Guest Posting: The Road to Canterbury – The Brexiteer’s Tale

 Tim Collard was one of our men in Peking for many years before becoming HM Consul-General in Hamburg until his retirement. He is fluent in both German and Mandarin and now forms a part of the Oxford Union in exile which meets up every Wednesday evening in an Edinburgh swill shop to discuss matters of great weight and drink beer. He has resolved to enjoy a long retirement at the expense of the hard working family taxpayers of Nuneaton.

In 1998 the annual convention of the Universal Postal Union was held in Beijing. (When writing a story, always draw the reader in with a real zinger of a first sentence.) At the time I was working in the British Embassy, analysing and reporting on China’s international relations. But, at such conferences, it was always essential for the EU – only 15 members at the time – to arrive at a common position to set before the delegates. This, of course, would need to be co-ordinated, and it was agreed to hold a meeting on the first day of the convention to assess the papers and arrive at a unified response. We all had advance instructions from our capitals, and there seemed to be no important points of difference between us.

Now, EU liaison was part of my portfolio. In theory a small part, consisting of attending one monthly coordination meeting. But there was no escape; this one was clearly a job for Muggins. So I sallied forth from my ‘safe space’ in the Embassy and hied me to the venue, a hotel ten miles away on the edge of town, where I met up with my regular muckers from the monthly coordination sessions.

Several hours later I reported back to base.

"Hello, Tim, how did the meeting go?"

"Um……"

"You will be back with us tomorrow, won’t you? It’s pretty busy…."

"Um……well, we haven’t actually started yet."

"WHAT?"

"You see, we took about three hours to collect and collate all the papers from one secretariat or other."

(My head of section slapped his forehead, but had enough experience to know that I wasn’t kidding and hadn’t been skiving.)

"And then – I’m afraid there’s been a complication."

"Oh?"

"Well, there’s been a row over the designation of the Palestinian delegation…."

(Head of section repeated his action, and his thoughts, from the last parenthesis.)

"And we all have to go back to capitals to agree the wording."

(Great sigh of resignation.)

I should point out that there is virtually no overlap between working hours in China and Europe. We’d only get the new instructions overnight, and next morning it would be once more unto the breach. In a further complication, all the telegram traffic would be classified, and we couldn’t use the convention centre’s fax machines. So it was all haring around in the car with shedloads of paper between two places ten miles apart, with Beijing traffic well on the way to becoming the gently undulating car park it is today.

You can guess where this is going. Were the fifteen sets of instructions sent by the fifteen capitals to the fifteen delegates identical, by any chance? Were they……. So there was nothing for it except to spend hours trying to agree new forms of words, and then send the new draft back to capitals for overnight consideration. And the next day the process would resume. And the next, and the next. I should add that at no point were we ever in contact with, let alone under pressure from, either the Israelis or the Palestinians to slant the wording in their direction. It was an entirely internal circle-jerk.

Meanwhile my Embassy colleagues were going up the wall, as we were a small team – seven I think – and the 99% of my job which I was prevented from doing was either not getting done at all, or having to be covered by colleagues who were quite sufficiently occupied with their own jobs. (I was discovering that they don’t call it the Universal Postal Union for nothing.) I asked my boss whether it might not be better to pull me out and let it go on without the UK (a proto-Brexit, in other words). No, he said, EU etiquette wouldn’t allow that. I remembered that many member states had much smaller Embassies than we did, and they weren’t pulling out either. We’d just have to keep right on to the end of the road.

And every day the bulging briefcase in the back of the car racing against the clock through Beijing rush-hour traffic. To my eternal shame I once caused a minor accident when just for a moment haste drove out due care and concern. My bosses had resigned themselves to losing my services (expensive if not necessarily valuable) for a day; they lost them for two whole weeks. When I say ‘expensive’, I don’t just mean my pay, which was generous if hardly bankeresque; but you, O taxpayer, were also paying for my 4-bedroom city flat and my children’s education in international schools which – I swear – cost more than Eton. To do a job which I wasn’t able to do because I was fossicking around in a spanking new Chinese hotel arguing about Middle Eastern semantics and knocking people off bikes for two weeks.

