That darkness where the carpet turns quite grey
Behind you when you face into the light
It’s not just shadow made of brilliant day.
You might ignore it, it might fade away,
But better far to take this piece of night,
That darkness where the carpet turns quite grey,
Acknowledge it is there, and holds some sway,
It’s purpose is to challenge what is right,
It’s not just shadow made of brilliant day.
It must provoke and tempt and you must say:
I know you’re there, but I’m prepared to fight
That darkness where the carpet turns quite grey
I will not let it rule by stealth, I’ll play
By rules I set. For it is rage and spite,
It’s not just shadow made of brilliant day.
So integrate it, thus keep it at bay
In fits of rage it seems to take delight,
That darkness where the carpet turns quite grey
It’s not just shadow made of brilliant day.
When the first would be Brexit day dawned it was beautiful. It would have matched the mid summer loveliness of the day after the referendum as pathetic fallacy, had it been the real Brexit day, rather than the non event. Virginia sat in the garden, tilted back to the fullest extent on her garden chair, in the balmy warmth of that first day of democratic betrayal and gazed up at the cloudless blue sky. In March there were always signs from the angels. They seemed to moult, like birds as they flew in the spring sunlight and rode on smudges and wisps of cloud. Today they were shedding like anything and their down and tiny feathers lay all over the lawn and floated down like snowflakes or cherry blossoms. All hope seemed to have gone. There was a bit of talk about the way things had been done being unconstitutional and of cases being brought, but there was no sense of an end in sight. The angels were all Virginia had. It was odd how she could flit between wishing for the help of all things black and dark, so that her enemies might be damned, to wishing for the assistance of God and the angels. It seemed to depend on the season of the year. There was a time for devilry and darkness and of cursing and voodoo and a time for praying and singing hymns and sending up one's hopes as the angels’ down fell from the fluffy clouds in the spring sky among the daisies on the newly verdant lawn.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?
I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it.
He hath made everything beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.
I know that there is no good in them, but for a man to rejoice, and to do good in his life.
And also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it is the gift of God.
Virginia knew she was a dreadfully screwed up and confounded old bat, with her devilry and her religion, her political and historical obsessions, but at least she managed to keep herself interested and entertained. And sometimes she told herself her witchcraft was not really devilry. She could not call on the power of the malevolent thing that had lurked in that dank corner of her childhood home, for example. She could never let its evil enter her soul or her mind, however much she called down terrible blackness to come upon the heads of her enemies. Sometimes she told herself she just had her shadow, well integrated, as Jung had suggested one should. That she could acknowledge she was imperfect, use her old female tricks well, as a means of bringing about a greater good. Her cries, she sometimes managed to convince herself were not much different from the Psalm of Asaph. They just had a little more fairytale about them, a little more hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo and involved certain peculiar rituals, rather than prayers. But sometimes she thought she was like him in the tenth psalm with a mouth full of curses and lies and warnings, who spoke evil with his tongue and made trouble, who said to himself “God doesn’t pay any attention, He covers his face and never sees me.” Yet didn’t Ecclesiastes remind us that many times we had called down curses on others and that deep down we know that is true? Virginia was excellent at arguing with herself and justifying to herself her contrariness. After all, she was female, and a human sinner - for was there one honest woman to be found among a thousand?
Virginia often found herself singing ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ by Nina Simone.
Virginia knew that once this day had passed there would be no urgency about letting the country get on with Brexit. The bastards had tasted power and they would not let go of it. But her prayers of supplication and her calling on the help of the angels brought about the beginning of the end of the May government, though it did not put an end to the anti democratic shenanigans. The days of April blue skies and fluffy clouds rolled on and Virginia took to long dog walks by the edge of the water, watching the geometrically designed egrets like the tips of wind turbine blades that had escaped and taken flight more freely than they could while attached to their turbine arms. She watched as the banks of fluffy white clouds rolled up and drifted away leaving flocks of wooly llamas or alpacas in the field where they had been, that always seemed like a miracle. It was odd that there had been all these symbols and signs from the angels, the white feathers on the lawn, the egrets, the cloud llamas,even Jon Snow seemed to have noticed: when crowds gathered in Parliament Square to protest at the lack of Brexit, he commented that he had ‘never seen so many white people’.
Virginia felt heavy hearted and disappointed at the same time as a kind of relaxation in powerlessness. There was nothing she could do with her witchcraft or her trolling, she could only remember what she had learnt in her dream, that democracy was the greater good they were fighting for, the idea before which the arrogance of politicians, the greed of corporations, the spitefulness of journalists who had all backed the losing side and still couldn’t get over it, almost three years after it had happened, would have to bow.
