Yesterday I woke to find the weather had changed (as I type this I realise that there is at least one, possibly two other blog posts with the same title, so clearly I often find this worthy of remark. Shows how uninteresting this blog is, really). It was grey and windy and wet, and when we went out for coffee it turned out to be quite icy as well. The inadequacy of my clothes became evident as my barefoot trainers conveyed the cold from the pavements, their breathable uppers let in in the wind, and my light linen trousers might as well not have been there, had it not been for getting quite wet and cold. Luckily I was wearing warm underwear bought for my Nepal trip, otherwise my legs would have been as frozen as my toes.
Boris has a Brexit deal, and it is unbearably depressing. I really don’t understand how an MP with any integrity can vote for it tomorrow, but my guess is that it will pass. It really feels sad, properly sad, to me. The ‘deal’ is worse than May’s much reviled one, and there was a very apt tweet about being the woman in a meeting who makes a suggestion which goes unnoticed, and then two minutes later a man makes the same suggestion and is feted for it. It seems to me very likely to lead to a loss of Northern Ireland and, eventually, Scotland. Not that I personally have much skin in the game, but how anyone who cares about the union could accept this agreement I find unbelievable.
Another thing that I find really, really strange is the elaborate customs mechanism set up for Northern Ireland. It is very complicated, and it seems to me really strange that a county which has existed in some form for a thousand years or more is entering this fundamental rearrangement which is built like a house of cards upon a ship deck in restless seas. How can this be a long-term solution? I can imagine it lasting twenty years, maybe fifty, but beyond that? That’s not even a lifetime.
Maybe it’ll be voted down, it’s very close. But then we risk a hard Brexit.
And Labour have refused to entertain the idea of passing the deal on condition of a referendum which I had come to think, reluctantly, would be the only way to prevent this leap off a cliff onto jagged rocks. It has clarified in my mind that while I will probably vote Labour in the future, it won’t be under Corbyn’s leadership. It’s a sad place to end after having been quite optimistic when he first won the leadership contest. I had hoped that this would pull the party towards the left and force it into some sort of intellectual engagement with what it stood for. I was, clearly, wrong.