And still they are no nearer to solving the dispute over the postal problems between Israel and Palestine, or any others for that matter. And no-one writes letters anyway these days except to dun people for money. And the poor bastard who is my successor has now got 28 sets of slightly-differently-worded instructions to deal with. (For a little while, anyway.) Friends – the EU isn’t all shiny happy people holding hands and singing Ode to Joy. Britain has been a member for 43 years. The total time wasted by highly-paid civil servants in this sort of palaver runs to a hell of a lot more than 43 years. As for the cost, it would make your calculator go all squiggly.

This tale could have been a great deal more Chaucerian. I discovered, just too late, that a young lady in whom I maintained a strategic minority interest had been attending a week-long residential convention at an adjacent hotel. That might have, er, changed the character of the narrative considerably. But heigh-ho.

I assure you, dear Remainer friends – and relatives – that my Leave vote contained not the slightest trace of racism or xenophobia. But enough is enough.

Here's my take on why people voted as they did

By the end of the referendum campaign you could pretty much tell how a person was going to vote by their accents and clothes. In elections you will always get some middle class types voting for a left party, or working class people going Tory, but here the class divide was as stark as possible.

Speaking only for myself, I stopped taking the Federasts seriously and started laughing at them on the Saturday before the vote. That was the day when the Brexit stall in central Edinburgh that I helped to man was blessed by the presence of a buffoonish individual  who walked up and began to scream that we were dishonouring the memory of Jo Cox, the MP who had been murdered two days previously. He went on to state, in full spittle-flecked lips and finger jabbing mode mode, that we were betraying the international working class by this failure to show solidarity with the oppressed of Europe, and so on and so forth.

When the tirade ended I pointed out the simple truth that the last time I had held a job in the UK that was full time, with holiday pay and the rest, it had ended in October 1981, to which he screamed: "That just proves how unemployable you are!"

Now, coming from a Tory that would be an expected response, but this bloke had just spent a good few minutes telling us all about working class solidarity, so to say that the response was off the wall is putting it mildly. Our crew were stunned, and I could see several mouths hanging open at the sheer inanity of the fool and his comments. As he opened his cake hole to start the next rant, I rather spoiled his intentions by bursting out in raucous laughter, raising my hand in the air and giving the international gesture of what a wanker, whereupon he stamped his foot like a petulant little girl and stormed off.

The real workers either voted for Brexit or didn't vote at all. The middle class voted Remain, and turned out in large numbers to do it, which is why Edinburgh showed such a large majority for the Federasts. 

This trend became clear very early on in the campaign when an electrician called at my house and told me that at the age of 50 he had never voted in his life, not even in the 2014 independence referendum, but that he had damn well registered for this one and intended to vote for Brexit.

By the end taxi drivers were double parking to dart over to our stall and grab leaflets to hand out to their passengers, whether they wanted them or not, bus drivers were sounding their horns as they drove past us, and building workers, complete with bags of tools and hard hats were arriving to state that they had just had enough of the EU and all its devilish ways.

They were joined by the poor with their pinched faces and uniform of grey tracksuits and cheap trainers, who often did not come to the stall, but who would take a leaflet. Then they would talk to us and explain to us in bewildered tones that it was wrong, quite wrong, that most of  the jobs had all vanished, and the ones that were left were being taken by Eastern Europeans.

Early in the campaign I would reply that giving management the option to pick and choose workers is just a very bad idea from our point of view, as it is far better if the bastards have as few options as possible. However, by the end there were so many plaintive people that the best our small group could do was just urge them to please turn out to vote. Sadly, few of them did, probably because after so many decades of political parties that just pander to globalised capitalism, the stuffing had just been knocked out of them, along with whatever enthusiasm they had once had for life.

