This letter to the Times, 18 January, is making a lot of good folk teary eyed. Remainers like Prof Brian Cox are overcome with emotion.…
“Rot the heart of Britain”. Really? Come now, professor!
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I don’t get it. I mean, I get the sadness at Brexit. I just don’t get the sadness at this rather nice letter.
After all, Europeans can still — will still be able to — have pint at an English pub. They can still pop over for a game of cricket, or milky tea and scones.
None of this changes with Brexit. Precisely nothing. To imagine it does is delusional.
Yet the good and noble, the remainers, are crying, literal tears. “What does this say about us?” (Well, nothing, really). “What have we done?” Oh we, Oh woe... oh wrack and wruin...
To repeat: nothing beloved in the letter changes. Nothing.
As one of the commenters on Prof Cox’s Tweet said: “We’re not going anywhere. We’re part of the Eurasian Plate”.
Prof Cox was recently overwrought over the Post-Brexit fate of British Universities. Again, I say huh? People will still line up (UK English: “queue”) for a place at Oxbridge. And international research is online, border-free. Does Prof Cox think that US universities are somehow constrained by not being part of the EU?
Prof Cox’s fame as a science populariser ought not make him immune to mockery for his plangent perturbations.
LATER: Prof Cox may be too young to remember: but it was Thatcher who brought the UK into Europe, while the Labour Party wanted to keep Britain out. So when he say that Tory ideology allegedly "festered in the darkest corner of the Conservative Party" he's being somewhat ahistorical....
After all, Europeans can still — will still be able to — have pint at an English pub. They can still pop over for a game of cricket, or milky tea and scones.
None of this changes with Brexit. Precisely nothing. To imagine it does is delusional.
Yet the good and noble, the remainers, are crying, literal tears. “What does this say about us?” (Well, nothing, really). “What have we done?” Oh we, Oh woe... oh wrack and wruin...
To repeat: nothing beloved in the letter changes. Nothing.
As one of the commenters on Prof Cox’s Tweet said: “We’re not going anywhere. We’re part of the Eurasian Plate”.
Prof Cox was recently overwrought over the Post-Brexit fate of British Universities. Again, I say huh? People will still line up (UK English: “queue”) for a place at Oxbridge. And international research is online, border-free. Does Prof Cox think that US universities are somehow constrained by not being part of the EU?
Prof Cox’s fame as a science populariser ought not make him immune to mockery for his plangent perturbations.
LATER: Prof Cox may be too young to remember: but it was Thatcher who brought the UK into Europe, while the Labour Party wanted to keep Britain out. So when he say that Tory ideology allegedly "festered in the darkest corner of the Conservative Party" he's being somewhat ahistorical....
