It feels like a lot longer since the 23rd June than it really is, proving that a week is a long time in politics - and two and half months is even longer. But since then, the mass media is yet to move on from the word "Brexit" (and it is unlikely to do so given that we've learnt it could take as much as 10 years to complete dealing with all the facts and details of leaving the European Union) but now they're having a field day - adding two more words to the nickname creating yet another complete and utter misnomer - it's £350m Per Week 2: Electric Boogaloo - Broken Brexit Promises.
This term has been bandied around extensively by the media representing anger felt by some of the 52% of the population that voted Brexit in the dramatic referendum. Many feel that now the negotiations are being prepared for and the realities are sinking in by our new Brexit team captained by Theresa May, they have been betrayed by the leadership because this wasn't what they were promised.
This really gets my goat.
When we voted Brexit, what was on the ballot paper was very simple. Leaving the European Union. Nothing more and nothing less. There was no promise to also redirect £350m to the NHS, or protect EU citizens in Britain (sidenote: the idea of using people's lives as bargaining chips is vile and morally reprehensible - symptomatic of a culture of human beings being used as a means to an end, especially foreigners (like in order to gain votes in certain referenda), or fund farmers, or cut down immigration, or give Britain an Australian-style points system or anything of the sort. There is a very simple reason why the British people feel violated and double-crossed over the things that were promised in the referendum campaign.
It's because they were lied to.
That's the long and short of it. Brexit campaigners like Nigel Farage and his band of merry tricksters willingly and with premeditation allowed themselves to mis-sell a post-Brexit world. They sold us down the river with promises of what were really whims and ideas which were certainly not written in stone and definitely not deliverable.
What makes this situation 350m times worse (if you'll pardon the pun) is that when these delightful concepts of a world free from the EU purely populated by candy, rainbows and bunny rabbits were sold to us, they were sold to us by people who had no authority to promise them.
It wasn't like an election where we were electing a manifesto or a series of policy agendas, we were electing a concept onto 650 individuals who in the majority do not believe in it. We weren't electing a government or an MP, we were electing a policy direction which would overshadow the premiership of any Prime Minister unlucky enough to be caught beneath it. Because of this, any promise made by Nigel Farage (who failed be elected as an MP not once, not twice but seven times I may hasten to add) et al. was worth the same as my Woolworth's giftcard (circa 2003). We must not let them abdicate from the responsibility for the fact that they painted a picture of a world that could never exist to win votes - we were lied to plain and simple.
And now Theresa May, not even 2 months into her leadership finds herself being accused of "breaking Brexit promises" that not only did she never make, but also that she campaigned against given her personal campaign for remaining in the European Union. When she realistically demolishes concepts like an Australian-style points system for Britain she is accused by many as cheating the British public (despite her never actually promising anything, the promises that were made were made without real power and authority, and the promises themselves being fanciful at best and deceitful at worst) when all she is really trying to is clear up the mess left by the British electorate.
Heaven help her.