Back in November Nigel Farage had founded the Brexit Party, he had been driven to it by the endless shenanigans and the realisation it had been foolish to stand aside and assume the Tory Party could deliver on the referendum result or their party’s manifesto pledges. The Brexit Party was going to fight the European elections, because the Civil Service and the corrupt Electoral Commission had determined the previous year that despite the fact Britain was supposed to be leaving the European Union in March it would be necessary to make funding plans and organisational plans on the basis that Britain would not be leaving the European Union, despite the Act of Parliament which had been passed to say we would. We would need to hold elections for Members of the European Parliament, as if we had no intention of leaving the European Union. This was how the deep state worked. The Government pretended it was in charge and produced bills, which were debated and discussed by the media, and so the country at large got the gist of them and came to their private conclusions, then these bills were either passed and became acts or they did not. But the deep state on the other hand had its own ideas, which were not the concern of the people, the demos, the electorate. They were the private affairs of the Mandarins, and sometimes they coincided with what the Government told the people they were planning and sometimes they didn’t. And when they didn’t coincide then the Government had to scrat about for some excuse to cover up the fact that they had lied, even if the lie was not really theirs, but just the result of the Mandarins deciding they didn’t like the Act that Parliament had passed, or the pledge the party of Government had made the electorate in its manifesto, or the answer the people had given to the Government when it had questioned them directly on a specific matter.
The way the Utter Bastards in Chief had decided that Parliament would act now, in harmony with the deep state, so that the Mandarins’ wishes could be fulfilled along with their own and that leaving the European Union would not be necessary, was to devise a series of what they called ‘Indicative Votes’ These were meant to allow Parliament to get a feeling for exactly how thwarting the will of the majority of the British people could be achieved, so that it stole a cloak of decency from democracy and gave it to the act of utter contempt and betrayal of democracy that this series of votes actually was.
Ken Clarke’s “Custom union” motion – which required any Brexit plan to include a commitment to negotiate a “permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union with the EU” – was narrowly defeated by 276 votes to 273. Nick Boles’s “Common Market 2.0” motion – which proposed UK membership of EFTA and the EEA and would have allowed continued participation in the Single Market and a “comprehensive customs arrangement” with the EU post-Brexit, including a “UK say” on future EU trade deals – was defeated by 282 votes to 261. Peter Kyle’s “Confirmatory public vote” motion – required a public vote to confirm any Brexit deal passed by Parliament before its ratification – was defeated by 292 votes to 280. Joanna Cherry’s ”Parliamentary Supremacy” motion – seeking an extension to the Brexit process or, should this not be possible, providing for Parliament to choose between either ‘no deal’ or revoking Article 50 – is defeated by 292 votes to 191.
Looking at who had put their names to which of the motions was interesting as an insight into the state of mind of each of the arrogant swine who’d dreamt them up. Ken Clarke’s idea was about a permanent Customs Union, which was just another way of saying staying in the European Union forever. He liked the idea of permanence as a kind of conservative principle, even if permanently committing yourself to something, the permanence of which was not knowable was patently silly, like vowing to clutch at a permanent straw, your options had to be open to changes in circumstances. But Ken was the Father of the House, he would be eighty years of age the following year and perhaps Virginia should not have been surprised that one who had given so many long years of service to helping the bureaucratic institution Virginia hated, to entrench itself ever more deeply within the country, should wish that entrenchment to become permanent so that his life’s work would not be in vain. It was astonishing that this indicative motion was only defeated by three votes, though. Only three fewer Parliamentarians did not give two hoots about democracy than did! That was indicative of something very seriously wrong indeed at the heart of the state. A quadruple bypass was going to be required, at the very least.
Nick Boles was the man Cameron had used to champion the idea of chaos at the heart of British economic life, as being a positive force. Boles had said nine years previously that there came a question in life, “Do you believe that planning works? That clever people sitting in a room can plan how people’s communities should develop, or do you believe it can’t work? I believe it can’t work”. So what had made him change his mind? What had made him think that chaos was alright up to a point Lord Copper? That it was alright so long as it took place within some big organised structure over which bureaucracy had some input, even if they allowed a certain amount of the ‘invisible hand of the market’ to do what it could within this organised arrangement. His new thinking seemed to Virginia not to be indicative of a real contradiction of his old position. Rather she thought it a confirmation that Cameron and co had just been happy to chuck big, political and economic theories about in the knowledge that Nanny was always there in the background, making sure things couldn’t get terribly out of hand, that the naughty, rough boys from the real free markets couldn’t cause any real trouble, break any windows or thump anyone. Nick and co. wanted a bit of naughty chaos because it made life a bit more exciting than when nanny was controlling everything, but they didn’t want Nanny to leave them in the room with chaos for too long and they still wanted her to serve tea and wash up afterwards.
