NO-DEAL BREXIT ?! ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR (DANDELION) MIND ?!

Last week I had the privilege of seeing Bill Baliey performing his current show, "Larks in Transit" at the NIA / Arena Birmingham. The man is one of my absolute favourite comedians, and his ability to draw laughs from music in particular is one of his absolute highlights. From using birdsong in rap music, a downbeat southern bluesey version of "Old McDonald", leading the audience in a rendition of the German version of "You Are My Sunshine", to a Brexit-based version of Cliff Richard's "Summer Holiday".

I mention this bit of the show in particular because the gig had taken place on the day of the 2019 EU "Elections" (something of an oxymoron in itself, as it's not actually possible to vote for any of / against / vote out any of the people that are actually in charge of the EU) and given that comedians are often the guardians of topical satire in this country, Mr Bailey clearly had to start the show with some rather obvious Brexit jokes.

They were side-splittingly funny, especially the one about Jeremy Corbyn, but it got me thinking.

One of the best things about Brexit has been its shattering of anti-establishment pretensions. All the people who for yonks had been getting away with posing as rebels and disruptors and irritants to the status quo have been exposed as utterly allergic to actual radical political change; as 'small-c' conservatives became freaked out by revolt; as the nervous, nodding footsoldiers of political power.

From the trustafarians of Momentum, those laptop Leninists who fantasised that they were revolutionaries, to columnists like Caitlin Moran, the Times’ token rebel who once said she lives ‘like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash’ (cringe much?), virtually every self-styled couterculturalist has gawped in unfiltered horror as a swarm of people, the 17.4m, has done something genuinely revolting. As they said for real, rather than just in a tweet or on a placard that will be binned before dinner, ‘We reject the political order’.

My favourite Brexit-delivered demolition of anti-establishment posing concerns professional nonce Owen Jones. Poor Owen. A few years ago he wrote a book called "The Establishment", (how on earth Hale and Pace didn't sue I don't know) railing against the rotters and bankers and tabloids he thinks are running Britain. Now he finds himself chortling along as bona-fide-establishment-figure-Nick-Clegg-takes-the-mick-out-of-stupid-northerners-who-voted-for-Brexit mouthpiece.

Owen, like so many Fischer-Price revolutionaries, weeps millennial tears over the democratic sucker-punch delivered to the EU, that most establishment of institutions, by the oiks.

But going back to Bill Bailey, and this was something he addressed himself during his performance, right-on funnymen and women, who for decades have been cracking gags about nasty, grasping politicians, have also had a meltdown over Brexit. They’re raging AGAINST the revolting masses and actually pining FOR the EU. They’ve been exposed as court jesters - Juncker’s jesters (until of course he bans them all along with internet memes of his ugly, vulture-like, wine-addled face) - telling jokes designed to flatter power and defame revolt. They are, perversely, satirists for the status quo.

Marcus Brigstocke told Radio 4 this week that his own anti-Brexit schtick is causing him trouble in the north of England: "People have been angry. People have walked out of my shows and people have booed". He reckons Brexit is ‘not just the hideous social and political turn we have taken as a country’ (yawn - change the record Marcus !!) but is also ‘comedic poison’.

Britain’s comics are almost universally anti-Brexit. The conformism is staggering. Aaron Brown, editor of the British Comedy Guide, nailed it this week when he said ‘the comedy world’s reaction [to Brexit] has been exclusively negative’. Too many comics, virtually all of them, ‘rely on lazily branding 52 percent of voters as racist’, he said. There isn’t much comic mileage, he reckons, in ‘lashing out at stupid people making the wrong decision’. Indeed. No wonder the likes of Brigstocke face fury in Brexit country. People don’t like being told they’re disgusting, hateful idiots.

Who knew that a hulking swathe of the populace rejects the EU but hardly a single comic does shows how utterly disconnected the comedic class really is. It confirms the colonisation of British comedy by a breathtakingly narrow strata of society. Tragically, the same is now happening in the pop and acting worlds: they’re being overrun by well-fed toffs or well-connected middle classes who tend to share the same worldview. Hence the cultural elite now thinks one thing, and ordinary people think another.

