Shurely shome mishtake?

This hereabove is a typical comment on Breitbart. Breitbart doesn't allow comments that attack Ukip. Moderate comments are pruned. The kind of comment we see above is encouraged. It is the business model of Breitbart to pander to these very people. Now substitute "muslim" for "jew" and "mosque" for "synagogue".

The comment was spotted underneath this article, by James Delingpole, entitled "Only ‘Brexit’ Can Save Britain From This Scourge Of Political Islam Waging War In Europe".

Demonstrably, and self-evidently untrue. A new low for Delingpole. Here vanishes the last shred of respect I had for him. 

You would think that would be sufficiently unpleasant for the head of communications of a Leave organisation seeking the lead designation to leave well alone. Not so Andy Wigmore of Leave.EU, penning an embarrassing screed on the subject of the Commonwealth (despite having had plenty briefing as to why it is not close to a plausible proposition for Britain).

It's not like he hasn't been told that Breitbart is a nasty rag that our efforts should not be associated with either. 

And as repellent as it is, such a line failed to produce a single MP for Ukip in the general election - and will not bring us anywhere close to securing the 51% we need to leave the EU - nor will it do anything to expand the appeal of our cause. In every sense it is ill-advised. More curious is that he is writing in his capacity a diplomat attached to the Belizean High Commission in London. Is this the message Belize is trying to project?

I can't say. But you can imagine my irritation and confusion when readers persistently complain to me about the things I say, when my message is that we must have a progressive, orderly and risk free Brexit plan and should argue the democracy and global engagement case over and above immigration and traditional little Englander euroscepticism. 

One must never point out that it's not a good idea to ally ourselves with nazi shitrags like Breitbart who deliver nothing but repeated failures for Ukip. And I mustn't ever say that Boris Johnson is a malevolent self-serving shit. And god forbid I call anyone a moron. No, I must show unity. I mustn't criticise. I could lose the referendum for us if I happen to notice that half the leave brigade are bunch of mouthbreathers, racists and fantasists. So long as I keep quiet, nobody else will notice, right?

Campaign conduct

From the outset I have had a torrent of mithering from supposed allies in all corners. Mithering about tone and language - in the assumption that if only we we nicer to people they would be more inclined to listen to us. This overlooks that the pig ignorant, self-absorbed, self-referential London clan have sought to exclude outsiders from the start - not least with the IEA who turned their backs on the very idea of a graduated exit from the EU - an idea now considered by our own civil service.

There has been plotting and scheming by illiterate, broadly racist Ukip scum to prevent Flexcit being adopted by the campaign, and a determination by the Remain campaign to deny such a plan exists. It stinks.

Time and again Richard North and I are told to moderate our tone and behaviour while it is perfectly acceptable for wankers like Boris Johnson to hijack the campaign and take a giant shit on everything we have worked for - while the eurosceptic aristocracy carve out their own fanbases on the back of risible Brexit propositions based on anti-immigration or libertarian fantasies.

Somehow we are supposed to moderate our tone and give these dickheads a free pass - meanwhile Tory wastrels have given the PM a free pass on the biggest lie of the century so far - that he has secured EU reforms. What the actual fuck?

In this we have all and sundry queuing up telling us what our tone should be, what we should do, how we should say it, and who we should speak to - regardless of them all being entirely unwilling to spend less time whingeing and actually doing as we asked - and set up a blog to attack the lying prime minister.

Richard North and I are utterly fed up, utterly demoralised and tried. We are sick of this pretentious twattery that says we must abide by certain standards but everybody else is entitled to fuck us over in any way they see fit. All the while the public are peeling away from the debate out of boredom and apathy.

At the launch of The Leave Alliance, the first question from the floor was not about the three years of intensive collaborative research we have compiled but a query as to whether it was the done thing to call Tory MP's bovine and Boris Johnson a moron. Despite both factors being entirely self-evident to anyone with an IQ exceeding that of a gerbil.

Frankly, I am sick of it. With four months to go, we've got the main Leave campaigns playing school yard politics - saying that the Remain camp can't say what staying in looks like - as their main defence. Anything rather than meet the challenge and present voters with comprehensive answers. It's pathetic.

Even supposed allies cannot make up their own minds, and the support we have is fickle - dependent not on the strength of our arguments, but on our willingness to watch our p's and q's in the presence of our betters - despite them pissing away our last best hope for democracy.

All we've had is a torrent of mithering rather than people joining our protest against the bastards who have hijacked this campaign from the outset and destroyed it - along with our chances of winning. Then have the gall to say that it is our protest that could cost us the referendum.

Sorry people, but given how little you have contributed to what we have tried to do, and how much grief you have given us, when all we have asked you to do is recognise and promote the fact that we need an orderly, planned withdrawal that protects trade, you have no right to be telling anybody how they should conduct themselves.

In fact, Richard North and I have come to the conclusion that being polite and constructive got us nowhere. It is not our conduct that prevented Flexcit being evaluated for use. It was the idiocy of Dominic Cummings and the cowardice of Arron Banks in the face of Ukipper idiocy.

In light of this, we feel no obligation to to pamper you or you sensibilities - and we will viscerally attack anybody on any side who has it coming because we have nothing to lose by doing so, except for the flimsy support we have - to whom we owe absolutely nothing. Doing so might be the one thing that actually sparks some energy into this otherwise lame duck of a campaign.

Some caution us that we risk being perceived as similar to cybernats from the Scottish referendum - but this is typical of the sloppy two dimensional thinking we see all round. The critical difference is that we are not blood and soil nationalists. We are pragmatists with a solid case for leaving and an even more solid plan to achieve it.

Anyone who wants to criticise our methods from here on in must demonstrate that others have put in even a tenth of the effort we have - with the marginal resources we have. Who among you has a better idea? We can play the wreckers if we choose because we have built up over a decades worth of political capital and now is our time to spend it. Who else can say that?

Frankly I am a gnats hair away from telling all of you to fuck off and I wouldn't be surprised if RN gets there first. Nothing is worth the bullshit even our own readers have put us through. We've had plenty of former kippers come to us an apologise for how they treated us for attacking us during the election, having realised just how toxic and inept Ukip were. The same will happen after we lose this vote. But what use is that?

The reply then will not be gracious when some of you have the decency to admit that we have been right from the outset - that Ukip are a bunch of amateurs - and that the largely Tory eurosceptic aristocracy are bunch of self-serving, self-satisfied morons without even half a clue.

I can say with pride that our team of bloggers have not in any way let us down - and it is ultimately they who have kept us going, but even then, because of the ineptitude and selfishness of the main campaign in ignoring us entirely we have not been able to expand that team. That's not our fault. This is a referendum killed by selfishness, egotism, pride and incompetence. Also jealousy, self-interest and political cowardice.

And if this sounds like those "sour grapes", you're fucking right it is. We have every right to be angry at our own side, not least those allies whose support has been only fleeting and conditional - even when virtually every day we have our noses rubbed in the meme that Leave does not know what out looks like.

Our side has not been able to specify how we would reach a destination, what that destination is and why the ordinary voter should even bother. That is why we are going to lose and that is why we deserve to.

In this, knowing what I know, it has been difficult to invest any energy at all in The Leave Alliance website in that eurosceptics are only interested in promoting the things that conform to their own narrow and dismal worldview, ignoring any of the arguments that might actually win.

In this I am absolutely at the end of my tether. I have no more patience and I am not in the least bit inclined to listen to a solitary word of advice from any of the wastrels on our side who have barely lifted a finger to help us - especially those fair weather friends whose own work is an actual embarrassment to be associated with. I actually couldn't be any more disgusted.

