What does the result say?

The Brexit party success in the European elections effectively kills off any hope for the approach I have been advocating.  But that is because we now have to deal with something which is reactive rather than creative (as Eric Morecambe might have said:  all the letters are there, they are just not in the same order!) but that has only amplified what has been all along the case.

We don’t see it because our own reactivity makes us blind to all this (just like the adults in the crowd saluting the Emperor’s new clothes) and we do not see either therefore that this is precisely what has to be overcome.

We have voted, collectively, for the solution which is just a reinforcement, a repetition and deepening, of the problem.

And this will go on as long as we continue to fail to recognise what is really going on, even if we do now get our Brexit solution (by sheer weight of numbers and force of sentiment). 

This will go down as another lost opportunity, where reacting prevailed over creating because we could not see what the situation was really calling for.

In or out of the EU, the situation was really calling for a new approach: a new way of weighing, sifting, evaluating and agreeing and what can arise out of that process; something that anticipates the future, rather than repeats the past, by seeking both in the present moment.

The last major opportunity for this was in 2003 prior to the war in Iraq.  In some ways that was very different; in other ways the same.  How?  Future blog posts will need to explain this.

But the challenge remains in terms of finding a new way to do politics and until that challenge is met we will go on confusing the new with the old.  The new in fact will not be able to find itself from out of the old even if the calls for that discovery are everywhere within the present situation itself.

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I have just heard Laura Kuensberg  on the BBC saying that the electorate has punished Westminster politicians for searching for a more nuanced position – within shades of grey – where they voted for black and white solutions.  And the latest vote has shown that.  But in the spectrum between black and white is not just grey: it is also where the colour is.  By settling for grey we are missing the opportunity for a colourful Brexit, if Brexit it be.  And neither soberness nor flamboyance on its own will make up for this!