13th May 2022
The multiverse is a concept well known to superhero comics fans.
A multiverse, in essence, allows the same characters and places to exist in a number of alternative realities.
For the storyteller and the reader this allows different stories to be told about say, Batman and Gotham City, unconstrained by the hobgoblins of continuity or consistency.
For the publishers and film-makers it allows deployment and exploitation of valuable intellectual property in a number of different contexts, unconstrained by those same two hobgoblins.
And there is the added advantage that, every so often, you can have crossover and ‘crisis’ events where universes collide.
Everyone is a winner.
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Brexit is a multiverse.
In one continuity, Brexit-I, you have the official position – as illustrated by treaties signed and legislation passed, and by economic data.
This is the version of the Brexit story that a historian working only from official and business records would tell.
In another continuity, Brexit-II, you have the excited briefings and front-page newspaper splashes that spill over from the soap opera of Westminster politics.
The weekly event of the United Kingdom government about to do something rather dramatic and plainly stupid, in return for claps and cheers from the easily impressed.
Often this second continuity crosses over to the first continuity and there is a crisis event.
And there is a third continuity, Brexit-III, which are the same events as set out above but as seen with bemusement and/or horror from Dublin, Washington, Brussels and elsewhere.
This is the world of Brexit-III – the story of outside entities who are affected by but cannot directly intervene in the worlds of Brexit-I and Brexit-II.
Those in Brexit-III are conscious of the propensity of Brexit-II in particular to create crisis events.
Yet Brexit-III is stuck in its own external continuity, with its own norms and values unknown in Brexit-II.
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Every so often in comics you will get a bright and ambitious executive who directs that the separate universes in the multiverse be fused, because it is all getting too complicated for new readers.
And we then get stories where characters in different universes are confronted with their counterparts, knowing only one version of themselves will survive.
This can be all great fun – but such grand fusions rarely last long, and the universes again multiply because that is the way of superhero comics, as it suits the respective interests of readers, storytellers, and businesses.
Some may think it is a good thing for a multiverse to be fused, but nobody really likes it for long.
And the same can be said for the Brexit multiverse of madness.
Brexit-I is best kept as far as possible from Brexit-II.
Those invested in Brexit-II will never understand Brexit-III, and vice versa.
Trying to unify Brexit so there is a single continuity and narrative that can be shared by all is pointless and futile.
There will not be a single Brexit story, at least for a political generation.
And so we will have, at least for a political generation, crisis events where these Brexit universes collide.
Brace, brace.
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