Brexit, Theresa May and What's Happening in the UK?

From what I can tell everyone thinks their generation was given the weakest hand of cards in the game of politics; if politicians really are the enemy then it makes sense that the best that people can salvage from them is the trump card that their government handed them the toughest odds to work with. But looking back this never seems to add up: my parents grew up during Thatcherism and a recession far worse than the one I've lived through; and my grandparents watched their American counterparts march into the inevitable loss of Vietnam. And look further back than that things only get worse. The state of politics in 2016 is no new low as some people are branding it; these are certainly dark days, but no darker than usual. In a generations time the current British government will just be another bragging point for the tough times we all went through, another ghost story forgotten in the view of a new cast of monsters.

If the current political moment is remembered for anything it will most likely be as the moment the public, even those largely invested in politics, seemed to stop caring. Politics became less an uphill battle and more a landslide - everyone seemed to simply resign their complaints and accept whatever politicians had in mind. The public became spectators, not participants. At least my generation can brag they had less of an idea what was happening with the state of our country than any generation before us (as good an answer as any for old cynics who wonder why my generation appear to always be looking inward instead of to the wider world outside). The once macho, intelligentsia-headed world of politics drifted into an abstract concept floating just above us, always that slight bit out of reach.

It's impossible to pinpoint when this political fatigue began, not that it much matters, so I'll use the Brexit vote as a starting point. Many saw it as a sign of moral defeat that so few young people voted, far less than in the last general election. The Stay vote, the losing side, was said to be the Young People's best choice, because the ramifications of the vote might not take full effect until they're not young people anymore. I didn't vote - I'm sure many will write this off as laziness (I know everyone who found themselves in the losing camp does) but why I didn't vote comes from reasoning a bit more complex than that. I doubt it came from not caring about a decision I was told again and again would affect my whole country's relationship with Europe forever, and I'm sure this applies to many young people who didn't vote. Not that I can speak for anyone else. Hell, maybe it was all laziness, but a good question to ask would be what made us feel so lazy and unbothered about such an important decision.

The day of the vote I found myself in a coffee shop in a group of around eight people, where the conversation could have been estimated to be on video games and gossip but of course veered into politics. The whole group was split half-and-half. It was a debate that went on for hours but didn't seem to solve anything, the arguments only became more muddled. Reading pamphlets and slogans from each side only pushed me further away from voting; arguments from everybody only clued me in that no one knew what they were talking about. My family was leaning Leave, my friends were telling me Stay was the only option, the media was ignoring the Leave faction, corporations were all saying Stay, every opinion peace said Stay. David Cameron went from Leave to Stay. Frankie Boyle said Leave. Everyone was positioning themselves on whether they were following the generally accepted choice or striking out from the herd, only nobody could say for definite which side was the general consensus and which was the contrarian choice. Writer Christopher Hitchens said to always pick the contrarian option (hell, he wrote a whole book about the idea) but I imagine even he would be stumped to say which side that would be.

The Leave campaigners had no facts and figures, only vague promises of making Britain independent or achieving things it couldn't while under the constraints of the EU - all buzz phrases that meant about as much as Trump yelling "make America great again". The Stay campaigners couldn't decide what they were offering: were they stopping an already failing country from further falling apart, or allowing a prosperous country to continue on its upward trajectory? They knew they wanted to stay but not what we would be staying with, or how this was better than the alternative.

The vote came through; we're leaving! Not even Leave campaigners looked like they knew what this meant, no one could say exactly what effect it would have on the country. There was a strange atmosphere to everything the day of the vote: a rare moment when a whole country has made a decision on their future, everyone together - which contradicted the results which made everyone appear hostile, unsure of why everyone else had collectively made this choice. The consensus was that Leave was the wrong choice. A whole country connected by their individual feeling of separation from each other. Boris Johnson, Leave campaigner, had no answers for anyone, he just looked filled with regret at every public appearance, grasping at straws to defend why we'd made the right choice. It wasn't hard to see Johnson as a man who thought he was backing an unpopular opinion for his own PR only to be surprised when the whole country backed his PR move. And were we even going to leave? There was petitions to stop the act; everyone I spoke to said they didn't even think we were leaving; officials saying it was a long process. Has the process even begun now?

I'd say David Cameron's resignation from being Prime Minister is the best example of what I'm trying to say about current politics: the procedure and coverage (or lack thereof) of Cameron leaving sums up, at least in generalized fashion, the feeling in Britain during the last few months. The Prime Minister resigns over a vote he himself was the key figure in negotiating; he says he'll be staying til October but he's gone within a few weeks; everyone guesses we'll have Boris as leader, but he pulls himself out of the roster; and by a process played out by the Tory party, and examined in detail by very few, Theresa May ends up as Prime Minister. And despite her being Prime Minister for over a month now I still no almost nothing about the sole human that has been chosen to run the country I live in. I'm used to seeing every person up for election covered by every channel on TV, multiple interviews and debates; we're living in a culture that loves to examine every skeleton in the closet, yet the woman elected as leader hasn't been examined at all. I don't know her views or opinions, nor her personality. And neither the media or the Tory party seem bothered about enlightening me.

It feels weird to end on a state of confusion, yet isn't that what British politics currently is? The idea of concrete decisions feels long in the past, only a waste land of second guessing and half hearted choices, done mostly for personal gain, and presented to us through a vague veil of marketing speak.