Reconnected

The good news is that after over a week without broadband, we are now reconnected. The bad news is that, I am reconnected and this is going to be a Brexit blog, so avert your eyes all ye who come here just to check on Ava-Jane. She’s good. We have had a quiet couple of weeks with just the four us round the house and no internet, so plenty of time to hang out. Otto disconnected is an absolute joy and he has been spending a lot of time looking after his sister while we are without a carer.

So enough of that, onto Brexit! For once, I think I won’t even have a picture of AJ for the blog to lure in the unsuspecting, thinking they are going to be reading a blog about a cheerful little blonde facing a difficult future. No, I will have a picture of the cheerful blond who is leading us into that difficult future.

I wanted to share something that I posted elsewhere on the t’internet , which I was quite proud of. I got in a little spat about Brexit on the Facebook thread of a friend of mine. She is one of the most valiant Remain campaigners I know and she had posted in support of David Lammy, the MP who had received a vile letter full of racist abuse and wishing for him to be strung up and death to the Windrush Generation.

A certain DK had weighed in, spraying insults about and arguing that Remainers, like Lammy, only had themselves to blame for being such numbskulls as to question the glories of Brexit. And having made the point that Lammy fully deserved the bile that had been written to him, he then moved on to pour invective on the heads of anyone who might not be fully behind the whole Brexit project. This is where I got stuck in:

DK I see you accuse socialists of being bad at maths and there is no surer sign of being a socialist than supporting our membership of the EU, like those life-long members of the SWP (Socialist Workers Party), John Major, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke. But in my case, you are right, I am a bit of a leftie and not great with numbers, so maybe you can help?

So we pay some £350 a week to the EU and as you mention from that we would have to remove the rebate that Margaret Thatcher secured. But we would also have to remove recreating the whole regulatory framework that we only have to pay a fraction of as members of the EU. I imagine that you are not a big fan of red tape but we do need some rules about silly things like how much arsenic you are allowed in drinking water, whether a plane is fit to fly or can you wash chicken in chlorine. Lots of money for lawyers but maybe not so great at rebuilding a functioning economy. Then we would need some cash to replace the subsidies for sectors like farming and fishing. The Tories have been very keen to stress that farming will continue to be subsidised because they wouldn’t want to abandon their chums with landed estates to the vagaries of actual capitalism, I mean look what happened to the miners. We would also need to go round the world, country by country, negotiating trade deals, again lots of yummy lucre for the lawyers. So after all that lot, how much have we got left from the fabled £350? You are allowed to use a calculator.

We could renege on our treaty obligation and not pay the agreed £39bn, but that would just be a saving rather than income and obviously just a one-off saving, so we can’t count it year on year. Also, given that every calculation for a post-Brexit economy ranges from very bad to catastrophic we are going to be considerably poorer. And, on the NHS, the cost of training-up doctors and nurses who have fled the country will be considerable as well as the additional costs of medicines that will no longer be covered by EU regulations. So if there is any money for the NHS it will be to keep it afloat rather than invest in improvements. Sorry for the diatribe but Brexit will not be good for the British economy, you will have to take another angle to support it. Parliamentary sovereignty? (Don’t go there)

I hope you will have noticed that I have, as promised above, not posted a picture of Ava-Jane as the Featured Image of this post, but I have instead, posted a picture of Boris Johnson holding a kipper. I have included this picture because I think it is emblematic of the man. I know I probably come across as somewhat obsessive about Johnson but I do think we are walking into a car crash (can you walk into a car crash?) and I feel I think I should shout it out from this weeny soap box that I write, more for my own enjoyment than anything else.

The context to what we can only now call Kippergate, is that yer man Boris gave a speech, his final oratorical push towards what looks like a foregone conclusion: with our next Prime Minister being one B. Johnson, esq. He held up a kipper in his speech and then a pack of ice. These props were used to illustrate the plight of the kipper producers of the Isle of Man under the yoke of the EU. A new EU regulation, claimed Johnson, meant that kippers now had to be transported, wrapped in these packs of ice, thereby massively increasing the transport costs of the kipper producers of the Isle of Man. Should you want to see the performance, it is available here. So the reasons that this was wrong on so many levels are:

• The packs of ice regulation is a UK regulation not an EU regulation. We have laws too, yeh!
• The Isle of Man is not actually in the EU. Yup, it’s not in the EU! It’s not an EU member, so even if this was an EU regulation, which it wasn’t (see above), it wouldn’t have applied.
• “Kippers” is a term for UKIP supporters. Bris, we know you need to get their votes but another choice of fish might have disguised your underlying desperation to tempt back all those juicy UKIP and Brexit voters that the Conservatives have been haemorrhaging recently.
• You are holding up a chunk of bagged fish while making a speech to convince people that you are the wisest choice to be PM during the gravest crisis this country has faced since we stood alone as the last bastion of freedom against the gathering hordes, you utter dipstick.

