Tag Archives: Britastrophe

Grassroots shoots

Don Adamson writes in his inimitable style from Yorkshire.

This week’s quotes: “Thick Lizzie is putting herself in a dangerous position … least experienced cabinet team the UK has had for decades (Comment after 12 years in office) … she will need every bit of Civil Service buy in she can get …Any efforts to introduce yes men will just drain the Civil Service of competent staff … … when Jacob Rees Mogg was supposedly in charge of public sector efficiency … incessantly wailing about civil servants not being at their desks while failing to notice that due to sell off of buildings there were not enough desks for civil servants to be at … Thick Lizzie’s moves are fundamentally unfair … crisis in the National Health Service is well known … calls for an independent enquiry (Comment: in Booming Brexit Britain an ‘independent enquiry is one that obeys Rupert Murdoch’s orders) … services unsafe as doctors struggle with huge workloads … no hope of building the promised 48 new hospitals … new Chancellor has admitted that any gas produced by fracking would not reduce costs for UK consumers … If he does not understand measures in his own price package what hope is there? …24 hours is maximum waiting time to file past body of the Queen … 40 hours waiting time endured by woman needing ambulance and hospital treatment … Thick Lizzie’s rusty Reaganomics … transplanting a 40 year old economic policy from USA to UK will not work … President brushed aside the contradictions … Thick Lizzie’s attempts to emulate the Gipper’s success is doomed … Thick Lizzie’s cheerleaders have read only the first part of the history of Reagonomics … early record was mixed … did not stop a recession … inflation rose … the result will be more conflict between monetary and fiscal policy … risk that inflation becomes entrenched … business leaders are warming to Labour … businesses despair of the Tory Party … after 12 years in office and four radically different PMs the Tories can hardly promise that Johnson’s tenure was especially shambolic … a suspicion that policy is being driven by ideological reflexes … Thick Lizzie’s approach worries firms … as for Jacob Rees-Mogg as business secretary, ‘I could think of a worse choice but you would have to give me an hour … NHS treats its workers so badly they are leaving … struggle to plan holidays … it is bonkers … the whole kit and caboodle of NHS employment is utterly Kafkaesque … working in an organisation that is indifferent to their needs … NHS can be a strikingly uncaring employer … The city is fighting to carve out a post Brexit role … 7,000 jobs, and £1.3Trillion of assets were lost from a sector that employs 1.1m … international firms opening a European hub prefer Amsterdam or Luxembourg … LSE’s importance as an equity hub has dwindled … in 2006 it raised 18% of global capital … in the first half of 2022 less than 1% … A wholesale repeat of the City’s post war reinvention remains out of reach … boosting the economy while ignoring environmental harm would be bonkers … keeping the heat on has replaced flying as an aspiration … Politicians of all stripes console themselves with the thought that Brits voted to leave the EU because they were misled by other, less upstanding politicians. ‘Nobody voted to be poorer’ runs the refrain. A scarier possibility is that people knew perfectly well what they voted for. Brexit will create a smaller economy but voters did not care … Thick Lizzie resembles a neo-liberal Kamikaze pilot, prepared to blow herself up for her cause …. The mad scientists … an experiment to test the riskiest of trickle down fantasies … It seems we have been misled … all we have needed all along was for the government to give vast amounts of money to the rich and wait for it to somehow boost the economy …Established economic theories and fact based research have disappeared a naysayer in a photograph of Stalin … all previous Tory governments have been left wing dupes … how doing nothing is supposed to increase growth is a mystery … this government will just find the money elsewhere … many things about this budget do not make sense … will cost the treasury a fortune … no additional growth, just a lower tax take … Cutting red tape is a right wing panacea, the kind prompted by snake oil sellers … the details are shocking … Justice system, social care, ambulance services and NHS are already on their knees … none of these measures likely to increase growth at all … a right wing wet dream … without even a semblance of an effort to make the numbers add up, no wonder the Office for Budget Responsibilities has been gagged … terrible news for those with mortgages (Comment: Daily Mail readers will love that) … right wing commentators in the press are praising it to the skies, but ignore these and read their financial pages instead … a right wing fantasy, an ideologically driven experiment to stuff the mouths of the rich with gold … it is betting with borrowed money that nobody knows how to repay … schoolboy errors … put the UK economy at risk … Kwarteng has always been a high risk appointment … too casual … too enamoured of his own intellect … a cabinet determined by loyalty to Truss rather than competence … in the space of four days three decades of sound economic management have gone up in smoke … pound suffered a rout … cartoon Thatcherism … Millwall strategy (no one likes us, we don’t care) is hardly a serious approach … Kwarteng, like the Bourbons has learned nothing and forgotten nothing … betrayed weakness not strength …,It is a fantasy to pretend that Britain can ignore the trend … a grab bag of ideas, poorly presented …it makes you wonder if Thick Lizzie is an undercover agent for the Bring Back Boris campaign … smug, cruel, arrogant, know it all ideologies …f*** the lot of you … failings of a wasted decade … sounds like insider trading … if it had happened under a Labour government the papers would have played merry hell … the money markets have made it clear they have no faith in Trussonomics … detestable characters in the Johnson resignation honours list … there are claims that Nadine Dorries knowingly misled Parliament …

