Tag Archives: Britastrophe

This week’s quotes

Updated on

05/05/2023 by author

Peter Cook

From Don Adamson, Brexorcist in Chief.

Tory Brexit Scum

This week’s quotes: “open goals that Labour are constantly missing … we have had uncaring people in high office before … rarely have they been as uncaring and incompetent as Priti Patel and Sue Ellen Braverman …disaster of Brexit … fake balance has corrupted TV in recent decade … Brexiters and Tory Party … to blame for everything … what does Labour think it is playing at? … Jeremy *unt knows that doctor’s pay has fallen relative to inflation since the Tories came into power … we are losing British trained doctors … go abroad where the pay and conditions are better … raw sewage pumped into English rivers on average 825 times a day …

Frack off …

What the papers say

Lawyers for the Daily Mail successfully argued in the High Court that that the names of Daily Mail journalists accused of crimes should remain secret … Graham Johnson confessed to fabricating stories for the Murdoch press … Gavin Burrows has provided contradictory witness statements to both sides in the Mail litigation … prompted chair of the UK statistics authority to write to the Tory Party to say their infographic was misleading … former Energy Minister Chris Skidmore MP … has been receiving salary of £80,000 a year as an adviser to a company … setting up a business.. Former education minister Gavin Williamson … will be paid £50,000 a year for seven hours work a month … News UK, the company that launched Talk TV lost owner Rupert Murdoch £4M in last financial year … even more than £31M lost by rival GB News…

Cost of living

Britain’s annual rate of inflation is 10% … still stubbornly high and twice that of US … populist economic model is bust … extraordinary … nightmare … reckless economic model … government has treated business with contempt … only bad options left … surging costs have kept the annual inflation rate in double figures … Britain’s post pandemic inflation rate … stubbornly higher than many of its peers … Tories will be remembered as the party who made most people poorer over 14 years and screwed up public services … there are more credible ways to count inflation … NHS is a stressful and poorly paid place … struggles to retain staff … junior doctors choose to work overseas … junior doctors left the profession a huge cost to the taxpayers for training them … something has gone badly wrong … real pay has fallen to around 14% below levels in 2010 …

The NHS

150,000 vacancies in vital jobs across the NHS … method is not working … Australia, New Zealand and Canada are only too happy to employ doctors we have paid £250,000 to 5000,000 to train … overseas recruitment is drying up because word is out NHS conditions are awful … excess deaths and waiting lists already high … UK has fewer doctors per head of population than most comparable countries and worse public health … worst public health crisis in a century … profiteering pack … profits of £78.4 M on income of £468M … extreme profits made by suppliers of PPE and testing kit … multi billion pound extent to which taxpayers were overpaying …

Brexit NHS Farage — We’re still waiting for the £350 million EVERY week Johnson

Brexit superpowers failing

We have no chance of being the new Silicon Valley and the Tories know it … all such promises will remain hollow … Tory politicians are anti Woke, despise the left wing ‘blob’ of human rights lawyers and civil servants … they want to represent the ‘somewheres’ and not the rootless cosmopolitan ‘anywheres’ … the ‘anywheres’ can take a hint … they will go anywhere to avoid the hate speech the Tories are spouting … what are the chances of UK emulating California … Zero … UK is lagging because we de-industrialised under Thatcher … our education system produces too few teenagers with maths and science skills … EU has agreed to pour in €6.2B of subsidies into semiconductor design … our young innovators are barred …

London is an attractive place for high flyers … in banking … Australia has become a Mecca for UK qualified doctors and nurses … Brexit has seriously damaged Britain’s ability to be part of the tech innovations story … youngsters have to believe that this is a country with a future, not just a past … Richy Scumbag has always been reluctant to talk about Infosys, the Indian IT giant founded by his father in law … government’s own database has shown the company has been involved in £172 M worth of public sector contracts … Scumbag’s wife holds 38.9M shares worth around £89M in Infosys … dividends £12M a year … not liable for UK tax …

Raab C Brexit

Dominic Raas … massively unpopular … more than half his constituents do not want him or his ideology… graceless remorseless death of a desperate man … Raas wrote the least contrite resignation letter of the modern era … Raas told the BBC that civil servants were out to sabotage Brexit, parole reform and overhaul of human rights laws … Tory Peer Lord Marland said exit of Raas … a conspiracy by the civil service … if anything the opposite is true … Raas did not recognise wise counsel when offered it … Johnson claimed ‘the civil service wants to destroy me’ … remorseless attacks on Civil Servants … is deeply corrosive to good government … populist politics … premise that there are simple solutions to complex problems … when the absurdity of this becomes clear the next step is the attribution of blame: the vilification of people supposedly obstruct the popular will … Judges are enemies of the people …

Parliament is unlawfully prorogued … civil servants are plotting against popular ministers … The civil service deserves a gold plated ‘thank you’ for keeping the country running while the Tories have been preoccupied with a seven year long nervous collapse over Brexit, the economy and tribal identify … Raas was one of the worst Foreign Secretaries of modern times (a disaster during the retreat from Kabul) … Underlying this is the weakness of Richy Scumbag … looked desperately for a loophole that would allow him to keep Raas … Scumbag clings to Sue Ellen Braverman ,,, she is a human shield between him and the far right … Scumbag presides over a hung Parliament of factions … just waiting to see how bad the damage is in local government elections … Tory edifice continues to crumble and the country suffers accordingly … Raas … pathetic conspiracy theories are just another manifestation of this protracted decline … a reminder that desperate people really will say anything …