So the Brexit voters tended to be people who had a direct relationship with capitalism, either because they worked in the private sector, or were prevented from working by it. It looks as if what united the skilled Bexiteeers was a hankering for more regulation of capitalism, so taxi drivers would complain about Uber taking work away from them, and electricians would moan about foreign competition. As for the unskilled, their longing was for the pre-1979 world of corporatism, with its big government, big business and big unions, all in the context of a nation state that built council houses, the NHS and ensured a decent life for all.

Facing us in the massed ranks of the bovine Remainer, who seemed to be drawn disproportionately from the ranks of government sinecure holders. It is impossible to over-generalise, but certainly the Federasts that I spoke to were by and large men and women who spoke with that cod-English accent that the Edinburgh middle class puts on, and as we saw at the start of this piece, they also tended to trot out the student union line about international proletarian solidarity, at least until they were put on the spot, when all their real lower middle class prejudices came out with a vengeance. Given that Scotland employs far too many people in pen-pushing non-jobs that are not productive of any finished good it is probably safe to bet that the Federasts ranks were chock full of timeservers and jobsworths who may have been worried that if the EU gravy train came off the rails, then their local government numbers would be next in line for scrutiny.

Of course, and needless to say, being middle class and parasitical on the economy, they had to cover their self interest with sanctimonious, self-righteous waffle, to try and pretend that they were not actually just trying to keep their own seats of the gravy train, but that it what it amounted to in the end.

So, the referendum was fought between people who had real jobs, or no jobs at all, and people who didn't, but who were doing very nicely, thank you, out of the labours and miseries of others.

Why the Brexiteers are right to exult in our victory and mock the shame of the defeated

I have not been blogging for a while, as I've been rather busy tasting a fine new liqueur, made from the tears of the defeated, mixed with the most precious of snowflakes. The over 17 million who voted to free our country from the claws of Brussels will long sip this heady concoction, so long as the defeated continue to disgrace themselves by their reactions to that defeat.

To be defeated is not to be disgraced, of course. My father stood on Luneburg Heath in 1945 and saw the German army streaming in to surrender, but he told me years later that he and his mates had given cigarettes to their opposite numbers on the other team. The Germans were in good order to the end, and they didn't whine or plead, but kept their heads held high and thus earned the sympathy of men like my dad all those years ago.

In 1985 the British miners marched back to work behind their banners and  similarly in good order. Defeated, yes, but never disgraced, they were the Brigade of Guards of the British working class, and even in defeat they were magnificent.

Can anybody have any respect for the pathetic whiners who were handed their arses on a plate last Thursday? I think not, and that is why we now call them snowflakes, because they melt so engagingly in the heat of the political sun.

We can understand their anger, because it is understandable. They had everything going for them, from the backing of the state machine, the support of the international machinery of globalised capitalism, a sizeable chunk of the press and an eager percentage of the population who preferred cheap mobile 'phone calls when abroad to freedom. Sadly they all forgot that a people who would trade mobile phone calls for liberty deserve neither the calls nor the liberty.

However, what we cannot understand is the whining. They can hardly whimper about the elderly betraying the young when so few of the young actually bothered to vote in the referendum. The argument that the vote coincided with university vacations and the poor snowflakes were thus disenfranchised is not a reason, it is a pathetic excuse. They could have made a simple telephone call and in five minutes changed their voting addresses, but they could not be bothered. My next door neighbour was cursing that he had been called into hospital at short notice and that it was too late to arrange a postal vote, however he was discharged on voting day as his operation was cancelled, so he went straight from the hospital to the polling booth to vote Leave. He suffers from bladder cancer, by the way, but he doesn't whine about that.

The claim that by these snowflakes that we have somehow ruined their chances of getting jobs in the EU is similarly pathetic. Just how many of this bunch have the language skills needed to take a tasty position in Germany, or the degree from a decent, Russell Group university that would allow for that, anyway? Here's the thing: people with good language skills and a reasonable degree from Oxford, Manchester or Edinburgh will always find a cushy number abroad if that is what they want. People who have to go to institutions that disgrace the very name university, and who find the tying of their own shoelaces an intellectual challenge, are probably never destined for anything other than a local government sinecure. 