Considering that Elvis, the Beatles and Cliff Richard were originally considered for being banned lest they might have swayed the minds of impressionable teenagers of the 50's to rebel against their elders and end up vote for revolutionary parties such as Free Love, Old (new, old as it was then) Labour and the Communist Party of Great Britain, this caps an astonishing cultural u-turn that would leave even Jeremy Corbyn gasping for breath.

Having utterly jettisoned self-awareness, many of these fantasy rebels convince themselves they’re still in the business of rebellion. How? By bashing Boris and Farage and Gove and everyone’s favourite 1950s throwback, Jacob Rees-Mogg. They pretend (they must know it’s a pretence?) that these four Brexiteers, being posh and quite wealthy and influential in the government and media, are The Establishment, and that anyone who makes jokes about them or tweets photos of them gurning on Question Time is a radical.

Please. It’s such a farce. A minute or two of serious reflection will confirm it’s the pro-EU side that is establishment, and the anti-EU plebs who are anti-establishment. In the run-up to the referendum, the EU side was backed by most MPs, by big business, by virtually every global institution, by the White House, by almost all of academia. If you’re making jokes or writing columns or taking to the streets on that side, then you’re not anti-establishment. You just aren’t! And that’s okay. You’re nervous and conservative. Fine. Own it.

All of this points to the spectacular failure of the left with regards to Brexit. I’m not sure the left will ever recover from its failure to see in Brexit a good and honest mass yearning for greater democratic accountability and meaningful popular sovereignty. The right’s failures on Brexit are technical - it looks like they’ll make just as much of a dog’s dinner of the negotiations as the left - but the left’s failures are existential.

A movement founded to express the will of the people against the established political order now does the utter opposite. The right might have been exposed as inefficient by the Brexit revolt, but the left has been exposed as kaput, over, reduced from a dreamer of rebellion to the obedient propaganda wing of a clapped-out oligarchy that millions hate. It's like living inside the hokey-cokey, remixed by Fatboy Slim.

Now that’s funny, so some on, comics: this material is rich, mine it.

That is it Thatcher hadn't sacked all the miners … boom, boom, hint, hint, satire, politics, etc …

AN OPEN LETTER TO THERESA MAY

Dear Prime Minister,

I live in Longbridge, Birmingham, in the Northfield constituency, an extremely Labour supporting area, and come from a very long maternal and paternal line of Labour supporters. My paternal grandmother was a proud active supporter of the Labour party. My maternal grandfather was a Labour voter because his father was and his father’s father was before him.

My mother isn’t particularly interested in politics. She still says that they were all as bad as each other and would make her mind up at the ballot box. My sister and most of my friends is Labour supporters and, until recently, so was I until they elected a scruffy, bearded, terrorist supporting Marxist who has openly declared that as a red-meat-eating, heterosexual, Caucasian male, I am not longer demographically interesting enough for them to pursue their vote. I, like my own father, am now Conservative-voting for the first time in my life. You could say talk around the dinner table and down the pub has been interesting recently.

Ever since I have been old enough to have the capacity to formulate political opinions (thanks in no small part the genius-level comedy and biting satire of Spitting Image) I have had no love whatsoever for the EU. I have loathed and despised them ever since my adolescence.

The main reason for me voting leave in the 2016 referendum was to take back control of my own country. I have seen the damage it has done to our region’s automotive, farming and traditional industries. The UK would be a much richer and finer country without the constraints forced upon us by the EU. What may be good for, say, Spain or Greece (not that it has turned out to be any good for either of those countires) isn’t necessarily good for the UK (and so it has proved as we now can't even unpeel a banana without being lectured about it's ecological impact - and havng to find one that's not bent enough in the first place). I am NOT a racist and find it extremely insulting to be called one simply because I voted leave.

The EU has never been a trade club; nor was it ever intended to be. Flag, anthem, embryo army, militarised state police, unaccountable politburo, Napoleonic Legal system, European Arrest Warrant, Supreme Court etc etc, do not signify a trade club. They signify the latest incarnation of European totalitarianism, strutting along in a haze of smoke and mirrors that no-one of sound mind could possibly mistake for a trade club, or anything remotely resembling one. Trade is not its raison d'etre; it is the EU's weapon for enforcing political control.

