Failing fast

By Don Adamson, Brexorcist and Saboteur First Class

This week’s homework: 1. Governments sometimes have to make tough decisions about controversial questions. There is a right way and a wrong way to do that. This government always chooses a wrong and stupid way to make tough decisions.

This week’s homework: 2. Brexit has failed and has been seen to fail. Every day produces more evidence that Brexit can only be a fiasco. Tories respond by sulking and blaming everybody but themselves. Labour Party responds by insisting that everything will be hunky dory so long as we pretend that Brexit is working (despite all the evidence to the contrary).There is no question of either Labour or Tories shifting their backsides and doing something to reverse the biggest act of stupidity any British government has perpetrated for many years. Which party is showing the greatest degree of hypocrisy and moral cowardice: Labour or Tories?

This week’s quotes: “English Chamber orchestra had to cancel a US tour … visa problems … King’s Singers … concert Pensacola College cancelled … one of the singers is gay … (COMMENTS: This does not sit well with Johnson forever talking about ‘new opportunities outside Europe’) … earthquakes in Turkey … Erdogan stripped the ‘experts’ out of state institutions … including the disaster response agency (COMMENT: 21^st century Tories have interesting things to say about experts. Perhaps it is just as well that UK is not in an earthquake prone area)… Britain’s creeping corruption … best assessment is Transparency International’s index … Britain is sliding to its worst ever score … Richy Scumbag is another in a growing list of Tory Prime Minister’s undone by Brexit … British companies do not train their staff … a lack of skills is making almost a quarter of all vacancies hard to fill … Covid 19 and Brexit have made that worse … government has completely ignored this puzzle … at a Facebook content moderation centre in Kenya run by Sama, an outsourcing firm … workers told Time magazine they were mistreated by both companies … accusing them of union busting, forced labour and human trafficking … Royal Mail is failing its duty to deliver letters on Saturday … Food chain may collapse when Brexit checks come in later this year … underlying problems caused by Brexit … to understand the problem you have to understand that this is a sector significantly disrupted by Brexit … UK market is not attractive … Brexit is adding to the chaos … despite what the ‘nothing to do with Brexit’ Brigade might believe … food logistics industry is less resilient .. a warning of what lies ahead … problems like this will be worse in future … sub standard meat is entering the country … could lead to African Swine Fever or another highly contagious and devastating disease … huge problem … small sign of what lies ahead … you ain’t seen nothing yet … government has had seven years to come up with a solution … and has failed … if ‘take back control was the lie that unleashed Brexit might ‘let them eat turnip be Brexit’s epitath? … We are on our fifth Brexit PM … ‘nothing to do with Brexit’ supply chains … Thick Lizzie believes it but her judgement is catastrophic … the environment secretary could not have looked more bored, disengaged, could not give a toss about farmer’s problems … Johnson said ‘F*** business’ … Coffey said F*** Farmers’ … the never ending civil war in the Tory Party … dire figures about NHS … Lasers are precise, powerful and efficient … when James Cleverly said ‘we remain laser focussed on finding a solution … the reaction in Brussels was bemusement mixed with scepticism … the closer Richy Scumbag gets to a deal the more the lunatic fringes of his party seem determined to stop him … there is no way to divide and conquer the EU … they have stuck together for years … the involvement of Johnson is seen as hugely damaging in Brussels … last year alone Therese Coffey chomped her way through £4,442 of hospitality … Johnson’s memoirs will cause a massive problem for booksellers and librarians … should they be classified as fiction or fantasy … Brexit ideas … hopelessly flawed, poorly conceived or just plain suicidally stupid …. Britain stock market has languished. Gilts may be next … disastrous budget by Toilet Kwarteng … long running exodus from London … shrivel compared to the rest of the world … Big firms are ditching their British listings … Britain’s stock market … on a downward path … make matters worse … buyers of sovereign debt departing … British assets no longer seem like a must have for global investors … totemic blow to the City of London … Richy Scumbag’s deal softens the Irish Sea border but not as much as he claims … London does not seem to grasp … Johnson still dreams of returning to Westminster … idiotic rows … Johnson’s deal was disastrous … the case for long term despair is compelling … public services are exhausted … day long waits in A & E … some crimes have, in effect, been legalised … slow growth, rubbish public services and falling incomes will probably doom the Tories at the next election … After 7 years of Brexit EU has emerged as the clear winner … Tories heading for a thumping defeat at the polls … thanks to Brexit … Vote Leave claimed to have all the cards … nobody ever worked out what the British really wanted … fuzzy notions … not even the maddest populist on the continent thinks leaving the EU is a good idea … dire governance … a bad official always says yes to the ruler … goes along with him even when he is wrong … Journalists will soon be replaced by artificial intelligence. The Turing Test of the near future may be a machine’s ability to convince a Daily Mail reader that the latest