As to where this leaves me, well I don't know. I do not feel inclined to put a nanosecond more effort into this knowing that our own side has already fucked the dog - and believes that marginal spikes in the polls are evidence that the campaign isn't a shower of brain-dead dullards with no clue.

We should be able to defend our own side from the attacks by the Remain camp but we can't because there is no possible way we could without contradicting everything we have said up to press. There is no way we can lie our way through the rest of the campaign to help these losers save face.

We always knew it would be an uphill battle but if I had known it was going to be such a catastrophic wipe-out I would have saved myself the bother. So here is what we are going to do. We are going to say whatever the fuck we feel like saying on any platform we so choose, in the manner in which we so chose - and if you don't like it, you can shove it up your arse for nothing and fuck off while you're doing it. How d'ya like them apples?

Vote Leave to get rid of these idiots

If I had to give out an award for issue illiteracy it would be to Chris Giles of the Financial Times. As bad as the FT is, he has taken Brexit bullshit to an artform. The constant thing about these dirges are that they are so predictable and so tedious ... all of them recycling the same limited set our sources, telling the same story in much the same way. Long before this is over, these people will have bored even themselves into a standstill.

What's clear to me is that if people are relying on the media with no prior knowledge of the issues they are not getting anything like a realistic or accurate picture. And it will be difficult for people to vote on the basis of which side is the least repellent because the Remain side is still a contender on that score even with Ukip on our side. Ukip may be thick as shit, but they genuinely believe the crap they spout whereas the Remain campaign are lying, know they are lying and everybody else knows it too.

Personally I find some of them so repellent I would not hesitate in using many of them for bayonet practice if I thought it would do any good. The big problem with political violence is if you take out an idiot, you martyr said idiot - and there is an inexhaustible supply of idiots to replace them. And if I was going to go that far I think I would start with the morons on my own side first. While there is no shortage of motivation, I would be apprehended long before the know was even close to complete.

But as much as Brexit bullshit is boring us all into oblivion, the media has succeeded in making it all about Tory infighting, where we have Mark Wallace of Conservative Home taking up comedy in the Guardian (see above). We know the Tufton Street losers are delusional but this has to be a laugh.

That it's actually too risible even for this blog to bother fisking it all tells you everything. It's a damp squib of a referendum if your only source of information is London. You get a better standard of debate down the pub than from our media.

But I think this ultimately why we need to leave the EU. Turnout is going to collapse after the referendum. We have all seen what a bunch of incompetent wastrels Ukip are who offer no real answers and present no real threat. Labour will only discover a surface level of unity to exploit Tory splits. There will be no coherent force in Westminster with any ideas and certainly nobody is offering any solutions. We may see a right wing equivalent of Corbynisation in the Tory party but after the referendum, what possible use is that?

The only vote that can possibly break this deadlock is to shake the whole system to the core. Only Brexit can do that. That will see the wasters and idiots cast aside as expertise once again comes back in demand and subsequently back in fashion. If we stay in the EU it can only get more toxic and more incoherent with the London hack-o-sphere disappearing further up its own arse (assuming that's even possible).

As much as the EU's economic stagnation is dangerous, the political decay is even more dangerous. If the entire electorate becomes convinced the Wesminster system is futile and incapable of changing, they will seek means of removing it. I will be among them.

Tory MPs are not serious about leaving the EU

Boris Johnson is more than likely Cameron's placeman. Johnson has no real track record of being a eurosceptic - and he comes from a europhile family and has written articles on why we should stay in. He's about as eurosceptic as Jean Claude Juncker. 

His announcement to join the Leave campaign was timed as a means of distracting the media from Cameron's bogus reforms. A clever, calculated piece of politicking that really understands just how debased our media is.

Also, Johnson knows full well Cameron will be replaced by a eurosceptic leader and so this is his ideal leadership bid. Boris Johnson's only concern is Boris Johnson. And of course, the Tories will only ever appoint a eurosceptic as leader when there is no real danger of leaving the EU. That is how they keep up the pretense that they are a eurosceptic party. This is the Tory elites way of retaining ownership of the party when their man is thrown out.

In reality, there are no Tory MPs actually serious about leaving the EU. If they were they would be tearing chunks out of Cameron for his utterly fraudulent reforms and his lies to parliament. Because they are yellow-bellies who put their tribe first over the future of the country, all we can expect is mealy mouth attacks and tribal sycophancy. Demolishing Cameron is key to winning - but Tories won't do that. Especially not Boris Johnson.

Tories have never been trustworthy on this and not in a billion years will I now vote for that party. As much as they are basically a snobby version of Ukip, with no greater policy insight, they are political cowards. That is inexcusable.

What we really want...

We leavers want democracy. We want a complete overhaul of our domestic institutions, from Whitehall down to the parish councils. We want real power back in the hands of the people. We want a complete reworking of our law making process, our agriculture, fishing, energy and trade policies. We want a more accountable and useful aid policy, we want a fairer immigration system, we want a reformed asylum system.

We want our courts to be places of real justice rather than the place where authority is rubber stamped and revenue is collected. On the whole we would rather not see our landscapes ruined by acres of solar panels, and our wildernesses spoiled by wind turbines.

On the whole we don't need all these every more oppressive rights that stifle the economy and reduce our employment prospects. In the main we are capable of securing decent enough terms and where we can't we should be organising and forming real unions and fighting for our rights rather than waiting for EU entitlements.

In the main, most of us are climate sceptics. It might be happening, it might not, but we do not trust the institutions who tell us it is real, we do not consent to all of their agenda and we want the means to say no to them. We don't trust their scaremongering any more than we trust the scaremongering of the remain camp.

None of us really dislikes foreigners as some suggest. A lot of us are just a bit uneasy with the pace of change because the brakes have been taken off and we never got a say in it. We all recognise that we benefit from globalisation but when do we get a say in it, and how do we say no to our government?

We are told that freedom of movement isn't that much of a big deal, and that's non EU immigration we need to fix - but when is that ever going to be fixed when it's human rights law that stands in the way of us closing the loopholes?

We don't really care all that much about roaming charges and so-called cheap flights. As it happens, a round trip to somewhere interesting in the EU is still going to cost £200 upwards. To your average worker with a family, that's a lot of money.

And if we are talking about more freedoms then we want more openness with other English speaking countries. And that's no great sin. Since we speak English and are not in the habit of learning other languages, we can't take advantage of free movement in the same way Europeans can.

If you're Bulgarian and you speak only Bulgarian only there's not much you can do, but if you learn English, you can go anywhere. If you're English and you learn Bulgarian, you can go to... Bulgaria. So why are Europeans free but Brits be caged by the confines of Europe? Sure there's nothing stopping us learning other languages but culturally, we just don't. That's a fact and that not going to change. If you were going to go to the trouble you'd learn a useful language, not French.

And that's not a little-englander thing, it's just a recognition that we're never going to be wholly European when culturally we have more in common with Canada, New Zealand and Australia. We have friend and family there yet we must go through the EU to get better access. Why is that a good deal for Brits? I want to go and work in Canada. I have no interest in even going to Bulgaria or Poland. If I go anywhere in Europe it will be to Norway to see fjords.

I don't hate Europe, I just don't care about it. I wasn't all that taken with Germany (and their food is weird), the bits of France I've seen are boring, Amsterdam is just York with more canals and drugs, Spain is full of all the sort of English people I try to avoid and though Italy looks amazing every single driver there has a deathwish.