The EU has no interest in small or beautiful, or efficiency or democracy or even people, other than as economic slaves and cannon-fodder. Its sole interest is the promulgation of itself as the next great, global, dictatorial superpower.

I am sorry, Prime Minister, but you have been shown to be exceedingly weak to allow yourself to be bullied by the EU, the remain members of your own party and by parliament. You are now acting against your Cabinet, party, manifesto, prior policies, repeated promises, electors and the law.

The result of the referendum was for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to completely and totally leave the European Union. I will admit when I found out the result (I was in the pub, naturally) I was overjoyed. Had the result been to remain, naturally I would have been disappointed, but would have accepted it and moved on.

Probably to to country with some common sense and doesn't have any nosey old Belgians making up their own rules and forcing them on us having drunk their way to their jobs in such a way it would make George Best, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris look like they were attending a Sunday school.

But anyway, I most certainly would not have demanded a second referendum simply because the result did not go the way I wanted.

It is astonishing that members of parliament on all sides are acting like petulant children. The UK voted to leave the EU, so do as the country has asked, and leave without any strings, conditions or clauses attached. I find it incomprehensible that all members of parliament have treated us, the British public, like a bunch of Milwall supporters.

They have brains of a cheese sandwich, and the attitude of ‘these moronic peasants have voted to leave but are too stupid to understand what leave actually means. So we will do everything in our power to remain or to broker a soft Brexit deal which is really remain by another name‘. Imagine what would have happened if the result of the vote was to remain. Do you think as much air time would have been given to leavers demanding a second referendum, and that MPs would try to force the country to leave when the country voted to remain ??

The vote for a further Article 50 extension was carried by one vote, and that vote was by a Labour MP who is a convicted criminal no less. It says a lot about the wretched state of our parliament. The British people deserve better than this treacherous rabble. I don't know where this is going to end in terms of British society but I am starting to get a bad feeling that things will get a lot worse unless we have a purge of this house of clowns.

I have never been so disgusted, both as a (recent) Conservative voter and as a British citizen (NOT, as I have NEVER considered or identified myself to be, an EU one !!), that my country should be reduced to this laughing stock of a nation. Members of Parliament should never be complacent as to who put them there in the first place. They are there because their constituents or party members voted for them. We are already beginning to see the consequences of this ridiculous fiasco. Local parties are de-selecting or proposing votes of no confidence in their MPs. It is us, the British public, who hold your P45 and we won’t think twice about handing it to you. It is time you and they are reminded of that.

This land is my beloved ancestral home, and it can never be morally illegitimate in any way to reject handing it over to foreign rule. That presence is not legitimised by our consent, therefore it is NOT legitimate, and you have absolutely nothing to lose from stating the fact; for we are already losing our life and land courtesy of the same political class which is contemptuous of our rejection of their other great project of assimilation.

If a General Election were to be called now I can confidently say that I will NOT be voting Conservative. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party will be getting my vote. How can I vote Conservative when all my faith and trust have been eradicated ?? It will take a new strong leader/PM to unite the party, and more importantly, the country.

Yours truly,

The Ranting Brummie.

UNION JACK AND THE BREXIT BEANSTALK

Once upon a standardised measure of European Centralised Time, a young man called Union Jack was asking himself once again why he was called Union Jack. He had just been reading a history book about a time when his country, the United Kingdom, was independent and free and used to display lots of so called Union jacks or flags. Could his Mum have been wandering down memory lane? He asked her.

She was quite severe with her reproof. “I have told you many times” she said “that I called you Union Jack after our glorious European Union, and don’t you forget it. It’s seditious talk, you know, to suggest otherwise. If you bang on about the old union jack flag they might start questioning you for racism, and I haven’t got time for all that”.

In truth, all was not well in the UK part of the great European Union. Jack and his mother could see the distant European castle that governed them. More importantly they had regular dealings with the EU Inspectors and tax collectors. They were told about all the latest laws by the local police, who had plenty of time to do so now that they were more concerned with monitoring people's Facebook accounts instead of catching actual criminals such as burglars, murderers, rapists and drug dealers. Jack thought secretly that they were having to pay more and more tax.

