It sounds like Rishi Sunak has somehow managed to mostly un-fuck the Northern Ireland Protocol which was dumped on him by…his predecessor but one, who in turn bluffed out his “oven ready Brexit” as a response to the unexpected secession from the EU…which he campaigned for in a referendum called by…his own party leader one preceding. And now the Windsor Agreement, so-called, is being questions and sandbagged by the very same bad-faith DUP who walked out of the NI Assembly to bring this deal about, and who provided the balance of majority for…the same party that called the referendum, signed the NI Protocol, and then spent three years wailing about the horrible burden of…the deal they negotiated.
Honestly, at this point, an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking that the problem behind all of this is simply the fact that the Tories are in charge, and have been for almost thirteen years, and that they took over a country with a comparatively strong European economy and now want credit for partly re-attaching the leg they blew off with a shotgun themselves. One could also boggle at the fact that in that thirteen year period, the Tories have put up five different individuals as Prime Minister, four since the Brexit vote and three in the last twelve months. It rather begs the question of why there hasn’t been an election at this point.
And that goes back to 2010, when the Tories made a deal with the LibDems to get into government and then quickly passed a law that would guarantee them a full five years, rather than facing a vote of no confidence. Thanks largely to that, the Tories have been able to avoid accountability – gladly undoing their own rules to get rid of Theresa May or Boris Johnson without facing the voters. For all the turnover, they’ve only faced two general elections since Brexit – one which was won by Boris Johnson on the basis of outright misinformation and misrepresentation, and one very nearly lost by Theresa May and saved by selling out to the DUP.
The DUP has been a bad-faith player from the beginning, going back to their opposition to the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998. They lent their supply and confidence to the Tories in 2017 in exchange for being allowed to work their will in the North with the tacit protection of the Tories. As a result, when the DUP found themselves behind Sinn Fein and Alliance, they were able to fall back on “cross-community” and tank the NI Assembly rather than go into a position where they would enjoy only mildly reduced puissance. And now, despite the fact that a solid majority of the people of NI support this agreement, they will have the power to thwart it if they don’t get special feelings in their chicken parts about it.
This is of a piece with so many things. You could point to the Super League, and flailing powers in Spain and France (and England, if we’re keeping it a quid) trying to keep by rule what they cannot earn on the field or at the turnstiles. You could point to the Republican Party in the United States, clinging to national power through gerrymandering and the Electoral College and rigging the judiciary to their advantage. Right now, we are watching an old and fading generation trying to rewrite the rules of the game to keep their power and wealth at the expense of everyone who comes after.
Everything dies, as Bruce told us, that’s a fact. Nothing lasts forever. Those who rage against the dying of the light have a choice: accept the inevitability of life and death and do the best you can for those around you and those who will follow you, and thereby attempt to make yourself a glide path to the end of the line – or pretend it’s not going to happen, change the rules to say it can’t happen, and then die ugly when it comes for you all the same. The people whose future is being choked to death will not be content to shrug and say “well the rules clearly state that the Boomers can choke us to death, and the rules clearly state that we only get 3/5 of a vote” – and the people who have rigged the game may not like what happens when the players who are always made to lose decided to play a very different game.
Which is the problem with being just this age. I never could get my head around being in one’s 50s – it felt like a weird sort of no-man’s land where you were too old to even pretend to be young, but not old enough to retire, and an age where it was too late to start from scratch. So the idea that I’m pig-committed to a career path and a retirement savings solution that depend on other people’s greed and bad decisions…well, suffice to say, I’m looking forward to being under 55 and having my Social Security savings handed over to Goldman Sachs or some such shit while the generation that won’t let go continues to get its tax free Social Security benefits, and then in twenty years or so watching as retirement income gets taxed to the gills to stick it to boomers who are mostly dead by the people who got shafted for their first twenty years in the workforce.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way in my first year with a 5 on the front of it, it’s that nothing lasts forever and anything can be taken away from you at any time. All you can do is hold onto what you have, hope you don’t lose it, and learn to live with the loss when it comes. And it’s hard not to hear Robert Palmer’s most anomalous song echoing in the distance.
Johnny’s always running around trying to find certainty
he needs all the world to confirm that he ain’t lonely…