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Bxt, Only the Beginning: Brexit & the ‘Dancing Plague’ | Opinion by Charles Gomez Principal Barrister at Charles Gomez & Co | Gibraltar | Campo de Gibraltar
It is probably too early for historians to write anything conclusive on that period before leading up to and after the 23rd of June 2016, when the UK voted for Bxt.
Much, if not all, of the ‘Old Continent’, the cradle of Western Civilisation, has been thrown into disarray. Last week a physician diagnosed a patient as having developed a mental disorder associated with Bxt.
What should have been a political act, albeit a very important one, involving the departure from the European Union of one of its Member States (and one of the few net contributors among many beneficiaries), has descended into mass-hysteria which if we’re to believe the chattering class opinion formers, might have a historical precedent in the ‘Dancing Plague’ that swept through central Europe in 1518 and on a number of shocking occasions after that.
To hear some of the political pundits and commentators, it is almost as if 17,400,000 British citizens, a race known for its pragmatism and level headedness, all lost their minds in June 2016. According to these illuminated minds, the Dancing Plague was a mere trifle, and nothing compared to what is happening now. Somebody on one side or the other has lost touch with reality.
And so, we approach the 31st of October 2019 with the kind of dread which, was reserved in the Middle Ages for the rapture and the ever imminent arrival of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In reality, I think that Bxt is a natural consequence of the deepening gulf and increasing disconnect between the ruling elites in Europe of the one part, and the European peoples of the other.
After all, when David Cameron called the referendum in 2015, he and the British cosmopolitan elite, of which he is a very prominent member, must have been sure that the British people who have had compulsory, free education for much more than a century and punch well above their weights when it comes to science, ingenuity and culture, would never turn their backs on the bounty that the EU and its predecessors have been providing since 1973, when the UK joined the Common Market.
There are similar self-regarding, cosmopolitan elites throughout Europe, and if you look at what is happening in other countries, you will deduce that there is an endemic problem despite all the efforts of the main stream media to cover it up.
In Spain, (as we have been reading in Reach) the bipartisan system has collapsed. ‘En Marche’ is a lovely-sounding title, but since Emanuel Macron moved into the Élysée Palace, Paris, and other French cities appear to be in a state of constant rioting. No far-right politician had been in the Bundestag since 1945, but since 2018 the number has gone from zero to 91. In Rome the nationalist, Matteo Salvini is now the power behind the throne.
Still, the elites in London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Rome etc, cannot believe what is happening and those of us who know their history are uncomfortably reminded of other periods when the European ruling classes so completely failed to understand the desires and ambitions of their peoples: 1642, 1789, 1917…
Is Nigel Farage, who will possibly be appointed British EU Commissioner if Bxt doesn’t happen at the end of the month so that he can sabotage the EU budget, a latter day Oliver Cromwell (the victor of the English Civil war, once known as “Our leader of Men”), or is he the sad clown that he has been made out to be in his 25 years on the periphery of British politics?
Is Frau Angela Merkel the female equivalent of Louis XIV, whose throwing opening of the European frontiers to all who would come here, an excess of such proportions which possibly not even the Roi Soleil ever achieved?
Most troublingly have all these detached elites released the genie of the extreme right, which we had all thought had been put back in the bottle forever in 1945?
In our region, we have to be particularly careful not to be taken in by the extreme positions that years of neglect by our respective metropolitan elites have visited on our continent. We must form a joint-front against those who might benefit from getting us to fight among ourselves.
Bxt, Only the Beginning: Brexit & the ‘Dancing Plague’ | Opinion by Charles Gomez Principal Barrister at Charles Gomez & Co | Gibraltar | Campo de Gibraltar
