POLITICAL comment has been changed since June 2016, quickly becoming a genre wedged somewhere between a weird and dark alternative history of the present and postapocalyptic dystopian iction. On 16 June that year, as news broke of the brutal slaying of Jo Cox, a young Yorkshire Labour MP, the mood of reportage and opinion veered of on a rapid tangent into the surreal. Whether watching the television news or reading the newspaper, we have all been let feeling the detachment – twisting in the wind, confused, shocked, as though we are spectators to a fantastical and frightening drama set on a familiar stage. Documenting this departure here on the pages of iScot Magazine or on my personal blog, I have been haunted by this sense of the unreal. Yet, no mater how fanciful my writing has seemed to me, the words rolling over the pages of the broadsheets daily conirm the truth that we have indeed wandered into the twilight zone.
As an experiment of sorts, then, I have decided to explore this gloomy and unfamiliar territory in this piece by documenting the future – sure, we might as well. Firstly, however, it is important to stress that this is not an atempt at iction, and neither is it a prophecy. If anything, I hope to God I’m wrong and that we never live to see this dark vision of the near future realised. Rather, this experiment is envisioned as an oracle in the classical sense; an analysis of the realities of the present read into the predictable and likely changes just over the horizon. Even before planning this out, we can fairly well guess where it is heading. The chaos around us is far from prety, and the promises of tomorrow are grim – to say the least. Come to think of it, one doesn’t have to be Nostradamus to write such a biter quatrain. So, are you siting comfortably? Good. Then we’ll begin.
TWO YEARS AFTER BREXIT