polemic by a flesh and blood employee and not by a machine designed to generate rabid headlines to stir up xenophobes … If the Tories are crushed they will be replaced by something even worse … Richy Scumbag’s sudden conversion to competence … if we are lucky that may go down as the first moves in a Tory campaign to avoid electoral oblivion … whenever I enter a TV studio for a political … there is nearly always somebody from the far right. Their shtick is always to avoid logic and evidence … Caution prevents Labour from telling the truth about Brexit … there is no shortage of Leave voters who now think Brexit was a mistake … A majority of Labour voters backed Remain and a sizeable share of Brexiters now think Brexit was a mistake … (Johnson) Lying Putrescence …Brexit continues to wreck the lives of Britain’s small farmers … Liz Webster (a small farmer) always knew Brexit would be a disaster … she underestimated how quickly that disaster would overtake the industry … It is actually worse than we predicted … everyone is suffering … some of the countries from which we import agricultural goods have much lower standards … prospect is terrifying for the food industry … always contradictions in Brexit promises … to hide that reality … Farmers thought they would get more money while the government planned to shrink the industry … industry is bracing itself for the pain to come … Government refuses to demand that imports comply with UK food standards … this could hardly have come at a worse time … farmers were promised the world and have been sadly disappointed … the agricultural industry is a sacrificial lamb for Brexit … Richy Scumbag has all but given up pretending to be a presence on the world stage; still less believing ‘Global Britain’ was anything more than an empty slogan … he is reluctant to go anywhere … partly because he is worried about what plots against him might be hatched in his absence and an awareness of what other world leaders think about him and Brexit … Johnson Fanzine the Daily Mail was having problems finding Tory MPs to say on the record that he could come back as PM. The style of the paper is to quote unidentified ‘friends.’… Johnson’s ‘friends’ would have more authority if they talked like real people … ‘Partygate is a political show trial with an outrageous level of bias that would make Stalin blush’ … absurd tabloidese … Mandrake challenges the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday to quote real people willing to talk on the record … long suffering readers of the Times and Sunday Times reacted with dismay to the papers’ ‘exclusive’ serialisation of Paris Hilton’s memoirs …’ has the times become The Sun?’ … ‘I thought my subscription was to the Times and not some grubby tabloid’ … Rebekah Brooks, CEO of News UK, forced the book on the editors of both titles … (Conspiracy theories) we have seen a combination of people who have deliberately manipulated the situation and misrepresented the facts … conspiracy theories are impossible to knock down. Any presentation of the facts is dismissed as part of the plot … Conspiracy theorists hold 16 random beliefs and eight contradict the other eight … the only thing that holds them together is resentment and distrust … symptoms of Brexgret … many layers of denial, bluster and jingoistic claptrap … spiteful, empty pride … you let a bunch of hucksters, gangsters and race baiting demagogues hoodwink you into destroying your livelihood and your grandchildren’s future … justify the unjustifiable and repeatedly deny the evidence … Britain has endured a decade of early deaths … pandemic is not the only reason … something went wrong in the early 20102 (COMMENT: About the time we started getting corrupt and incompetent Tory governments) … between 2012 and 2022 approximately 700,000 Brits died sooner than they might have … death rates for 30 to 49 year old steadily increased in Britain since 2012 in sharp contrast to with neighbouring countries … life expectancy has fallen for the poorest and increased for the wealthy … Britain has done worst out of its European peers … hospital wait lists of record lengths … crisis in primary care … poorer Brits are more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at a later stage … it will be tricky to find enough radiologists and GPs to make a difference … life expectancy worst affected in places with the largest decline in housing services and social care spending … cannot obscure the fact that something has gone badly wrong in the last decade …no European country has stalled as much as Britain … funding cuts are likely to have worsened health outcomes … 40% of the burden on the NHS may be preventable … services have been pruned in the last decade … 10m years of life have been in lost in Britain over the last decade compared with what might have been expected in 2011. The grim total keeps ticking up … Russia’s war on the Ukraine has vindicated Macron’s call for a stronger EU … A new plan to stop migrants in boats is unlikely to work … impractical, morally and legally dubious … a myriad practical flaws … echo an earlier failure to tackle the problem … lawyers say plan has made no actual difference … though it may temporarily please the right of the Tory party … the plan is the wrong way round … new law will not stop the boats … Tory intellectuals (sic) declared that culture had vanquished economics … ‘It is not the economy, stupid’ ran one headline … What is going on out there is brutal … miserable politics … economic competence is decisive in general elections … Tory right wingers who call themselves Thatcherites have treated distribution networks much as a toddler with a hammer treats a wristwatch.