Fantasy Island

BREXIT voters are living in a fantasy world every bit as made up as Middle Earth or Westeros. Unfortunately, it's a shit one.

Nigel Farage's next poster idea

A small child is refusing to eat her dinner. Her father, having exhausted logic such as food assuaging hunger, attempts to exploit her childish mind.

"If you don't eat your dinner," he warns. "Mice with the legs of giant spiders will wrap you in webs of melted cheese and carry you away."

The girl looks at her father as if she was peering over glasses, even though she doesn't wear them. "Don't be silly, Daddy," she replies. "I'm not daft, you know. If there really were mice with the legs of giant spiders that spun webs of melted cheese, the giant cats with squid tentacles and faces made of herring would have eaten them."

Welcome to the intellectual world of the EU Referendum, where facts are routinely ignored in favour of who can spin the most persuasive lie. 

I refuse not to be disappointed in the politicians responsible for this situation. One has to maintain a level of disappointment: it's like putting oil in your car - as soon as you stop being disappointed the whole system grinds slowly to a halt. But I'm mostly disappointed by the people of England, the country of King Arthur, Robin Hood and The Lord of the Rings. It's not even that they are clearly living in some sort of fantasy world, like transdimensional beings whose bodies are present in this reality but whose minds are active on a different plane entirely. No, it's just that given some sort of collective derangement has made them reinvent their reality, why have chosen one so unremittingly shit?

The last few years in Britain have not exactly been Utopian. If half the British population want to "get away" in their heads, "escaping" like Sam Lowry at the end of Brazil, imagining he can escape bureaucracy, pollution and torture to live an idyllic life in a mobile home on the slopes of rolling hills, who can blame them?

Except that's not really what they've done. Like Bilbo in The Hobbit, they escape from goblins to be caught by wolves. Their collective delusion takes a slightly disappointing reality and replaces it with a really disappointing fantasy. At least David Icke believes we are in thrall to lizard people. What have we got?

A fantasy world where Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are your last hope. A Middle Earth where orcs don't cut you to pieces, they undercut your friend's friend's painting and decorating business. A medieval kingdom in the thrall of a dragon that takes £350m a week from you instead of virgin princesses*. They’ve conjured a world in which a reality which is already grimly disappointing is unspiced by the idea that’s it’s all about to get worse because the EU (standing for the Empire of Unbritishness, presumably) is planning to replace you with a Turk, in some sort of racially confused remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 

If you tell these low-rent fantasists that immigration is good for the economy, they don’t believe you.  It’s true that we’ve not been very good at sharing the benefits of immigration (thanks, austerity); then again we haven’t been very good at sharing the benefits of being a country stuffed full of rich people, but membership of the Communist Party doesn’t seem to be burgeoning. 

This is because people are incredibly selective about their lies, and they’ve picked one they like. And that’s the disappointment.  If you’re going to live in your own world, it says something rather horrible about you if populate it with a zombie apocalypse of benefits-eating foreigners rather than, say, talking manta rays and synchronised-swimming badgers.

I fully intend to exploit my imagination not to exaggerate my misery but to protect me from the bleakness of Brexit Britain. The fact that our collective, mean-spirited delusion is about to compound the evils of the financial crisis and pointless austerity means that I may have to spend the next few decades believing I'm a magic yo-yo. Don't do that to me. Vote Remain. 

* the true number of virgin princesses** claimed by dragons is heavily disputed, thanks to a rebate and a misunderstanding over whether you get a certain number of princesses back before or after the dragon has eaten them.
** Note the lack of a capital letter. This has nothing to do with Richard Branson.