The whine that I enjoy the most is the one that has it that we baby boomers had it all when we were young and now we  are ruining it for Generation Snowflake. The problem is that we are the generation that left school at 15, fought tooth and nail to ensure that management scum knew their place, and just at the moment when the final victory against capitalism itself seemed imminent, were voted onto the dole by the parents of today's snowflakes. 

Speaking for myself alone, I went from the dole to university when I was pushing thirty in 1983, and five years later was told that I needed some post-graduate degree to even get an interview. So I spent a year back on the dole and then went off and got a post-graduate something or other. Then I was told that I was too old to apply for any decent job and too well qualified for the lesser ones. So I bought myself a catering wagon and sold burgers and hot dogs to drunks before cutting my losses and going to live in Mexico. If you are destined to be poor, then trust me when I say that it is better in a warm climate. Luckily I had a diploma from Ruskin College, Oxford, a degree from the University of Manchester and the wit to teach myself Spanish, so I accept that this may be out of reach for the average poly wallah, but at least they can become social workers or something equally useless and parasitical.

Let me conclude by saying that people who could not be bothered to vote are now telling people like me who have had a lifetime of being done over by the state which their parents supported, that we have somehow wrecked their life chances. Can you blame us for sipping the fine liqueur made up of the tears of pathetic snowflakery when all they can come up with is such a total whining response to their well merited defeat?

Edinburgh's Brexiteers enjoy their well earned victory celebration

Quite rightly the Edinburgh Brexiteer group had its victory celebrations in a Wetherspoons pub. Given that the chain had done so much to help the cause with its publicity on every table, we thought it only right and proper that we meet up for the last time in one of their hostelries, so we did.

Not everyone who had turned out for us over the past months was able to make it, but there were enough of us there to celebrate this momentous victory.

By the time I took this photo I was too well oiled to even notice that I had somehow managed to switch the flash off. The later photographs are even worse as I could barely hold the camera straight.

One by one the former members of the group said their goodbyes and wandered off to restart their lives. A very small group of us had one for the road, and then another to chase it down, and then the pub closed at midnight and that was that.

It is still hard to believe that an ad-hoc group of people who had only come together with the common aim of freeing our country, a group that was largely ignored by the official Leave campaign and from whom we had to pretty much scrounge materials, could have played such a major role in so momentous an event. 

We were the only group in the whole city that campaigned for Brexit, so a sizeable chunk of the vote that went to Brexit here came out as a result of our efforts.

We did it - we won - after all those decades, it is finally over.

Thoughts on the day after the Brexit storm

As the Brexit storm dies down and a new day dawns over this country, I want to reflect, briefly, on the momentous events of yesterday. We, the people, took one look at just about every vested interest that was ranged against us, be it the City of London, the CBI,  to say nothing of all the senior politicians and serious political parties, and we decided that we didn't really care about them anymore. We decided that we would make up our own minds, thank you very much, and by God we did. The Brexit winds then blew, and today the country is becalmed as we all come to terms with the magnificence of yesterday's achievement.

My role was minimal, arguing the cause in Edinburgh, a city that, sadly, voted overwhelmingly to remain under the control of Brussels. Luckily for us, the Scottish government campaigned on a pan-British platform with senior figures even going to London to argue the doomed Federast cause, so they can hardly complain when a national vote goes against them. They will of course, but it does make them look rather ridiculous.

I was roped into becoming one of the scrutineers for Leave at yesterday's Edinburgh count, which was a pity as the heat in the three rooms where it took place was such that I could barely stay upright. My body was protesting even before I entered the halls, so I made my excuses and left at about 1.00am, which was over two hours before the city result was declared.

No that there was any doubt as to what that result was going to be. We tried our best, but were losing so heavily from the very start that the mood amongst the few Brexiteers who were there was sombre in the extreme.  

