Back in 1995, when I first got onto the Internet, in an era where the graphical richness of the current internet UIs did not exist, there were few actual websites, UseNet was still…well, useful, and BBS’s were still common.
One new facility that was becoming known was the weblog. The first one I came across was a site named antipope.org. It turned out to be a commentary from a Scotsman named Charlie Stross. Charlie, in true Different Person mode, lived with a Pagan lady and several cats outside Edinburgh, and was an emerging sci-fi writer.
20+ years have passed, and Charlie still writes his blog, albeit with a snazzier UI. He tends to not opine much on political matters these days, since his writing career is advancing yearly. However, once in a while, he does write articles about great political issues. Like most sci-fi writers, Charlie is of a libertarian mindset, with an ability to call out nonsense in a way that converts fools, knaves and incompetents to the role of punchline victims in his articles.
In June, after the initial vote for Brexit, Charlie wrote this analysis of the state of play for the UK. It is worth reading, partly because, like most of his writing, it is very good, but partly because most of his predictions are coming true.
This more recent article by the Independent confirms that if the Scottish National Party has its way, the UK is going to break up within the next 3 years. The blame can be directly apportioned to all of the little Englanders who collectively voted to leave the EU without a frigging clue about what was going to happen next. Like the dream of Texas secession, Brexit is soon going to devolve into a train-wreck that may end with a bankrupt UK losing a significant percentage of its population, as younger mobile professional people bail to Ireland, Scotland and Europe, leaving an ageing population and a country generating insufficient revenues to pay its way in the modern world.
All of this is being enabled by a Conservative government that is more concerned about pandering to the base of support for the UK Independence Party than it is concerned about making sensible collaborative decisions about the country’s economic future. They seem to still be living somewhere adjacent to cloud-cuckooland when it comes to negotiating the UK out of the EU. They clearly did not process the messages implicit in the outcome of Greece’s attempt to renegotiate its debt burdens a year ago, where after initially declaring it would resist concessions, Greece ended up having to take a deal no better than the one it originally rejected, having suffered a near-total collapse of its economy. Right on cue, a senior EU official has warned that Britain is unlikely to get a half-inn, half-out arrangement on any key trading terms.
The continuing fall of the Pound against the Euro and the Dollar is also starting to have an impact on the UK. Suppliers are having to pay significantly more for imported food raw materials. The recent standoff between Unilever and supermarket chains over wholesale prices for food items is the tip of a larger iceberg, as this article explains. People in the UK will soon be paying a lot more for food items.
This will not end well.
