This from Don Adamson, once in Kent, now in Yorkshire, with some reflections on the march to Rejoin:

I arrived at the rendezvous at seven bells in the forenoon, that is 1130 for landlubbers and when the big hand is on the 6 and the little hand is on the 11 for Gammons and Flagshaggers. I took the last leg of the journey by underground. A charming young lady offered me her seat. I explained that I would be getting off in a couple of stops but it was nice of her to offer. I get a lot of that these days. I must be showing my age.

At the rendezvous I noticed about 30 motorcycle cops loitering. It was not clear to me how that would assist in the matter of crowd control. I found a park bench near the statue of the Duke of Wellington and ate my sandwich. The first thing I noticed was that we did not have the numbers that we used to have before lockdown. I assumed this was something to do with cancelling the September protest and rearranging another protest at short notice. Does this add substance that Thick Lizzie and her horrible friends assassinated HMQ? 

I got to talking with a young man named Fouad (not his real name). He was British born but his parents took him to Qatar as a child from whence he had recently returned. He was concerned about events in the Middle East. Qatar’s economy was in trouble because of the country’s involvement in wars in the Horn of Africa and the region. He believed that young people were getting restless and pressure was building up for change. I hoped he was right. I reminded him that Lawrence of Arabia felt strongly that the post WW1 arrangements would cause endless trouble in the Middle East. That was still happening. Perhaps the Duke of Wellington’s greatest achievement was his involvement in the Treaty of Vienna (1816). From 1702 till 1815 there had been a succession of major wars in Europe. The Treaty of Vienna brought a century of relative peace to Europe. It was not a perfect peace (Crimea, Franco-Prussian War) but it was an improvement on the century preceding 1816. 

The Treaty of Versailles (1919), by contrast, was a disaster. It practically guaranteed another terrible war barely 20 years later and, as stated above, the consequences in the Middle East rumble on. Do not underestimate the damage that incompetent politicians can do.

We set off at the appointed time. We chanted obscene slogans to the evident approval of the crowd. I saw the flags of Ireland, Scotland Wales, Cornwall, Devon and various European countries. A band planted the banner of the White Rose of York and bellowed out ‘Ilkley Moor bar t’hat.” I not sure what the anti Brexit connection might be but perhaps they wanted Londoners to know they were there. Some people carried banners demanded ‘Vote out Tory Scum.’ I mentioned that ‘Scum’ was took kind a word for Johnson, Thick Lizzie and their scumbag supporters. We turned down St James’ St past Davidoff’s. That is a cigar store that, the last time I checked, sold 18’ Cuban cigars at £1,000 a time. I shudder to think how much Cuban cigars cost nowadays. Then we went on to Trafalgar Square and down Whitehall. We made a lot of noise as we passed the entrance to Downing St. 

A contingent of Gammons and Flagshaggers loitered outside the Red Lion and shouted abuse at their betters. I made it to Parliament Square. Cops had erected crowd barriers to prevent people from sitting on the walls. I can walk for miles but standing around plays havoc with my old knee injuries. I hung around for about an hour then headed for Victoria Station. According to the cops and the neo Nazi newspapers the crowd numbered about 10,000 people. The organisers counted 50,000. Thick Lizzie has gone and been replaced by the robber baron capitalist who was partly responsible for the 2008 financial crash. Thanks, Tories.

The Brexit Balderdash Conspiracy and other TV broadcasters made no mention of the protest but they did cover the Hero’s welcome Johnson got at the airport. They made no mention of the sneers, jeers and booing when the other passengers on the aircraft learned that Johnson was on board. Apparently Johnson heard Gammons and Flagshaggers singing ‘Will ye no’ come back again.’ Johnson had returned to get his old job back and replace Thick Lizzie. Something tells me that not all Scottish people would approve of Gammons and Flagshaggers singing a Jacobite sing. Johnson has since decided that the time was not right to attempt a return to politics. 

