• THE cause of the United Kingdom’s parliamentary, constitutional and democratic melt-down stems from wildly differing experiences and perceptions of the ‘beneficence’ of the European Union between middle-class know-alls and their more hard-up, and therefore less starry-eyed, fellow Brits.

To the former the EU represents agreeable professional jobs in stylish continental cities, cultural exchanges, bursaries and scholarships for the youngsters, villas in sunny places and free movement of cheap and plentiful labour for their businesses and domestic servants for their households.

To the latter, in some of the more shattered areas of the UK, the EU represents brutal gang-masters and people-smugglers importing cheap labour (and in some cases slaves) to undercut modest livelihoods already hard hit in the name of austerity, while at the same time what remains of local services – already cut to the bone for the same reason – is overwhelmed.

Importing poverty is no answer to anything and merely exacerbates the poverty we already have. Bellowing threats at people in this situation that their lives will become “even worse” if they don’t accede to the whims of their betters just sounds like more bullying and worsens the venom, signifying as it does the resurgence of a form of high-stepping arrogance not seen since the demise of the 19th-century aristocracy.

People who voted to leave the EU are loftily informed by those who think they know better that they didn’t understand what they were going to get.

They completely fail to understand themselves that nobody voted to get anything: they voted to get rid of something. People at the grimmer end of life never believe political promises of something better – only potentially, possibly, occasionally of something less bad.

The ineffably acquisitive simply don’t understand the concept of needing to get rid of something and maintain their lives in blissful ignorance of the less fortunate, who spend a lot of their time swerving trouble and who are inured, more or less from birth, to the inevitability that those above them seldom have their best interests at heart and never listen to them anyway. The iniquity going on with parliament at the moment proves their point.

MARTIN KENNEDY
Brewer Street, W1