RIP the UK

The title might be a little dramatic, but this week's news that the supposed Prime Minister Boris Johnson has decided to send Parliament home for five weeks in a bid to stop them from stopping his no-deal Brexit agenda is also quite dramatic. It's also probably overkill, since Parliament had trouble agreeing on anything before he took power.

Because I read the Guardian, it's hard to escape the impression that things are going to hell in a hand basket, and that we'll be back to death by stoning by dinner-time (I never get tired of that Blackadder quote, in part because it remains so apposite with each new development in the Brexit saga). But in fairness, if I read the Times, the Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) or the Sun or the Daily Mail, I'd be just as het up but in the other direction: worried that my Brexit and taking-back of control could be stolen out from under my nose at any time by shifty foreigners and disloyal leftists.

Which is part of the problem: in normal circumstances it's a good thing that the papers in Britain have a viewpoint, but here it just means that people are unable to find any common ground, because they're being whipped into a frenzy by their respective sides.

My problem with the whole business is that I actually guess the UK's going to be okay. Not great, not as well off as it would be if they'd just voted in Ed Milliband in 2015, or more likely, had returned a majority or coalition for Gordon Brown's Labour in 2010. But the UK's economy is probably big and robust enough that it could do okay on its own - potentially even with a no-deal, though because it's so unprecedented it's impossible to tell.

But what's frustrating is the eternal deadlock that's been unleashed by 2016's Brexit vote. Labour and the Tories respectively are in disarray because being pro-Leave or pro-Remain doesn't cut neatly across party lines - Theresa May had a fifth column in the shape of Jacob Rees-Mogg's cronies in the European Research Group blocking everything she proposed, just because it suited them to do so, while Jeremy Corbyn's personal distaste for the EU is balanced by the strong Remain contingent in his party and counter-balanced by the knowledge that a great number of Labour strongholds voted heavily to leave.

And while it's comforting (and probably accurate) to point to the massive irregularities in the vote caused by dodgy funding and social media interference, the fact remains that the country voted and people have picked their sides. I won't claim I could foresee the result, but conversations I had as early as 2004 made me wary that a vote to leave would always be possible - for as long as I've lived in the UK there's been a steady drumbeat of negativity about the EU (in no small part because of Boris Johnson's agitating in his newspaper columns).

Add to that the fact that even then the north, or really anyplace that wasn't London, was being left behind. For all the vibrancy of Manchester, Liverpool or Edinburgh, the place to really do most anything is London, whether you want to get into politics, finance or the media - or simply find a job, given that so many former industrial communities in the North and Midlands still haven't recovered from the double blow of their massive inefficiencies and the Thatcher years.

I don't like to subscribe to notions that it's grim up north, especially because the farthest north I've ever been in England is Nottingham (I'm hedging a bit, because I have been to Edinburgh), but I knew enough people from those areas to know that coming down to London was their best bet to getting started in their early twenties.

The problem with Brexit generally, and my suspicion that Britain will be okay (though as stated, not great), is that it'll do nothing to address those structural issues. Power will still be concentrated in the southeast, and with it all the funding and attention; housing will remain impossible to find, at least at decent prices and at a sufficient level of quality that you'd like to see your children live there. And given that Brexit was revealed as a massive racist attempt to stop immigration, it's ironic that the folks driving up property prices in London - rich Chinese, Russians and Middle Easterners, among others - won't be affected by the end of EU freedom of movement.

Moreover, Scotland's going to make more noises about seceding from the UK, hoping in part to get back into the EU, while Northern Ireland could turn back into a powder keg - or at least a giant headache for Westminster, since it had already gotten so fractious that it wasn't being ruled from Belfast anymore.

But I think the best summation of the issue is my friend's comment that the instant rage directed at the idea of revisiting the vote is ridiculous. As he points out, if the arch-Brexiteers have their way, we'll never be able to vote on it again. It's like if we were to stop having elections in the US after we voted in Donald Trump, because we can't go back on that ever (though watch this space - in the unlikely event that he loses the 2020 election, who's to say he leaves the White House...?).

Still - there's probably enough there for the UK to muddle along once it crashes out of the EU without any trade deals. There probably won't be riots or fighting in the streets, and the march of business will set things back on course at some point. But it'll be a smaller, crappier and less pleasant place, losing many of the things that made it a nice place to live or visit. And that's the tragedy of this whole farce.