Murdoch

I wanted to see Rupert Murdoch put his hand on the bible and burst into flames … an alternative facts’ media empire … did concede that Fox News promoted 2020 election falsehoods … Murdoch has got away with it … what is $787.5M when you have another $20B to spare … Fox News broadcast of lies … the settlement is tax deductible … Murdoch thought ‘the election is a hoax’ thing ‘really crazy’ … Fox fact checkers considered the promotion of election deniers as ‘dangerous’ and ‘mind blowing nuts’ … hoodwinked outright fools … *ucker Carlson was the fountainhead…stoking ‘white hatred’ … maintaining a toxic workplace … Johnson and Thick Lizzie ludicrously turned up for the dinner at Hillsborough Castle … even he must have felt the coldness of the cold shoulders turning as they saw him loom … qualities of bad leaders ‘bitterness, jealousy and paranoia … the damage Brexit has done to the Good Friday Agreement … change of government in London cannot come a day too soon …

Little Brexit Britain

Britain has been diminished by Brexit …People in France remain baffled why a once powerful partner in the European project has been stricken low by an act of elective impoverishment … Claims that Rejoiners are lying about the true cost of leaving the EU are more absurd than ever … Lord Adonis said in 2016 that the vote caused a nervous breakdown in Whitehall … it is a jump to suggest that this proves the existence of a dastardly plot …. Remainer propagandists like nothing better than to use ‘official figures’ to suggest things are not working …

In Tombsland if figures do not show that Brexit is a triumph they must be the work of a dark conspiracy that supposedly pro Brexit ministers have been deplorably slow to disavow ‘misleading’ statistics … attacks on what he calls ‘dodgy figures’ … make no sense at all … The UK would see income losses of about £57B annually … in fact we are losing £40B annually so the cost of leaving is four to five times higher than the cost of membership and that is only if you count the cost of leaving the single market; just one small part of the EU … Swathes of the UK political and columnist class have lost their sanity over the visit by Biden to UK and Ireland … UK’s strange neediness towards America … “

Brexit cannibalism

Posted in Brexit, Brexorcism, Britain, Britastrophe, Keir Starmer, Labour, Liz Truss, Sovereignty, Sunak | Tagged Brexit, Britastrophe, Democracy, Don Adamson, NHS, Rishi Sunak, Suella Braverman, Tories | Leave a reply

Grassroots shoots

Posted on

08/10/2022 by author

Peter Cook

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 …

Posted in Brexit, Brexorcism, Britain, Britastrophe, Economics, Leadership, Liz Truss, Northern Ireland, Sovereignty | Tagged Brexit, Britastrophe, Conservatives, Politics, Recession | Leave a reply

Britastrophe

Updated on

25/01/2022 by author

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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Posted in Brexit, Corona, Politics | Tagged Britastrophe | 6 Replies

SAY NO TO Britastrophe

Updated on

25/01/2022 by author

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

Support us by downloading our music on Bandcamp

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

Posted in Borders, Boris Johnson, Brexit, Britastrophe, Corona, Cummings, Farage, NHS, Politics, Russia | Tagged Britastrophe | Leave a reply

The Britastrophe Tour

Updated on

24/01/2022 by author

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:

Posted in Brexit, Corona, Cummings, NHS, Politics | Tagged Brexit, Britastrophe, Cummings, Durham, Road Trips | 4 Replies

Lest we forget

Updated on

22/01/2022 by author

Peter Cook

Our Tunbridge Wells correspondent, formerly a staunch Tory supporter, reports from the G7 summit in Biarritz, France this time last year where Boris Johnson began his career as British prime minister on the international stage with a lie which was massive even by his standards. On 26 July 2019 he said:

“We asked the people to vote on whether to stay in or out of the EU. They voted overwhelmingly, they voted substantially to leave by a big majority”

WRONG

Only a minority of UK registered voters voted for leave – just 37%. 17.4 million Leave voters are NOT a majority in a country with 46.5 million registered voters, or a country with a population of 67 million. The margin for Leave’s win was wafer thin, just 3.8%

That’s NOT substantial, overwhelming or big.

By comparison the amount to remain in the 1975 referendum was 34.5%. That was substantial, overwhelming and big.

Moreover

Many people directly affected by the referendum results were denied a vote.
Two of the four members of the United Kingdom – Scotland and Northern Ireland – voted against Brexit
Leave won by lying cheating and breaking the law. The Prime Minister’s own Counsel agreed, in a case before the Supreme Court concerning the referendum’s validity, that it was ’notorious’.

A Prime Minister who lies to the world is a liability to the British People … all 67 million of us

Write to your MP to demand honesty in politics and the removal of liars. Use Adrian’s article to help you.

Johnson further discredited our country’s reputation for honesty and reliability when, having reached an agreement with the EU on fundamental principles for our future trading relationship, he went back on his word after the 2019 election on the key issue of a level playing field As matters stand today, this issue may well result in “No Deal” with the EU which, combined with coronavirus, can only result in total “Britastrophe“.