The utter misery of UK train travel

Choo-choo to all places

I used to consider train travel great fun, the pleasure of watching the English countryside from Brighton to Manchester over a 6-hour journey, even Manchester to Edinburgh, London to Glasgow, or Manchester to Torquay gave you a view of this amazing land. Yet, there are even more spectacular views by train on the British Isles.

In July 1999, I embarked on a train journey named the Imperial Tour from London Liverpool Street to Budapest and back. I was to complete the journey in 2 months stopping over wherever I wanted for as long as I needed to, it was first class for £483 and I plied my route through Amsterdam, Hannover, Berlin, Dresden, Bratislava, Prague to Budapest, my return leg through Vienna, Salzburg, Zurich, Basel, Brussels, and London. I would say, the Bratislava – Budapest leg and the Vienna – Zurich leg gave me the most spectacular views.

Ten years later at Easter, I was meeting up with my best friend in Geneva and I took the train from Amsterdam, the view from the window through places that you would neither see from the air nor from the road just gives you a different appreciation of the beauty, the culture, the nature, and the architecture of different places. That I vicariously watch train journey programmes to far-flung places is one of fascination and curiosity.

A travesty and atrocity

Yet, train travel in the UK has been anything but pleasurable, if the service is not sclerotic and substandard, it is the exorbitant cost of travel that puts you totally off, except that there are no good alternatives. Living in Manchester, for years, I enjoyed the Virgin Trains West Coast Main Line franchise, it was generally affordable, and the service was dependable, they ran the service from 1997 to December 2019.

Now that the franchise has fallen into the hands of Avanti West Coast, it has been misery piled on misery, what was once affordable is now outrageously expensive that you’ll guffaw at some eye-watering prices to travel on trains gilded with incompetence and lethargy. If you forked out over £300 for a Manchester – London Euston train journey and I never paid that much for a peak time return journey with Virgin Trains in first-class, beware because the train manager can unilaterally declassify the train and you are a mug even if you can claim compensation.

No words can describe

On my return from London on Sunday, it was prescient to consider an earlier journey back, though, on arrival at London Euston, I should have been presented with a timetable of trains departing every 20 minutes, but there wasn’t one for an hour and the one after it was already cancelled.

I boarded the train and took one of the Premium Economy seats, thinking I would be charged the extortionate £25 upgrade, but something said, the train would probably be a coal wagon, heaped high and trundled up the train line at speeds that would make walking seem a sprint.

Well, I was right, apparently the two scheduled trains before the one I boarded and the one after it was cancelled leaving the train carrying potentially all the passengers for 4 trains going a route that took 3h41 as opposed to the typical route we enjoyed with Virgin Trains that lasted just 2h10. Everyone having paid handsomely for this travesty of impunity, for this is not the first time that Avanti West Coast has merged trains.

It gets worse

All the aisles had standing passengers that the train manager had to implore some to get off and wait for another train that no one could with any certainty say would run. I endured, with my mask on to the end, only to find passengers in Manchester rushing to get on, why? A train had been cancelled and this was running late.

How Avanti West Coast got this franchise, I cannot tell, but the experience has been anything but pleasant or remotely good, it has been so deplorable that the only salvation would be to return to horse-drawn carriages. At least you can feed the horse carrots and hear it neigh all the way. They say it would be over 2026 come then, or come Lord Jesus.

A score years from Amsterdam

Arrival Schiphol

Twenty years ago, today was a Saturday, I had packed a suitcase, left for the airport and boarded a flight to Amsterdam. At Schiphol Airport, Dick van Galen Last, now deceased, who I had met in Paris some 3 years before was waiting to collect me having offered to give me boarding for as long as it took to find my feet.

Thus, began my over 12-year sojourn in the Netherlands, the culmination of a series of events that began in January 1999 when a relationship of almost 7 years came to an end. It presaged a turbulent year of career upheavals, house moves, job changes, and a period of interesting adventure.

I was in London, having gone back to work in Ipswich where I rebased myself for 6 months thinking things had changed in my head from the 3 years before, but I learnt that situation was not a solution to turmoil. The job I took up was not offering the fulfilment I had hoped for and so I resigned as the end of November, just at the cusp of the Millennium, depending on where you place it.

Mid-life marauding

In the New Year, I returned to my original lodgings in London and found that the search for work was fraught with difficulty, applications going out by the truckload, responses returning by the trickle and interviews rarely leading to offers. That was when John Coll, also deceased, suggested I see an occupational psychotherapist.

We met for a chat in Central London whilst I relayed what my circumstances were. His view was that I was doing quite well even if I was not getting the results I wanted. It was also a difficult realisation of having gone through probably half a million pounds in earnings without having much to show for it. There are two things I took away from our conversation, that I was going through a mid-life crisis a decade early and the need to change something radically in my life, location, career, or purpose.

A romance in Europe

That set me on the quest to look for work outside the UK, something I was quite reticent to consider for years. In that same conversation, I was informed that Belgium, Germany and The Netherlands presented the best choices for opportunities. Soon, I was on a flight to Munich for an interview with Compaq, I was not as forward-looking as was expected, I dismissed Intellisense in its infancy as bunkum. I stayed in Munich for a week, it was just before the Dot-Com bubble burst, how I tried to persuade a stockbroker in a Munich sauna to cash out as if I was that prescient.

Back in the UK, I scored an interview, it was conducted at the office of a recruitment agency where set questions were posed to us and the whole charade recorded on video for the customer to review in a team of technicians before selecting those they thought knowledgeable enough. I got the job and was commuting the Reading whilst still looking at prospects on mainland Europe.

