60 days of Brexit and the massive success stories of Brexit keep coming in. Here’s a roundup of recent news and fake news by The Express, Mail and Sun.
Brexit realities
Millions face economic shock from COVID. Brexit simply multiples the problem into the long term. See New Economics.
Meanwhile, Kent Police are involved in Operation Mask Brexit, drawing in thousands of Police officers from 33 forces to cover up the effects of Brexit on borders, ports and roads.
Steve Cock, who runs a customs consultancy, regularly sees lorry drivers forced to stay in his firm’s car park at Ashford for several nights because they do not have the right paperwork to get into Europe. Such confusion is echoed by the Road Haulage Association (RHA), which says that 50-60 per cent of freight vehicles are leaving the UK empty. A haulage source was blunt: “We have become the world leader in exporting fresh air.”
There’s still time to make your mark on Boris Johnson’s awful Junta. Please follow the links below and help us chart Dying for Boris this week.
Daphne Franks writes in The Craven Herald about the realities of clapping for carers versus the hard realities of paying key workers properly. If you care about carers vote the Tories out on May 6th in the local elections.
“We need our nurses. They care for us. We need to care for them”.
A stitch in time saves nine
Join us to find out how you can move the dial on local elections every Tuesday at 7 pm via ZOOM
Masking Brexit 1984 style
The media are now running ads to tell people how well Brexit is going. The ads are not paid for by Russian oligarchs or our enemies, but by OUR Government !!
+UPDATE+
U.K. govt paying British newspapers & media outlets large sums of money to run pro Govt fake news items telling the population what a success Brexit has been.
Don’t die for Boris – download the song and take back control of our media – click on the image to find all options to bugger Brexit
A number of people are suggesting myself and others in the shellfish industry have been lazy, stupid (or both) for not being ‘prepared’ for the carnage Brexit has caused on the shellfish export industry. If we predicted this, why weren’t we ready? 1/9
You know we have reached rock bottom when businesses ask Michael Gove for help with Brexit. The Gove – Johnson marriage of convenience is clearly under strain now that Johnson has put unelected mediocre bureaucrat “Sir” David Frost into the cabinet to fight Gove.
Distraction and gaslighting
Andrew Bridgen wants us to drink “Peckham Spring Water” and not that “smelly Euro water”. Satire made real in his letter to the House of Commons to distract us from Brexit realities.
Peckham Spring
Get your copy of our book on Brexorcism – click on the extract
With thanks to Irina Fridman, Mike Cashman, Peter Daws, Helga Perry, Lisa Lanfranchi, Daphne Franks, Adrian Ekins-Daukes, Heike Wilms, Louise Hunter, Martin Housden, Carol Fraser, Paul Bowers and Susanna Leislle.
EU rules on some types of shellfish leave UK fishers ‘devastated’.
By Adrian Ekins-Daukes
Fishers around the UK have been “devastated” by fresh problems with exporting their produce to the EU, after the government admitted that exports of live mussels, oysters, scallops and certain other shellfish would be subject to ongoing restrictions.
Those are all classified as “live bivalve molluscs” – a category which also includes cockles and clams. Under longstanding EU rules, catches of live bivalve molluscs from non-EU member states can only be imported without treatment if they come from waters deemed of the highest quality. Vessels from non-EU states also cannot land live bivalve molluscs in EU ports.
These rules have closed off many exports of live bivalve molluscs from the UK, since Brexit took full effect. The market for such shellfish is a small and specialist one, valued at less than £12m a year, but for the small number of fishers who operate in it, it is often their main livelihood.
Selfish Shellfish? Click on the image to Re-Boot Britain
The rules, and the disruption their enforcement has caused for fishers, cannot be termed a “teething problem” as other red tape has been, because they will apply permanently under Brexit unless the government can forge a fresh agreement with the EU to make exceptions for UK produce.