The best place in Europe to my mind is Switzerland and that isn't in the EU. Geneva is an amazing place. The freshest air anywhere. But I don't want to live there, I don't want to work there. I'm not saying we should end freedom of movement, all I'm saying is that I don't really care about it either way.

And if by now you're thinking this is a kipperish whinge about the EU and foreigners in general, there's a bit of that, yes. Again, it's no great sin to prefer a bit of stability, normality, security and democracy. When kipperism steps over into naked racism and idiocy, it's then a problem but in the main, ordinary Brits don't see themselves as EU citizens and don't want to be. Nobody asked for the EU and if it didn't exist we wouldn't ask for it to be invented.

In this some of you may be thinking that leaving the EU doesn't fix all that, and maybe it doesn't, but it's start. We will always take regulation from global bodies but why shouldn't we have a right of refusal? Why shouldn't we have a little control? Why should we have to cave in to every single demand made of us? Why should our only line of defence be if enough foreign MEPs agree with our moronic MEPs?

Why shouldn't we have the democratic controls to refuse local planning applications for fracking, wind and solar? And if that means the boffins have to go away and think of something else then that is want they will have to do. And what if we don't want an EU wide register of cars and black boxes recording our journeys and transmitting the details to insurance companies? That's how it's going to go down isn't it? The money men and their lobbyists will see to that and parliament won't get a say.

And why shouldn't Britain's fishing industry have the best shot at fishing in British waters? Why should we have to wait years for the EU to make trade deals with countries we favour? Why shouldn't we protect some of our agriculture from competition? Everybody else does. Especially France even though they are supposedly in the single market. We Brits stick to the rules, so why is it one rule for us and another for France?

And though this set of complaints puts me in the minority and very much at the kipper end of the spectrum, just listen to the Remain camp. They say we will have wind turbines, we will adopt climate change measures, we will keep our borders open, we will close down our coal stations, we will lose industries we value and we will surrender every last scintilla of sovereignty. And why is that?

It's because they've decided that's what we should have and they want the EU because they know what we know. If we had democracy, if we had a choice, we might decide that Britain should go a different way to the liberal "progressive" orthodoxy that seems hell bent on committing national and cultural suicide.

They not like us, they do not respect us and they do not trust us. They have so little faith that they could win the arguments they use the EU to avoid having a debate at all. It never occurs to them that Brits might not be the shrivelled right wing ogres they believe us to be and when the choice is put before us we might actually decide that more open and more liberal really is better.

We will never know and we will never find out while we are in the EU. We will never have a choice. A vote to remain is a vote to carry on not having a voice, to leave the same people in power, to leave our institutions the same and to keep doing as we are told without any real recourse.

And so in the final analysis, they can bleat all they like about uncertainty and the complexities of Brexit, but I don't want their certainty. The certainty they offer means that nothing gets fixed, corporates always get their own way, parliament is shunted into the sidelines, nothing politically gets resolved and people become gradually more resentful as the world changes around them without having either a stake in it or even a voice. I would pay every tariff in the world to have just a little bit of democracy and I do not want Britain to be the prisoner in the gilded EU cage.

The bottom line is I want things to change. I want the possibilities of uncertainty and I want things to evolve. I want us to play a part in those changes and I want the people to decide what those changes are, not the EU Commission. I don't want to be represented by politicians. I want full referism and direct democracy.

I want people to be able to say no to government at every level. That can only mean more participation, fairer decision making and a more vital democracy. It's little wonder that young British people go off to join ISIS when our lives are so sanitised of any influence over events. We are all passengers without a destination, and nothing to bind us but for the fact we exist in the same space. That is all a corporate democracy-free EU utopia can offer us.

In this, it's not surprising record numbers of British men are committing suicide. Spiritual boredom I imagine. As my friend puts it we are "derided and emasculated - and the rights that went with our responsibilities have been stripped away, and our achievements derided as the products of undue privilege". - Underpinning that is the "equality" and human rights culture that have ultimately produced the entitlement society - one that sees mass welfare dependency and teenage girls abused on mass.

We're now quite used to the notion that if you call the police they won't come - and if they do they won't act. They won't investigate anything. They will give you a crime number and refer you to the machine. We know if we need to go to court for any administrative reason our side of the story will not be heard or factored into the decision making.

We know in the end that they will chip away at everything we have built since the war than makes life just that little less harsh. It's all becoming mechanised and impersonal and when you need a real answer from a real person the system says "talk to the hand".

And is it because the evil Tories are in charge? Can't be, can it?, because we had Blair doing this to us for over a decade. And do you think Corbyn would be any less a puppet of the system? He's already come out for the EU when his track record shows he thinks differently. And can we blame all of it on the EU? No. But it is the one constant through as we have seen most of what we value eroded. Slice by slice another one of our hard won rights is eroded in practice yet in theory there has never been a time when we have had more legal rights.

Ultimately systems of governance are becoming more harmonised with the global standards because of hyper globalisation - and that is what is forcing the EU's hand in regulations, and the EU is the reason we can't say no. For sure we want progress and more freedoms, but not at the expense of every safety net and every protection.

While leaving the EU is only part of the solution it really is time for us to draw a line in the sand. Not everything comes down to the price of goods and convenience of trade. This is as much about who and what we are - and having a voice in how we are governed. The Remain campaign doesn't like what we are, despises our traditions, dislikes our culture and it definitely doesn't want us to have a say. That is why I am voting to leave - whatever it costs. If there are consequences, then so be it. We'll live with them.

Westminster has a cancer.

The Jess Phillips creature, arbitrarily reading out names of murdered women in parliament is primarily why I want to leave the EU. A functioning parliament ought not to have the time or the patience to indulge silly, juvenile gesture politicking of this nature - and as an institution it should have the self confidence, gravitas and seriousness to slap it down for what it is: self indulgent, narcissistic virtue signalling.

That we give any of these UN fad days a nanosecond of our time is symptomatic of how debased politics has become and how Westminster as an institution has been utterly, and quite deliberately, hollowed out.

These gestures have the emotional maturity of a hormonal teenager. What sickens me even more is that there are people who would actually go as far as saying this was admirable behaviour. It ought to be contemptible by reflex. We have lost this instinct for democracy and lost touch with what MPs are even for - and as dismal and crass as parliament is now, I fear that it does actually adequately represent what we are as a society.

And if you don't see the EU connection, you really should - because this is what displacement activity looks like. A parliament that was concerned with its own aid, trade, energy and agriculture policy would not have the time to be discussing the contents of children's lunchboxes in a Hartlepool primary school or resorting to behaviour as crass as Jess Phillips. If we still had the instinct for politics, vacuous creatures like these would never even reach selection.

It was always the EU's intent to neuter and hollow out national institutions and this is what it looks like. Jess Phillips and Boris fucking Johnson. And no, there is no argument or excuse. These people are idiotic, parasitic and they are scum. A public that cannot recognise this is equally lost in the morass.

And that is why I maintain that Brexit is not the silver bullet. There is so much damage to undo and damage on this scale will take decades to repair if we want anything approaching an adult government. Leaving the EU is only the statement of intent. But since we are now collectively too bovine to understand what democracy is and why we need it, these losers will likely be the shape of politics to come until nothing functions at all. Idiocracy is now. I just hope I live long enough to see them used for bayonet practice.

Europhiles are the ones dripping with hate

Heh! Look at all those silly flag-waving old people wanting Brexit. Those hateful old racists huh? That's the attitude of leftist Europhiles on Twitter.

Nevermind that these are ordinary people who will have been about my age the last time we saw a political con to take us deeper into the European project.