A clean break

For the first time ever, I was in a shift pattern of work, 12-hour days every 4 days and 2 days off. The pay was not close to my peak, but the hours made up for it. In the second week of taking the role, I heard back from a prospect in Amsterdam, they wanted a face-to-face interview and as luck would have it, it fell on the days I was off. I took an EasyJet flight to Amsterdam, attended the interview and returned the next day when my laptop suffered a battering at the hands of baggage handlers.

I have not flown EasyJet since then. On my return, I received an offer for the job in Amsterdam. On having a conversation with my manager in Reading, we decided on a quick and clean break, it was fine with me. I hated the work environment, people were promoted beyond their capabilities to manage the team, it was cliquey and toxic, I was glad to be shot of the place.

That is how I began the Dutch phase of my life history, it would be one of the best decisions I ever made; the opportunity to begin again, make a new life, find new friends, and live new experiences. Much as I tried, my conversational Dutch was poor, I became an Englishman abroad.

The UK: Exercising a prerogative of protest at the prorogation of principle

This is trouble brewing

Amidst the other uncertainties that have occupied my time and space, it was a sense of powerlessness and numbness that caught me when I read that the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom had asked the Queen to suspend Parliament. [Channel 4]

This could easily have been a constitutional crisis, but the decision was purely political, a gambler’s last stance at a poker table to get #Brexit over the line where the power of persuasion, the force of argument, the exchange of ideas and robust debate had failed to bring Parliament over to the intentions, agenda and programme of Her Majesty’s Government.

A brigandage in Downing Street

The Prorogation of Parliament is rarely used in a high stakes drama like this, almost never in living memory except for peers of the super-septuagenarian set. It is in this case an act of malevolent Machiavellian statecraft that would have far-reaching consequences for the way the traditions of our parliamentary democracy can be gamed in the interest of ideology over national interest.

The Queen by terms has the prerogative power but is bound to act on the advice of her government and the Privy Council. Whilst she might offer advice, the monarchy has the solemn duty to be above the fray that it cannot interfere even of she as a person and sovereign of our nation has had the great fortitude of inviting 14 Prime Ministers to form a government since she was enthroned in 1952. Sir Winston Churchill was her first.

A disorderly mess

Our distorted, rancorous, and disorderly exit from Europe has left many carcases in its wake, we are on our third Prime Minister and for over three years, not one side of the people’s representation in Parliament has been able to claim a decisive victory in the quest for either exiting or remaining in Europe.

An advisory referendum, poorly implemented, badly fought and corruptly won has hamstrung the country and sucked oxygen out of any viable activity in the UK, yet, the creed stands strong in the hurtling down this precipice in a display of everything redolent of English bloody-mindedness.

Europe is not the problem

I do not believe that Europe has ever been the problem, it is the people we have sent to Europe that has left us with a raw deal. Where other nations sent their best, we found the eccentric, the rabble-rousers and fringe politicians to negotiate on our behalf, the likes of Nigel Farage whose penchant for insult, rudeness and cringe-worthy soundbite would never have with the best ideas in the world be able to win a consensus or an agreement in any committee.

He, as a member of the fisheries committee only attended 1 of 42 sittings, and he had to audacity to board a fishing boat throwing dead fish in the Thames to make the point about seizing back control of our waters.

We, as an electorate have ourselves to blame the most, those who came out to vote won over by questionable arguments, those who allowed apathy to rob them of a say in how they are governed has led to a representation of gamblers. David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn, they all owe their rise to people gambling on their future or hoping their single vote can send a message, which is fine, but many messages can end up choosing the wrong representative and lead us down the road to an uncertain future as Brexit portends.

How Europe gives clout

Being in Europe still matters, the evidence of that is in how the Republic of Ireland with just 4.9 million against the almost 70 million of the UK has clout by reason of being backed by the heft of the EU-27, the UK stands alone looking in from the outside with an outsized view of her influence that was progressively lost after two World Wars.

All the trade deals we now want to negotiate after Brexit, we already have as part of the European Union, we are not going to get better deals than those that the EU has already won with hard bargaining, the numbers, the skill and the statesmanship. The UK in the hands of these peddlers of vacuous optimism who have the temerity to question our patriotism when we challenge their baseless assertions leaves one terrified of the future.

Not this cacophony of jesters

Yet, we are full of fight, the last has not been heard of this matter, for if at any time there was a leader of the calibre of Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee or Margaret Thatcher amongst this lot, there might have been a slight chance that they can pull off a successful Brexit, I doubt a hundred of them together can successfully manage a piss up in a brewery, they would likely piss away our future on the altar of privileges they have come to expect as their entitlement to rule without taking responsibility for any failings.

The Parliament is supposed to be sovereign. At this juncture, where the country faces a momentous decision as to our future, we have a Prime Minister who has no electoral mandate putting the mother of all Parliaments in the cooler to allow his government carry the country divided as it is through to a conclusion many of his cohort including himself have severally said to be anathema.

We already have the best deal

A no-deal Brexit is the worst-case scenario with no upside to it as the pound languishes at about 25% below its value before the Referendum, businesses are closing or moving to Mainland Europe, EU citizens who have made their home in this country are none the wiser of their status post-Brexit and the retired Brits out on the Mediterranean coasts of Europe and further afield in the Canaries have to contend with unnecessary geriatric anxiety.