The fishing industry called on the government to do more to try to resolve the problem. Barrie Deas, chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, said: “This is devastating for those involved, and it cannot be left as a closed issue. Those of our members who produce mussels and cockles in particular are affected and are very seriously impacted – no exports to the EU as the UK is now a third country. This has to be sorted at government-to-government level and our understanding is that talks are under way, but so far without producing a satisfactory outcome.”
Alistair Sinclair, chair of the Scottish Creel Fishermen’s Federation, blamed the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as well as the UK government for the difficulties, and warned that they were a foretaste of future negotiations. “This is possibly a demonstration of the difficulties that lie ahead Throughout the whole run-up to Brexit, our voice was not considered by the Scottish government and indeed the Tory grandees.”
Fishers could try to comply with the regulations by taking on further processing of the molluscs, to gain the health certification necessary for exports, but this can be costly and time-consuming. Many had hoped that the Brexit agreement would allow for their exports to continue. The EU is the main market for many such specialist fishers.
Brexit was sold on the promise of fish and ships
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “Live bivalve molluscs such as oysters, mussels, clams, cockles and scallops can continue to be exported to the EU if they’re harvested from class A waters or cleaned, or have cleared end product testing in the UK. We will continue to raise the issue of live bivalve molluscs not ready for human consumption with the EU, to ensure the trade can continue securely.”
The European commission confirmed that the requirements were not temporary, and were applicable to all such shellfish imported from the UK.
Most of the fisheries affected are in England and Wales. Exports of bivalve molluscs are worth less than £12m a year, of which clams make up more than half, with oysters and mussels worth about £2.7m each. Defra said it could not estimate how much of this market would be affected as some are subject to “depuration” which would allow their export to continue.
The author
All at sea with Brexit?
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At what point do you consider that “enough is enough” in terms of voting conservative in the local elections? Are you at breaking point yet? Ask yourself the following questions?
Do you mind that Boris Johnson promised fishermen that he would take back control of their waters only to find that this was a red herring?
Do you mind that Liz Truss has done a trade deal with Japan that gives them five times more trade than we get?
Do you mind that Matt Hancock wasted £37 BILLION of your taxes on fictional Test and Trace equipment?
Do you mind that Boris Johnson presided over up to 80 000 unnecessary COVID deaths?
Do you mind that the Conservatives are now unhappy with the Brexit deal it signed off without reading?
Do you mind that Boris Johnson lied to The Queen?
Do you mind that Boris Johnson will be judge and jury at an enquiry about his conduct as the leader of your country?
Do you mind that Boris Johnson said there would be no border in Ireland and now there is as Brexit marks a return to “the troubles”?
Do you mind paying £35 ++ in tariffs and taxes for goods imported from Europe when we were promised that trade would be frictionless and free?
Do you mind that India and other countries require freedom of movement as part of any trade deal with Britain? This is the very thing that the Conservatives promised to stop through Brexit.
Do you mind that you were lied to about Brexit, COVID and Grenfell?
Do you mind that James Dyson was paid millions and never made a single COVID ventilator?
Do you mind that UK trade in dairy products has been decimated by Brexit?
Do you mind that farmers are unable to get workers to pick fruit and veg after Brexit?
Do you mind that the wallpaper used to redecorate Downing Street costs more per roll than most people earn in a week?
Do you mind?
Do you mind?
Do you mind?
Vote for any party other than the Tories on Thursday May 6th
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Five years on and Brexit’s still undone. I often get quaint looks when I talk about Brexit in Kent now and some subtle or even less subtle social disapproval. For the record, I’m quite happy to be considered to be “so last year” until I am returned to the soil by my maker, or Brexit is placed in a shallow grave, whichever comes soonest. Brexit is in fact undone now that Johnson has realised he never read the contract. It will never be “done”. I told everyone that we’d be doing Brexit for the next 50 years and it begins to look that way. In five years it becomes apparent that we still don’t know what Brexit means but we are beginning to make some evaluation of what Brexit has brought us.