Nevermind that it's these people who have been our teachers, doctors, bus drivers, nurses, policemen, diplomats, traders, businessmen, servicemen, labourers and civil servants. The people who made Britain what it is. They just hate immigrants right?

Or could it be that these people know something these smartarse, smug leftists don't? I'm guessing these are the people who have seen Britain at its best and worst - and know that something is missing and that something isn't right - and have been around long enough to know that we had something worth keeping?

But let's not let that get in the way of snobbery and ageism right? They're old people. What could they possibly know?

An open letter to Remain voters

Dear Remain voter,

By now you've had a good look at the Leave camps and their arguments. You will have concluded that for the most part they are godawful people with dreadful ideas and a slim grasp on reality. Lucky for all of us, this isn't an election and after the vote, if Leave wins, these people won't be in charge - so a lot of what they say is completely irrelevant.

That said, I trust that you are not going to vote to remain on the basis of the politicians involved. This is a referendum where yours and my vote matters as much as theirs. And if you're honest you've got some idiotic specimens speaking for your side too. You can't honestly expect me to believe you think Chuka Umunna is a serious person? No. Of course not.

So we have to rise above this, ignore the media and the politicians and the crap they spout and look at the facts. What we can say with absolute certainty is that we are not going to get facts from either campaign and it's going to be a torrent of interminable bullshit right through to June.

I don't believe Brexit will cause the apocalypse any more than you believe we're going to have £933.17 back in our wallets and a spending bonanza on teachers and nurses. Unlike them, we both live on planet Earth. And it may surprise you to think that it's not just your side who thinks Nigel Farage is a "goggle-eyed cock goblin", or that Boris Johnson is a pompous, lazy, self-serving buffoon.

What matters is what we can deduce for ourselves on the basis of what is in front of us. What we know for a fact is that the EU is a dysfunctional bureaucratic mess that struggles to call itself a democracy. Many on your side point this out, and the main reason they want to stay is that our side can't offer a better idea that bears any relation to reality - and can't guarantee we can achieve it. In this, I don't blame you. You've taken one look at the complexities involved and thought "bollocks to that".

The rest of you believe that because the Leave side are swivel eyed dinosauric little-Englander losers, that wanting to remain in the EU means the opposite - which by virtue makes you an internationalist progressive - exactly as you see yourself.

But that's not true. The world is seldom ever binary like that. What if I told you that the EU was Kipperism writ large? After all it is erecting massive fences in Hungary, it's obsessed with controlling immigration, it puts up all kinds of protectionist barriers and it spends half its diplomatic runtime look for ways to close off avenues in.

Now I'm not going to spend the rest of this letter badmouthing the EU, because you've heard it all before, and if you're honest, you know most of it is absolutely true, but you're still going to vote to remain on the basis that there is, to your mind, no other option. Personally I think that's a cop out.

The point I wish to convey to you is one of a different nature though. I challenge you to go and look at Hansard and dig out some of the parliamentary debates from 1975, and also 1992. Have a look at some of the media archives and Youtube.

The first thing you notice is that the people change but the same tired, dogmatic arguments do not. We have had vote after vote, and row after row and still we don't seem to be able to resolve this. And when the Leave side inevitably screws up this referendum, we will have more of the same, for decades, until we have yet another referendum.

In short, your children will have to suffer the same interminably beige politics we have for all of our adult lives. Do you really wish that upon them? If so you are even more of a complete bastard than me.

The fact is, the EU is thorn in the paw of Britain and it doesn't sit right with our national ego to be ruled by a supreme government for Europe. It was assumed as the old boys shuffled loose of the mortal coil that this resistance to le grande project would die off. It hasn't. It has passed like a torch to the next generation. It will never die. So really we have to find some way to accommodate these people so they will shut up and go away and let us get on with something else in politics.

That's where Brexit comes in. Like I said earlier, the scare stories about Brexit are nonsense, and so leaving the EU is actually safe. And here's why. Our government, and in fact any government handling the negotiations, will not want to leave the EU. Consequently, what they agree on will likely be as close to being EU membership as possible without actually being in the EU.

That is going to resemble something a lot like the so-called Norway EEA/Efta model. It won't touch on freedom of movement to the annoyance of kippers, but the government will likely say "tough, this wasn't a referendum on freedom of movement". It's worth voting out just to watch the kipper outrage.

Now I know what you're going to say. Norway has no say and we still pay. I may surprise you here by saying so what? Go and look at a Youtube of MEPs in action. For the last few years we've been lampooning Ukip MEPs for being thick as a whale omelette, but go and have a closer look at the others.

Pay close attention and you will see that Kippers are not all that far removed from the norm, Do you honestly believe these people sat in the Hemicycle, pushing buttons when various lights go off, have the first idea what they are voting for - or what its effects will be - when just a few hundred of these morons are making decisions for half a billion people? Do you really think they add a critical layer of scrutiny and protection? If so, stay right there, I have a bridge to sell you.

This idea that being in the EU somehow means we have influence is a long standing joke, not least among MEPs not suffering from delusions of adequacy. People criticise Ukip MEPs for not turning up, when when you look at how utterly futile it is, I can't say I would honestly bother either. No amount of reform or tinkering with the process is ever going to make the parliament relevant or democratic.

More to the point, I am keen to remind voters that the EU employs fewer people directly than the BBC. There is no possible way it could come up with sophisticated industry regulations as diverse as marketing standards for cabbages through to pollutant levels in container ship ballast water. And that's because they don't.

The EU doesn't make the substance of these laws and adopts them from global conventions and international super-regulators - so in or out of the EU we end up accepting them as they are and we will increasingly find, to avoid deviation from the global standard, MEPs won't be allowed to amend them in any meaningful way. Regulation is increasingly globalised and the EU is increasingly irrelevant to that process.

So my point is really this... who gives a tinker's damn if we send a bunch of mouth-breathers from the shires over to Strasbourg to push buttons that wave through masses of regulation they couldn't even begin to understand? As to having to pay into the budget, that's inevitable. What we can say is that we'll pay a bit less. Who cares? We need regulation, devising it is based on research and that won't come for free.

As to joint cooperation programmes, we will still participate and by way of being the world's fifth largest economy, we will still be consulted. We have clout in our own right so long as we keep paying. Money talks.

What we get for our trouble is Britain enjoying more or less the same good relations with the EU on slightly different terms. There are pitfalls to this approach but freedom to trade according to our own needs is a good way of offsetting them. On balance, it's going to be ok. From there, we'll have a few more freedoms and more control over fishing and agriculture and I can't for the life of me see why you might think that's a bad thing given what the CFP did to our fishing grounds with no real prospect of reform.

I don't see that we have that much to lose. Not that much is going to change so there is no real commercial advantage in businesses quitting Britain - and they know it. What we do gain is a clean slate in our relationship with Europe, and a change to put this horribly tedious debate to bed once and for all.

Best of all, it means no more Ukip. Sure, they will find something else to whinge about and they will never stop banging on about foreigners, but having thrown them a bone of leaving the EU, we can rightly tell them to shut the hell up. They got what they were set up for and if they didn't like the result then they should have drafted a vision and a plan before pushing for a referendum.

I won't pretend it's not without risk, but the default option is safe enough and it presents us a with a lot of new opportunities. That's really what will make us outward looking and enterprising. We won't have the option not to be. It will be a rebirth of multilateralism and possibly even democracy. If we are back in control of critical policy areas then we will need better politicians than Gove and Umunna, and maybe the public will start taking their votes seriously enough to elect competent people.