For those who want to leave and those who wish to remain, we have a greater issue at stake, the reckless abuse of and usurpation of power by the executive in silencing the elected representatives of the people with the revising chamber for the presumed will of the people, which first was advisory, which was superseded by a general election, which should have had the full-throated agitations of the Parliament and having not won the argument, the government should have conceded defeat or sought another mandate.

We will fight this

This is a travesty and I believe there will be civil unrest for the fact that if taking back control was not to give it back to the sovereign Parliament, but for the executive to arrogate those powers to itself, our democracy is at an impasse and we need to revisit the fault lines of the separation of powers and how the Parliament should by rights be able to hold the executive to scrutiny and sanction for every action they take in the name of the people.

Opinion: How much longer can we endure Theresa May and her #Brexit ineptitude?

She never could do it

News that Theresa May the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland had decided to delay the meaningful vote on her much-vaunted deal from Europe for #Brexit was hardly a surprise.

It is depressing and a depressing state of affairs that a nation that in the last century was one of the leading lights of world leadership, diplomacy and political nous is in a state of ineffectiveness, utterly inept, incapacitated by infirmity, deformed in prospect.

I have never had the confidence that Theresa May could pull off #Brexit with any credibility or ability, she mastered and spearheaded a negotiating tactic that projected hubris and bluster, sending bombastic blowhards to Europe with delusions of grandeur convinced in the exceptionalism of the UK. Her powers of persuasion were deployed as dogged obstinacy, tinned eared in her hope that brinkmanship would yield a result.

A living insanity

For 29 months since she assumed office, she has followed the same course, mouthed the same mantras, repeated the same talking points and achieved nothing. Paraphrasing Albert Einstein, "The definition of this #Brexit insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results."

It is insanity that bedevils this #BrexitShambles, she can win no support within her party and she has found no way to unite the country behind anything she has to offer apart from uniting us in disgust and revulsion of her deal.

Theresa May had ample opportunity and scope, she could have on becoming premier gone for a grand coalition to work on this #Brexit issue. Rather, she triggered Article 50 completely clueless of what she could achieve, then gambled away her majority on an ill-judged election before losing two Brexit Secretaries of State, a Foreign Minister and scores more from her cabinet.

Neither up nor down

Dysfunction and derision have become the hallmarks of this government hellbent of driven the country headlong into perdition on the force of ideology above reason. The Pound Sterling in the wake of foolhardiness not seen since the Grand Old Duke of York became a nursery rhyme of the utmost ridicule.

The problem is not in Europe, the EU-27 countries have already agreed the deal she wants to renegotiate with them, they all know it is the fact that she cannot persuade, convince, cajole, cudgel or bribe enough in the House of Commons to buy into her plan. She is an abject failure and if any Tory is ready to put the country above self-interest, it is time to pension off this apology wrecking the country and chart a new course in leadership and in Europe.

Stop this #Brexit nonsense now

The #BrexitShambles has sucked all productivity, progress and oxygen out of our national effectiveness and the ability for us to take our place in the comity of nations where we belong. There is no Kumbaya of rich pickings after #Brexit.

We belong in Europe, the best deal we could have we already have in Europe and we need to send better representatives than those of the ilk of Nigel Farage to Europe who would attend meetings, constructively engage our partners and win compromises, concessions and consensus that gives of the best of what Europe can offer.

It is time to end the leadership tragedy of Mrs Theresa May and consign her to the scrapheap of history. She has done enough damage already.

#EURoaming: Roam, Roam, Roam Your Phone

Roam, roam, roam your phone,
Gently overseas,
Silently, noisily, merrily, happily,
Call Europe with ease.

What the EU gets us

Roaming charges are being dropped within the EU from Thursday, the 15^th of June 2017. You can carry your contractual tariffs and allowances abroad without incurring extra charges, these also cover your Pay-As-You-Go bundles.

However, once outside the core allowances, the prices can suddenly go up. I remember returning home from a Spanish holiday in September 2007 to a phone bill of €1,420, though it did not really bother me, I thought being with the same company in different countries and being charged exorbitant rates was just outrageous.

There are lots of benefits of being in the EU and I doubt when a closer look is made of #Brexit we would see any advantages for the UK apart from that obsession with freedom of movement. I dare say, that codified phrase that looks innocuous enough is more an appeal to our latent xenophobia.

As a consequence, we suffer

In the end, the politicians will suffer little consequence for #Brexit, they will swan off into retirement with eye-watering pension pots, just like Nigel Farage would, but the ordinary person will be affected. The pound is at its lowest for decades just as gambler-politicians alter and change our lives at a whim like the throw of the dice for their own egotistical and political ends.

Whilst it lasts, let us roam and enjoy, the need for a dual-SIM phone might be obviated in the EU, I will find out when I travel next month.

From what I can see in the Which article, it appears Three offers the best deal for UK customers travelling out, you cannot acquire a cheap contract in another country to exploit roaming in your home country. I am sure mobile phone companies would come up with ingenious ideas to make up for the loss of profits from roaming charges.

Courtesy of Which magazine

We, the people said, 'Silly girl.'

Catching up on it all

No doubt, reams of commentary and analysis would be written about the just concluded UK General Election of 2017, but I will like to write a postscript to the event.

When Theresa May the incumbent Prime Minister suddenly called an election on the 18^th of April 2017, the ruthless streak of the lady was to completely annihilate the opposition and put the Labour Party completely out of the reckoning.

The polls suggested the Tory Party would win a landslide and Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party would lead it to its worst electoral defeat in history. There were analysts who until the day before the election who completely underestimated Jeremy Corbyn and believed their prognostications to the point of annoyingly projecting it on any platform that would accommodate those views.

