Why I still think Brexit won't happen
In the run-up to the Brexit referendum in 2016, I wrote that I wanted the British to leave Europe so they could "finally show us all what they are really made of". The initial Brexit negotiations have indeed exposed what the British are made of: nothing much at all.
The only deal agreed so far is that Britain will pay 50 billion euros in return for not even a slice of pizza. There is no legal requirement for this: It is simply a shakedown they've been bullied into by the European Union (EU) to ensure discussions continue - discussions that will entail even more humiliating demands.
Terms are being dictated to the British in a similar manner and extent as were forced on Germany at Versailles after World War I. But while it took four years of gruesome trench warfare, 40 million casualties and the occupation of the Rhineland to make the Germans accept such conditions, today's Brits have conceded with not a gun pointed at them: the stupidest national capitulation in history - like being robbed by someone wielding a banana.
And other powers now wait to carve their own chunk out of Britain: it's easy manipulation by the EU, an advertisement to all possible trading partners that the British are suckers, there for the taking.
Brexiteers fantasised the referendum result would unleash their country's supposedly shackled genius, but the rest of mankind doesn't share the British opinion of themselves and simply sees a country with an ageing population, an army that can't fight and an economy owned by highly-extractive foreigners: chumps, to be cleaned out by anyone who does business with them.
The British are, on the whole, a dumb people who mistake their very brief lucky-streak at the roulette-wheel of history as proof of innate greatness. Their dumbness is an open joke among immigrants who routinely outperform the native Anglostanis in everything from academia to sports, business and pop culture. And now the rest of the world can see how dumb they are too.
Amusingly, articles are now being published in the British bourgeois press encouraging their readers to send their children to schools with a large intake of Indian pupils, in the hope that their greater intelligence will rub off on them.
I wrote in 2016 that I didn't think Brexit would happen or that it will only be a phoney one that leaves the EU unthreatened. Eighteen months later, I stand by that prediction, because the Brits are much too dumb to make it happen, being comfortably outmanoeuvred by the EU at every turn. Indeed, the EU seems to be executing a meticulous long-standing plan to neuter Britain altogether, ensuring it can never again obstruct its imperial project and reducing it to the sort of servile vassal status the US has locked the UK into for the past 50 years: a suzerainty that, given its general silence on the matter, America seems now happy to share with Europe.
Unlike the elections of Donald Trump or Narendra Modi, Brexit is one populist phenomenon that is doomed to fail because, unlike Indians or Americans, the British are not a smart people - though they like to pretend they're smarter than everyone. Even now, in the age of Microsoft, Facebook and Google, they routinely consider themselves intellectually superior to the US, pointing to the success of the Harry Potter books or how Britain's most esteemed inventor, Sir James Dyson, revolutionised the design of the latrine hand-dryer as proof of their eternal brilliance.
Whatever one thinks of Trump or Modi, their respective economies are booming and both have very quickly implemented vast once-in-a-generation reforms of their taxation and other structures, while Brexit, Britain's own supposedly epochal national moment, has resulted in nothing but exposing how weak and stupid it is: a truth that was already apparent to everyone but the British themselves.