Economiceffects
£2.3 Trillion was lost in just one month from the city of London. Just for comparison and scale, that’s 58 years’ worth of our contribution of £39 billion to the EU wiped out in just one month. So, we would have to make up our losses due to Brexit until 2079 just from this impact alone. Let that sink in!!
Our Australia trade deal is worth 0.02% of GDP over 15 years. It would take 2000 deals like this to even make up our losses from our arrangements with the EU. At a generous estimate of our rate of deal making, we can expect to make up the losses from Brexit in trade deals by the year 3021. I know that’s bad economics as not all trade deals are worthless and some also take years not months but I think you should get the point.
£37 billion has wasted on test and trace. That’s more than what it takes to land a space mission on Mars at a mere £22.5 billion. Our contribution to the EU is £39 billion per year.
Despite promises made to fishermen on Brexit, the UK fishing industry will have been filleted by the time any new arrangements come into being with £1 Million being bled from the fisherman every DAY. Yet, we plan to spend £200 million on a Royal Yacht that the Royal family do not want or need. Brexit McBrexitFace will no doubt spend its time trawling international waters trying to net trade deals without catching anything more than scurvy.
Brexit shrank UK services exports by more than £110 billion over a four-year period. That’s 3 x our yearly contribution to the EU, much of which we get back.
Farmers have also been sold down the river with the introduction of hormone fed beef and the dumping of poor quality products into UK markets, just so that Liz Truss can claim success.
The building industry is beginning to show cracks with materials shortages and other supply chains being affected.
Food and drink exports from UK have declined by 50% since the beginning of 2021.
Coming soon, having lost EU steel import protections, our steel industry now faces a wave of cheap imports.
Hired goons distract people from Brexit shambles. Help us Re-Boot Britain by clicking the image.
Social / Welfare / Environmental
Brexit has been all consuming on Civil Service bandwidth and this means that there have been numerous areas of neglect. For example: social care, Grenfell, The Northern Ireland protocol and citizenship issues remain undone with massive consequences for lives and livelihoods. 305 000 people are caught in civil service backlogs for settled status and Johnson says he will not budge on the deadline of June 30th with impact on breaking up families and imprisonment at borders. Big issues in 2016 are still issues in 2021 due to the significant entropy of Brexit on progress across the board of Government.
“You can stay but your kids can’t”.
We are yet to see the whole impact of the end of the grace period at the borders but already all major supermarkets have imposed rationing on tinned tomatoes with food shortages predicted in the coming months and the army on standby.
And, of course, far from taking back control of £350 million per week for the NHS, Dido Harding is on the way to privatising your NHS. Was this on the side of a bus?
We did not need to do Brexit to deal with immigration. Our hostile environment has discouraged Europeans to work here. In particular we have seen a sharp decline in fruit pickers, care workers and other professions. The arguments made by Brexiteers to “grow our own” have not gathered any takers …
Instead of planting veg this year I have taken the Brexiteers advice to "grow our own". I have planted 3 doctors, 10 nurses, 5 scientists and 20 farmers in the ground. I now await the results #Brexiteers#BrexitReality#NHS#farming#ScienceResearch
— Re-Boot Britain – Rage Against The Brexit Machine (@BrexitRage) June 21, 2021
Political / Constitutional
The destruction of peace in Northern Ireland has already begun by the reckless abandonment of the Good Friday Agreement. Johnson promised there would be no border down the Irish Sea. He broke that promise, ending 30 years of peace on the island of Ireland. Kate Hoey has been cynically and dangerously stoking the fires of unrest in Northern Ireland, having promoted Brexit.
The destruction of the United Kingdom has begun with Scotland seeking independence, reunification of Ireland and independence movements beginning in Cornwall and the North East. Independence for Scotland and unity for Ireland are of course good things and entirely predictable consequences of Brexit. In extremis, England will be reduced to the People’s Republic of Thurrock by 2040!! Gibraltar has special status as a means of dealing with the fact that the majority of residents work in Spain. In 10-20 years time we can expect Gibraltar to be under Spanish control. The same goes for The Falkland Islands, The Channel Islands and The Isle of Man.
