In company with walking under a ladder, crossing paths with a black cat or ensuring seven years of bad luck by breaking a mirror, a Friday on the 13th of any month is considered bad news. Election day the 12th of December will be the day that goes down in history as the day the United Kingdom decided on Brexit. This may be so but for most of us, the shit doesn´t hit the fan before the votes have been counted and reported, that is to say on Friday the 13th of December and everything associated with that particular, unlucky day. This will be the day that etches itself into people´s memories or will it?
A society founded in the late 19th Century by an American named William Fowler sought to provoke the superstitions surrounding the number 13 by dining regularly on the 13th of every month. Googling on the subject I discovered that walking under a ladder before dinner was one of the rituals yet I found no evidence of any unlucky consequences. One might hope that the food was good to balance the obvious anti-climax of success.
Likewise, this next election will be anything but decisive and will in the following months or years be seen as just one of the steps in the torturess Brexit process with any of the outcomes being nothing but a gigantic question mark.
- A Tory majority = what will the deal be or hard Brexit in a year?
- A Labour majority = which deal will be put up against a promised referendum and then what?
- A hung parliament = another referendum or people´s vote and the outcome?
Brexit has from day one been a political tornado that has ravaged the country, opened up old wounds and re-drawn political affiliations. Ironically it will result in the exact opposite of the promise of taking back control. The United Kingdom as such may well not exist in a few years but even if it does it will have ruined its historical reputation as a sound and reliable democracy and possibly have relinquished its predominant place at the decision making table of european power thereby accepting a minor role on the global stage.
Friday the 13th give or take, this is self inflicted bad luck.