Who are the ones who are really hankering after the past?

We all know that the right-wing "taking us back to the 1970s" propaganda trope was already written well before the Labour manifesto was leaked don't we?

Stuff like facts and evidence don't matter a jot to the people who mindlessly regurgitate this kind of right-wing propaganda as if it's some kind of wonderful political insight rather than something they've just absorbed from the right-wing gutter press.

It barely takes a puff of critical thinking skills to tear this "back to the 70s" trope to shreds, yet the mindless political rote learners just can't do it.

• They don't care that the rip-off private energy companies only formed after the privatisation of the National Grid in 1990 (long after the 1970s).

• They don't care that the railways were privatised in 1994 (long after the 1970s).

• They don't care that the Royal Mail was only privatised in 2013 (long after the 1970s).

• They don't care that, unlike almost every other developed nation in the world, the UK never actually had a national investment bank/fund (not even in the 1970s).

• They don't care that the proliferation of exploitative Zero Hours Contracts only happened over the last decade (long after the 1970s).

• They don't care that house prices have soared out of the reach of millions of ordinary working people as a result of the Tories overseeing the lowest levels of house building since the 1920s since 2010 (long after the 1970s).

Facts and evidence just don't matter to the kind of people who rote learn and regurgitate the propaganda they read in the extreme-right press.

They only care about the dopamine reward they get from successfully remembering that they've seen these simplistic extreme-right propaganda tropes before, and from faithfully repeating them like a small child who is ecstatic at having learned the first few letters of the alphabet or the two times table.

Worse even that the immunity to facts, and the aversion to critical thinking skills, is the downright hypocrisy of so many of these right-wing blowhards.

They're been trained by their masters in the extreme-right press to pour scorn on any policies designed to undo the damage that decades of hard-right economic madness has done to the UK economy, and accuse their proponents of living in the past, or wanting to drag the UK back to the 1970s ... yet, we know that a huge proportion of the hard-right propaganda reading Brexit fanatics are obsessed with bringing back stuff like blue passports, Imperial weights and measures and corporal punishment in schools.

We also know that they're now intent on voting for a party that wants to bring back the divisive segregation of children into a minority that go to well-funded grammar schools and the majority who get left to rot in the under-funded secondary moderns.

They accuse others of wanting to live in the past, yet they clearly hanker after the distant past themselves, when passports were blue and children got whipped and beaten with sticks for failing to learn how to divide stuff by 14 and 16 properly.

And they're off to vote for a political party that is plotting to allow their posh mates to begin ripping foxes apart with packs of dogs for fun.

The really sad thing is that they don't miss the actual good things about the past like the house prices that weren't way beyond the reach of ordinary working people, the decent wages, the train tickets that were cheaper than doing the trip by car, the affordable energy bills, the full employment, the decent workers' rights ...

No! The stuff that most Daily Mail and Express readers seem to miss about the past is the teachers beating the crap out of the children they didn't like, the ridiculously archaic and impractical weights and measures, the barbaric blood sports, the segregation in the education system, and the bloody blue passports.

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The blue passport farce

The results of a recent YouGov poll about what people think the government should do in post-Brexit Britain creates a horrifying picture of the delusional post-Brexit fantasy land that huge numbers of Brexiters are anticipating.

A post-Brexit fantasy land where the colour of your passport cover is of more importance than the rights that your passport gives you!

What Brexiters want

The single most popular thing Brexiters want to bring back is the death penalty. It's been proven time and again that the death penalty doesn't act as a deterrent (life sentences are much more of a punishment, that's why mass murderers and the like so often try to commit suicide in jail). It's also well understood that the death penalty creates appalling miscarriages of justice (many of the people executed by the British state during the 20th Century have had their convictions posthumously overturned). Despite all of the evidence an astounding 53% of Brexiters want the death penalty brought back.

42% of Brexiters say they want corporal punishment in schools brought back too, meaning that one of their top priorities for Brexit Britain is to give teachers the right to physically assault our children!

48% of Brexiters want things to bring back pounds and ounces. Firstly they never went away, it's always been legal to sell stuff in pounds and ounces in the UK as long as you include the metric conversion too. Secondly imperial measures are a ridiculously over-complicated anachronism. If Brexiters think that grams and kilograms are foreign unpatriotic muck they can avoid using them, but forcing the rest of us to abandon the sensible and easy to use metric measuring system so that we can all start dividing stuff by 14 and 16 again is ridiculous nonsense.

Blue passports

After pining for the return of the death sentence, the second most popular thing on the Brexiter wishlist is for the return of blue passports. 52% of Brexiters see this as one of the main priorities for Brexit Britain!

The hard-right tabloids and Eurosceptic MPs have fed into this nostalgic delusion that the colour of our passports is of such significance whatever and millions of Brexiters have lapped it up.

The Tory MP Andrew Rossindell has gone as far as describing the current burgundy passport as a "humiliation" and claiming that once the blue passport returns the British people "can once again feel pride and self-confidence in their own nationality when travelling"!

The idiocy of this stance is astounding. The current UK passport gives us all the right to travel, and work, and study, and retire in any of 27 nations across Europe. If the Tories insist on scrapping freedom of movement then it's obvious that the post-Brexit passport will not provide all of these rights, no matter what colour the cover is.

Over half of Brexiters are more bothered about the colour of their passport cover than they are about the fact that Brexit is going to significantly diminish the value of it!

The reintroduction of blue passports won't be a source of "pride and self-confidence" at all, it will be a constant visual reminder of the fact that the British passport has been reduced in value and rendered inferior to the Irish one.

Perspective

• Since the Brexit vote the pound has collapsed in value and not recovered. Millions of Brits living abroad suffered an instant 15% devaluation of their money, but people in the UK are much more insulated from the fact they're 15% poorer than they were before because price inflation takes time to seep through. It only becomes glaringly obvious that we're all poorer when we go on holiday and notice the shockingly poor exchange rates.

• The EEF manufacturing organisation has warned that hundreds of thousands of jobs could be lost if Theresa May follows through on her ludicrous threat to flounce away from the Brexit negotiating table with "no deal". 

• The London School of Economics have calculated that a "no deal" scenario could damage the UK economy by 6.3% to 9.5% of GDP, that's an astonishing £4,200 - £6,400 per UK household.

• Dozens of major UK-based businesses (including swathes of the financial sector) have already announced that they're making plans to abandon Britain in order to keep themselves in the Single Market zone.

• Record numbers of EU nurses have been quitting the NHS which is already severely understaffed after years of ideologically driven Tory cuts.

• Various sectors of the UK economy are warning of severe Brexit-related recruitment crises. The services and agricultural sectors are particularly worried.

• Scotland is preparing to remove itself (and all of its oilfields and enormous renewable energy capacity) from the Brexit car crash.

• The Australian foreign minister has said that Brexit represents a great opportunity for them to improve their trade relationship with Ireland because they remain in the Single Market, and Donald Trump's trade adviser Wilbur Ross has described Brexit as a "God-given opportunity" for the United States to take business away from the UK.

But screw all that stuff eh chaps. Our passports are going to be blue again, and that's the fundamentally important thing. Hooray for the magnificent benefits of Brexit! 

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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