By No, you haven’t seen 2017 yet Mr. Farage! What is going to happen? What does your crystal ball tell you when you have donned your silk robe decorated with stars and crescents and your turban?
Trumpetering
Perhaps it tells you that the UKIP will implode? Not because of a lack of funds or because of continued internal in-fighting or because you have denigrated their members in your Telegraph interview and withdrawn your patronage. No, maybe because all over the UK (nod your head vigorously as you read each word) ‘ordinary, decent, hard-working-people’ are going to turn around and realise that they are just that, (nod again please) ‘ordinary, decent and hard-working’ and they are ill-advised to trust charlatans and opportunists who really HAVE (nodding again) ‘never done a day’s work in their lives’? Maybe these people will start thinking for themselves when they realise what a political monstrosity their trust in your errant doctrines has created?!
Perhaps your crystal ball tells you that Trump will erupt ‘BIG LEAGUE’ when the legality of the US election is challenged? His carefully posed lower jaw will drop in astonishment! His mouth will gape into the familiar ‘O’ shape that precedes a Trumpnouncement. ‘It’s rigged!’ he will trumpet before releasing the pent-up venting of sulphurous hot air normally associated with a volcanic, trump (sic) outburst … perhaps?
Maybe a crystal ball wide-screen upgrade will be necessary to reveal Boris Johnson eating cake and realising that if you ‘have it AND eat it’, you keep eating and eating and eating while your greed outpaces your bowels? Perhaps the Brexecutioners will admit to themselves and the electorate that negotiation is for mutual benefit and that the cavalier sound-bite slogan ‘have-cake-and-eat-it’ merely panders to the immature humour of the selfish chauvinistic faction that swung the EU referendum marginally in their favour? We should not have to say ‘Grow up’ to the Foreign Secretary … but that’s the bottom line.
Negative unity
Maybe, Mr. Farage, your crystal ball will shock you by revealing that a second EU referendum without civil war is possible and that a rerun of the US election travesty will return a more sober, sane and acceptable result; nationally and internationally?
Maybe your eyes will open to the dangerous position you have been instrumental in creating that threatens the hard-fought-for peace realised through the EU project? Maybe your epiphany will show you the results of the brinkmanship your all-American protégé has already embarked on with China … perhaps?
Or maybe everything you hope for, with your negative view of the value of global unity, will continue to materialise in the misty images of your political crystal ball. Heaven forbid!
Crystal ball, bloody entrails, or the augury of ravens, in the current political climate I prefer to listen to the soothsayers and necromancers rather than the experts! Well I know what next year is going to be like for me. I’m going to bed and keeping my head under the duvet. I can’t wait for Xmas 2017 when I will push back the covers and open my eyes to see who were the winners and who were the losers. I’m dreaming of a … zzz … zzz … !!
I expected a rather dry and cynical preview of 2017; like you siobudms I could only view it with ironic wit, a satirical slant between serious points. Is it that 2016 has been such an awful year that even with the potential for worse to come the only way we can meet it is to clear our minds and laugh, hoping others laugh with us? If so, then I have real hope that 2017 will be well and truly survived so that at this time next year we may be able to make a more serious set of predictions. Mind you, without raising at least a few smiles would it be worth it? The political world is a very dangerous tragicomedy at present with some of the leaders being very nasty comedians generally telling extremely tasteless jokes with horrifying punchlines.