They came to bury us ….. and we let them.

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”

Am I making things up or have we heard this before? Oh, I’m sorry, it was Bloated Grandiose Wounded Leader just now, talking about Hollow Chameleon Wounded Leader and how “he had been one of the most extraordinary politicians of the age”, as the latter crashed to the ground, defeated by his own appeasement to the nastier forces in his party.

“…. He delivered one-nation Conservative government….”

Really? One-nation? Where has Boris been? Will we now really be led by his Bloated Grandioseness, with such originality and such command of the truth?

I think I may be loosing it …. How can so many be fooled? And we’ll have the Redwoods, Goves, Foxes and IDS, and maybe even the Farages, and all their multiple personalities, in support. Don’t people get how dangerous these folk are?

And does today say anything about Europe? No. Nothing.

All this terribly sad day shows is what a thoroughly divided nation we are. We are divided along class and education lines (as I have been banging on about for years) and now by geography. We are two nations: Leavia just out-yelling Remainia, to use the idiom of the day.

Those in Europe are either in despair or in a state of deja-vu; their Neo-Nazis are loving it. But the ordinary people and even their politicians still don’t quite understand it; they get our arrogance, our ambivalence: but they just don’t get our class divide because they aren’t seamlessly educating for it, like we are.

Worse: we haven’t tackled it. We, the liberal educated, should have done more to listen to people’s fears and to insist our media have more psychological understanding of the politics of fear, dissociation and blame.

So now the betrayed and fearful working classes egged on by our disastrous right-wing media and joined by the bitter foreigner-haters of the middle classed retirees have taken command with assurance of the turkey voting for Christmas, just as the US poor votes against health-care and refuses to let their nation de-arm. And there is no dialogue with them.

The afternoon of June 9th was a very hot one in London. I was walking towards South End Green to the launch of our new book, Trauma, Abandonment and Privilege, and passed by the one pub in my area that has resisted gentrification and is not a gastro-pub. It was about 5pm and outside sat half a dozen bare-chested, beer-bellied white males of about 50, swilling lager and smoking.

“Oi, mate, stay or leave?” one called out to me with cheeky Cockney provocation.

Did I reply? No, I didn’t. I funked it. I walked on.

I knew they needed their foreigner hatred to support their dwindling identity. I knew I couldn’t tell them that even if we got out we’d never stop this flood of people to the wealthy West. But I was a coward and walked on.

We have just ignored them and now they have taken their revenge.