So in that one little vignette, we can see the many ways our soon-to-be Prime Minster really should not even be up for consideration. He has been making this sort of rubbish up about the EU since the late 80s. Claiming that the EU was holding the UK under some sort of regulatory jackboot was the stock-in-trade approach of his journalism for various publications. And like claiming that this kipper-packing law is imposed by the EU, he invented all sorts of other diktats emanating from Brussels.

Johnson is also famously lazy and prone to winging it. I have to admit that I was quite surprised to hear that the Isle of Man was not an EU member. I knew that it had its own ancient parliament but I imagined it would come under all the same organisations as the the UK in general. I think it is quite cool that it doesn’t. But I would like to think that if I was going to make a point about how EU laws affect the Isle of Man while I was campaigning to be PM, I would check that the Isle of Man was an EU member. For example, I did just check that the Tynwald (Isle of Man parliament, don’t you know?) is indeed ancient, oldest Parliament in the world it is claimed.

So there’s Johnson’s lying, which is well attested, but also his ability to make himself look like an absolute twat. As I said, I know I look like I am obsessed with Boris but actually I think it would be brilliant to spend time with him, I imagine he would be hilarious. People who are prepared to make themselves look ridiculous can be a lot of fun. Some of my very dearest friends are hilarious and somewhat ridiculous, I would like to think that this would apply to me too. But I wouldn’t make a good Prime Minister and nor would any of my hilarious friends. You want someone who doesn’t wave smoked fish about or get himself stuck on zip wires, see pic below. The poor Miliband brothers both got skewered for eating food items in slightly the wrong way. How come Johnson gets away with being a complete pollock? I mean pillock.

And then the kipper/Ukipper thing, didn’t he even pick up on this? For a supposedly intelligent man, he can be extraordinarily dim. Like when he started reciting Rudyard Kipling, the Poet Laureate of empire, in Burma, a country still in the throes of post-imperial trauma.

We might think that Johnson is a bit of a laugh, we have seen him on comedy panel shows, as Brits, we kind of get his humour. But I don’t think that’s how the outside world sees him. They see the UK about to install a buffoon as Prime Minster. They are looking at us in the same way that we looked at Italy when Berlusconi was elected or when Trump was elected in America. For me that is one of the ironies of the whole Brexit programme. Us Remainers have been painted as unpatriotic, disloyal and worse when the rest of the world is looking at Brexit and thinking “WTF are you doing to yourselves?”

On the whole I like to think that I avoid online spats. I do spend a lot of time on social media but I would like to think that, on the whole, I like to spread a little happiness. I did have the spat with DK that I quoted above on Facebook and I did have another on Twitter about whether the Brexit party members were behaving like Nazis when they turned their backs on the proceedings during the opening of the European Parliament. I tried to make the point that the Brexit party are not Nazis but, on this occasion, they were behaving like Nazis because the Nazi Party had also turned its back on the proceedings of the German Parliament, see pics.

I think it is important to be balanced so I did also call out a friend of mine who described the ERG (European Research Group, Brexit-supporting group with Tory MPs, Including Jacob Rees-Moggas) as Fascists. The ERG are not fascists, the fascists were an Italian phenomenon of the 1920-40s. The Nazis weren’t fascists either; they were Nazis. For that matter, neither the ERG nor the Brexit party nor even UKIP are fascists. They are what they are, today, in our world. History doesn’t repeats itself but it does sometimes rhyme. It wasn’t me that said that, it was someone far cleverer than me and I am not even clever enough to remember who it was.

And Boris Johnson is not Donald Trump. He isn’t Jair Bolsonaro or Orbán or Erdoğan but can we say he is our, our British iteration of all of these? I think we can. Hitler, Mussolini and Franco were different in their own ways but they certainly shared commonalities that drew them naturally together. And before the week is out, it looks like we will be yet one more nation falling under the spell of an outwardly charismatic leader prepared to spin any kind of yarn, to scapegoat any kind of minority and to promise any kind of false horizon to secure the reins of power for some kind of nefarious means.

I said I wasn’t going to post a pic of Ava-Jane but I thought I should end on some kind of upnote. So here is one of my favourite recent pictures. AJ having a cheers with John to thank him for his wonderful performance for her and her friends at our party.