Peter Kyle’s motion gave Virginia pause for some conspiratorial thought and machinations. Kyle had grown up in Sussex and moved to Brighton and Hove, a land of greens and hippies and lefty nonsense if ever there was one. Virginia had one memory of Brighton from when her older half brother had lived there, it was of him walking in the sea in a pair of massively flared jeans and not caring that they were getting wet. It was when he had been at the height of his dope smoking hippie-ishness, before he had moved back to Kineburn with his equally hippy girlfriend. So anyone who came from that neck of the woods didn’t bode well as far Virginia was concerned. There was something in the water, in Brighton, or the quality of light, something in the nature of the Regency/George IV decadence that had saturated the area with the spirit of self indulgence and a collective obsession for satiating one’s personal greed, while pretending one was making some sort of sacrifice for the good of man in general, or the planet. It wasn’t surprising that Brighton had been the destination of choice for divorcing couples to arrange to meet and to be discovered in bed, in front of private detectives. Yet it was not just the sleaziness of the act of sexual betrayal that Virginia imagined hung about the place, it was the wanting to overthrow something sacred and established in a formal, rules based way. ‘I will be an utter shit, but I know how to play cricket, we will throw over this thing we once held sacred by following an established set of procedures’, seemed to be the mind set. It was simultaneously exhibitionist and dishonest. Because private detectives did not catch adulterous couples in real sexual acts, but fake ones, in order to secure photographic evidence of something that had taken place, but was not taking place at the moment that it had supposedly been captured on film. In order to bring a contract to an end, which had been made before God.
Anyway after having grown up and studied in that sleaziest and most decadent of places, this Peter Kyle went off to the Balkans and got involved with all the crap out there, in a charitable way, trying to put things right after the huge wrongs. Nobody, Virginia thought could be involved in that episode either during the worst of it or afterwards without being involved in that episode, as it were. In Virginia’s mind the man was tainted a second time, by the association with that place, in some way. Virginia never sought out any evidence for her suspicions, evidence tended to get in the way of instincts, which were much more reliable.
And once you’d been tainted by rolling over and over in shit for years, and trying to cover it up and make amends for it you were due a lifetime raking it in, money that is, not shit, though often both, in any bit of the third or the public sector you fancied. So poor old Peter didn’t stand a chance with Virginia. They were not the Bottomleys. He had gone on to work for a company that connected ‘civil society leaders’. Who the hell were they? Virginia had no recollection of voting for a leader for civil society, or even one for uncivil society, which she often felt she had more of a connection with these days, thanks to her persistent trolling. This group of civil society’s self appointed leaders got together to lobby the government on matters it thought it knew more about than the democratically elected government. This group was a strategic partner to the secretive Cabinet Office and its Office for Civil Society.
Virginia would not trust any of them further than she could throw them. So she wondered how this confirmatory vote would have played out if Mr Kyle’s motion had passed. Virginia thought of that Elsan loo she’d been shown, so ceremoniously, waiting to be emptied, at Jane’s farm when she was a child and about how profound it had seemed. This huge, rock hard, cannon ball of a motion was too huge to pass, thank God. This piece of trickery would have been the most dastardly of all, because it would not just have stolen a fig leaf from democracy to cover its humongous stinking form it would have wrapped itself in a whole multipack of Democracy style bog paper. It would have required the people to vote again, on a much more complex question than ‘Remain’ or ‘Leave’, after three years of telling the demos they were much too thick to have understood the original, simple question. And if the cabinet office were this guy’s friends then the whole thing would be rigged from beginning to end anyway, because the Mandarins had already decided Brexit was not going to happen.
The fourth of the indicative motions was put forward by the SNP’s Joanna Cherry who was a lawyer, a Queen’s Counsel, no less and an expert on Constitutional law.
Virginia could not bear these ‘powerful women’ whom she believed abused the trust placed in them and took advantage of their learning by taking up political stances which were in direct contradiction of their job titles and areas of expertise.
