Outists – those who still cling to the blatantly irrational idea that Brexit was a great idea which hasn’t utterly crippled the UK – really are simple things, aren’t they? Yesterday afternoon I got into an argument with someone over Brexit on Facebook. I otherwise have a lot of respect for this person, so I’ll not name them. However, beneath one of the memes criticising Brexit I had shared, they had posted the full text of an article by someone called Zoe Strimpel. Looking Strimpel up, I found she is an ‘academic’ who writes for the Torygraph.

Reading the text, I soon saw it was nothing but a tract of bilious nonsense. The general line of argument was that European countries have many internal problems too, it isn’t the paragon of bliss and virtue we ‘remainiacs’ apparently imagine it to be, Britain does things better, so we were right to leave the EU after all. I’m sorry, but is this the type of bollocks Outists read and swallow these days? For starters, nobody is saying other European countries don’t have problems: we saw another violent night in Paris last night; far right parties are gaining popularity across the continent, and so on. But such internal issues do not mean the European Union has failed or that we were wise to leave it. In fact at such times unity is more vital than ever, as it is only through working together that we can solve our problems.

The reasoning behind this article is blindingly obvious: point out a list of problems in other European countries in order to make readers feel better about their hostility towards Europe and the EU. It’s a simple ploy, but people are falling for it, if only because it allows Outist readers to keep telling their selves that they haven’t really ruined the UK because the rest of Europe is ruined too. Yet, reading the article, the issues listed had nothing to do with the EU, or if they did, they were no reason to break the union up. What worries me is that people are falling for this moronic guff; reading it and thinking that their Europhobia has some kind of intellectual legitimacy. That such shit is being published is also very worrying in that, by using words like ‘remainiac’, it splits British culture even further, making the Leave/Remain voter chasm even wider, and ultimately making it even harder to reverse the damage caused by the Crime of 2016.