Irvine welshes

I’ve just read Irvine Welsh’s Guardian article, The Beauty beneath Brexit’s Bedwetting, and I genuinely can’t figure out if he’s naively sharing some not-quite-right, bigotry-addled awakenings, or if he’s the most arrogant man in the world. Probably some befuddled combination of the two.

Welsh’s attitude towards the referendum has been consistently drippy. He seemed to want to back Leave, but was afraid of being packaged up with Boris Johnson and the bogus bigots- those mythical, xenophobic trolls clumsily potato-printed into existence by some charlatan factions of the Remain camp. But his loathing of Tories is so strong that he couldn’t see his way to backing Remain either, because- fearful gasp!- Cameron and Osborne were on that side. He appeared thoroughly terrified of both sides, and unprepared to try using his celebrity to wrest some ownership of the issues away from the politicians he’s so inexplicably unsettled by. So, like a bit of a nesh bedwetter, he apparently decided that his best role in the affair would be to provide opinions for money.

In his latest piece he’s decided to halfheartedly, several weeks after the result, come down, almost but not quite, on the side of Brexit, maybe. He does a reasonable job of highlighting some of the reasons why Britain is leaving the EU, with lines about the undemocratic, unreformable EU commission; the straitjacket of corporate neo-liberalism; the new vulnerability of governmental elites, and a win for political diversity.

All good points, but here’s the thing- these arguments are already well oiled and have been repeated a thousand times by Leavers. Along with a great amount of other evidence against EU membership such points have been at the centre of the Leave campaign since, well, before the Leave campaign even existed as a topic of social commentary.

And yet Welsh, in what comes across as stupendously overbearing arrogance, strongly implies that the people who actually went out and voted for Brexit weren’t aware of these things- that is, weren’t aware of their own reasons for voting!

The further message is that although the Leave voters were all wrongheaded simpletons ticking boxes through a fug of media misdirection, we shouldn’t worry too much because Irvine Welsh has figured it all out. And you know what- those idiots’ idiotic vote might not be so bad after all! Thanks Irvine!

Here’s what we get on people who voted Leave:

“Britain’s youth will feel they have been turned over by the Captain Mainwaring tendency from that most selfish and narcissistic generation, the baby boomers. After 60 years of relative prosperity, the older vote is strewn with reactionary bedwetters; massively in denial, and easy prey for any opportunistic demagogue who advocates turning the clock back to a golden era that scarcely existed.”

And don’t forget the well worn lie that:

“it was obvious to many that the leave campaign didn’t believe it would win, merely wishing to register a protest, and was thus left thinking: what have we done?”

Sure Irvine, right. So nobody knew any of that bad stuff you’ve figured out about the EU. And they didn’t know that if they vote for something it might happen. And it was all just despicable baby boomers what done it anyway, who were brainwashed, and living in cloud cuckoo land.

Oh, but in the event that Brexit has positive outcomes for Britain or the EU, which you’re saying it might (let’s not commit to anything) then you can take credit for kind of almost calling it. The feckless, know-nothing Leave voters, on the other hand, will have called it absolutely correctly, but only by happy accident, like tossing a coin.

I think my favourite part of Welsh’s delusional junk is when he blesses us with the nauseating epiphany that voting leave “has paradoxical underlying nobility.”

Paradoxical of what? Underlying what? God only knows. Or Irvine Welsh.