Giving Jeremy a closer look

Until the election was called, we were coasting to a somewhat ruinous separation from Europe called a Hard Brexit, Theresa May believed she had read the minds of us Britons and came to the conclusion that it was the freedom of movement that bothered us the most and so her headstrong Brexit strategy was gathering moss in that direction.

Invariably, we also had our doubts about what Jeremy Corbyn could achieve and probably would have voted for someone else until Theresa May’s arrogance, audacity and effrontery presented us with a stark choice of giving her free rein to take us over the cliff edge or we begin to subscribe to the reasonableness that became the hallmark and demeanour of Jeremy Corbyn.

The media bias against Jeremy Corbyn and his team was unrelenting and palpable as they brought up every ghost of the past to scare and terrify us into Theresa May’s ‘Strong and Stable’ corner.

Yet, the hashtag #EndMayInJune bore an amazing resonance as we began to look at Theresa May’s record as Home Secretary and then Prime Minister, we began to see leader that probably stood for nothing, all goals, aims, ambitions and promises given the oxygen of rhetoric, sloganeering, soundbite and endless repetition was just a lot of hot air and nothing else.

A broken record it was

We were not convinced that giving Theresa May a stronger hand in the #Brexit negotiations would give us the kind of Brexit that would be good for us. The referendum is a done deal, however, it is my view that if the politicians decided should ask us about whether we wanted to stay in Europe, it is right for them to return to us and review the manner of our leaving.

Basically, if we want to get off the EU bus, it is best the bus gets to a bus stop where we can safely alight rather than us jumping out of the window whilst the bus is in motion. There was a streak of British bloody-minded daring-do that was beginning to inform our manner of leaving the EU that was patently unacceptable.

Then again, even if Brexit was an important electoral issue, there were seriously pertinent local issues that were left by the wayside, those were the issues that Jeremy Corbyn brought to the fore as Theresa May sequestered herself away from needed scrutiny to challenge her record in government.

We had to stop this gamble

She was either clueless or given to sophistry that the gamble she took calling an election was beginning to write itself out as political folly. I had to vote and so I committed myself to a 500-kilometre roundtrip from Edinburgh to Manchester to vote on Thursday morning.

I believe, there were many like me who decided they had had enough of politicians in the mould of Donald Trump who took everything for granted and had no scruples gambling away our future on the whim of egotistical and reckless abandon for personal ends portrayed as a national interest.

Invariably, even after two terrorist attacks within weeks of each other and the local elections that appeared to buoy the Tory Party, the gamble did not pay off, and rather than increase her majority in the Parliament we are met today with a hung parliament with the Tories needing the support of the anachronistic, provincial and primordial Democratic Unionist Party of the Northern Ireland to form a minority government.

What a silly girl

One is left to almost blurt out, ‘Silly Girl’, but a lesson has been harshly taught and history is being penned with the enthusiastic aplomb of an epic-making thriller. Theresa May will go down in history as the incumbent leader who called an unnecessary election to bury the opposition into irrelevance giving her the freedom to traipse about like an empress, only to be reduced in clout, authority and effective mandate.

Unfortunately, the stiff-necked woman has learnt no lessons, the core of the team that heralded the shambles we are in have been retained to continue in shambolic plunder of our commonwealth. The Tory Party is, however, a restive hornet’s nest, it would sooner implode over something before the next scheduled election of 2022. I do not expect Theresa May to last this new Parliament as the leader of the Tory Party.

We, the people

What we have learnt is that people do feel strongly about the way we are governed, they are concerned about the NHS, social care and our communities, but would not be terrified into making choices like the ones that brought us Brexit again. We want a managed exit from the EU that involved consultation, consensus and agreement.

We are done with UKIP and its immigrant poison, the people persuaded of the UKIP agenda did not automatically file into the Tory column as Theresa May expected, they dispersed into columns that appealed to our greater sense of being as the Labour Party that was supposed to become history claimed more seats off other parties than they lost, a net gain of 21.

A strengthened opposition is what we need for the kind of Brexit Theresa May was cooking up for us and we have one led by Jeremy Corbyn who by terms is in the ascendancy. For that alone, I’m in clover.

God Save The Queen!

Related notes

Blog - The UK: One Vote! #GE2017

Blog - Fuck #Brexit, there are people suffering

Blog - Opinion: He was British, what changed him?

Blog - Manchester: Our humanity is our strength

Blog - Homelessness: Make June the end of May - #EndMayInJune

#Brexit: A royal fuck-up by caddish toffs

In utter disgust

Nothing spells disgust as the troop of inveterate spineless public school educated Englishmen who have shirked and absconded from responsibility when they have been met with the challenge and the call to duty.

It is appalling beyond words and utterly contemptible that we by the hand and machinations of a few little men consumed from schoolyard rivalry projected on the nation in a barefaced dare redolent of Renaissance duel, that has gambled away fortune and future for uncertainty and flux.

Deserters most vile

We are here today with Nigel Farage who spent 17 years earning a handsome purse in Europe as a scoundrel and a scallywag, uncouth, uncultured, intemperate, a rascal, and a truant extraordinaire who for all he did not do for us in the European Parliament has never been called to order, easing himself into retirement from the leadership of Ukip.

Before him, we had Boris Johnson, the bumbling scatterbrain of a nincompoop, the ebullient and charismatic leader of the #Brexit campaign, refusing to step up and put in order the turmoil he has wrought by his escapade which for all intents was to become Prime Minister at the expense of his lifelong rival, David Cameron.

