Sometimes when you make a decision you wake up the following day and say to yourself "my God what did I do that for". It's often the case that your actions have consequences and these consequences which are not on your horizon prior to the decision suddenly loom up like battleships on the horizon. The potential to do you harm is enormous but until the shells start to cross the water it's the threat which frightens us.
Our lives are full of moments when we turned this way and that and if you have a mind to you could spend hours contemplating, 'what if'. The fact is, we do things often on a whim, often because we believed what we hear, often because we are emotionally or ideologically driven by events.
Listening to the Noble Lords in Parliament hang their collective heads (with a few exceptions) and wish that "the people's vote" had never happened and that the plebs have been ignorant in not understanding the consequences, it was always so.
As the Titanic went down and the first class passengers took to the boats their concern was for 'their families' not the third class or stowage class who's route to the lifeboats was blocked since the ship didn't carry lifeboats for them.
The Lords are concerned, neigh terrified that their estate is going to be turned over and their lives disrupted. Who could wish to rock their boat and how can they prevent it.
52% of those who took the trouble to vote wanted to leave the EU. They very possibly misconstrued the dire state they were in, economically to those damn foreigners. The lack of jobs, lack of accommodation, overloaded healthcare and the near non existent social contract they had been promised in old age.
With the Daily Express and the Daily Mail bombarding them with false news, day in and day out, month in and month out, year in and year out, even decade in and decade out, was it any wonder that the brainwashed washed public, who had suffered, (particularly since the financial collapse in 2008) not from our relationship with Europe (Europe have pumped money into the hardest hit areas of Britain), but rather they suffered from that strange brand of Etonian leadership which, looking around to save money and balance the books, books which the bankers had pillaged when being payed out after the crash, settled on the poor and the already destitute and it was these very people who had hit back with the only weapon they have, their vote in the Referendum. Theirs is not, as they see it, given the wilful brainwashing by the establishment, a difficult choice, it was "Johnny Foreigner what did it".
Their Lordships much removed from the travails of Hull or Rotherham were never much exposed to what goes on outside the bubble of London and specifically Westminster, the nearest they get to a tenement is reading a paper produced by a think tank written by academics as part of the course requirement to get a First.
If we go off the high board in a couple of months time and providing they haven't drained out all the water, we will hit the water and instinctively learn to swim again. Perhaps it won't be in an Olympic pool with flashy facilities but rather like the municipal pool in Peel Park where I grew up, a bit smelly and run down but adequate.
Adequate has to be our new adjective. We need to adequately adjust to being a second flight nation. We need to rid ourselves of grandiose ideas, of punching above our weight. We need to consider our own people before we worry about everyone else. We need to spend the money we flash around in 'overseas aid' and expensive expeditions to solve the wars that unruly nations across the world get themselves into and concentrate on educating our own children to be productive human beings. For too long we have ignored our own stock of home grown talent (other than the fee paying schools) and rather filled the work space with imports from outside.
Sell off trident and reduce the fleet to patrolling our own waters. Keep the army, airforce and navy to a minimum like the Scandinavians, they too had a glorious past but grew up to realise the advantage of being small is also to be self-sufficient.
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