Brexit is ‘ultimate punk’, apparently.
So claims Martin Daubney, who will no doubt be wanking himself silly at the attention his fatuous claim has received. It is of course as derivative as it is ill-informed. Many self-styled Brexiteers have previously claimed the same, with varying degrees of delusion/ignorance. But let us allow ourselves to fall into Daubney’s trap for a moment and entertain the premise.
The ex-Loaded editor tweeted this:
Brexit is anti establishment, working class revolt. It’s ultimate punk. Total rage. The rest is art school bollox. It’s perfect 🤷🏼♂️🇬🇧
— Martin Daubney 🇬🇧 (@MartinDaubney) October 24, 2018
Firstly, Brexit is not ‘anti-establishment’, nor born of working class revolt. It is very much in the establishment’s interests for Brexit to happen, and that is why they lied, manipulated, and sold broken promises to the masses. The working classes have much to revolt about, and their wide-ranging resentment was harnessed and weaponised by disingenuous rich twats.
As for the laughable suggestion that Brexit is a modern-day manifestation of ‘punk’, that is monumental bollocks in so many ways. One of the most obvious being demographic. Every fucker knows that there’s a significant grey vote bias to leaving the EU. Indeed, the stats show that over-65s are more than twice as likely as under-25s to have voted for Brexit.
Punk, and all it (still) stands for, is inherently a young person’s game. Of course you can continue to have anti-capitalist, rebellious, anti-establishment tendencies for all of your life, but age generally rids people of their anarchic views, as they accumulate capital and become the establishment. Even the fucking Sex Pistols grew old, sold out, and cashed in.
Speaking of which, there’s a cartoon definition of ‘punk’ which incorporates safety pins through noses, mohicans of bright green, and the Sex Pistols as the only musical reference. It ignores the glamour and sexual ambiguity of the New York Dolls, the raw talent of the Ramones, the musicality of the Buzzcocks, and the anti-nationalist leanings of Crass and the Clash.
But again, let us put all that to aside for a moment and focus on the Sex Pistols – as Daubney does – and the bizarre suggestion that ‘art house bollox’ is somehow the opposite of punk and everything the Pistols stood for.
Presumably Jamie Reid – who designed the iconic artwork for ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, and ‘God Save The Queen’, and whose work Daubney’s house is apparently ‘stuffed with’ – fits snugly into the Venn diagram overlap between ‘punk’ and ‘art house bollox’. As does the Pistols’ mentor Malcolm McLaren, whom he met at Croydon Art School.
As a side note, regarding Daubney’s ham-fisted conclusion that ‘Brexit is punk rock & Remain is Pink Floyd’, here’s an interesting fact: Sid Vicious was born Simon John Ritchie. He was nicknamed ‘Sid Vicious’ after Johnny Rotten/Lydon’s pet hamster Sid – who was named after Syd Barrett…of Pink Floyd.
Then there’s the fact that Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious reportedly met at a state art school, both were David fucking Bowie fans, and the Pistols first ever gig was at Saint Martin’s fucking College – the art school famously name-checked in Pulp’s ‘Common People’. But yeah, you’re either ‘ultimate punk’ Brexit, or ‘art school bollox’ Remain.