The UK is now a four nation state and a one party state with no effective opposition. It may sound hard to say this but Brexit is as much a product of a passive and fearful opposition than it is the result of a hard core of Brexit ultras and psychopaths.
Britain no longer has a special relationship with the USA as President Biden seeks to re-educate us about the realities of breaking international law. At the same time Biden has forged stronger links with Europe as a natural partner of similar size in terms of trade and other opportunities.
I invite Brexiteers to provide a list of benefits of Brexit – Five years waiting
Ethical / Legal
Protest is now being clamped down on, using COVID as an umbrella to hide under. Boris Johnson is to remove the powers of the Electoral Commission after they asked awkward questions about the redecoration of his flat.
Crony contracting continues as The Good Law Project reveals details of companies offered lucrative contracts based on personal networks rather than competence in the chosen industry. If you are to shrug and say “so what” to this, these contracts were for PPE. This means that people will have died unnecessarily because of faulty selection procedures. You may well say that the pandemic demanded a speedy response. Well the speediest response would have been to select companies with the capacity and competence to make the products rather than novices.
My own MP Mr Rehman Chishti is under investigation for having his hand in the till over property development scandals. You can help by reporting him to the bar council.
— Re-Boot Britain – Rage Against The Brexit Machine (@BrexitRage) June 21, 2021
We have still not found the identity of the Tory rapist. Is this an example for our children to look up to?
It now seems that our children are to sing a Soviet styles song in school to unite the country. I have a better suggestion – see the song below
Ignorance is strength – Post Brexit education syllabus
I could go on but I won’t. All this in just five years … and we’ve only just begun …
A collaborative effort to mark five years of Brexit carnage from Greg, Lisa, Patricia, Irina, Andrew, Adrian, Mike, Helga and the good people at Re-Boot Britain. Join us every Monday to Break Brexit Before Brexit Breaks Britain.
Please support our work – click on the boot to Re-Boot Britain
There is a job going for Director, Brexit opportunities in the Cabinet Office – I was excited by the prospect of finding out what these were after five years of waiting patiently so I have applied. My application is below. I’d urge you to do the same. Here is the specification:
Dear Lord Sir David Frost,
I have been an avid follower of your work ever since The Frost Report and I was excited to see your research post for a Director of the BOU (Brexit Opportunities Unit). You need look no further, as you have found your man. To quote ELO, ‘I’ve been searchin’ for five years on my own account, meticulously comparing what we had in the EU with what we are getting, now that Brexit is out of the oven. I’d like to continue that research in the quest for the economic, social, technological, ethical, environmental and constitutional benefits of Brexit. As far as your job specification goes, I meet and exceed your requirements, in brief:
I am a skilled researcher, covering qualitative and quantitative methods, survey design and communications. With 3.5 degrees covering science, business and HR, I am quite used to dealing with the distortion of data by politicians, so I’d be more than able to extract the Brexit benefits from the background noise, if they exist. Broadly speaking, I am happy to continue with your line of “if the facts don’t fit the story, change the facts or just erase them”.
I am used to dealing with intelligent senior people across industry, politics, media and in public life. I am quite sure I could “level down” to work with imbeciles, sycophants and psychopaths as required by the role. I met the Prime Minister in 2012 shortly after the Olympics when he was dating a young woman so we have actually met.
In terms of change management, I have written 12 books on leadership and one on the question of changing minds on Brexit. Admittedly, the strategies in “Let’s Talk About BREX .. it” are directed towards the removal of illusions and fantasies about Brexit, what I call “Brexorcism”. However, these change management strategies are just as applicable to the erasure of people’s minds who voted to Remain, although it may be a lot quicker to round these people up and send them to a BCC (Brexit Concentration Camp) – in fact, I will make a proposal on this separate matter to Priti Patel shortly. I am prepared to work on this for 50 years as suggested by Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Change minds on Brexit
In terms of commanding confidence, I am a skilled practitioner of speaking truth to power. I see that lying is a precondition for doing the job and I would cope with this by using a placard saying “fake news” whenever I give a public brief to the media for greater clarity. In any case, in the post-Brexit world, the truth is an expensive luxury. I see that you, Johnson, Patel, Hancock, Raab, Duncan Smith, Francois et al. have managed to get by without needing to get dragged down by the truth. Bravo!!
