The Stupidity Of It All

Just took a trip to the post office and accidentally saw the front page of the Daily Express, which is calling for a speeding up of Brexit because, horror of horrors, more migrants suddenly want to come in! What the hell did people campaigning for Brexit expect. It's obvious isn't it if you're thinking you might want to emigrate somewhere and suddenly you see the door closing you're going to make your mind up one way or the other and get on with it if you decide to go.

Brexit cannot be done overnight, never could be so OBVIOUSLY immigration would go up after a vote for Brexit. It is my belief that this kind of journalism will add to the hate crimes already escalating. What do we want riots on the streets? Are we lemmings? Actually we seem to be worse than lemmings – at least they're cute and cuddly. Unlike the Daily Express.

There is now talk of negative interest rates, in other words banks charging people to 'look after' their money. Naturally if that happens a lot of people will start withdrawing cash, if the banks have insufficient liquidity chaos could ensue. I know it's a bit of a doomsday scenario and one could see conspiracies everywhere. However, a rise in interest rates would shore up the pound and what about all the responsible people not living on credit and in perpetual debt.

Maybe the talk of negative interest rates is just a ploy to get us all to think again about Brexit, if so it's unlikely to work. People voted emotionally not sensibly, and they're still stoked up while the media seems intent on stoking them up more. If people cannot see now what harm they're doing then they never will AND they won't accept they caused it either. You don't make friends, or win people over by calling them stupid or racist, but what do you do if that's what they are?

I heard about an interview with a young Remain voter complaining about my generation, how we all got free university education, great pensions and how we've now destroyed his future. I have a great deal of sympathy, really, I'm on his side, but I would like to say that my generation didn't all vote Brexit – shame on those who did though and that in my day only a few went to university.

Blair got it very wrong, even if widening opportunity is generally a good principle. University isn't right for everyone and now we have a generation used to indebtedness as well as receiving dumbed down university courses and not enough apprenticeships and trades people, which brings us back to immigration.

I personally started work at eighteen and no one gave me any kind of grant, my partner started work as a nurse at sixteen because her parents generation didn't see education as being so important for girls. It wasn't a cake walk after that either. We saw mortgage interest rates as high as fifteen percent I struggled to pay anything else for years, my partner, now a widow had to take on extra hours to make ends meet and care for children at the same time, so she worked nights and looked after the kids by day snoozing when she could.

Having come through all that and having lived within our means and having saved a little what happens? Gordon Brown destroys our private pensions, the state pension gets put back (six years in the case of my partner, one year in my case) and no-one really knows where they stand on the terms and conditions anymore thanks to clever Brexiteer Iain Duncan-Smith.

The stupidity and damage this country is inflicting on itself is positively masochistic. With a little help from the newspapers.

Malcolm Snook is published on Amazon , Kobo and Barnes And Noble