Elections 2021.

The abused voted to support their abuser.

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response whereby abuse victims bond with their abusers. This psychological connection develops over the course of years of abuse. A large part of the English population have developed the condition.

A classic abuser tactic is to create external enemies that explain away any bad experience, and from which the abuser protects the abused, thus reinforcing the dependency.

Over many years the EU was held to be the source of many of our woes, the politicians' lies repeated by their compliant media. Xenophobia was stoked with threats of immigration; leave voters gave succour and support to the racists.

By the time of the referendum the fishermen, farmers, and business folk dependent on foreign trade, had been locked into their Stockholm syndrome state, impervious to rational argument, convinced by what they read in their newspapers that the politicians had their best interests at heart.

Covid provided the coup de grace.

The pandemic was entirely avoidable but the British public were told that the government would protect them. Unlike the experience of several Eastern Hemisphere countries, diverse in geography and politics, where a zero covid policy was enacted from the start, resulting in few deaths, the UK Government's approach resulted in some 150,000 deaths and immeasurable suffering.

Just in time for the May 6th elections, the Government delivered what the people wanted to hear: a promise of freedom. Covid restrictions were being lifted and some semblance of normality was being restored. This, they were told, was the gift of good governance. The vaccination programme was another gift, but even this was not the triumph it was portrayed as. The vaccine was no 'miracle' but just what scientists do when given the resources to do their work, and the roll out was not exactly rocket-science. (Bhutan vaccinated it's entire adult population in one week.)

All the while the government were able to transmit what was effectively a Party Political Broadcast every day it wanted under the guise of the 'covid briefing', to leave no doubt who was the protector and benefactor. 

The parallel between the behaviour described by psychiatrists of abuse victims and the condition of the English public was exemplified by the Hartlepool resident who said he voted Tory because there were now nine food banks but under Labour there were none. Rationality is dispensed with, the victim defends the abuser.

The abused English public dutifully trooped to the ballot box (or, more often than not, didn't bother to vote at all).

And all the while around the world the pandemic rages more than ever, each new case an opportunity for viral mutation, and the UK's decision to leave the EU the source of bemusement and ridicule by all who retain their sanity.