It's a long shot I know, but if you vote to remain, what you are saying is you can cope with decades more of the status quo - with these vacuous wastrels filling the airwaves and column inches with there their monotonous drivel. Don't you long for some real political change? Brexit would at the very least give us that elusive "new politics" we have been chasing for the last decade or so.

Voting to leave may throw up challenges and uncertainties, but it's challenges and uncertainties that make life worth living. It's what brings our lives meaning. The fact that we have eradicated both from politics means we can only expect Westminster politics to remain as empty as it is.

I say let's chuck out these tired old arguments and make way for something new. The EU issue is a bed blocker to advancing politics onto subjects which could manifestly improve our wealth, health and human experience. Thus far, the only thing this Brexit debate has enhanced is my ability to spell Chuka Umunna's name. How depressing is that?

If you vote to Remain in the EU, you are voting for certainty. You are voting for the certainty of identical politics for the next forty years and another tedious referendum. You are voting to bore us all into extinction. If that really is your intent, please let me know now so I can stop wasting my time and put a bullet in my brain - or see if I can get a Canadian visa. If this is the politics you really want to condemn us to for the remainder of our natural lives then you are welcome to it. I'm checking out. I can take no more.

Yours sincerely,

Complete Bastard.

No, I won't stop attacking losers

If the above was a political party, would you vote for it? I wouldn't. At the moment, I couldn't be more anti-politics and anti-politician. I am totally fed up with empty-headed posturing know-nothings pontificating over matters in which they hold zero expertise.

While that is true in spades of the Remain camp, whose intellectual big guns thus far are Chuka Ummuna and Karen Brady (I know), I can still find plenty of room to loathe and despise the stupidity on my own side - of which there is an inexhaustible supply.

I'm told I shouldn't do this, but I profoundly disagree. We should never tolerate stupidity in our midst just because we like the flavour of it. That's how we got in this mess to begin with. For me the whole point of leaving the EU is to dismantle the idiocracy that rules over us - and it does not stop at leaving the EU.

Any undecided voter you talk to isn't convinced that we should leave the EU because it is not a democracy because there's not much you could call democratic about our own system. They are right. Every five years you get to vote for one of these mongs who is largely impervious to new information and sees the position of MP as one of authority, whereby they preach to us and make decisions for us - rather than doing as instructed.

Some say democracy is the freedom to vote for your dictators, but that isn't democracy - that's representative democracy - which isn't democracy at all. It represents democracy in the same way a stick man represents a person.

For the five years in between election, you have no say and very little power over how your MP votes. And though you can vote for someone else, that doesn't really make much of a difference, if any at all. For reasons that escape me, we're supposed to be satisfied with this arrangement.

I simply can't support the line that we should "return powers to Westminster" because I don't want those clowns making choices for me either. Just because these mouth-breathers pictured above want to leave the EU doesn't mean I should blithely accept or support whatever crapola leaks from their mouths even if it's conducive to winning (which is categorically isn't).

No, my blogs are for people who look at Boris Johnson and think he's a vacuous, unpleasant, lazy, venal man-child with all the innate charm of necrotising fasciitis. My blogs are for people who think none of these people should be trusted with so much as a TV remote.

Boris Johnson's opinion

This is to say that you don't have to identify with these window-lickers to see that there is obvious merit in retaining our vote and veto at the global level and that keeping control over energy and agriculture is a necessary part of self-rule and national security.

And if these things are too important to be delegated to MEPs then MPs can't be trusted with such choices either. We really need to find a wholly different approach to politics that involves a good deal more direct democracy, preferably with as little involvement form politicians as possible.

There have been two Brexit debates going on since the election. There's the debate among London hacks and politicians - and then there's the debate between citizens, which has been more thorough, more honest, more accurate and more up to date. Let's trust the people to sort it all out instead of these oxygen thieves. 

Click for large

Many bizarrely assume that MPs must posses a particular talent in order to climb the greasy pole as far as the house of commons, but the system is somehow broken so that people of extremely low calibre and intellect can now become MPs. (see right)

And then let's not go into Ukip MEP David Coburn saying the UK should leave EU so we can have better toasters. Or rather it's the EU's fault that his toaster doesn't work. And then there's the intellectually subnormal bunch who actually believe David Cameron has secured EU reforms. Morons.

The short of it is, the whole sorry lot of them need to get in the sea. We need out of the EU to first revitalise our politics and secondly to begin the process retiring politics as a profession.

We only need part time politicians to deal with national emergencies. There rest of it can be dealt with locally and through direct democracy. It may not produce more intelligent decisions, but if you're going to have stupid people making decisions, why not cut out the middleman? At least the decisions will be legitimate.

In this, referendum I honestly couldn't give a tinkers damn what any of the politicians think. I don't care what Tom Enders of Airbus thinks, I don't care about what the army Top Brass thinks, I don't care what the PM thinks and I especially don't care what MEPs or MPs think - and if they would kindly, quietly, go somewhere die that would be super. This is a referendum and this is about what you and I think, not them, and especially not Boris fucking Johnson.

Eurosceptics just don't have a credible case

They say we will have more money to spend on teachers and nurses and public services. No we won't. The fact of the matter is the EU does so many things and some of those things it does quite well. It will be the case that if we leave the EU we will still want participate in the economic and social life of the EU - as indeed many non-EU states do. And that is not going to come for free.

Moreover, there are spending commitments and leases taken out on our existing obligations. There are contracts to uphold and there are microscopic levels of integration that cannot be causally unpicked. So to say that we can calculate down to the last pound the sum we will save is a fool's errand.

All we know for sure is that we would likely pay marginally less, on the basis that we disengage from certain key EU programmes. Those would have to be replicated on a domestic basis so what we save comes down to how efficient our execution of it is. That will depend on UK government becoming efficient virtually overnight.

They say we will be able to make our own laws. No we won't. Regulations are the result of global conventions. If we want to export we will have to remain part of those conventions and meet the same standards. They say only exporters will have to worry about regulations. But that isn't true.

They say we can control our borders. To a point, I suppose we can. We can make it difficult and expensive to move people and goods. And maybe, just maybe deter a hundred thousand people a year from coming here. About that level it was when Ukip first started moaning about immigration.

They say we can get a better deal of our own - in just two years. But we can't. Single market access on better terms would prompt other countries to leave - so no better deal will be offered. We'll get an equitable arrangement, much like Norway - but that's as good as it gets.

They say we can leave the single market. But that's not going to happen. The regulatory framework of the single market is expanding, the world is converging on standards, and if we break away from that then there's only limited export opportunities. The argument may have stood up in 1985 but not in 2016. They say we will trade with the rest of the world, but they can't say what that means in practice. They think it might be something to do with the Commonwealth. They're in for a shock.

Course, Stronger In have gradually got wind of this. They are quite good at exploiting all these big holes and they will get better at it. If they get round to reading Flexcit, they will see that our own self-critique identifies much the same holes. If they do nearly as thorough job in the public arena as we have, they will take the arguments of Leave.EU and Vote Leave to pieces. They will cut through them like a hot knife through butter. It will almost be funny.

Course, our cause has many prominent figures, who by way of holding prestige are leaders whether they want to be or not. Redwood, Hannan, Hoey, Carswell, Banks and Farage are all leaders - and in that they share a common responsibility to be making winning arguments that hold up to public scrutiny. They have a solemn duty to provide detailed and accurate arguments so as not to expose the cause to vulnerability and ridicule. They also have a duty of care to ensure our side is not painted as backward looking little englanders.