If you were an expert on constitutional law, you should respect and want to maintain the constitution, you should want the rules based system to be followed, not just say, rules are for subjects but parliamentarians are above them. Yet this is what she wanted. She wanted to overthrow the monarchy in a way, by saying the people were not sovereign so that the Coronation Oath was not upheld, since the Queen was under oath to uphold the ancient freedoms and liberties of the people and to protect them. Parliament did not have ‘Supremacy’. It could neither vote to overthrow the powers that were allocated specifically to it, via the constitution, nor to give itself total power over a subject people. The Queen was the Head of State, but the Queen as Head of State was The People, Parliament was just a collection of individual people who had a temporary mandate to carry out the wishes of a majority of the people of voting age and above, in the first past the post system, for a term of parliament. They had no right under the constitution to vote themselves a supreme body in order to grant themselves the right to bring to an end an obligation they had to the people.
The arrogance had a celtic flavour to it, Virginia thought. She remembered how different the laws on Home Education were in that neck of the woods. Home educating parents north of the border all had to be registered and had to seek permission to teach their own offspring. They had to comply with all kinds of state imposed rules about what it was necessary to teach them, too. Then there was all that funny business up there with the named adult, they were bloody crazy authoritarians, who needed horsewhipping. The powers they had been granted under Blair and which had increased under Cameron should be removed. The Scots should be forced to live as independent anarchists for a century or two, it would do them the world of good, only they’d all come down here and start moaning and demanding things and complaining.
How apt that it had all taken place on April the first. What a bunch of fools they were, how hasty they were, tripping over themselves to rush through their ill thought out ideas, not realising that their ambition was matched by that of their fellows and nobody wanted to allow the other to win. They were like a bunch of devils attempting to sup with long spoons, none of them feeding the other, so starving for want of generosity or doing as they would be done by. And of course far too pompous to realise that the haste of the fool is the slowest thing in the world.
On April the second it was the turn of the Snow Queen herself, Yvette Cooper, she who represented the miners and their daughters and granddaughters as well as the grand daughters and great granddaughters and nieces of the lassies with the strongest legs in Pontefract, who had once toiled in the liquorice fields but now had the opportunity to use their hams on the ski slope at Cas., if they could afford it on the wages they earned from working in the cafes and bars and stores. Yvette wasn’t going to take any ess aitch one tee from the likes of them, or their fathers and grandfathers, sons and brothers and nephews and uncles who hadn’t known what they had meant when they voted Brexit by a majority of sixty nine percent. The article fifty process must be extended. Until some way of bringing this madness to an end was found which would allow the grasping, useless swine in and around the British parliament continued access to the European gravy.
It all got through as it always had been intended to get through, allowing May to write, on April the fifth to Donald Tusk (there was a good bit of nominative determinism for a boar and a hog with its snout in the trough) confirming Britain would be taking part in the European elections, just as the Electoral Commission and some other bastard bureaucrats had decided we would the previous year.
Virginia’s mood at this time was full of Lent and Easter. The betrayal of the majority of the electorate was par for the course in that season. Treachery was always in the air during then, denial of everything that had been acknowledged, everything that had been promised, a giving up on all that had been hoped for. So none of it was exactly surprising, and yet they were so unaware, themselves of how they seemed to those looking on, helplessly, in that season. Plainly they did not think of Judas, because there were so many of them, and they were united in their desire for betrayal and they had even convinced themselves the demos had changed their mind. When a few hundred thousand people supposedly demonstrated against Brexit, the establishment thought this somehow represented a new cohort who had been Brexiteers before, but who, if a second referendum were to take place tomorrow would now be Remainers. Were these traitors possessed of the Devil, or just stupid, was the motivation the love of money (the gravy train, huge EU pension) or was the betrayal part of a prophecy, written in the political scriptures? Certainly, as the Electoral Commission and Civil Service had proved with their announcement the previous year that the European elections would take place, it seemed that the traitors were perfectly capable of scripting their own acts of betrayal and making sure that they were fulfilled. But that wasn’t quite the same thing.
If there was some big author of political events who satisfied the conspiracy theorist’s needs in that he had everything in hand and could control the outcome, he must be on the Brexiteers side, in order to be God, in order for the Remainer traitors to be Judas. So what lesson were people being taught by the act of betrayal? Perhaps it was about the quality of those we elect, about the process by which they are selected to stand and how much attention is given to their morality, when that selection is being made and to making sure they know their constituents are their masters and that they are merely servants. Did that explanation answer also for the other two explanations typically put forward to make sense of Judas, separate from his predestination? If money was the root of all evil, then it was also the Devil and those who were possessed of the Devil would never humble themselves sufficiently to acknowledge their role in life was to be of service to others. This all seemed satisfactory to Virginia. She didn’t hold out much hope that any of them would go and kill themselves when they realised they had killed Brexit, though. They had not Judas’s conscience.
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