The alien hatches

The referendum alien that was implanted by idiots in the British body politic is gestating nicely. On 24 June the British people will wake up to find that it has burst out of that body, just as the movie alien did, leaving us all puzzling: 'Yuk! What now?'

Whether the vote is Leave or Remain, the consequences of bringing this political alien into the world will all be bad – there will be no good consequences, none at all.

We have to note that, if we believe the polls, the result is likely to be close. As we already forecast, neither side will be able to claim political or moral legitimacy from a close result. The referendum will have settled nothing, just confirmed the divisions in the populace.

The Prime Minister's claim that the result of the referendum will be accepted however close it is, is just another one of those non-deliverable assurances that he emits so smoothly and so firmly.

If Remain wins

There will be a large number of very bitter Leave voters. They are on the whole a committed and very angry group. Who knows what form this anger will take, but they are certainly not going to fade mildly away in a tacit acceptance of the result.

The question of the legitimacy of stirring up millions of the apathetic ignorant, uninformed, thick and tardy to skew the vote will have to be resolved. There can be no resolution of this problem: it will fester and take its place in the litany of the 'we wuz robbed' faction.

It will be difficult for those politicians who supported the Leave campaign to reintegrate into their divided parties. The only clean survivor will be Nigel Farage of UKIP.

Over the next few years those who voted for the status quo will come to realise that a vote to remain in the EU was not the static and stable option they thought it was. In this, Remain presented a false prospectus to its voters.

The EU is evolving, Proteus-like, continuously. A new two-level constitution is currently being drawn up. Britain will have to choose whether it wants to be in the centre with some influence or on the margins with hardly any. If the former it will have to abolish sterling and take up the Euro.

The position of the UK on the financial sidelines has long been an irritant to the EU – integrating the UK economy fully into the single-state EU will be the first priority after the referendum. There will be an easily engineered run on the pound followed by a devaluation leading to a scramble for the safety of the German currency. If you think this scenario is far-fetched, consider the financial alphabet soup that wants to keep the UK in the EU: the ECB, the Fed, the IMF, the BIS, the BoJ, the BoC and probably the BoE. Their combined reach is long. The Chancellor of the Exchequer will be happy, since the devaluation will reduce the huge debt that the country has built up over the decades.

If Leave wins

It will finally become clear to everyone that the result is not binding on Parliament or the Government, despite the Prime Minister's slippery suggestion that the result would be honoured.

The odious Stephen Kinnock, a lifetime beneficiary of the EU as were his parents, has posed the problem: The majority of MPs support Remain; only Parliament can initiate the exit from the EU – how are two thirds of MPs going to be persuaded to vote for something they do not want? Even the present collection of supine careerists cannot simply be overridden by the Government.

Leavers are on the whole passionate and angry. If a leave vote were not to be implemented in its full sense there could very well be blood on the streets.

Whoever wins

The nature of this alien, the non-binding referendum, will then become clear to all (except our readers, of course, who knew it all along): why hold a referendum, why ask at all, if either result is unacceptable?

Update 09.06.2016

Daniel Hannan on the subject of the status quo fantasy after a vote for Remain:

All the integrationist measures that have been put in the fridge pending our referendum would come tumbling out. First, the directives that have already been drawn up: import licensing, which will wreck London’s art market; the ban on high-power electrical appliances; the Ports Services Directive, vainly opposed by every British port operator, trade union and MEP.

Then, soon afterwards, we’ll get to the bigger things: the budget hike, the harmonisation of taxation and social security provision, the gradual creation of an EU military capacity. There’ll be no point protesting: we’ll have voted to stay in knowing that they were on the agenda.

As I say, some people will vote Remain precisely because they want a political merger, which is fair enough. But don’t imagine that you can somehow cast a qualified Remain vote. Every Remain ballot will be interpreted in Brussels as a wholehearted endorsement of the European dream.

Quite.

Update 10.06.2016

Any surprise we expressed at the use of these tactics would be feigned:

Mr. Cameron is only targeting 18-35-year-olds exclusively on Facebook in order to get a huge voter registration bump in favour of the outcome he prefers: a vote to stay in the EU.

Facebook sponsored adverts, which have accounted for a huge percentage of those registering to vote on the UK government website, reveal that Mr. Cameron is using his own tax payer funded Facebook page to target younger voters.

As we noted above, if Remain wins, such trickery will not be forgotten:

The question of the legitimacy of stirring up millions of the apathetic ignorant, uninformed, thick and tardy to skew the vote will have to be resolved. There can be no resolution of this problem: it will fester and take its place in the litany of the 'we wuz robbed' faction.

Update 24.06.2016

The alien has hatched a Leave vote.

At the moment of writing we have been told that the Prime Minister will step down in October [and then depart and make some real money]. Presumably the Chancellor will also hang around until then to give 'stability and continuity'.

The Chancellor is political toast: he has no hope of the premiership or even the chancellorship in the next cabinet, so visceral has his argumentation been in the campaign. Like his Prime Minister, he will depart, ditto, ditto, his political career finished. We can only await the 'punishment budget' he promised us, should Leave win.

The only thing that will heal the Conservative party now is a thorough purge of those Remainers in any position of power. We have arrived close to the point that Peter Hitchens has long desired: an almost total destruction and a rebuilding from the ground up into a 'properly conservative' party. If that is not done now then an historical opportunity will have been missed and, as Mikhail Gorbachev put it to the dictators of East Germany, 'Those who are late will be punished by life itself' (there are many versions of this famous saying). Nemesis will surely come.

Let us also not forget that UKIP has lost its purpose and now should be set upon integrating with the Conservative party, where it really belongs.

The closeness of the referendum result must not be used to justify a half-hearted attempt to water down what needs to be done and somehow muddle through the middle. The result of the referendum was a binary choice, not merely an opinion poll to be interpreted and nuanced. The party must lance the boil that has festered in it for the last thirty years. The BSE people who don't have a sudden and very public Damascene conversion to the idea of a Britain outside the EU should resign.

I told you that this referendum alien would bring blood.