On all counts they have failed. Not only have they failed, they have actively isolated themselves from anybody who would correct them. They take criticism as an attack. Such is their egotism. They are not interested in dialogue or even self discovery. They are content with hackneyed and mediocre arguments that have long since faded in relevance. Thus they are failures as politicians, leaders and people.

And if you doubt the veracity of any of my claims, you are welcome to challenge me on any of them. You will lose, but it's your time to waste. After which you'll be stood there naked, all shrivelled with nothing to go on but hackneyed eurosceptic bluster. You will rage and rage at me, as you have already done. You will spill your invective onto me as though it were burning acid that could melt through the floor. You will hate me because you will realise in one perfect instant that everything you have been told is wrong and you foolishly absorbed every last deep fried nugget without question or scepticism.

But don't think I'm attacking you. No, I have no time for that. I'm just standing here holding up a mirror and you don't like your reflection. I too have had that moment, where I saw that I was once very much like you. I had to ditch most of what I believed in and hit the books.

Now, I think very differently. I have blogged much of my findings and discoveries over the last two years to a cacophony of outrage that I would dare to contradict the orthodoxy - and that I refuse to show lemming like unity with a campaign that will take us over the cliff. In any other circumstance, this would be more your problem than mine, but you, dear reader, are very much my problem. You see, your obstinacy is what undermines our case. It is you who taints us in the public eye. It is you who loses the intellectual argument. It is you who embarrasses us.

I know I want to leave the EU. I know how to do it, what the costs will be and what the distinct advantages are. I know what the point of it is and I know what the mission before us is. You don't. Look closely in the mirror. You've been hating and moaning for so long that you've forgotten why you're even fighting. You settled on your opinions so long ago that you forgot to re-examine them and grow. You are the same person you have always been - and that's not a good thing. You have squandered years in which to prepare.

Moreover, you have allowed yourselves to be led up a blind alley by fraudsters, charlatans and idle incompetents. Those are the people you took for leaders. And now judgement day is coming - you stand divided, directionless, clueless and without a single standing argument. You chose to spit at us. Now suck up the consequences. 

The left fear Brexit because they hate democracy

You shouldn't vote for Brexit. No, because then howwid tories might get in. Then those evil nasty men will come and abolish human rights and reroute sewers on to beaches and put nuclear reactors in schools. They will abolish paid holidays and maternity leave and children will be forced to work for free from the age of ten.

That's the essential message of the Remain camp. If we have democracy people might vote for people who aren't pious leftists. The people might collective decide that they don;t mind the government dismantling decades of entitlements that nobody asked for and few utilise. Then leftists would have to do the unthinkable and get off their pampered backsides and start dealing in the substance of politics and prove that their ideas are worthwhile.

Because they are so fundamentally bankrupt of ideas (see Corbyn, Jeremiah) it would take some considerable convincing that they are fit for powerr - or that a conservative government really was as beastly as they perceive it to be in their infantile estimations.

In that time, we might find that adults negotiating their own rights and entitlements collectively and individually with their employers doesn't actually result in a draconian reduction in standards. We might actually find that added dynamism in the economy would mean tangible progress in increasing wealth rather than having well-to-do leftists legislating us into further inflation.

We would probably find that the prevailing orthodoxy has been wrong about quite a few things. We will also find they were right about other things and we shall have to fight to restore and preserve that which was worth having. And through political engagement we might just find a settlement that everybody can live with. This would be that much vaunted democracy thing.

But that isn't what the left want - which is why they there are so few left-wing eurosceptic voices. The left will not vote to preserve democracy. They despise it. The left are authoritarian power fetishists, and the UK political system has too many checks and balances for their tastes.

So the lesson here is that Brexiteers should bypass the left. The left is united against Brexit - the Greens, Labour and the SNP are all pro-EU. The toadying conformity to the orthodoxy is a fearful act, knowing that if the people were genuinely allowed freedom to decide their own affairs, their bankrupt ideas would be thrown into the dustbin of history. Debate is what they fear which is why they try so hard to shut it down through online witch-hunts.

While this blog wholly welcomes any effort to root out and marginalise naked bigotry and hate, there comes a point when the concerned voices of ordinary people get labelled as extreme. That then becomes the zetigeist where politicians are actively afraid to show solidarity with the opinions of voters.

The truth is, the far left are the minority. They do not speak for Britain, and so while being politically astute is advisable, be not ashamed to say that democracy matters more than their worthless entitlements and politically correct rights. The left are losers. Their ideas are beaten. The only thing preventing us challenging the orthodoxy is the fact democracy is on pause. Brexit is our chance to change that - and start putting things the way we want them.

Democracy is not for sale at any price

There are few forces more destructive than a bunch of people who have convinced themselves they are doing good things for the right reasons. Ask any Iraqi. And that's why I am intrinsically opposed to the EU. A well pampered broadly liberal class of politicians spoonfed with seductive "progressive" propaganda can easily engender a herd mentality that cannot be brought to reason.

If you tell well meaning people that the entity they subscribe to is about peace, unity, cooperation and pluralism, then at some point the ends justify the means - even if that means eradicating democracy. Then if you manage to establish the notion that the sky is falling in then there is no restraint at all.

Everything then becomes about popular sentiment and what appeals to the most number of politically engaged people. It assumed this is democracy. But on this scale, it's just a case of capturing a popular sentiment in order to assume a mandate for what they were going to do anyway - and if they can't secure agreement, just finance more "research" to manufacture a protest movement. That's why yoghurt weaving Greens and academia make such perfect "fifth columnists" - and it's precisely why the EU funds both.

At that level of politics you could have a resolution to save the planet with a subclause that explicitly demands the slaughter of the first born and because the substance is ignored in favour of the virtue signalling gesture, we end up with hugely damaging laws we are pledged to obey.

On the more mundane level this means stifled growth and lost opportunities, and on the more serious level, vanity legislation where each politician is in a bidding war to prove their right-on credentials. You don't have to be a rabid climate change denier to know this is true. This race to produce ever more stringent carbon restrictions may well look like progress but in real terms, it means higher taxes, slower growth, bigger energy bills and a marked decline in living standards - while at the same time producing negligible reductions in emissions.

When so much decision making is made at the global and regional level, too much power is taken out of the hands of ordinary people. It causes even greater political disengagement and reduces accountability by way of having fewer eyes watching our rulers. Why bother watching politics when a vote changes nothing? That then gives our political elites free reign to do as they please.

Just today we have seen MEPs crowing about a vote to hand over powers to the EU to close tax loopholes, but Christ alone knows what is tucked in in the details, in which will no doubt be a more pernicious power grab. There always is. The lefties won't give a monkey's about the detail because they only see the surface intent, when what we actually get is another salami slice of powers going in the opposite direction to the people.

When challenged, ultimately the lefties always come clean. See above illustration. They don't mind sacrificing "a little democracy" for extra tax revenue.

In broader terms, the basis for staying in the EU is that the Tories might change something they like. This is why there are few left wing eurosceptic voices. The left will not vote to preserve democracy. They despise it. The left are authoritarian power fetishists, and the UK political system has too many checks and balances for their tastes.

The problem here is that this principle is not a sliding scale. If you concede to it once you will concede forever. And that is why eurosceptic feeling is so utterly irreconcilable regardless of how apparently strong economic arguments are for remaining in. To us, democracy is not for sale at any price and we know from our knowledge of the EU that once the EU has a foot in the door, there is always more of a power grab to come. Slice by slice it affords itself more powers with virtually no protest.

