined nightmares. We have liberated ourselves from the terrors of the monster under the bed that was never there. We are the children that never grew up.
It is a great pity that of the many thousands of bells that were present, only one should have had its noise-making capacity removed. Between them, Brexiteers raised more than £100,000 in a fruitless quest to have Big Ben’s clapper temporarily restored to bong us out into the cold. How much might remainers have paid to silence Farage for the night, if not for all eternity?
Too late now. His supporters went wild for him, naturally. “Nigel! Nigel! Nigel! Nigel!” It’s an unlikely name for a hero.
Before him there’d been Ann Widdecombe, fresh from marching out of the EU parliament two nights ago, saying it was “like storming up the beaches again”. She’s never stormed up any beaches. She’s only 72. Which is young enough, it turns out, to stand on a stage in Parliament Square and ululate away about “the glorious future that awaits us” – the one she has forced on the nation’s young entirely against their wishes.
There was Tim Martin of Wetherspoons, saying in all seriousness that “our victory is not a victory against the people of Europe. They are our friends. It is a victory over the institutions of the European Union”. Tim Martin, for the record, banned all European-produced drinks from his pubs. So there’s that.
“At 11pm tonight, there is no such thing as leavers and remainers,” Dewberry told the crowd. “We are all leavers now.” I think the reply to that one comes in the form of a song you might call "16.8 Million F*** Offs."
What next then? Come together? Move on. You can close your eyes and hope for it, but you’ll not find any evidence that it can actually be done.
Brexit’s ultimate tragedy is that it has broken the very thing it imagines itself to have restored: national identity, national cohesion. There is none at all. There are just two huge tribes set against each other, and the mutual loathing is as fierce as ever.
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Leave voters mark Brexit with raucous celebration in Parliament Square
There simply isn’t any middle ground. The gulf is as wide as it has ever been: one side revels in regaining its imagined independence, while the other mourns the terrible loss of having been part of something big, something ambitious, with its eyes fixed on the future and not drunk on the imagined glories of the past.
We simply do not have more in common than that which divides us. It is an irreconcilable, fundamental rift that goes to the core of everything everyone on either side believes. There will be no moving on. For 10 years or more, all the nation’s fortunes will be tied back to this event.
What happens, say, when another huge financial crisis hits, lives and livelihoods damaged? Half the country will blame the other half for the vast economic growth squandered to Brexit. We won’t move on. We can’t.
The prime minister urges healing – but he is the disease, not the cure. What do we do next? Are we to accept defeat, make peace, all the while knowing that, were the shoe on the other foot, Farage and company would be doing absolutely nothing of the sort?
Are we really expected to get on board with this farce? To look upon this absurd, imagined liberation and try to see the good in it when there is simply nothing good there?
With his final words, as well, Farage hinted at the next chapter of the story. Urging other countries to follow Britain’s example, to leave the EU, to become “free nation states, trading, co-operating”. Go back to the old days, in other words, and try to ignore that the old days are absolutely drenched in blood. That preventing the old days ever coming back is the precise reason the EU came into being.
These people really do think it’s 1989, or the Arab Spring, that Frisby is their Vaclav Havel. They think the blue touchpaper has been lit, except for the fact that our neighbours are not rising up but glancing up to look upon us with embarrassed pity at our own crushing stupidity.
There is simply no way anyone of good conscience can make peace with being so very clearly on the wrong side of history.
Come together? Sorry, but no thanks. The long walk back to sanity starts now. Who knows, it might even be a surprisingly short one.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-nigel-farage-parliament-square-a9312436.html
