…Brexit Britain is shit.
Maybe by this morning our lunatic PM will realise
that the economic as well as the health and social systems failures – are not
going to be wiped out by a fizzle of hysterical non-essential shopping sprees
perpetrated by the gullible British public. There are limits.
A few years ago I observed the slightly painful
process of my eldest daughter and son in law as they gamely faced the
challenges of their first born with a touching faith that once they got over
this hurdle (then the next then the next) somehow they would end up ‘back the
way they were before’. No one – least of all me – was going to drop it to them
that the change was permanent. They’d get it. I think a lot of the public now
get that we are not going back to the way things were. In some cases – thank
goodness. The only person who seems not to have grasped that is the idiot
nominally in charge – Boris Johnson.
The problem is that – thanks in large part to Brexit
– we certainly are not going forward either. And there the analogy breaks down because children bring joy. Brexit is a miserable poison.
Firstly ‘non-essential’ is a phrase that requires
deep, critical examination. 80% of the UK economy is rooted in the service
‘industry’ in other words it is not about making stuff or providing stuff we
can’t do without.
As that figure sinks in and the government rushes to
open pubs and zoos ahead of a working schools’ strategy, it is clear to anyone
not breathing in the rarefied air of the Westminster bubble that an economy
based on coffee shops and out-of-control credit will not give the UK a post-covid
recovery and will most certainly not sustain us in the
post-covid-waiting-for-the-next-one world.
Boris Johnson is putting his half-baked fantasy of
instant recovery squarely at the feet of the public he so despises. He assumes
that those terrified by his incompetence into self-isolation and economic
hardship will automatically go back to big spending on stuff they don’t need,
have done without for three months and for which they do not have the money
anyway. And some will – for a few days.
Privatised and Brexitised Britain does not make much of anything the
world wants to buy. Firms like Nissan (and there aren’t many) are getting
fidgety again.
The economy teetering on coffee shops and nail bars
providing expensive respite for insatiable consumers is as terminally ill as
the colonial mentality that brought us Brexit.
If Covid-19 was the tempest we ignored until it was
too late, Brexit is the slung lifeboats that we sawed in half just before the
storm hit.
It’s time to confess
Boris Britain’s a mess.