As we have seen, so much decision making is done at the global level where there is no real democracy - before the European Parliament is even remotely involved, which should mean MEPs automatically refuse to wave through any decisions, but they don't. Talk to most of them and they believe they are the embodiment of democracy. We have but 751 MEPs (less than a YouGov sample size) deciding matters for half a billion souls. Even Ukip aren't that dim. 

Moreover, given how the odds are stacked against Britain, and how meaningless half the votes are, I actually don't blame Ukip for not turning up half the time. I doubt I would bother. This is why, as much as I despise Ukip for its ignorant bigotry and its stupid histrionics over everything and everything, I mind them less than leftists. At least I can count on Ukip not to blithely hand over more powers on the basis of a politically correct fad. They may be muddled on the details, but at least they know who the power should belong to.

As thick and crass as Ukip may be I prefer them representing Britain in the EU than any one of these smug virtue signalling leftists who think that being anti-Ukip is the fullest extent of progressivism. Time after time they show us how little regard they have for democracy and how little scrutiny they apply to their own thinking. 

Their toadying subservience to every right on fad regardless of the substance makes these people sheep - and in the end it is the conformists who enable the fascism they claim to stand against. They are the ones who eventually think the world would be perfect if only they could get rid of the people who don't think like them.

What happens if we stay in the EU?

You've heard plenty from both sides about what happens if we leave the EU. Nobody is saying much about what happens if we stay. I'm going to venture a scenario based on my understanding of how things are going.

We can only speculate what happens in Westminster after the election. Events are so fluid that I wouldn't like to venture a guess. The EU is a more predictable beast. We know that it will need extra powers to keep the eurozone in tact. It will get them. We will have our two speed Europe. The EU will have almost total control over economic affairs in the eurozone and those nations not in the Euro will be way down the list of concerns.

Having asserted itself as a new power, it will push for more powers and more of a presence on the global bodies that make trade rules and regulations. It will use the courts to award itself more exclusive competences. On working parties at the ILO and other bodies, the observer status the EU has will be upgraded so it controls all of the votes all of the time, including ours. Any kind of veto will be extinguished.

From then, if we want a change in the rules that affect trade we will have to add it to the list of EU concerns. Only after many meetings to decide if we are allowed to put it on the list of concerns. We will have meetings about when to have a meeting. If there is a crisis between then everything goes on hold. And there usually is a crisis. When is there not?

Eventually a problem will become a crisis and the crisis will become and emergency. Only then will the EU act. It will then claim the only way to solve the problem is for the EU to have more control. As more financial shocks occur in the turbulent years to come, we will find the survival of the Euro is the primary concern and so our problems will not be their problems. We will be way down the list.

Sooner or later a problem will be so bad we find ourselves taking unilateral action to fix a problem only to be slapped with heavy fines by the EU for breach of treaty obligations. We then find ourselves on the fringes of the EU, with diminished influence within, no presence on the global stage - we're told how to vote in the UN general assembly and then we cease to be a nation in any real sense, except for when the EU is keen on bombing something. After all, the EU will want to keep up the illusion we are still a proper country.

Meanwhile, as more and more of the minutia of government comes under EU control we will find Westminster politics becoming increasingly more divorced from foreign affairs and trade, turning ever more inward and parochial, acting only inside the parameters set by the EU. No political innovations or new ideas not allowed by the EU will even be suggested.

As displacement activity, we will find Westminster assuming control of more and more local affairs that should be the province of local authorities - right down to the micromanagement of classrooms. (yes, more so than they do now). We will then see the trivial elevated to high importance in the media as it fails to realise there has been a complete transfer of governance to the EU.

Councils will be even less democratic than they are now as they become regional development agencies answering directly to Brussels when not carrying out the fringe instructions from meddling MPs. The consequence being British political life, and the media, becoming even more hollow and asinine than it already is, prompting a massive disengagement from politics.

We will see a resurgent Ukip - or a similar entity - and it will make more gains than Ukip ever did. Euro elections will be used as a mass protest and all we will ever get representing us are the kind of knuckle-scraping dunces that Ukip presents us with now. It will be out "two's up" to a government we didn't want and didn't ask for.

Meanwhile, the 51 Convention goes unreformed so more and more migrants flock to Europe. Nothing will be done about immigration. Politics will be more toxic and bitter than it has ever been. Possibly to the point of lone wolf terror attacks from the far right.

The stresses will be magnified across the whole EU so that all MEPs will be from fringe parties. There will be a rout of moderate voices from the European Parliament. The consequence of this is that the EU will seek to slowly and invisibly strip powers from the EU parliament - in a way that the media will not notice. It will become an administrative dictatorship.

After that, the consequences are anybody's guess. It could either see Britain slide into mass industrial action and rioting - or just a gradual slide into obscurity where nothing works every well, everything costs a lot and nobody has any money to spend on the good things in life. It will happen so slowly that nobody will ever remember it being different. Except for the ones who voted to Leave.

The future is an unhappy and poor one inside the EU where democracy becomes a thing of the past and prosperity only a distant memory. Our influence will fade and few will even care. It will be a winner takes all society and the winners will be few and far between. Britain will be a violent, disorderly and miserable place - and eventually we will see a political backlash that sees us leaving the EU by way of ripping up treaties. Then all the grimmest prognostications of Brexit will come true in ways that even the Remain camp never envisaged.

Knowing the EU as I do, knowing what is coded into the EU's DNA, I can't see it going any other way. It is not geared for democracy. It is not geared for competitiveness or agility. It is geared for centralisation, bureaucratisation and ever more control. It won't end well. It never does.

Here's a prediction.

The hacks of SW1 will get all excited about the new wave of airstrikes. Private clinical polling will tell the PM that support will collapse soon as the public has caught up with what has just been done in their name. Consequently the scale of the missions will be drawn down quite soon.

What we'll then see after the first wave of raids is a dispersal of ISIS forces, very well disguised from satellites and recon flights. The choice targets will be much harder to find and hit. Public scrutiny will be extremely close so the subsequent operations will be so risk averse that the abort rate will be over 60%. From the air, they won't be able to tell ISIS fighters from civilians.

We will waste quite a lot of airframe hours with sorties landing with no munitions launched. What we will then see is a massive inflation of operational costs as spares have to be fabricated from new. At this point the RAF will be telling the MoD that if they want to avoid a capability gap then they will have to reduce the mission times. Using up all the Tonka spares leaves us with nothing until Eurofighter weapons delivery systems are working. 2017 maybe?

Then the Americans will get snotty that they have to budge their scheduling around to slot the Brits in to add no capability they don't have already, and privately they will be taking the piss out of us while the French won't give a flying fig.

We will step out of the way and instead do loiter missions comprising of sixty minute slots where we may get to pop off a brimstone missile or two if we get some half decent intelligence from the ground. Pretty soon, everyone will have forgotten we are over there, the media will be bored of reporting it and then we'll just phase out strike missions, unless there is a terrorist attack on European soil in which case they will keep up the charade.

Eager to climb down, the government will invent a particular objective and then miraculously claim it has met that objective, saying that it can do more with intelligence assets for the coalition, launching surveillance sorties from aircraft we leased from America. What we should have done in the first place.

We'll be able to say we stood up with France to "defeat ISIS" when in reality all we've done is dispersed them until the next window of opportunity for a surge. Far from actually winning the peace, they'll form the rump of a new body along the lines of Hezbollah, so even if Assad wins the day his authority won't extend to territory where the airspace is controlled by the west.

Because there will be no satisfactory reckoning, there will instead be a low grade civil war that rages for decades much like Lebanon with daily suicide bombings and political assassinations.

