In one of last night's posts I noted the use of the "looms" by Katie Razzall on Newsnight, suggesting that it revealed her bias on the Brexit issue:
Today's From Our Own Correspondent also featured the word. Here BBC journalist Chris Bowlby linked the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992 with Brexit today (though oddly, whilst describing all the complications and turmoil of that "divorce", he didn't make the obvious point that the two successor states are doing just fine now):
"As a Brit you won't really understand", [a Czechoslovak] added, "as nothing like this could happen in your country".
"Ha ha, yes", we laughed, amused by the very thought of Britain being a place where suddenly everything seems unstable and a huge legal process of separation looms.
The theme of Chris's report can be summed up by the following pair of sentences:
I don't want to exaggerate. No one's suggesting Britain's current dramas approach anything like the horrors that swept 20th Century Europe but Brexit is still a huge shock to how the continent views Britain.
That's a rather sweeping statement as it is. How much of this 'continent' he's talking about is actually the political elite and his fellow members of the nomenklatura, and how much is the people forced to live under their rule and would like to be relieved of it?
ReplyDeleteIndeed. It is for such things on social media I value #wefiles to log how often 'they' include 'me' under 'we'.
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