Friday The 13th

I’ve digested the results of the General Election. Suffice to say, they aren’t what I’d hoped.

About the only things that are certain at the moment:

• The Withdrawal Agreement Bill will go through Parliament
• We’ll start the process of leaving the European Union on January 31st next year
• The SNP will call for another referendum on Independence for Scotland
• Austerity will continue, even if they don’t use that name
• The poor and vulnerable will continue to suffer needlessly
• Public services will continue to crumble and break through underfunding
• The lies will continue ad nauseam.

Everything else is up in the air.

Who will lead Labour after Jeremy Corbyn? No idea, but whoever it is they’ll need to kick-start a new beginning for the party, and get ready to take on all the potshots that the Tories (and the press) will aim at them.

Will Brexit succeed? That seems highly unlikely. Getting this far was the easy part. Negotiating new trade deals will be several orders or magnitude harder (and longer), and I very much doubt the Tories are up to the task.

Will Scotland become independent? That seems probably, though it won’t be without a fight.

What will happen to Northern Ireland? I suspect it will eventually choose to join the Republic to the South, and the Tories may not stand in the way, if only to reduce their Brexit headache.

Boris Johnson has promised to reunite the country, but I fear he’ll achieve the opposite. Not just the break-up of the Union, but alienating much of the Tories traditional support, including business. His only true priority, it seems, is to stay Prime Minister for as long as possible, and he will do anything in pursuit of that goal, no matter what the cost.

We cannot rely on Labour or the Liberal Democrats to lead the fightback. We have to start this ourselves by taking steps to build the world we want to live in, not the ones the Tories want to put us into.