Veteran political heavyweight Melvyn Bragg lays into Brexit, David Cameron, Jeremy Corbyn and Sir James Dyson
In an interview in The House magazine, Lord Bragg spoke complete sense in condemning the madness of the current British political scene.
Remarks included:
“I’m looking forward to getting hold of [David Cameron’s] book, I can tell you. Self-serving, and now this swaggering on – ‘I’m very bored, I’d like another job now. Bit bored, so I’d like to be Foreign Secretary’. He ran away. He ran a lousy campaign and then he ran away – he said he’d stay but ran away, he resigned from the Commons – we’ve never heard a pip or a squeak from him. He didn’t go on the Remain march, he didn’t do anything. Cameron could have saved his name by leading the Remain minority. Who the f*** does he think he is?”
“Now, Cameron, with his usual bloody stupidity, should have said ‘it’s got to be at least a 55%’ and so on. But he didn’t think that through because he doesn’t think things through. He is a smarmy PR man.”
“These bunch of squirearchal, hedge funding, over-privileged people who think [Brexit is] going to be okay – it’s going to be okay for them. They’re not going to suffer – not a bit of it. They don’t offer any evidence now. It’s ceased to be a programme or a process, it’s a cult. It’s a bit like the Moonies. They just believe it because they believe because they believe it. Because they are who they are, they think them believing it is significant. No, it isn’t.”
“Their so-called figureheads like [Sir James] Dyson runs away, buggers off – traitorous you could say, in some ways. ‘I’m a big Brexit man’ – as soon as he sees an opportunity, he goes to Singapore. Puts two billion in there when he could have done it here. Isn’t he rich enough? He’s the biggest landowner in the country. How greedy can somebody get?… Horrible… Everything is wrong about it. It speaks to what is wrong about our country. It also has unleashed feelings that are very unpleasant. We were getting on pretty well.”
“I would like for Jeremy Corbyn to go flat out for another referendum and back it and say Remain because that is going to be the way to keep this country prosperous, to keep it tolerant by accepting people who come from other countries instead of setting up a system that repudiates people from other countries. I’d say come off the fence, back Remain and get on with it. His dallying is doing the Labour party no good. They should be streaking away, they should be streaking away. So, that’s disappointing.”
“I was canvassing in Carlisle for the Labour party – you couldn’t believe it really – they were worried about immigration. Nearly ninety per cent of the people in Carlisle had been born in and around Carlisle… but ‘oh, this terrible threat of immigration!’ Why didn’t the Labour party tell people that. Why isn’t the Labour party behind the truth?”
“Forty-eight per cent is not a minority. This country has been built on minorities. The slave trade was abolished because of the minority pegging away. The suffragettes, the trade unions… universal education came in… again and again and again. Minorities turn into majorities quite quickly, especially when they’re right. I won’t go as far as Oscar Wilde, who said that minorities are always right. They’re not always right – but they were in this case.”
All at The Steeple Times today salute Melvyn. His analysis was utterly (sadly) brilliant.
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