Any excuse to visit Rohan is a good excuse. He is a little bit further on every time we see him. He knows more words; most of them to give orders to his parents and other willing slaves. When Jim was learning to play football I had him outclassed, at first, but that did not last. James had me outclassed at an even earlier stage. William runs me ragged. I shudder to think what Rohan will do to me when he is a bit older and I am even more decrepit than I am now. It was wonderful to see Rohan. It would be nice to see more of all my grandchildren.

The journey home was interesting. Traffic tends to be heavy on a Sunday afternoon and that weekend was no different. We had minor delays, nothing to get worked up about but tiresome just the same. The M62 is not my favourite stretch of road at the best of times. There seems to be some kind of technological black hole around here that confuses our Satnav. We spent a lot of time wandering around South Bradford before we finally got home. For all that it was a good weekend. We do not see enough of Rohan and his parents.

I have said before that when Management Consultants are good they are very good. The bad ones are dire. Robert Townsend believed that the one person consultancies are the best but the large, bureaucratic consultancies are a menace. The South African Government called in a consultancy to modernise their tax and revenue raising. It was disastrous. The consultancy goes by the name of Bain. I had the misfortune to have a South African called Bain p******g in my soup. He imagined himself to be a financial and commercial genius; despite all the evidence to the contrary. He was forever meddling in matters that were not his responsibility and which he was too thick to understand. In fact he was so thick he did not get it even when the issues were explained to him (carefully and in words of one syllable). His masterpiece was when he demanded that I put the organisation’s pension and medical insurance into a Ponzi. He was a commercial and financial genius who did not recognise a Ponzi scheme when he saw one. I wonder if he is at all connected with the Consultancy that did so much damage to the SARC.

Warmth tip for the winter: You lose a lot of heat through your mattress. Spread you summer weight duvet over the mattress, fit your sheet over that and put your winter weight duvet on top. It warms things up nicely. 

