It's 5 O'Clock Somewhere - Roads & Kingdoms. For this special edition of our weekly Drunken Screed, we at Roads & Kingdoms asked some of our favorite Brits to have a drink or five and weigh in on the surprisingly exciting U. K. Grab a pint and join us as we rant, rave, and revel over last night’s vote. My Whole Brain Feels Like a Bottle of Champagne. Mo. This was how it felt when I first saw the exit poll in last night’s British election. My whole brain felt like a bottle of champagne. Everyone I knew was loudly insisting that something positive could happen, while quietly expecting the worst.
Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party was surging in the polls, but the polls had been wrong so many times before, and his message of solidarity and kindness and tremulous impossible hope was facing the dread certainty of a Conservative landslide. This whole election had been a hideous contrivance: Prime Minister Theresa May had spotted an opportunity to massively increase her hand and give electoral weight to her project—hard Brexit, pitiless social sadism, covert racism bulging monstrously into fully- fleshed being—and she took it. The rest of us were just passengers, mute and helpless. Those of us who believed in something better were about to be crushed. Our enemies, the vultures of common sense and political reality, were laughing in their low, hollow sky.
I had expected to stay up until sunrise watching the BBC, alone, inconsolable, mourning a future that never had the chance to be born. The experts were wrong.
The projected result showed a substantial gain for Labour: not enough for them to form a government, but enough to destroy the Tory narrative of inevitability, enough to prove that socialism really isn’t a cultish fringe interest, but the only way forwards. Instead of staring heartbroken at a lonely screen, I found myself speeding in a taxi to the South London headquarters of Novara, an insurgent left- wing media outfit. This was not what was supposed to happen. This is not the report I expected to write. The whole place was fizzing with terror and excitement. In the foyer, a small group of people—friends, writers, commentators, activists, people who had been on the leftward fringes of British politics for years, but were suddenly discovering that they were right all along—clustered around laptops, smoked frantic cigarettes by the doorway, popped open cans of Red Stripe.
Every Tory defeat brought a chorus of roars and a flurry of joyous swearing. A few of us would occasionally bound up to the studio upstairs, to channel our wordless joy into sober political commentary for the all- night live stream. It was impossible: grins kept bursting out on our faces. Eventually, long past midnight, a few of us went on a booze run, jumping around in the empty London streets between the bright abyssal glare of the all- night KFC and the sullen tenebrosity of shuttered warehouses and silent shops.
We must have wandered miles, chasing 2. Google Maps, before we found one; it felt like a Homeric voyage.
When we found one, I impulsively grabbed two bottles of Mo. She grinned. She knew the answer. We’d done it. Finally, when dawn broke, the sky was entirely clear. A faint, shining, impossible blue flooded over the city, and I really believed that there would be no more low and drizzly days in London ever again. Signed, A Citizen of Nowhere. Butcombe Bitter in Brentford.
By Alexa van Sickle. I had a very modest hope for this election. All I wanted was for Theresa May—and the Tories who got us into this mess—to have a bloody good scare. It’s what they deserved for their vile campaigning, amplified by the even more vile right- wing press, for being so cocky they didn’t bother providing costing details in their manifesto, and for May calling this snap election to strengthen her grip on power. Among other concerns I have, his anaemic support for the Remain campaign was, I believe, a big factor in the vote to leave the EU.) I voted in the Borough of Hounslow, my sometimes- home in the U. Deletion Request From Infocube After Update Cannot Connect there. K. The polling station, in the squat clubhouse on the edge of a 1.
Afterwards, just past noon, the Magpie and Crown, a small Georgian- fa. But all the customers were solo: reading papers, working, or stroking their chins over pints of ale. In some ways, I got what I wanted. The Tories are rattled in more ways than we could have hoped for only a month ago. But I can’t help thinking about how my expectations have lowered so much in just one year that I’ve learned to accept, and expect, only crumbs from the political universe.