The day after the #Brexit vote, just as the markets slid and the pound plummeted with no clear guidance of what the future holds, David Cameron threw in the towel and before us we had a rudderless, listing and a precarious situation at the most trying of times for Great Britain in almost a century.

These men and I use men lightly would have been typical of deserters, cowards with neither cojones nor liver who in the heat of battle turned their backs on the frontline and hightailed to the bosom of their mothers quaking and trembling like leaves that it would behove the generals to have then shot at dawn and never remembered for anything but their cowardice.

A disgrace beyond countenance

These men are a disgrace to everything that makes the English proud and gave us the history that dogs our present existence as we strive to punch above our weight in the world. However, in just 11 short days we are diminished in status, in influence, in capacity and in leverage.

We had no #Brexit plan, it is in fact almost laughable that we do not have any experts to negotiate the best deals for our post-#Brexit status, we might have to hire immigrant expertise to fight our corner. So much for #Brexit, it was a wasteful exercise that exacerbated division, accentuated anxiety, heightened uncertainty and complicated issues, many of which are unanticipated and frankly idiotic as they materialise.

A royal fuck-up

How did we end up with such a royal fuck-up orchestrated by some of the people who are supposed to be the most privileged, best educated and self-assured? Never has such a great nation been bequeathed to a generation so lacking in honour and gratitude for being chosen that they have brought it so low that what we have left is empty boasts, bluster, bombast and baloney.

Europe is not going to bend over backwards for us and the sooner we realise we’ve shot ourselves in the foot with #Brexit, the easier it would be to get treatment for the wounds.

Shame on all of them. If a man cannot stand when called to stand up and be seen, we might well have their dogs for company, the loyalty of the animal might just begin to pay for their perfidy and treachery.

Other reading

Blog - #Brexit: He traded his kingdom for horse shit

Blog - #Brexit: The Brexiteer is Brexecuted

#Brexit: The Brexiteer is Brexecuted

A DEAD STATESMAN

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.

Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.

What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

Rudyard Kipling                                      

The favourite

This is a blog I had wanted to write for a few days when I discovered the Rudyard Kipling poem titled ‘A Dead Statesman’, but the time was not ripe for it to written until this morning,

At the back of my mind, I had heard just a few days before on the possible contenders for the leadership of the Tory Party the opinion of a Tory MP that the favourite never wins.

I probably should have laid a wager at that point that Boris Johnson, the flamboyant and charismatic face of the #Brexit campaign, who was considered the favourite to become the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom will not claim the prize.

The knifing

Yet, this morning as I was having breakfast, I was in shock when I saw on television that Michael Gove, the Justice Minister who was Boris Johnson’s sidekick was running for the leadership job.

We must not forget that during the #Brexit melee, Michael Gove famously adopted the anti-intellectual stance that we should ignore all the experts that ‘prophesied’ disaster for the UK if we did #Brexit.

Then again, within 24 hours of the #Brexit vote, the proponents were backpedalling on the talking points that formed the basis of the #Brexit campaign, the £350m we were supposedly paying into the EU was not really so, the NHS was not going the retained moneys, we really would not be able to reduce immigration after all, because Europe is not at our door with a begging bowl for our trade.

The excoriation

We have become independent and probably sovereign but diminished in influence, economic power, clout and are in limbo with a rudderless government and an opposition engaged in internal insurrection. Project Fear has become Project Fact according to Lord Heseltine and the reality we face is, no matter the gloss we put on it, grim.

Lord Heseltine was no shyster when he laid into Boris Johnson who having given Nigel Farage’s odious campaign a veneer in credibility, his vitriolic excoriation is also a statement of the consequence of #Brexit and it would do well that we note his words.

"I think there will be a profound sense of dismay and frankly contempt."

“He’s ripped the party apart. He’s created the greatest constitutional crisis of modern times. He’s knocked billions off the value of the nation’s savings. He’s like a general that led his army to the sound of guns and at the sight of the battlefield, abandoned the field - to the claims of his adjutant who said he wasn’t up to the job in the first place.”

“I’ve never seen so contemptible and irresponsible a situation. It’s a free society. There’s no question of punishment. He must live with the shame of what he’s done.”

“This process, which would not have happened without him, has now left a great gaping hole in the future of Britain’s decision makers. Not just Britain’s decision makers but all over the world, people thinking about investing in this country don’t know what the future holds. The priority now is for that question to be answered and quickly. We cannot just let this thing drift as everyone makes speeches and pontificates.” [Mirror]

In another interview, Lord Heseltine went on to say that Boris Johnson was like, “a general who marches his army to the sound of the guns and the moment he sees the battleground he abandons it … The pain of it will be felt by all of us and, if it doesn’t get resolved shortly, by a generation to come yet.” [The Guardian]

The odium

Meanwhile, Nigel Farage in his valedictory speech at the European Parliament where he accused his colleagues of never had a job or created jobs in their careers, one can only be bemused that Nigel Farage has idled in that parliament for 17 years when he was supposed to be representing our interests.

[]

His penchant was to obstruct, to insult, to abuse, to belittle, to bluster and to exhibit the most reprehensible and undiplomatic conduct to partners who we needed to persuade and with whom it was necessary to find agreement; a polar opposite of the global consensus builder Winston Churchill, and we wonder why we always got a raw deal from Europe when we sent the worse of our lot to beat the drums for our interests.

And so back to the poem at the top and the blog, the lies that undo statesmen and bring political careers to an end, if anyone is weeping for Boris Johnson, crocodiles have shed more pitiful tears. The damage wrought by his perfidy reverberated around the globe and it will harm us for generations. There is no way he deserved to reach to for helm of government which many thought was his selfish aim for siding with #Brexit.

