Extract from the book Private Eyelines. Britain officially slid into what looks like an L-Shaped recession today (L stands for LONG). Whilst Corona undoubtedly provided the tipping point into recession, we must also look longer into the past for the underlying reasons. The FT reports that UK is the worst performing nation in Europe regarding our decline into recession under Corona. Brexit must therefore be added in terms of how deep and rapid our plunge into recession has been. Brexit uncertainly has laid the table for our Britastrophe, making Britain especially vulnerable in terms of resilience. The term resilience is essentially our ability to ride out tough times. Longer term, adding a man made disaster in slow motion (Brexit) to the Corona crisis offers us a “Britastrophe“. We have to endure Corona, but we need not have Brexit.
In March 2020, we made some socio-economic and political forecasts about the coming 6 months. Prediction is largely a dangerous game, but it turns out we were mostly right. We would be very badly advised to add Brexit to our list of problems in 2021 under this analysis:
But here at Rage Against Brexit we look deeper at the underlying economics and today we can report that it seems that Britain’s problems have been caused by … cheese ….
Taking back control … of our Stilton
Liz Truss has made the protection of Stilton a red line in the Brexit talks with Japan. In case you are not familiar, Truss is a massive defender of cheese and has made it her personal mission to defend her “blue veins” against what she considers the “yellow peril” in Brexit talks.
In case you are wondering about the benefits of the “Stilton Clause” as it is referred to in Whitehall, here they are:
Our trade with Japan was worth £31.6 billion last year
The Stilton Wedge is worth £102 million
In case of doubt, a billion is more than a million – a lot more
70% of Japanese people are unable to eat Stilton due to lactose intolerance
Liz Truss: [furiously] “Tell the yellow midgets that they’d better start liking Stilton or they can make their fucking cars in their own country”
You may well ask, why is Liz standing up for cheese? Well, it may have escaped your attention, but we have not done a significant trade deal since we “left” on January 31st, 2020, although we all know that Liam Fox said that getting trade deals was to be the easiest thing in history. Liz needs to bring in the bacon (and brie) pronto, so that we can say we did a better deal with Japan than the EU did … because Stilton is included. Makes sense, eh?
The Stilton Clause” is said to include unlimited supplies of Cheesy Wotsits in exchange for the ceremonial inclusion of a Torii at Cheddar Gorge and its use on premium brand Cheddar:
Moveable Feast
In other news, the much vaunted moveable barrier for the M20 gridlock in Kent promised for 31 December 2020 by Grant Shapps is not going to be ready until 2022. Shapps was heard to say that this would not be a problem, as we would improvise with wedges of cheese in the two year intervening period. Here is an artists’ impression of the SS (Stilton System) in action during the Brexit food shortages.
As Boris will say:
Sadly Corona, Flu and Flooding are natural phenomena. Brexit is a man-made disaster and we don’t need to add it to the Winter of Discontent. We must avoid a BRITASTROPHE.
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