As regards changing laws, I have no respect for the law, having been let down by the Police on several occasions when being attacked by Brexiteers. This means that I regard the law as unimportant in the quest to get Brexit done. Judges and the judiciary are one of the areas we must target to remove the scales of justice from people’s eyes.
I was considered to be too organised to get a job for Dominic Cummings. This demonstrates my ability to stick at something that has been a proven failure over the long term.
Dealing with the Russians at Parliament – Photograph by Bruce Tanner http://www.brucetanner.com
Crucially I have no political experience at all, a massive asset in a political world befuddled by political experts. Who needs experts (Gove, Govia). But I am good at coming up with meaningless phrases to describe the toxic cocktail of Corona crisis + Brexit disaster aka “Britastrophe“.
In the words of The Clash “I hate the army and I hate the R.A.F. I don’t wanna go fighting in the tropical heat. I hate the civil service rules. I won’t open a letter bomb for you.”
Put plainly, if Dido Harding can run the NHS, I can run the fucking Cabinet Office, FFS.
In summary, 27 years diverse experience as a business consultant, author, speaker and academic, working with companies such as Unilever, Pfizer, The UN, Virgin, BP. Find me at Linkedin.
On the suggestion of Julia Smith, may I ask for these other fringe benefits:
Free flags for my home, car etc.
Private health insurance delivered by the NHS
Cocaine discounts
Free use of the Royal Yacht Brexit McBrexitFace at weekends
Exclusive access to PPE contracts for which I am quite unsuitable @ £107 million per item
I require a minimum of two cats in the office at anyone time and a supply of fresh food for the kitties
A job for my son in strategic management
A gravy train and two year’s supply of Bisto
Yours in waiting
Peter
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Ignorance is the new intelligence
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Will world leaders COP out at COP 26? The world is watching.
Brexit madness makes our climate change problems much worse:
Increased transportation increases the Carbon footprint of Brexit Britain.
A bonfire on standards leads to moral hazard in materials and product manufacture. It’s back to the bad old days.
Disaster capitalism also leads to unethical practices, some of which are environmentally unsound.
Even Evan Davis sold us down the river on BBC Radio 4 when he proclaimed that, until we stop flying, driving petrol based cars and stop industry we could more of less forget any progress. Although Evan is an economist he seems not to understand that billions of people making small decisions makes a massive difference to our net zero target. Importantly, his careless comments contribute to the view that “climate change is someone else’s fault”. I’d expected better from him.
Nicola Sturgeon is much more on point, having been unafraid to meet Greta Thunberg today.
We must be the adults in the room. Watch this video and share widely:
Please help support the people who made this video at COP26.
Here are our first cut stories from our Scenarios to Rejoin exercise. We are still working on these and you can join in every Monday at 8 pm via ZOOM. So far we have four thematic stories which may end up mixing and intermingling but at present are separate:
Bluff, Bluster and Bust – predominantly macro-economic
Breadline Britain – predominantly socio-economic
The Empire Strikes Back – predominantly political
The Eye of the Irish Tiger – predominantly global but focused on the post Brexit world outside Albion, so not exclusively Ireland, more a competitive scenario as to how the world responds to Brexit especially near neighbours
I’ve yet to capture some of the other scenarios – environmental and long range legal stuff. But we have made huge progress down to your efforts. Please get in touch to add your fingerprints to the work.
Please be kind. These are by no means finished and need your input.