Like the Shakespearean play, when Marcus Junius Brutus knifed Julius Caesar, the Brexiteer has been Brexecuted.

#Brexit: He traded his kingdom for horse shit

The truth is expendable

Probably there is much to be said of the EU Referendum results that have commenced the divorce of the UK from the European Union.

Throughout the campaign, it was difficult for me to elicit from all the talking points, the propaganda, the debates and outright lies that made up the interaction with the public what was fact from fiction, understatement from exaggeration, fear-mongering from bare-faced reality and snake-oil remedies from wild assumptions.

However, what it more or less confirmed to me was the need to redefine Modern Democracy as “The government of the sentimentally cajoled, by charismatic confidence tricksters for untrammelled vested interests.”

Appealing to emotions

Worse still was the fact that literally all expert opinion was rubbished, dismissed, debunked or excoriated as fallacies were deployed with soundbite efficiency, completely ignoring any semblance of objectivity, truth, data or fact.

They appealed to our basest instincts and excited such raw passions that one young mother of two and an elected representative of a Yorkshire constituency was shot, stabbed and killed by a mental incompetent fuelled by the hateful rhetoric that had pervaded the discourse. Pandora’s box was opened and every kind of poisonous view let lose without compunction.

The most potent fallacy in the #Brexit debate was the appeal to emotion on the matter of immigration, it became the focal point by which a 0.5% increase in our population was made to look like a 5% influx of undesirables taking liberties and abusing the hospitality of our generosity that we had reached breaking point.

A reckless gamble

Prime Minister David Cameron, took a political gamble and with hindsight he had no chance against the charismatic buffoonery of Boris Johnson and the caddish affability of Nigel Farage. He is to be consigned to the scrapheap of history as the man under whose watch the United Kingdom faced an existential crisis of disintegration and ostracism from its closest partners.

He had lost his deft touch, in another statesmanlike setting, he would have put in some hurdles beyond a simple majority, this was the lowest threshold possible and on a 52% - 48% share in favour of #Brexit, we are in the realm of uncertainty, in uncharted waters, subject to avoidable but understandable turmoil, turbulence and volatility, unsure of what the future holds and this is supposed to be our Independence Day.

At the very least, a higher percentage threshold should have been met, the four-country lock suggested by Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister of Scotland should have been in the mixed, ensuring unanimity of all regions of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, before we agree to #Brexit and the 16-17-year-old cohort should have been allowed to vote.

Not that this might have changed the result, but whatever victory for whichever side would have been hard fought for and more than well-deserved. Worse than Shakespearean Richard III, David Cameron did not trade his kingdom for a horse, but for horse shit.

For now, the country is split down the middle, he has resigned, the pound was in freefall, the stock market took a battering along with bourses of our allies and the leader of the opposition faces a vote of no confidence.

We’ll suffer for this

Europe has also gone shrill and strident, the next meeting of the heads of government does not have the United Kingdom as an invitee, we have more than tough times ahead, we are most likely going to be harshly dealt with to ensure the referendum we just concluded does not become an excitable contagion to others.

Never, has a nation had the voice to express itself and squandered it on irrational fear of the other considering it has a not too distant history of dominating over 25% of the world in its heyday. The Great British Empire which was at its height just a century ago has collapsed upon itself with a whimper, and whilst in 1982, Margaret Thatcher put the Great back in Britain after the Falklands war, in 2016, David Cameron has welded the Little to England in our march out of the door from Europe.

The consequences of #Brexit will be more far-reaching than we have ever contemplated, and the people who promised us the world if we #Brexit probably only have loads of sorrow, tears, pain, sweat and blood to offer.

Welcome to the new world.

On #Brexit: We must remain for our democracy

The Control

Much has been said about taking back control by the proponents and outsized figureheads of the #Brexit campaign, and maybe they have a point.

However, there will be immediate and long-term consequences if the United Kingdom votes for #Brexit.

The main issue is our democracy and that has been a serious debating point throughout this referendum discussion. We have a parliamentary democracy in the UK, and though I did not vote for the Conservative Party in the last general election, I am happy to be represented by the government of the day.

Some of their policies are not to my liking, but the people in charge headed by David Cameron who we voted for have maintained a somewhat steady course from 2010 in a coalition and then as a majority government since 2015. This parliament, come what may, will run until 2020.

The coup

If we do vote #Brexit, this the very likely scenario, there will be a palace coup, David Cameron and his cabinet will probably be thrown out and we face the possibility of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister with senior cabinet figures in Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith, I will not be surprised if Nigel Farage is flung into the House of Lords in gratitude.

Whilst this will be a democratic exercise within the ruling party, it is unlikely to bear the hallmarks of the democracy we desire and it will run until 2020. None of these personalities have ever held a great office of state, that is Prime Minister, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary.

Iain Duncan Smith has been a leader of opposition, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London and Michael Gove is the Justice Secretary, the government of the UK carries a greater responsibility than these men have ever faced, they will be tyros, inexperienced, learning on the job and at the same time trying to negotiate a new identity for the UK in the world.

The greenhorns

It is my humble opinion that this task will be well beyond their experience and capacity to manage that the UK will probably both suffer internally and internationally for this venture into two uncertainties of experience and unquantified hope.

