2020…facing up to it.
This survey of facial expressions identifies reader types of the nation’s favourite newspapers…
Daily Telegraph readers: authoritarian;
The Times: inscrutable;
The Guardian: knowing;
The Sun: suspicious;
The Mirror: sullen;
Daily Mail: blank
Cycling Weekly: euphoric
ANON.
Warning! This beast of a piece clocks in at 666 words.
This Blog is all about cycling, except when it isn’t.
It’s 2020 and the new road season is under way. But that’s not all.
There I was enjoying Eurosport’s review of the Tour Down Under won by home star Richie Porte only for my euphoria to be shattered at the stroke of not quite midnight; 11pm.
Yes, this was Friday night, January 31, when something totally unnecessary happened. The threat of Brexshit finally became reality and a small island divorced from the European Union to cries of joy from demented Leavers and sobbing from tortured Remainers.
Except of course nothing changes until the terms of the divorce are settled 11 months from now. When, depending upon what you believe, it will be all a bed of roses with lovely new trading deals across the world or chaos because the government, doing what they do best, didn’t have a plan.
So it has come to pass that 31 years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall – celebrating the reunification of Eastern and Western Germany - the world watches perplexed as Britain does the opposite and separates from the European Union. And hides behind an imaginary barrier to make sure those pesky neighbours across the Channel cannot watch as we drift rudderless off the edge of the world.
I feel as sick now as I did three years ago at the referendum result to Leave the EU.
Until this new dawn I was in a good mood as a new season of bike racing got underway Down Under. Not even sports dark history can dent my enthusiasm. Not even my recent telling of Big George Hincapie’s story of how he doped for almost his entire professional career (see my previous blog).
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The Mersey Docks
and Harbour Board building reflected
in the black mirror-like façade of the modern edifice opposite at Liverpool's Pier Head. The city was
Cultural Capital of Europe in 2008 and voted
strongly for Remain (58 percent).
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Doping! It’s an occupational hazard. So I’ll be keenly studying the form and wondering how long we’ve got to wait for another positive. Positive, a good word gone bad in the case of sport.
And I can find nothing positive about Britain leaving the EU.
Maybe I should switch to reading the Daily Telegraph, see the world through rose tinted Specsavers.
But it was Sunday, so sister paper the Sunday Telegraph would have to do. I found it full of the joys of spring for our prospects once free of the EU. I could almost believe it myself.
Reading it cover to cover in a corner of my local supermarket, I detected echoes of Empire, of British stubbornness, our famous laisser-faire, and a blunt negotiating style – give us what we want no compromise leave our fish alone!
I almost fell in love with the idea of Britain going it alone, no longer tied to the best trading block in the world; we’ll do it our way, at the food banks.
The Telegraph writers waxed lyrical, going on about how democracy won the day, how the people of Britain voted to Leave – well 17 million voted to leave and 16 million to remain.
Nothing at all about the indisputable fact that it was all a con. That the four main issues which drove the Leave vote had nothing whatsoever to do with the EU.-
Austerity – wholly due to British policy;
Regional economic inequality - ditto;
Immigration – ditto;
NHS to get the £350m a week paid the EU – LIE.
We were wrong to say that – admitted the Brexshit campaign afterwards.
And to compound the con, Prime Minister Johnson promised to fix all these things once Brexshit was done; a cunning ploy which reinforced the mistaken belief that it was all their fault, over the water.
Nothing about any of this in the Telegraph of course, gloating, like Johnson himself, in “abnormal self-admiration” as the dictionary defines narcissism.
Well said Keith
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