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

Editor’s footnote: since Don wrote this, another Tory MP has been fired …

Britastrophe

Peter Cook

People ask me about the thinking behind the “Britastrophe” stickers from EU Flag Mafia. I took some time to design the slogan way back in March and a quick look behind the scenes reveals the thinking:

Brexit is a long term disaster in slow motion. Because of the long term nature of Brexit and the slow motion aspect, people have tended to discount the impacts or deny them as project fear. Following 1000’s of hours of on the street conversations with Brexiteers, I find that the vast majority of these people are not long range planners or strategic thinkers. They think in the here and now and tend to believe that you cannot plan for the future. Que sera sera is their modus operandi for long range planning.

However, Corona is very much in the here and now. Brexiteers recognise the impacts as they are very much within their “lived experience”. As I pointed out some 5 months ago, Corona has given us the one thing that Brexit never could. A realistic preview of Brexit, where toilet roll is currency, chicken drumsticks are traded in dark alleyways and Pampers are on their third use.

People tend to compartmentalise issues and we needed to make the connection between Corona and Brexit. In doing so we brought the short and long term together in a potent mixture. We initially tested this out on the street with my bicycle hoarding and then with the stickers.

In terms of sequencing the strapline, a catastrophe is bigger than a crisis or a disaster, hence the catchphrase Corona Crisis + Brexit Disaster = Britastrophe. Note the order and sequence and the use of the word Britain within the phrase. All the above must be done within as few words as possible for busy people, five in this case or three for the short form version. “Britastrophe” also sounds like the kind of word that Boris Johnson would use, hence my choice of a unique word to describe the combined effect.

I am deeply aware that people do not analyse stickers for any length of time but it’s important that we get our message across concisely and clearly.

Get your “Britastrophe” stickers at EU Flag Mafia. You may also enjoy their Bollocks to Brexit Facemasks … the best way to protect yourself from Brexit in the shops!

Sign our “Britastrophe” petition today

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The benefits of No Deal Brexit – 26 July

Peter Cook

I am constantly reminded by Remainers on social media that Brexit is done. There’s nothing we can do about it, and we should shut up and accept Brexit. Although I find this daily capitulation to Johnson’s Neville Chamberlain moment deeply depressing, I have decided to take their words seriously as I’m tired of fighting a war on two fronts. So here I’m setting out the reasons why No Deal (also known as an Australian deal) Brexit is a much better outcome for Britain than any other Brexit deal.

We already know the impossibility of securing a good Brexit deal from four years of vacillation and nonsense from our government in terms of economic, social and political outcomes. Theresa May’s Brexit deal was the high-water mark of Brexit and everything else has been a degradation of what could be said to be Brexit. Even Jacob Rees-Mogg and the ERG have derided recent Brexit proposals from David Frost as not being a true Brexit, positioning themselves in order to avoid responsibility for the Brexit monstrosity that they created.

Parliament rejected the Brexit deal by 432 to 202 votes

In any case, No Deal and the most likely Johnson Brexit deal are not very far apart in terms of the economic and social costs. Already Brexiteers are saying that the Brexit on offer will not be a real Brexit. This is rather like arguing about whether the real IRA was better than the Provisional IRA. This shapeshifting by the Brexit antagonists mitigates against securing a Brexit deal of any kind. Experts predict that the impact of Brexit will be a sustained loss of between 5-7% GDP over 10 years, compounded by COVID losses. The word “Britastrophe” has been coined to describe the combined impact of Corona crisis + Brexit disaster. Remember, it only took 3.5% loss of GDP to give us the 2008 crash. Imagine the exponential impact of Corona + Brexit on lives and livelihoods?