There is every reason to be energised by the concept of an Independence Day tomorrow, but give it a thought, on economic matters, they have no insight, on immigration, they have held no such responsibility. On negotiations even Boris Johnson could not bring to fruition the night travel he promised on London transport, Michael Gove literally frustrated the teachers rather than persuade them, Iain Duncan Smith presided over a regime where the vulnerable were victimised and Nigel Farage besides being abusive and rude in the European Parliament could not win his own constituency last year.

These are the untested and untried people, we are about to hand our country to, to take us on an untried and untested journey outside Europe outside of the people on the remain side have gathered a wide coalition, many of whom hold offices of responsibility and have validated contacts with our partners far and wide around the world.

 Some realism

Yes, we can be bloody-minded and adventurous as Britons, and indeed, if there were a different set of tested experienced people to hand control over to, the case for #Brexit might have been stronger to me, but there is nothing in #Brexit than a suicidal attempt in the unknown, for the unseen, in the uncharted, for a destination unscripted, there is just too much unappealing about this matter to hand it over to this crowd.

It is for this reason, even if we are persuaded of no other that I will appeal so earnestly that we vote to remain, for continuity in the hands of the experienced, for some confidence in competence even in the uncertain times ahead, a sense of quantified risk in what we know as opposed to a whole set of unknown unknowns.

This is just too great to risk for independence in the hands of greenhorns.

We must vote to remain.

Europe: We should remain

I’m a Europhile

Having lived on mainland Europe for almost 13 years, there is no doubt that I am much of a Europhile. It did take a while before I could bring myself to think of living and working outside the UK.

My first foray outside the UK was in 1992 when I visited the Netherlands, it was a bus trip that included a ferry ride to the north of France, through Belgium and up to Amsterdam. I felt lost, but it was somewhat an enlightening experience.

Then in 1995, I flew out to Berlin and with that began my love for mainland Europe, soon with my partner it was Paris a few times and Barcelona. In 1999, having acquired a strange fear of flying, this affecting someone who first flew at 5 between continents and into my teens flew a number of times in Nigeria, I went on a tour.

The Imperial Tour

I booked what was the Imperial Tour [The Netherlands, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium to be completed in 2 months.] from Liverpool Street Station, it was one of those crazy ‘have a credit card, will travel’ adventures that I planned within 10 hours and was a ferry ride to the Hook of Holland and over 3 weeks I was in the cities of Amsterdam, Hannover, Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg, Zurich, and Brussels.

Earlier in the year, a 7-year relationship had ended and with that was the exploration of possible job opportunities on mainland Europe, I concentrated on Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, I interviewed in Germany, but eventually, the best offer came from the Netherlands in May 2000 and I left for a new life and experience.

Life in the Netherlands was laid-back, the quality of life was high and there was means to extend travel to Portugal, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and further afield.

We have our identity

The ties with the UK were still strong, but with each election season came a spot of bother, the growing Euroscepticism that threatened my status in Europe, you just didn’t know what to expect.

Having returned to the UK for almost 4 years, I am no less a Europhile and my love from Europe is borne of deeper consideration than the political talking points of immigration, economy or sovereignty.

The Netherlands is by many factors a smaller country compared to the UK, yet I never felt the Dutch were losing their identity nor sovereignty from being in the midst and centre of the European project.

What gets to me is this incipient exceptionalism exhibited by the #BREXIT camp and sometimes in the #BREMAIN camp that suggests the United Kingdom has no control of its borders, can’t make their own laws, are being held back by Europe and many other supercilious and superior sounding arguments as if Europe is an imposition by the other 27 members of the union.

We’ve done ourselves in

Herein, is our problem, we are in a group that we have railed and carped about since the times of Margaret Thatcher, a setup that requires agreement and consensus, but we send people whose starting point is to antagonise rather than negotiate and we expect to win the argument when there is a difference.

In my view, we have a place at the table, but we have the worst representatives at the table, for instance, we have the highest number of representatives in Europe from Ukip, we are constantly in some sort of détente and suspicion thereby having none of the engagement that can carry anything even if well-reasoned in our favour.

We have become a nuisance in Europe and then expect a better deal from Europe, we are the cause of our own European handicap in the main, the rest is a matter of consequence.

We are not superior

I feel quite threatened by the prospect of #BREXIT because we are not necessarily better or superior to our other 27 partners in the scheme and the people who front the somewhat isolationist stance have not promoted any new thinking of a great future beyond denying, debunking and rubbishing the ideas and advice of others.

The thought of the UK cast adrift in the hands of an untrammelled Tory leadership whose austerity and government ideas have brought many into mystery. The whole concept of cutting costs by surreptitiously granting autonomy to schools and hospital trusts, thereby shifting responsibility elsewhere and burdening the setups without adequate means.

We belong in Europe

The laws and directives are not made with us excluded, they arrive because we are not participating enthusiastically enough. I do not believe the money that comes back from Europe will go back into the services that are under strain.

We live in a more tightly integrated world, I think we need to belong to global and regional blocs for us to project strength and clout, we belong in Europe and that is where we should remain.

Europe: The wetsuits from Calais that humanised the migrants

The Calais of our times

Yesterday night, a full understanding of the so-called Calais crisis dawned on me. In fact, it is now known as the Calais migrant crisis and it is seen through the eyes of business and tourism.

Business by the reason of tailbacks of traffic consisting of lorries needing to cross the English Channel between Calais and Dover in either direction. On the tourism side, it is about British holidaymakers unable to cross to mainland Europe and thereby a crisis of sorts in the Kent countryside.

The migrants in Calais consisting of people fleeing from areas of conflict and unrest as Syria, Eritrea, Sudan and Libya along with seemingly economic migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa number up to 5,000 living in the most inhumane conditions in Europe and all trying to cross over to the United Kingdom.