The Federasts were out in force, all trying to be important with their little clipboards, trying to do sample counts of the results. I was the only Brexiteer in the Edinburgh North and Leith hall and I didn't need a bloody clipboard to work out that we would be lucky to get thirty percent of the vote. Still, I suppose they had to at least try and pretend that they were doing something important, because they sure as hell did nothing during the campaign. The only people who did were the Brexiteers so the honours of war go to us, and as many people have said since the result was declared, our tallies when added to the rest of the country, gave us the victory that all can now enjoy.

Arriving home I switched on the TV and started to chat on the 'phone to an old friend in Southern England. Slowly but surely it became clear that overall the people of Britain had voted for freedom, and that vote was led by Wales and Northern England. Then Southern England outside London joined in, and it seemed as if a great tidal surge was heading freedom's way. I could not believe it, but it became clearer as the dawn began to light up the new day that we had just done what nobody ever thought possible. We had overturned over half a century of British state policy, and were demanding that the politicians listen to us, the people of Britain, for once.

Great civilisations are remembered for their artefacts and the actions of their people, not their bank rates. Yesterday, the people of this country showed that they are as worthy to inherit the responsibility of keeping  the national flame alive as any who came before.

If you have not voted Leave yet, here is why you should

This is what Remainers think about England. This dipstick went into a social club that had been rented for the day to act as a polling station and decided that the English flags that bedecked the place were fascist symbols! Got that? As far as the Federasts are concerned, a national symbol that has been used for centuries really only represents a political ideology that was only thought up less than a century ago.

It never entered his mind that with England playing in the European Finals, and with the Queen's official birthday having just taken place, most social clubs in England will be flying the flag. He never thought of that because he is a Federast and what untes these people is a hatred for us, the ordinary people of the UK, whether we are English, Northern Irish, Scottish or Welsh.

Neeless to say, other dipsitcks are getting in on the act over at Facebook:

Now the flags were not put up this morning, they had been there for some time, but this Federast could avoid adding her spin to the mix, could she? Now look at the replies to her Facebook posting:

Sure, a few sane people tried to stand against the odious tide, but they were swept away by the deluge of loathsomeness  that only the Federasts can spurt forth.

Just remember, this morning when I voted I met a neighbour who was taken into hospital to have an operation for bladder cancer which was cancelled at the last minute. Instead of whining he dragged himself to the polls to vote Leave.

That is the difference between Brexiteer and Federast: we represent the best of Britain and they are its detritus.

You must vote Leave! You owe it to your country!

Today is all about voting for independence

I voted for independence at 11.10 this morning. Unusually for a Scottish polling place there were no placards outside urging people to vote for this or that, and no tellers either. Scottish law is different from English, so in this country you can grab voters on their way into the voting place and give them a final appeal, but neither side seemed to want to bother.

Inside there was only one table, unlike the independence referendum and 2015 General Election when there were two. The place was empty apart from me, with just two people leaving as I walked down the long path to the school that was my polling place. The two officials who gave me my ballot paper told me that turnout had been very high earlier on, and looking at the polling register as they found my details and put a line through them to show that I had voted, I noticed that about ten percent of the electorate on that page had already voted before me. My guess is that most of that early vote went to Brexit, we are just so much more committed than the Federasts, because we believe in our country in a way that they never will.

On my way out I met a neighbour who had complained late last week that he had been given an emergency hospital appointment and feared that he would not be able to vote. That operation was cancelled at the last minute so an elderly man with bladder cancer was able to hobble on his crutches to vote for his country's freedom. 

The Federasts are worried, I hear, about the rain in London that may keep some of their precious voters at home for fear that their expensive hairstyles may be ruined by a drop of water, but we can rely on men who can barely walk as a result of their cancer dragging themselves to the polls.

I suspect that more of the people who read this blog have already voted. Now is the time to take to talk to your neighbours and get them to vote. Take them in your car, if you have one, or just jolly them along if you haven't.

Leave the excuses for not voting to the Federast: we are Brexiteers and our day has dawned!