by Shelton Bumgarner
@bumgarls
Let me be absolutely clear — I’m a nobody American in the middle of nowhere. No one reads this blog and so, relative to my point of view, I’m kinda talking to myself. I just find myself growing ever more alarmed with what’s going on in the UK and feel compelled to write about it.
The Brexit crisis in the UK continues to be chronic. The two sides are growing ever more angry at each other. But, so far, there’s no sense of radicalization. Everyone wants to at least pretend to work within the existing Constitutional structure. As such, I have yet to see anything concrete that would indicate all of this won’t be solved politically.
For what I fear will happen, to happen, something has to change. Someone — like doofus Boris Johnson — would have to make a strategic error that would radicalize things. When he prorogued Parliament, he came pretty close to doing it. And, yet, I can see a lot of ways this will either be punted down the road or simply solved politically via a General Election. The Government would have to make a major power grab in a ham handed manner that would shock and enrage the populace to such an extent that talk of extra-Constitutional methods of solving the problem would start to be taken seriously.
The key issue right now is both sides are beginning to think they have a legitimate claim to having their will enacted. Brexiters think “Brexit is Brexit” and say the the referendum’s results give them the right to make Brexit — even No Deal Brexit — a reality. Meanwhile, Remain thinks that given it’s self-evident that No Deal Brexit would be a complete clusterfuck that maybe there should be some more debate on the issue.
What I fear will happen is there will be a succession of power grabs and miscalculations on the part of the Government such that people begin to think there simply can not be a peaceful political outcome to all of this. And once you cross that Rubicon, things could grow pretty spectacular pretty quick.
The Last Taboo might be broken — people will start seizing shit. Parliament might tell radicalize enough that they would go rouge en masse. Then what? Would the Government risk the optics of the military force being used to disband Parliament? From where I am in the States, at least, it wouldn’t take too much for Remain protesters to become republican revolutionaries. Revoking Article 50 would be the initial goal of such a revolutionary government, but that would, of course, only be the beginning to a much broader event in history.
All that is just the absolute worst case scenario. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. So, I think — I hope — things will calm down and be solved politically one way or another.
