I just came across this profoundly worrying Guardian article. An outist tory MP has written to several universities to ask them what they are teaching about Brexit. In a decidedly McCarthyist move, ”Chris Heaton-Harris, Conservative MP for Daventry and a staunch Eurosceptic, wrote to vice-chancellors at the start of this month asking for the names of any professors involved in teaching European affairs ‘with particular reference to Brexit’. Neatly ignoring the long tradition of academic freedom that universities consider crucial to their success, his letter asks for a copy of each university’s syllabus and any online lectures on Brexit.” Basically, this p’tahk wants to vet what universities are saying about Brexit to make sure it’s nice and positive, rather than the obvious truth that it has completely fucked the country.

Obviously we should be appalled at this. Any move to censor what academics can and cannot say is a step towards somewhere very dark. Heaton-Harris will know that eighty percent of academics voted Remain, and he doesn’t want them teaching students to question what is going on. At the same time, this is also a clear sign of how worried the outists are: if things were going as well as they would like, they would be fine with people saying whatever they wanted. But as reality becomes clearer and clearer, people will begin to realise how badly they were deceived last year, and Brexit will start to crumble. The only way the outists can keep their farce going is to try to suppress the truth and silence opposition. We saw another instance of this recently with Farage protesting on his LBC show that the media weren’t showing the good side of brexit; trying into con people into thinking that everything was turning out to be wonderful, but the evil, liberal mainstream media weren’t allowing that to get across.

In both examples we can see a form of desperation; both men realise how badly things are going, but scared that the public will finally see them for the scum they are, they concoct all kinds of bullshit to have us believe they were right all along. Either that or they try to get the truth suppressed. In their desperation we can also read a sign that, sooner or later, brexit will collapse – that is now inevitable, but as it becomes more and more difficult to keep the fiction going, I fear the lengths the outists will go to will become increasingly extreme.