During the EU referendum many on the Leave side said they felt patronised being referred to as ‘Turkey’s voting for Christmas’. But surely we’ve never had a better example of actual turkeys having the last laugh because the metaphorical turkeys who voted for their own demise may not now get the plump fat stupid bird (no – not Boris Johnson) as ‘supply chain problems’ (that would be Brexit to you and me) mean that there is not enough CO2 to get the birds killed in time and there is a lorry driver shortage for all the usual commercial shit that passes for Christmas in consumer mad Britain.
As a Christian, environmentalist and a vegetarian,
Brexit finally makes me laugh…
…hysterically!
As John Lewis announce with great fanfare they’ve saved
Christmas by luring lorry drivers to work for them and their new commercial cabal
– a general cry of relief goes up. The Christmas shit will get here. Hooray.
And if you like your irony mixed with madness and
some WTF on the side – how about the not-an-energy crisis the government is
blabbering about. Even if enough CO2 is found (and let’s face it there is plenty in the
atmosphere wrecking the planet – could we not get some of that?) there might be
no gas or electricity to cook the things anyhow. The turkeys if not the
chickens are coming home to roost though maybe not to roast…
But those lorry drivers weren’t plucked from under a
bush with their John Lewis £1000 golden hellos. They have been pulled from
other hard pressed areas that might be delivering things a bit more important
than your sparkly table runner and the expensive tat that goes under the tree
dying in the corner. I would say its dying in an ever over-heated home but Kwasi
(I cannot help but think – Quasi) Kwarteng – business secretary has assured the
UK public that the energy crisis will be handled by the government. So that’s
ok then. When has anyone in Johnson’s government – or Johnson himself – ever
lied to Britain or allowed their incompetence to entirely 100% foul things up?
KK has promised in his best faux Boris doing bad
faux Churchill that “the lights will not go out”. For myself – the electricity
in my street has been going off intermittently in the early hours of the morning for
many months now. NO ONE HAS EPLAINED WHY. It could, of course, just be that a
lot of UK infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose since privatisation.
The shortages on our shelves are linked to lack of
lorry drivers and that is to do with Brexit not covid.
People dying because they waited – in one case – 40
hours for an ambulance, as the once untouchable NHS slips from 1st to
4th place in the world (and sinking) after being hammered by Tory austerity and the
effects of – yes covid but also Brexit.
The limp, lame, pathetic, government-enthralled media
need to cowboy-up and start calling this what it is and they are going to have
to shout loud to be heard above the celebrity shriek of Strictly Come Brain Death,
I’m No Longer A Celebrity Which Is Why I’m Here and The Great British Back-hander
which is UK TV.
Are folk going to start paying attention when it’s
finally time to send the increasing number of poor children back up chimneys?
Will the great British public eventually snap out of it when there is a
workhouse in every town and the ‘deserving poor’ line up for gruel on a Monday
morning?
Will Joe Normal and Mrs Ordinary finally stop literally
shopping for England when the last
bird has fallen out of the sky? The Independent (a scenario drawn in my audio story Casey & the Surfmen)
It is all linked. Little England did this, like delinquent
12 year olds that got locked in the school over the weekend with access to
matches and kerosene…
We can all smell the smoke, hear the alarms; our
eyes are stinging and it’s getting hard to breathe or see through the black
sooty smoke but the UK media is still behaving like it’s just the toast burning. And falsely smelling burning toast is such an appropriate sign of senility where the press are concerned. As for the government – well…
*
Usually I suggest you check out my books – because I
think you’d like some of them but also it makes me happy when I get sales
despite not having a mainstream publisher. This week I’m just going to recommend Zero One Zero Two or where we are definitely
going from here.
*
And - not to overload you with links this week but there is a reading from Zero One Zero Two on Brum Radio's Poetry programme which will air this Sunday 26th Sept at 10am. Brum Radio Poets
*
And - finally - i'll be doing the Comedy poetry night at the Leamington Poetry fest in Oct. Details to follow.