We probably won't end up killing many civilians because our operations will be largely ineffectual, and when there are no observers on the ground, who's counting anyway?

I'm not sure about the exact details but we can say that it will be a risible show of force that will demonstrate privately to our allies that we are a waste of space, and most participants will call the whole damn thing a farce. The politicians though will walk away self-satisfied that they have done the right thing, and will applaud themselves for their strength and unity. Medals will be handed out by the dozen to bemused aircrew.

Meanwhile the public will be none the wiser because nobody in the media has the military literacy to understand what is going on and hacks will take MoD press releases as gospel. Meanwhile, us "ranting bloggers" will be nose deep in NATO reports and procurement orders showing the media up for the worthless hacks they are.

What nobody will clock is that the really evil bastards who did the really bad things will vanish without a trace and will never be held accountable for what they did.

Does that sound about right? Place your bets now.

Let's call these airstrikes what they are. Virtue signalling.

We're going to see a lot of comparisons with the existing air operation, the one about to start and the one of Libya. None of which are directly comparable.

Libya is unique in that there was an immediate humanitarian concern that could be reasonably affected by air power in a short time and there was every advantage in ensuring warplanes, SAMs and other ordinance was knocked out of action lest they end up put to use elsewhere.

Eventually though, regime forces soon learned how to evade airstrikes by blending in. After which, there was a high rate of aborted missions. The whole effort went off track as military stalemate was achieved. People then started asking "now what?" which was answered by removing Gaddafi. You can argue the toss as to whether that was a good idea. On balance I think it probably was (with a boatload of caveats) but there is no real endgame in Syria.

Firstly I don't see how we would identify ISIS forces unless they are directly engaged in hostilities, and if we can then it won't be for long as they adapt and blend in. We can disperse them and operate long enough so that it can't reform as an effective fighting force, in which case it will go dormant or move to the next most vulnerable spot (possibly Lebanon). What then?

There is also every possibility elements of it will merge with the rebels we are supposedly supporting. We won't have any idea who we are engaging with by that point. The downside of scattering ISIS is it very much removes the opportunity for the Syrian tribes to rise up and slaughter them so in a lot of ways, we are offering ISIS an exit strategy to a surge that cannot succeed anyway.

More to the point, we can't do anything useful like we did in Libya by getting rid of all the heavy ordinance in the region, because it's all under Russian protection and we don't have complete air superiority in the region. We'll be asking Russia for flyover permissions.

The moral posturing over this is seriously stupid and if you look on Twitter right now, the politicians and hacks are applauding the likes of Hilary Benn for a florid and rousing speech with absolutely no grounding in the very dangerous realities of what we are about to undertake.

All this high talk of "they hate us for our values" and "defeating fascism" is unmitigated crap. It's an opportunist surge which is nothing new under the sun in the middle east and most tribes lending their support to it see it as a vehicle for either seizing the spoils of war or doing a houseclean of the old order. Some with just cause. The threat that it does pose to us is managed by surveillance, not airstrikes.

Effectively ISIS is the new Al Qaeda style media demon to distract us - and what a pitiful public memory we have that we haven't learned any of the lessons. That the commons could vote it through on the basis of virtue signalling shows that our politics is now broken beyond repair, and our culture so twisted that representative democracy just cannot be trusted as a decision making mechanism anymore.

That the media is now pouring over the debate video looking to see how it affects the power divide in the Labour party and how many times Cameron was asked to apologise rather than examining the ramifications of a decision to go to war ought to be seriously alarming. This is very much bread and circuses. Just how SW1 parochial can you get? We're actually going to war in a very tight spot were Russia is also fighting. And nobody in our media thinks that's apparently a bad idea? No - better write a piece on how "brilliant" Hilary Benn's speech was. Pathetic. Sickening.

Bombing Syria won't end well.

Airstrikes are very much a vanity project in this and in most other instances. We have decided that something must be done, and have decided that air power is the means by which it will be done, without deciding what that something is or what the effects are, or even if the means can achieve it.

That does not sound like a reasoned proposition to me. It sounds childish. It's a kneejerk response to Paris to satisfy the egos of blowhards who think sending out bombers is the answer to every geopolitical crisis.

It has had some effect in Iraq against ISIS where we have had a reasonable idea of what's going on on the ground, a knowledge of which territory we are defending and the likely deterrents. But Libya proved that you can't really stage a sustained campaign without having good, trustworthy ground intelligence.

As the enemy works out the rules of engagement are, they find ways around them and ways to hide which means increasingly missions are aborted in fear of collateral damage. We then revert to face saving by going after targets of lower priority that are not engaged in immediate hostilities. We end up fighting round the edges, wasting a lot of money and a lot of time while burning up our credibility.

The enemy is not some brigade on a map with static allegiances. It's tribal, it's fluid, and allegiances can turn on a sixpence. One wrong bomb in the wrong place can change political alliances. We have little in the way of trustworthy ground intelligence to know which way things are going. We do have informants, but they are not always telling the truth and have agendas of their own. It's much the same as a political leak to the opposing party in order to attack factions on your own side. It's risky business.

If you believe that ISIS is some kind of unified force that can be neatly bombed until it vanishes then you have been playing too many computer games. The middle east is not Command And Conquer.

I am not opposed in principle to intervention, but this isn't a planned operation, nor is it in any real sense dedicated to a lasting strategic outcome. Saying suck it and see, let's start bombing and see what happens is foolish. To devise a route to success you first have to define what that success looks like - otherwise you're pouring petrol on the bonfire.

We are talking about contested air space with multiple agendas over ground we have already diplomatically conceded, with Turkey playing it's own games which are not yet apparent. There is no good reason to trust Turkey.

I do not believe that Britain's presence adds value to the operation in that we offer little capability that is not already oversupplied. As far as the Americans are concerned, they would probably view British air operations as battlefield clutter and a nuisance.

I also think this notion of "standing with our allies" by joining in is bovine. Just because the global elites are agreed that something must be done does not mean there is unified agreement of what that something is, and it not does it mean they have a mandate.

Where the power dynamic lends itself to bovine conformity it demonstrates that our political establishment is incapable of making a legitimate representative decision in this regard and only public deliberation can really produce a valid verdict.

Strategically it seems pointless, militarily it doesn't seem feasible, the objectives are vague with unknowable consequences in a situation where it really is up to Syrians. Even if we did quash one tribal surge we would just make room for another - and if, as ISIS was, it found itself militarily disadvantaged, it would resort to the same savage tactics employing any of the same tools against ISIS collaborators and allied tribes.

There are no good guys to pick in this, and in the end, Russia has decided Assad is staying in place. That is probably how it will end, and we are going to do absolutely nothing to challenge Putin in Syria for that regional influence.

What it does mean is that the risk of a "friendly" fire incident is increased and while nobody gives a shit that Turkey shot down a Russian mig, this gets hairy when British aircraft are accidentally shot down by Russian air defences.

I see plenty of potential for souring already deteriorating relationships while handing huge diplomatic leverage to Russia. What I don't see is a coherent plan to bring peace to the region or anything that enhances our security, or is even in the national interest. Taking home a souvenir t-shirt saying that we stood we France while we made yet another mess seems unnecessary for continued good relations with France.

The bottom line is that we have no track record in succeeding in these such endeavours. Applying our kind of intervention to what is already an unimaginable mess should make our further tinkering unthinkable. It will have more to do with the power positioning within our own dismal tribes than bringing about any lasting settlement to Syria. That should never be the basis for military action and the fact that it is says a lot about how degraded our politics is now. I think we need a little regime change of our own here at home.