BREXIT
The Great British Backyard Tire Fire
London is burning in the flames of a catastrophic response to Brexit. All that is left is the search for the ideal metaphor.
Halfway through the British period piece The Favourite, Baroness Abigail Masham, played by Emma Stone, realizes her courtly machinations have painted her into a corner. Only extreme measures will allow her to spite her fiercest rival while gaining an unearned sympathy in the process.
Desperately out of options, she does what any narcissistic, entitled English aristocrat would. She reaches for a heavy leather-bound book and smashes herself repeatedly in the face, producing black eyes, a broken nose, a torrent of blood, and the perfect visual metaphor for Brexit.
The Brexit result was decided by Little Englanders who would swap the prestige of a proud nation for the chance to live in an Anglo-Saxon Utopia where a white man can walk down the street without seeing a brown one.
It is easy to say Britain got what it deserves in the way America deserves Trump. They cast their vote, they had their chance, and chose their lot. Just as Scotland and Australia chose to remain tethered to England by voluntarily rejecting independence and republicanism, respectively.
The truth is that only 52% of them deserve it, and only the worse of those at that. The most venal, the most racist, those too old to care and with little left to lose.
Forgotten among the thugs and fascists enabled by opportunistic chancers in Parliament are the ones who posed valid and democratic arguments for a United Kingdom that stands proudly alongside but apart from their European cousins.
They could be forgiven for assuming they would be guided by a political class who would know what they were doing. But association has consequences, as Scotland Editor at The Spectator, Alex Massie pointed out:
“Nigel Farage and his motley crew don’t speak for everyone in the Leave campaign and I feel sorry for the good and decent and intelligent and downright nice people who are on that side of the dispute but who do not much care for Farage and his game. But these are the people you lie with and that, in the end, is a choice.”
The viewpoint of the rational Leaver is beside the point now, anyway. We won’t be hearing their voices again.
The megaphone of England’s existential crisis has been snatched by cartoon caricatures of naughty public schoolboys. Jacob Rees-Mogg looks like Harry Potter if Harry had been born rich, smug, and a bit of a prick. Boris Johnson is the buffoonish fourth-former who flushes the new boy’s head in the toilets as he desperately scans the room for the approval and affirmation of his chums.
These two are far from the only offenders in the Conservative Party, but they are the loudest and the worst. Whether they are propelling the nation headlong into this disaster for their own advancement or their own amusement is no longer clear.
In the face of this their vaudevillian antics, Theresa May never had a hope.
Once the Great British villainess, the Prime Minister has been reduced to a minor character in this pantomime. Who knows if she evens believes a dignified exit from Europe is still possible, let alone desirable? Her only remaining motivation is a depressingly British sense of duty, an obligation to see it through to the end with stiff upper lip and cold dead eyes. Progressives once sought to end her Prime Ministership because they feared she was the second coming of Margaret Thatcher. Now they wish it upon her as a small mercy, like putting an old family pet out of its misery.
This is why the sensible center has become, for all intents and purposes, politically extinct. If even the Prime Minister struggles to be heard of the screeches and caterwauls of the Johnsons and the Rees-Moggs, what chance does a sane person have?
The United Kingdom is descending into that greatest of British inventions, farce.
Even the Continentals can’t get enough of it. In the middle of Brexit deadlines and negotiations, the European Parliament found the time to declare war on fake meat. Names like vegan steak or soy sausages are to be outlawed. The humble veggie burger will become the rather less appetising ‘veggie disc’.
It may be a simple capitulation to the powerful meat lobbies of Germany and France, but it sounds suspiciously like the Europeans are trolling raw meat-eating Brexiters in a live-action re-enactment of the Eurosausage episode from the great British satire Yes, Minister.
Closer to home, each passing day brings a fresh cause for alarm for Britain. Predicted shortages of everything from essential medicines to daffodil pickers are turning the land of Hope and Glory into a nation of paranoids and doomsday preppers.
In bathrooms across the land, Keep Calm and Carry On posters have been replaced with directions to the air raid shelter.
The Welsh county of Swansea voted to leave the EU in almost perfect statistical union with the UK overall. 52% of the 120,362 ballots cast in Swansea were to leave. In industrial townships like Fforestfach, the number passed sixty per cent. Demographically, there is little to distinguish Fforestfach from the many warehouse and factory estates that pepper this part of Wales. It has the same overwhelmingly white, Welsh-born population that typifies Swansea, with the same birth and death rates, the same types of workers and the same levels of underprivilege and unemployment.
The town has had a wholly unremarkable existence except for three weeks in the summer of 2011.
One June afternoon, emergency services were alerted to a warehouse on fire in the industrial district. Once the cause of the blaze became apparent, they knew it would be an environmental disaster.
Tire fires are tricky things. Rubber tires are difficult to ignite, so the fires are almost never accidental. Once the temperature hits the required 750°F, they are almost impossible to put out. They have a habit of internally reigniting, a major factor in tire fires raging for weeks or even months.
They are also extremely toxic. A long list of chemicals and toxins released during ignition are carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, cyanide, and the carcinogens butadiene and styrene. Storage and disposal of tires are tightly regulated for a reason.
In the end, 45 firefighters battled the fire for 23 days, vanquishing it, but at a cost. The price of fighting the fire alone was £1.6 million pounds. The subsequent cleanup and disposal pushed the bill well past the two million pound mark.
Then there was the health and environmental cost. 18,000 people were exposed to at least ‘moderate’ levels of pollution, the classification at which those with existing medical conditions such as respiratory, pulmonary or heart disease are at increased risk. A further 23,000 nearby residents were spared worse than ‘mild’ exposure only because of favorable wind directions. Investigations by Public Health Wales Observatory, found that exposed asthma sufferers were a third more likely to visit their doctor.
In the aftermath, two directors of the company that was illegally storing the tires — the ironically-named Globally Greener Solutions — pleaded guilty to illegally storing more than 5,000 tires in a warehouse. They were piled more than ten feet high in places, creating a significant fire risk.
Judge Paul Thomas told Scott Phillips and Peter Thomas that “only an immediate custodial sentence can be justified. There is no room for recklessness in this sphere.”
They were each sentenced to six months’ prison.
In Fforestfach at least, the men responsible were held to account for the damage they caused.
So perhaps the perfect Brexit metaphor isn’t something as cunning and calculated as Baroness Masham’s meticulously-timed self-abuse. Maybe it’s more like Fforestfach, something wild and unplanned that just got out of hand.
For their part, the people of Swansea, once staunch Leavers, have changed their mind. They are unimpressed with the ineptness of the Brexiteers and are acutely aware of the pending economic catastrophe that awaits communities like theirs. Knowing now what they didn’t know then, they would now emphatically vote to remain, if given another chance.
Swansea sees Brexit for what it is. An expensive, destructive, disruptive, and easily avoidable mess that will leave a stench over the land long after the flames die down.