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Here’s another example: I hated her politics, but I wanted to give Theresa May the benefit of the doubt when she succeeded David Cameron when he resigned after the Brexit referendum. Pokemon Team Rocket Edition Rom Download Gba. Friends who had worked under her in the civil service always said she was sharp; that she read all the materials in her red box; that she cared, that she did her homework. This sounded like a relatively good deal next to a certain orange- tinted bullshit purveyor, and even next to that consummate political dilettante, David Cameron, who made his government an extension of the Eton common room. Above all, I regarded May as a lucky escape from that monumental hypocrite, Boris Johnson—the original fake news merchant who shaped a generation of British EU- bashing as Brussels correspondent for The Torygraph by making up lies about EU directives on the straightness of bananas and the recycling of sex toys.
The campaign revealed May is not capable at all. She seemed to have no vision. She repeated meaningless alliterative slogans—for several totally unrelated questions—like a string puppet.
She lacked grace under fire. She also didn’t call out Trump when he attacked London Mayor Sadiq Khan after the London Bridge attacks. And of course, her policies read like a Daily Mail editor’s wet dream. They probably are.
But as poetic as this electoral drubbing feels, it comes with some unintended potential disasters. If somewhere down the line this Tory snafu ends up ushering Boris Johnson back within sniffing distance of the leadership—he’s no doubt already licking his lips—to me that will have been one of her worst misadventures. Also, the morning after, my gleeful fog of Schadenfreude gave way to another rude realization. May said she called this election to secure a stronger mandate for Brexit talks, which are set to start in 1. She’s persevering with the same cliff- edge Brexit, it seems, but her now weaker hand bodes ill for the flexibility and diplomacy required for the task. She has already needlessly antagonized her European partners.
She mindlessly repeats that “no deal is better than a bad deal.” She has never explained this gibberish, so allow me: she is laying the groundwork for walking away, so she can blame everything—everything unpopular her party ever does in the future—on the intransigent 2. EU states who (how dare they?) are presenting a united front. She also says she wants to guarantee the rights of UK citizens in the EU, and those of EU citizens in the UK—but how can that happen if she walks? She is openly disdainful of what she calls “citizens of nowhere”: the people who might—for many different reasons, perhaps even because of something called freedom of movement—call more than one place home. She said we don’t know what citizenship is. I am a citizen only of the UK.
But I was born and raised in what is now an EU country. I have spent most of my life outside the UK. My lack of dual citizenship, which I never knew I would need, (thanks, Brexit!) could certainly cause me some problems later. But these would pale in comparison to the problems May’s “no deal” would cause for the millions of EU nationals who have settled in the UK, some for decades.
Restaurant workers, joiners, bankers, musicians, cleaners, doctors, nurses, students. Not to mention the Polish bartender at the Magpie and Crown who served me my cheeky half- pint of Butcombe Bitter ale—and that Romanian baker who hit one of the London Bridge terrorists on the head with a crate. The same goes for the millions of UK nationals living in the EU whose futures are unbearably uncertain. Many on both sides are already leaving, because May has refused all opportunities to guarantee they can stay.
She says these millions of people are a priority when she starts to negotiate Brexit later this month. I don’t believe her. Because the exit polls in the British election are in and Jeremy Corbyn, the 6. London has managed to create the biggest political upset in British politics in decades. And I’m over- the- fucking- moon.
Corbyn’s vibrant election campaign went against all of the establishment’s rules and yet still managed to secure a whopping 4. Labour vote in 2.
Voter turnout was high, particularly amongst the under 2. Theresa May, the Tory gremlin who pushed an ugly agenda of selfishness and greed, lost her overall majority and the UK is heading for a hung parliament. I gulp down another beer and take a moment to glance up from my phone to smile manically at no one in particular. My cheeks are flushed pink and I have butterflies in the pit of my stomach as I realise I feel something I’ve not for years. The torture of it is almost unbearable. A hung parliament?
How could that be a cause for celebration. I know us Brits are known for downplaying success, but surely we should have been hoping for better that that, right? The outpouring of electoral support for Corybyn comes in the context of him having faced the most unrelenting barrage of criticism from every section of the mainstream media, as well as most of his (back- stabbing) parliamentary Labour Party. All of them insisted that Corbyn was utterly unelectable and have spent the last two years putting every ounce of their energy into trying to destroy him. They ridiculed and mocked, claiming he was too old school, too unpolished, a dinosaur from another time that wanted to take us back to the 7.