Bluff, Bluster and Bust
London made a bid for independence in 2030 as news that the UK economy slipped from No 4 in 2015 to No 11. This had been preceded in 2029 after the UK Brexit economy finally tanked. The Sun reported the headline “England sick as a Brexit dog”.
The rot had started much much earlier, when Rishi Sunak removed the triple pension lock in 2022. This produced a generation of pensioners that were effectively living on the breadline, unable to support children and grandchildren, selling off their homes to pay for retirement and care homes. This was compounded by stagflation due to Brexit, as wages levelled off and National Insurance increased. Working people struggled to get well-paid jobs. Brexit economists struggled to find diversions to point the finger for Britain’s problems elsewhere but the underlying logic of high structural costs and declining economic activity defined our early years of so-called freedom. Things became so bad in 2024 that some people in UK insist on being paid in Euros. The Lugano Convention had still not been signed by 2026 but Britain continued to rely upon services to drive it’s economy, yet Lugano prevented UK from thriving in a post Brexit world. Save for an uptake in food production which happened as a necessity after The Hunger Games in 2022, Britain was broken.
The new EU tax avoidance scheme came into force on January 1st 2022. Brexit supporters started to become angry that it meant that Amazon et al had to pay tax in the countries they operated in within EU countries, whilst Britain became a haven for companies who wished to avoid tax. This meant that people were exploited to even greater levels than before and thus the dream of Brexit became even more distant.
Contributory factors to the decline of Britain as a world economic power began quickly after Brexit with Scottish independence in 2023, Irish unification in 2025 and a decision by Wales to seek independence in 2027. Their economies disappeared too, although Boris Johnson tried to hold back Scottish independence by moving UK public service agencies out of Scotland. Once the contagion began, it was unstoppable with London seeking to make itself a Crown Dependency and Cornwall and The North-East asking for Regional Parliaments.
In other disruptive and unexpected events, cybercurrency became regulated as the Bitcoin economy collapsed in 2025. Jacob Rees-Mogg lost everything in 2024 in the Sterling Crisis, after overplaying the markets with his financial trading company. The Daily Express headline said “How the mighty have fallen”, whereas The Sun ran with “Mogged off’. The Brexit illusion of Singapore on Thames came back to bite people where it hurt most. Never more had bluff, bluster and bust made more sense to the blowhards of Brexit.
Join us on Wed 8th September to discuss Rejoining the EU with Professor AC Grayling – Click picture for your ticket
Breadline Britain
By 2031, the impact of The Brexit Hunger Games had been felt through civil unrest, the formation of The People’s Progress Party (PPP), formed from the fragments of Labour, Lib Dems, a merger with The Green Party and Memoranda of Friendship with the independent Governments of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and The European Union. Although the party could not stop the damage done by Brexit, Brexit carnage had eventually unified the people against the remnants of the Conservative Party. This took place after an attempted takeover by Jacob Rees Mogg and following the worst riots ever seen on the streets of Britain in 2022, after the impact of Brexit on food supplies, prices and availabilities of goods and services previously taken for granted. One of the earliest acts of the PPP was to prosecute various culture carriers of Brexit. In 2026 a group of these people were jailed for various offences, including Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.
The PPP was formed in 2023 in a complete volte face of traditional politics. People were selected for office, based on rigorous selection methods and then elected by people’s assemblies. Whilst the party had some politicians drawn from the best of the crop, it was formed from people from business, the arts, community leaders and so on. This was informed by the insight that some celebrities and sportspeople were more skilled and popular than Westminster politicians. This was however no populist uprising. The PPP insisted on informed democracy, fought the election in 2024 on some old-fashioned ideas about trust, reforming politics and healing the country. They won a majority of votes but lost the election to the Conservatives due to the existing FPTP system This was based on some very good campaigning, based on an Enough is Enough message and a promise to make a Better Britain in a Better Europe through Better Politics. This included plans for electoral reform. It had become clear that the European Union felt they were better off without Britain at the table and, although they had left the door open to rejoining the EU, it would come with some important pre-conditions. The most important one was for a complete removal of the Brexit ultras from power, to avoid a “Hokey Cokey Brexit” i.e. in/ou/shake it all about approach to EU membership. Other items such as Schengen and Euro membership were negotiable depending on whether they felt that our standards of democracy were acceptable and the degree to which English exceptionalism had been removed from the political culture.