A No Deal Brexit is the most likely Brexit to help us regain an entry to the EU. Two to three months of abject chaos on the streets through food shortages, supply chain breakages, tariffs, delays, queues at borders, gridlocking of Kent and so on should be enough to bring Brexit Britain to its knees. Of course, there is no guarantee that the EU would let us re rejoin at this point, although they have kept their powder dry on this matter, unlike our testosterone filled bloated Prime Minister. Nonetheless, a No Deal Brexit offers us the quickest shortest sharp shock to Britain, whereas a Brexit deal simply delays the “boiling of the British frog”. Note that no frogs were injured in the making of this video.

No Brexit or No Deal?

Why then is a Brexit deal worse than No Deal I hear you ask? Well simply this. A Brexit deal will mean waiting 5 to 10 years to rejoin the EU whilst we “try the Brexit experiment”. Brexiteers will argue that it took 5 years to get Brexit done so we should at least allow 5 years minimum to try it out. When Remainers talk about rejoining the EU, they seem to forget that we would rejoin on a completely different basis than the current state of the United Kingdom. It is quite likely that Scotland will have left the UK within 5 years. It’s also quite plausible that Northern Ireland will be on the way to reunification with Ireland. Wales will probably join in the contagion of countries wishing to leave broken Britain and possibly even Cornwall. I said as a joke at No 10 Downing Street in 2017 that Britain would be reduced to the people’s republic of Thurrock. An exaggeration? Yes, but also containing certain grains of truth.

At the same time, the economic state of Britain will not be the same. Company departures, realignment of business models such as JLR, BMW, Toyota, Nissan, Airbus, Honda, HSBC, Santander and total relocations away from Brexit Britain could likely mean that the UK does not even meet the criteria to rejoin the EU. At the same time, the experience of Britain’s aggressive approach to Brexit will undoubtedly harden the EU’s view on our potential to rejoin without conditions, such as the adoption of the Schengen zone, the use of the euro as a currency etc. I would not want us back, so why would Brussels?

Doomsayers united

“Don’t be so pessimistic Peter”. I hear you say. “You are one of those doomsayers”. OK, I hear you. Perhaps you are right, so let’s be positive.

By September / October, it is quite likely that there will be severe unemployment, once the protective umbrella of furloughing is removed by “Dishy Rishi” Sunak, aka Mr “Whatever it takes”. At the same time, we are likely to be into a second Corona wave by then, given that the R rate in England is now at 1.00 or above, thanks to Tim Witherspoon and his ilk for insisting that pubs must be opened. I predict severe social unrest as people reach the bottom of their Maslow triangles. Mr “No Plan Johnson” has no plan for this. There are simply not enough police officers and army officers available to deal with mass civil unrest. What happens then? Is this positive enough for you?

What can you do about it?

We cannot rely on an opposition to help suspend Brexit. Sir Keir Starmer is lovely, but he is also playing the long game of waiting for this Government to fail. Labour are also embroiled in their own internal battles of anti-semitism and wokeness at this time. We must do it ourselves. Here are some things to do:

We must write to the 40 or so wavering Tory MPs and present the arguments for suspending Brexit in the wake of Corona. In fact, just write to your MP, full stop, using any of these arguments to make your point.
Get out on the streets. Visit your MP and demand that Brexit be suspended in the wake of Corona.
Write to the newspapers. Present compelling arguments for suspending Brexit in ways that Brexiteers can understand.
Work on individual soft Brexiteers and weary Remainers through “Brexorcism”.
Keep reminding people that Corona + Brexit = Britastrophe. Grab a roll of stickers from EU Flag Mafia to help you paint your town yellow.

Brexit is the product of “Parliamentary Paralysis”. We change parliamentary paralysis by influencing our MPs. We change the will of the people by writing to the newspapers and presenting the arguments. So, we need to target our MPs and we still need to target the general public to change minds. A “Brexorcism” takes skill patience and time. You can find out how to do these by reading the book “Let’s talk about BREX .. it”.