A fantasy, at best

The draw to the United Kingdom, has elements of reality and fantasy, many do think they can easily be subsumed into the system through the black economy which we must accept thrives despite protestations to the contrary and the idea that we have an easy and accessible welfare entry threshold compared to other European countries.

Besides, many of these people come from countries where whatever standard of English they have is passable and will be useful enough for them to get by.

Yet, to view this through the lens of our convenience is to miss the greater issue of the humanitarian crisis on our borders, the fact that a possible majority of these people are desperate, fleeing conflict and danger whilst seeking any opportunity for a life that has a modicum of peace, stability and the ability to provide for themselves and their families.

Our peace is a draw

Peace in Europe is a more than a draw for those willing sometimes without any other choice or opportunity to embark on life-threatening, dangerous and risky journeys from their ravaged homelands for the opportunity of a new life – that is an undeniable draw that is just human in all its ramifications and something anyone in their position will probably do without hesitation.

The English Channel is just 33.1 kilometres (20.6 miles) at its shortest width and standing at shores of Calais it is easy to view the White Cliffs of Dover which are quite visible from Calais as deceptively closer than they really are. Many people have swum the English Channel crossing, the fastest being in 6 hours and 55 minutes, but is it not a feat for the faint-hearted.

Two young men in wet suits

This is how Mouaz al-Balkhi and Shadi Omar Kataf from Syria bought wetsuits and plunged into the busiest shipping lane in the world of the English Channel from Calais in order to swim to England only to perish in their attempt and wash up on the shores of Texel, an island of the Netherlands 465 kilometres away and the coastline of Lista in Norway some 850 kilometres away, respectively. [Their Story]

The lives and deaths of these two young men shows not just the desperation of the migrants, but the risks they are willing to take to make it to the United Kingdom, even if it costs them their lives. Thanks to the Dagbladet newspaper of Norway, these two young men did not end up just another migrant statistic of misfortune, the coincidence of two bodies in wetsuits found on foreign beaches, but they are people like you and me who might have had a different story if their homelands were as peaceful and as comfortable as ours.

This is the case of each and every migrant who has embarked on a perilous journey from the turmoil of war or any other uncomfortable circumstance in their homelands to seek a new life in Europe. Meanwhile, our politicians are suffused in rhetoric and constituency-pleasing banter as the migrant reality is toyed with as a poor reflection of our humanity.

We can do better than this, we surely can.

Holiday Snaps: Nowhere near a post-racial Europe

Mythical curiosity

Maybe to my mind that is the case, but there are possibilities that I have been in places where I am probably the only ethnic minority for miles.

Now, it does not bother me, though there seems to be an exotic and sometimes erotic quality to my presence as curiosity and myth collude in a bizarre setting of becoming the cynosure and object of interest.

This can be comfortable as in where over 40 Turkish school children gathered round me for a photograph in the amphitheatre of antiquity amongst the ruins of Ephesus to where some young men with other interests appeared to sit with me for a picture but had their hands in all my empty pockets.

Keep your valuables in your hotel

I am the wiser to know that when going out at night never to take anything of value with me, the list of those things includes passport, wallet, lots of money and most particularly my mobile phone.

The mobile phone which can be replaced is a lot more valuable than we realise, it contains address books of contact details and information that cannot be easily retrieved as pictures and certain utilities or application settings too important to be without as banking apps, navigation tools and so on.

This became evident last night when a lady, I used that word loosely, got herself so inebriated that she became a victim of opportunistic crime. She lost both her money and her mobile phone to one of the many who look for the vulnerable to exploit. Spurting out expletive after expletive would not have changed the situation and the more she railed, the less it made it to help her, I was saddened for her sake.

No one should be a victim of crime, whether vulnerable or not, yet, one cannot absolve the victim totally from blame if a few precautions were taken as leaving valuables in the hotel and drinking sensibly. The phone had much treasure pictures of her daughter, but thieves are not people who place any value on anything we hold dear. The phone would be pawned off for a pittance just because, I’ll leave it at that.

Impressions about black people

Back to what I began with and I have not written about this before, the fact that regardless of how open and free Europe appears to be, we are nowhere near a post-racial society where stereotypes, prejudices and ascribed attitudes define how people are viewed.

I cannot count the number of times I have been approached by people who assume I have hard drugs to peddle. The idea being that mainly what black people do, they do not have conventional careers or professions but live on the edges of society fully involved in some sort of criminality.

Where you wonder do you begin to tackle this rotten misconception and image of people of my race, many of us, honest, decent, upright and hopefully respectable members of society and the communities with which we work and live?

Fuck Off!

So, this Swedish couple approached me, the man sat beside me and then asked if I had smokes to sell. When I responded in the negative, not only was he displeased, he intoned, “Not good.” Basically, he genuinely expected me to be peddling drugs and never expected me to be doing anything otherwise, it was obvious he approached me because of my race rather than any other factor.

Somewhere in his preconceptions, that is what we did. The slight and gravity of disrespect seething with insidious racism was compounded by the fact not an apology was offered for this effrontery of atrocious stereotyping.

I was half-angered and I am minded to blurt out an uncharacteristic – Fuck Off! – When next I am approached for drugs. Not my kind of expression, but it would be more than effective in helping such idiots realise than we should be approached with great caution, if the intention is to belittle us with association with criminality rather than quality of character and better assumptions of status and achievement.

We are nowhere near a post-racial Europe, even for those of us with a very high self-esteem and well-developed sense of self.