‘Game over’ for the UK?

Another ‘glad I don’t live there any more’ moment. If what I read in the news is correct, there is a distinct possibility that the UK will cease to be, sold down the river by it’s own politicians without giving it’s populace the right to have a say in the matter.

David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party has given his promise to hold a referendum re the Lisbon Treaty / EU constitution, providing it has not been ratified by the time he gets elected. Ratification of said treaty is being bulled forward, and even if there is an election, my estimation is that any election will come too late for the English, Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish. They will find themselves assimilated into the EU collective whether they like it or not.

At this point I’m feeling oddly prescient, as my ‘Sky full of stars’ MSS is partially about people who are escaping to the stars via North America from the great totalitarian prison-state of the ‘Gaian European Republic’. England is acidly referred to by several of my characters as ‘that wretched little poverty trap’. Will real events overtake my fiction? The very thought is chilling.

There are times when I look at the UK news and feel like a political refugee, even though I am still feel a stranger in this new and (For me) strange land of Canada. This alienation is not wholly of my doing, as I am merely reacting to what I see as forces beyond my control, yet after over two years living and working over here, Vancouver Island is more home to me now. Although I watch the news and keep in touch with the family and friends I left behind, over here I’m just another expatriate. One of many thousands looking for a new home in a better land. At the moment of writing, the very thought of returning to the land of my birth makes me unhappy.

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the sheer sense of personal space I have. The big skies with hundred mile horizons, the spectacle of every morning’s sunrise. Fishing in crystal rivers and hiking along game trails through mile after mile of forest and it's all on my doorstep. Would I swap it for the leaden greyness and closed in sensation of an English town? The constant looming of CCTV cameras? Numerous speed cameras sited on wide open stretches of lightly trafficked roads? The crowds of unsupervised kids that all “Know their rights”? The nannying fingerwaggers who seem to form a cancer within local and national ‘services’? Erm, no. I may come over as a little crazy sometimes, but I’m not bloody stupid.