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SAY NO TO Britastrophe

Peter Cook

I coined the phrase “Britastrophe” a while back to explain the toxic combination of Corona Crisis + Brexit Disaster. Today sees the launch of the song “Britastrophe” by “Mutant Algorithm”. Download the mini album with three tracks and a free ringtone here. Here’s the trailer video:

Please GIFT the song to MP’s – both to Conservative MPs in order to persuade them to pull back from breaking international law and to Opposition MPs on all sides, to persuade them to grow a backbone and suspend Brexit in the wake of a Britastrophe.

Find your MPs E-mail address here.

Please send your gift with a personal message – a template is below for your use or adaptation. Personal messages work best.

Dear xxx,

I write to you with the gift of “Britastrophe”, a song which explains the toxic combination of Corona Crisis + Brexit Disaster. I ask you to exert your influence to suspend Brexit by voting against the UK Internal Markets Bill, currently passing through Parliament. The bill breaks international and domestic law and represents a new low point in our reputation as a great nation. Of course, your own reputation as an MP and that of your party goes hand in hand with this.

You will be aware that even Theresa May, Lord Howard, Sajid Javid, Norman Lamont, former Attorney General Geoffrey Cox QC and many others have raised serious objections to the bill as well as six former Prime Ministers on all sides of our politics from Sir John Major to Gordon Brown and even David Cameron. It has also gained international condemnation from world leaders across the globe, for its parallels with the 1933 Enabling Act. I need not remind you where that led. Our membership of the EU costs us 37 pence a day for 70+ years of peace and offers us opportunities for our children and country to be world leaders through the membership of the most successful experiment in collaboration on the planet. I write this letter as we learn that Kent is about to have a hard border in order to deliver Brexit chaos.

I ask you to restore trust and decency in politics and pull back from the brink of this Dominic Cummings inspired initiative. I am aware that MPs on all sides find the power grab by Cummings and Johnson extremely unacceptable with extremely worrying implications for democracy in the UK as Britain slides into a banana republic. Is that what you really want on your Wikipedia page as a legacy?

Corona Crisis + Brexit Disaster = a Britastrophe

Silence is complicit behaviour. Will you act to suspend Brexit before it’s too late?

Yours sincerely

Your name

If you like this article, please support us with a regular donation via GoFundMe or Patreon. Give us a tip via Paypal. We need support to continue doing this. It takes considerable time. Thank you in advance.

Read our book on Brexorcism

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Join us every Monday at 8 pm to Re-Boot Britain

The Britastrophe Tour

Peter Cook

Here are the highlights of our ongoing tour of Britain. Please support the tour via Bollocks to Brexit.

Last Saturday, we hit the Dorset coast. I counted some 82 conversations we had over the entire weekend. Somewhat astonishingly we only had two objections to our project in areas that were very “Brexity”. The roadside cafe owner on the A31 quipped “I thought you guys had given up”. I replied that whatever you thought of Brexit we had to keep on naming it for what it is. He nodded, although I sense he still wants his country back. But two objections from 82 conversations is not what our Government is telling us. COVID has changed people’s attitudes to Brexit and our core message that Corona crisis + Brexit disaster = Britastrophe was extremely well received in these Brexit voting areas. Time to think again.

From Portland to Poundbury – Only two out of 82 people still want Brexit

Somewhat more worryingly, the Lib Dems cancelled events we had put considerable time into at Chippenham and Cricklade. The committee had objected to our “Bollocks to Brexit” messaging. I was part of the group that originated this slogan on the street at No 10 Downing Street. It was subsequently popularised by Steve Bray at SODEM and then adopted as an official slogan by the Lib Dems. I seriously worry about their strategy if they are to worry about every small issue. The space in which they have to take a position gets smaller by the day. Ho hum.

On Sunday we visited Swindon for Europe with a great reception and a street performance of some of our songs, including “The Mogg Chorus” and “Brexit’s Comin’ ‘Ome” which nearly reached the UK Official Charts. They gained publicity from This is Wiltshire.

Mogg is one of the few who will gain from Brexit

Brexit Pathos as seen from the mind of the Brexit voter

One person still felt the need to defend Brexit. He has had nearly four years to do so, yet was unable to provide one save for the football metaphor of “WE WON, YOU LOST”. I do feel sorry for these people at times. Despite my football song, this is no game.

We continue this week with the tour:

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