This week’s quotes: “If Thick Lizzie wants to present herself as the voice of sensible reconciliation she will be shocked to hear about the Tory Parity Conference …MPs trying to outperform each other with hare-brained schemes. Top prize to anybody who would come out with an idea that would not work … would make things worse but would be sold as a triumph to rabidly anti EU Tories … data gathering may seem like an obscure branch of computer science but is vital to every business … The EU may simply refuse to accept British changes … there is a limit to how much divergence you can have before it becomes counter-productive …massive delays and costs that far outweigh any benefits … Minister says the GDPR system will be adequate. Nothing could be further from the truth … shows how pointless and counterproductive this whole exercise is … current system is useful … changing it will be disruptive, time consuming, expensive and pointless … any attempt to make British legislation weaker will hit a brick wall … Red Tape will double … there is no room to manoeuvre, little to be gained and much to be lost … The PM’s growth strategy is a fraud… In the Thick Lizzie era we learn that after a storm you get another storm … we have yet to see the worst consequences … It does not look good for anybody … Thick Lizzie’s emergency budget did not need to happen … numerous extra factors complicate the picture … bizarre situation .. an administration’s complete lack of competence … Even Rupert Murdoch could see that Rothermere’s Mail titles were making an unforgivable blunder … Murdoch was incredulous that his fellow non dom could not see that in making Thick Lizzie PM he ‘laid out the red carpet for Starmer who is committed to outlawing non dom status … The options are death if we stick with Thick Lizzie and ridicule if we get somebody else … Doreen Lawrence, Elton John, Prince Henry have begun legal proceedings against Rothermere … ‘abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy’ … disheartening for Brexit die hards to learn that Michael Gove has been wondering ‘if Brexit was the right thing to do’ … That is up there with Karl Marx wondering if Communism wasn’t a boo boo  … Gove was ‘deeply troubled with a darkness inside him that corrupts the soul’ … Nigel Garbage praised Toilet Kwarteng’s budget … ‘best Conservative Budget since 1986’ … Garbage launched his own brand of gin … no distiller will admit to making it … An extinction level event for the Tory Party … UK has become the biggest money laundering criminal enterprise in the world … the ‘anti-growth coalition’ consists of everybody except Thick Lizzie … increasingly shambolic vestigial administration … Tory party’s rapidly dissolving morale … a country that is economically imploding and literally up to its knees in its own effluent … if policies are to be pursued as religious doctrine it follows that all who reject that doctrine must be unbelievers … Having a leader who hates to make mistakes makes it harder to correct them… Thick Lizzie wilts in a mess of her own making … has already secured her place in history … the PM whose grip on power was the shortest … roughly the shelf life of a lettuce … Investors have decided that Britain has become riskier … will probably try a great dollop of fudge … Premiership is already fatally spoiled … a lesson about the importance of sums adding up … turbulence has proved more persistent and more ominous … Trader’s nerves are jangling … underlying questions remain unchanged … vicious circle … downward spiral … credit outlook ‘negative’ … risk of prolonged inflationary pressures … limits to the amount of fudging they can get away with … MPs are in no mood to unload pain on their constituents … political feasibility diminishing by the minute … government has no good options … Britain has not helped itself … overconfident and underprepared Brexiters assumed they could hoodwink the EU into granting the benefits of membership without the costs … EU resents having to renegotiate a deal the UK agreed to …Macron came to distrust Johnson deeply … not even extreme populists in Italy or Poland talk of leaving the EU … Brexit is less a blueprint and more a cautionary tale … attempts at deregulation and tax cuts resulted in market meltdown … that the proponents of the doomed economic course are the most ardent Brexiters has not gone unnoticed … Three Prime Ministers have failed to make Brexit work. Why keep trying? … What we see is not just collapse of UK fiscal credibility. It is the evisceration of a cadre of Tories capable of doing the job … Each of these politicians has tried to make Brexit work. It will not work … Tory debacle … you can wing it as an amateur at DEFRA … as Home Secretary you can make sarky comments about the police, or, like Boris Johnson, you can simply lie. In monetary and fiscal policy you are dealing with reality … all other options to make Brexit work were tried … The magnitude of the Tory debacle does not lie simply in the damage it has done or the damage it will bequeath to a Labour Government. It lies in the ideological dead end the party has reached … a chimera, the Tories face a moment of ideological reckoning … out of the wreckage must crawl a new cadre of politicians who believe in fiscal realism … the pound has lost nearly a third of its value since 2016 … the strategic choice is the reversal of Brexit … a whole generation of Tories leapt over the parapet to be mown down. Hopefully we will not see their like again …a desperate winter looms with a forecast of high inflation, an NHS crisis … people are deeply worried … even Tories not famed for sensitivity, such as Rees Mogg, grasped this to some extent … the vision came attached to a serious flaw .. ecologically dismaying … politically insane … Tory grandees warned Truss of the dangers … we have had four Tory PM in just over six chaotic years, triggered by Brexit … Tory MPs mainly do not like Thick Lizzie or respect her and dread the idea of her leading them into an election … that is a tits-up tale if ever there was one … Thick Lizzie believed she had found the Holy Grail … found buried treasure … the pain was instant and severe …  George Osborne remedies did not work then … disastrous … the Shambles in Downing St … the markets looked aghast … £60B whole in public finances … financial fiasco .. Leaving the EU was a strong negative … Johnson’s infamous ‘F*** Business ‘remark … Business confidence in the UK is totally shattered … is it any wonder investment is flowing out of the UK? … Impossible to imagine how this promise can be fulfilled …  the damage has been done … projects that might get the country going will be beyond available resources … Collapse of Thick Lizzie’s authority is the logical conclusion of the anti EU cult that has wrecked Britain’s economy … in 2016 British economy was 90% the size of Germany’s, it is now less than 70% … Brexit … at each step has made things worse … May destroyed the bargaining position of the UK and its economy …  negotiations were mishandled by David Davis … the damage will continue for a long time … still the ultras try to make things worse instead of better … six years of failure, lies and fantasies were just too much … Tory Party has been taken over by a Death Cult … most politically prudent thing might be to lose an election and watch Labour try to sort it out … “

Pip Pip             Medway Delta (Retired)           Saboteur and Brexorcist First Class