Breadline Britain tipped over in September 2021, when children were seen crying in the aisles of Dudley Tesco, as their parents fought over the last packets of frozen chicken nuggets. An angry woman was heard to say “I voted to get my country back, but not for a chicken shortage. I was duped”. Once Brexit food import restrictions kicked in on October 1st 2021, the situation rapidly deteriorated. Shortages were not limited, sporadic and selected. They were continuous, deep and they touched everyone in strangely different ways. Still one or two leave voters celebrated the Blitz spirit. Laura from Basildon won a prize on “Come Dine Without Me” and went to No 10 Downing Street. She was reported as saying “I’m actually not that hungry”, when having an austerity Christmas lunch with Boris Johnson.
Government plans to mitigate foreign lorry driver shortages due to Brexit backfired badly into 2022. The 2000 army HGV drivers diverted to deal with the 100 000 foreign lorry driver shortage were quickly rediverted to deal with the Autumn of Discontent, which emerged because of the food shortages and rationing of specific items. Attempts by food retailers to up HGV driver wages to £55 000 were of course welcomed by lorry drivers. However, it quickly became apparent that this would “drive traffic” around the supply chain of drivers, as some ambulance drivers, HGV drivers in other sectors etc. decided that they fancied a better wage. It simply created deficits in other areas. The initial reaction of the public to the “Keep on Trucking for Britain” campaign was positive but turned sour quickly, as people realised impacts on prices and NHS services.
A tipping point in the Brexit debate was the so-called “Pigs in Blankets” famine of December 2021 where frantic parents fought for Turkeys and the trimmings in supermarkets after the supply chain broke down. Preceded by a number of marches for and wildcat disturbances at food depots in Britain, Bernard Matthews was asked to join a Government taskforce with Ian Botham and Roger Daltrey on the future of turkeys for Christmas. Botham promptly attempted to blame farmers for the problem and was squewered by Matthews who was heard to say “Bootiful”. Meanwhile M&S Chair and former Conservative Party MP Archie Norman pointed out “This is totally down to Brexit. Nothing to do with COVID and the product of a party I was once proud of, but which has now put Brexit ideology above pragmatism”.
But Britain was not beaten. Boris Johnson, buoyed up by the birth of his second son, Aristotle, whipped up enthusiasm for British Bulldog Spirit and initiated a new scheme called Grow for Britain, where house owners were given a £50 grant to convert their gardens to allotments, using Afghans as live-in labour as part of their cultural conversion. Johnson appeared on Gardener’s World just before Christmas in a project with Monty Don to convert the Rose Garden into a cabbage patch just before Carrie delivered Aristotle to offset people’s thoughts about food shortages at Christmas. In real life however, the British people found that micro farming was not popular, especially in the middle of winter.
Brits, freed from lockdown restrictions and loaded with cash sought to unload their excess financial baggage by holidaying in Europe and beyond in 2022 and 2023. But they faced a new problem. Sterling. In 2022, Sterling had parity with the Euro and in 2023, with the dollar, due to Britain’s new standing in the world as a third country. Although some continued with their holidays, Rishi Sunak introduced restrictions limiting the amount of money taken on holidays to curb the Sterling crisis. The Daily Express was unable to blame the problem on Johnny Foreigner and used the headline “Pounded by Brexit”. Queues at passport control when the EU channel was absolutely empty made holiday makers irate, aside from the hassle and £6 charge to go into Europe. But most staycation holidays in Britain were out of reach financially for many people, as prices were hiked due to supply and demand considerations.
