If only the Conservatives had made this a bit clearer during the general election we would all have had a much better idea what to do: sell the house, quit the job and move to another country because, clearly, Britain has no great post-Brexit future after all.
I can’t believe I’m having to write Britain’s epitaph so soon after the joy and jubilation of Brexit Day but look at what Boris Johnson’s ‘Conservatives’ are offering a bemused nation:
Britain is now in ‘chaos’ and ‘pandemonium’; crops are rotting unharvested in the fields; manufacturing is tanking; the UK economy is expected to shrink by 7 to 10 per cent; tensions are rising on the Irish border; the risk of war has increased dramatically…
No, not actual reality: just a scary glimpse into the warped and overactive imagination of Sen Chris Murphy (D-CT).
Murphy has been tweeting out his fantastically stupid and wrong opinions on Brexit to any Americans foolish enough to take him seriously.
Boris Johnson’s Brexit administration has got off to a terrible start.
To appreciate just how bad things are, here’s a thought experiment: imagine if you had been told that the price of Brexit was the wholesale reordering of the UK economy on eco-socialistic grounds, as outlined in my book Watermelons.
If you haven’t read the Independent’s hilariously bitter account of the Brexit Day celebrations you absolutely must! It captures, I think, better than any article I have ever read why it was that the Remoaners lost and why the Brexiteers (eventually) won.
There’s a big clue in the fantastically snobbish phrases that the author, Tom Peck, uses to describe the celebrations in London’s Parliament Square when Britain regained her independence. (How odd that a newspaper — well, ex-newspaper — called the Independent should be so appalled by this.)
Nigel Farage called it exactly right in his good-riddance speech to the European Union: by quitting the EU, Britain is not merely abandoning a marriage of inconvenience; it is getting a long-needed divorce from an ugly brute of a wife-beating loser with bad breath, terrible wind, a tiny penis, no discernible talent and a gambling problem.
Or, as Farage rather more succinctly put it (you’re only allowed short speeches in the EU debating chamber):
It is a bad project. It isn’t just undemocratic, it is antidemocratic.
Dominic Frisby’s “17 Million F*ck-Offs” is, beyond doubt, the greatest song about Brexit ever written.
All right, so the field is not exactly crowded with competition.
Nonetheless, Frisby’s comedic masterpiece — which wittily, liltingly, and swearily celebrates the bravura act of defiance which led 17.4 million Britons to vote for Brexit in the EU referendum, against all the advice of the Establishment ‘experts’ — is, in Brexit terms, like “My Way”, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “Stairway to Heaven”, and “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” rolled into one.
Would you buy a communications system from an oppressive, secretive, totalitarian regime which may be responsible for perhaps the deadliest viral pandemic since the catastrophic Spanish Flu outbreak of 1919?
Even before the coronavirus raised its terrifying head, buying 5G technology from China’s Huawei looked like a bad idea for Britain.
Now it’s looking like the most stupid idea since the Trojans saw the Wooden Horse their Greek enemies had left outside the gates of Ilium and said: “Nice! Let’s drag it inside.”
To recap, 5G — which stands for ‘fifth generation’ — is the next wave of wireless telecoms technology. Insanely, against the advice of allies from the U.S. to Australia, the British government has decided to award the contract for this strategically vital communications system to a country which is not only a major geopolitical rival but which is also infamous for spying on its competitors: China.
a) Solitary Green MP Caroline Lucas; Guardian readers; other tofu-munching eco-freaks; anyone else who lives in Brighton or Totnes; Greenpeace; Fiends of the Earth; Greta Thunberg; Extinction Rebellion.
b) Normal people who like driving in their cars, taking regular holidays, being able to afford to keep their houses warm when it’s cold, and who are bored rigid with being lectured by hectoring little nobodies with crappy pretend science degrees from the University of East Anglia about how the planet’s dying and it’s all their fault and something must be done by yesterday or we’re all doomed.
Boris Johnson is no fool and he seems to have worked out using his Oxford Classics mega-brain that the correct answer is b). At least this is what we can infer from his most significant environmental decision since his landslide general election victory — bailing out the stricken airline company Flybe.
Flybe is the kind of cheap and cheerful budget airline that normal British people use for their holidays. That’s why it is so important that it should not be allowed to die, and why Boris Johnson has just done the right thing by saving the cash-strapped airline with a government rescue package.
Happy New Year! Here’s a few things the public sphere could probably survive without by this time in 2020…
Greta Thunberg
Every time you thought that the cult of St Greta could not get any more insane, reality said: “Hold my beer.” After being feted across the world by everyone from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Pope, hailed by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood as the new Joan of Arc, St Greta achieved full apotheosis at year-end when a Swedish pastor described her as the successor of ‘Jesus of Nazareth’.
How sad it will be in 2020 when the world wakes up to the fact that this teenage school drop out is nothing but a puppet for green crony capitalists in her native Sweden, who have choreographed every stage of her progression from ‘lonely schoolgirl protesting against climate inaction’ to Nobel-Prize-nominated superstar. No one likes being taken for a fool – and Greta the Puppet has fooled almost everyone.
Princess Meghan
I’m sorry America, but you’re going to have to take Meghan Markle back. It’s bad enough that she turned our favourite bad boy prince — Afghanistan veteran, chopper pilot and all-round cheeky chappie Harry — into a joke-averse, henpecked appendage, but what’s worse is that she has infected the whole Royal Family with Hollywood woke values.
