Have you stocked up yet?

Now that a government advertising campaign has begun advising E.U. citizens living and working in the U.K. to apply for ‘settled status’ (applications now free, but the original price tag I believe was £75) there was a rather shaming interview on the BBC PM programme this evening. It featured a woman who has been living here for years, with her two children – and I believe she said her husband had been working and living here for 20 years – saying the family was thinking of leaving. What a bloody disgrace this is. And how ashamed of one’s own country should we overly proud Brits be? Your children are at school, you're paying your mortgage, you’ve learnt the language and sufficient skills to have a job and pay your taxes – and then like some alien you have to register with the bureaucracy your existence as if you were a threat, a lesser human being? Remind you of anything?
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But we have a government which co-incidentally sits on top (judging from today’s Guardian) of an Islamophobic volcano within its own ranks. There is something truly awful going on. What I wonder really explains it? I’m not looking for the explanation amongst those who voted for Brexit for the usual reasons, i.e. immigration, austerity, to kick the establishment – what I’m wondering about are the very keepers of that establishment, who seem to have accepted a course of self-immolation, harbouring some form of patriotic self-disgust to the extent that they can no longer be at ease with themselves unless they scratch this ’foreign’ scab until it is a deep wound. That’s what it feels like. It would be a price worth paying, perhaps (a big perhaps) if Brexit meant the end of the Conservative Party, which in most sane circles can now only be seen as unfit to govern. What happened to the ‘natural’ party of government? It seems to me like May is trying to keep something together which has already irrevocably fallen apart. I wonder if what we are suffering from now is the result of the Conservative’s greatest crisis ever (duhh), or if it is something which its natural survival instinct will save it from (with all the horrors that will entail). The trouble is, if we do get a no deal Brexit, it is likely the Conservative Party will be reborn, and its new self will be triumphantly of a Tea Party-like character. C’mon Jeremy, get stuck in!