Can’t get no
Shortages continued at a deep level for two more years until 2024, but they never actually went away completely. Some items simply disappeared from shelves. Many were unexpected, such as bleach, diagnostic tests, tonic water and some medicines for rare conditions. As with all crises, human ingenuity finds a way. If an out-of-stock item was discovered in a particular town on a given morning, all the stock would be gone by 9 am and then sold on the black market. “Only Fools and Horses” became the reality in trading scarce goods and every village had a character known as Del Boy. Clandestine banana trading was used as a kind of proxy to preserve community spirit as Del liked to say “’Ave a Banana” to keep the neighbours sweet. The Police noted a small rise in looting, not of money or property, but of vegetables from gardens. All the while Boris Johnson refused to accept humanitarian aid from the EU during the UK “hungry gap”. This is the few weeks, usually in April, May and early June, after the winter crops have ended but before the new season’s plantings are ready to harvest. Boris Johnson continued his campaign of deflection into 2023 after he swapped Carrie up for a debutante who was working as a media relations executive at The Daily Express. This followed Carrie’s failure to host a third child for the Johnson dynasty.
Little things seem to irritate more than the big-ticket items. Whilst people were prepared to forget the £37 billion wasted on fictional PPE and the 150 000 unnecessary COVID deaths, they found it extremely annoying that the EU’s new satellite system Galileo made GPS navigation much more accurate with implications for driverless cars and HGV’s into 2027. Insurance companies started to insist on the use of Galileo as the gold standard for driverless vehicles and people were able to access Galileo on a paid for basis.
Although Boris Johnson attempted to deflect the fact that Britain has systematically degraded its levels of food security over decades, people were more persuaded by the continuing food shortages in 2022 and the so called “Andrex Wars”. Strategies to pay lorry drivers extra by commercial companies are seen to backfire after it becomes obvious that these were taking staff away from NHS ambulance drivers and critical services. In any case smart young people who saw the future did not want to take up careers as lorry drivers as they saw the advent of driverless trucks in 2028. Some hauliers upgraded to LHV rather than training new HGV drivers. The trucks were more efficient, lower GHG emissions per tonne transported.
After a complete meltdown of the Conservative party in 2027 and the removal of the Brexit ultras from power with some being imprisoned, the PPP finally got elected in 2028 and began the business of Rejoining the EU. This was preceded by riots by pensioners after free prescriptions were removed in 2026 on the road to privatisation of the NHS.
Join us on Wed 8th September to discuss Rejoining the EU with Professor AC Grayling – Click picture for your ticket
I came across a Linkedin post that wrote just before the referendum in May 2016 entitled “Should I Stay or Should I Go“. It attracted a lot of commentary including a 2916 word essay from one chap who outlined all the benefits of Brexit. I was reminded of the article and struck by just how inaccurate his predictions were. I reminded the chap of this, an HR professional, now retired. He replied that it was a casual comment and not an essay. He then became angry as I called him to account and phoned me up to tell me to ‘lighten up”. Why would I when he has ruined future generations’ futures? Later on he removed his comment and left Linkedin to cover his tracks. I confess that this was not my finest act of Brexorcism, but nonetheless, I’m sure his essay will have appeared to have weight. I’ve summarised it here as an interesting record of Brexit illusions. The trouble is, he still believes them!! Here is a summary of the main illusions that Paul has swallowed:
TRUE : We are not leaving NATO et al
FALSE : Security implications of Brexit remain unclear
FALSE : Border and travel issues are a major source of Brexit problems
FALSE : The UK economy will benefit by Billions – in fact the reverse is true
FALSE : Farming is a shitshow under Brexit and has hardly begun. Fishing the same
FALSE : Human rights are significantly reduced under Brexit
FALSE : European workers have not continued to flock here under Brexit. We are yet to see the full impacts in transport, NHS, care, hospitality, construction and so on
FALSE : Jobs and production will not move out of UK. We have seen a steady stream of jobs leaving the UK under Brexit and again this is just the beginning
TRUE : We never lost our sovereignty. The withdrawal act stated it on the first page of the document
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