Their income did not seem to go up. Indeed, it was going down. The fish from their local seas mainly went to the Union’s ships, so they were banned from fishing for them. They had to accept big taxes on any food coming in from outside the Union. They lived under increasingly complicated and expensive rules which made it slower and more costly to grow and make things for yourself.

If Jack ever shared any of this with his mother she warned him off it. She told him the European Union was very good to them really, and it would be worse if they were not in it. For a couple of months, they had to just concentrate on changing all their emails and website to comply with some new directive or other, instead of actually getting on with earning their living.

Privately, Jack’s mother did understand that things were going from bad to worse. She could not afford to keep going as they were, but was scared of saying so to her son in case he got into trouble for repeating it.

The European Union had been very clever, and made sure anyone in government, in the universities and in big business all thought the Union was great and defended it at every opportunity. The system was too powerful to pick a fight with. They all thought the same. They all talked down to people like her. They were good at making predictions of how much worse her life would be if the people did revolt against the European Union. They did have powers to make her life even more difficult.

One day though, the money had run out. She told her son things were a bit tight, and told him to take their cow to market to sell. It was a dangerous measure. It meant they could pay the bills for a bit, but would no longer have any milk. Which would have pleased all the EU environmental law-makers forcing everyone to go vegan anyway. On the way to the cattle market Jack met a man who asked him where he was going. Jack told his sorry story.

The man was very sympathetic, and said he too thought the European Union was damaging their prosperity. He got some beans out of his pocket, and said these were special freedom beans. If Jack took those for his cow, he could grow the precious plant of freedom which should transform his position.

Jack was much cleverer than people realised for someone who had not had a great education. He did know a bit about freedom, and had been thinking for sometime how the Union was crushing him and his mother. So, he asked, “how could freedom help me?”.

“Well” said the man “if you were free you would not have to pay all those taxes to the EU, and not have to obey all those costly regulations.” Jack was smitten, and willingly accepted the beans for his cow. It also cut down the journey and the difficulty of getting a half-starved reluctant cow to the market, where it probably would have been rejected anyway for not being halal.

When he got home, Jack told his mother the great news that he had a way to improve their situation. When she heard his mother was livid, and afraid. How could her little Jack stand against the might of the EU. She scolded him and threw the seeds out of the window. Didn’t he know the great and good would rig it all against his precious freedom?

Next morning Jack and his mother arose and were shocked beyond belief. A massive beanstalk led away from their garden right up to the gates of the European Castle. His mother was distraught, realising they could be found. Jack took courage and decided he was going to see how the other half lived. Jack shimmied up the beanstalk and crept through the castle gate unseen … he was astounded by the wealth they had.

All those tributes from the Union meant they lived well in the governing castle, led by the five Presidents. They always seemed to have a fish course from all those fish they took from UK seas. Jack soon found the Treasury and there to his delight was the money that the UK had agreed to send.

It was a signed promissory document, so Jack tore it up. He took the pieces away with him and showed his mother when he got home. “We are rich”, he said.

“Now our country can have all the teachers and nurses and doctors it needs, and we can pay less tax so we have more to spend. “

“You are naïve” said his mother. “Don’t you understand our local government will just send it back again to the EU because they want to keep us poor”.

“So,” said Jack, “we will have to see about that”. Off he went again to the castle before his mother could stop him.

The next time Jack came back with more torn up paper. He had found the binding document that required the UK to impose high tariffs on the rest of the world and blocked any special trade deals and lower tariffs with their friends in the USA or Australia or New Zealand.

“There” said Jack to his mother, “this is just like the golden goose in the old fairy story.

Now we can buy cheaper goods and trade better for ever, so we will be better off”. Once again, his mother, petrified by now of what the EU and all their powerful friends nearer to home might do, told him to stop. Once again Jack dashed up the beanstalk. This time he seized the most precious item of all, the voices of the UK people who were singing by a large majority that they were going to be free and they would not obey the 5 Presidents any more.

Just as he was leaving the castle, the 5 Presidents were catching up with him and chasing him. Except for Jean-Claude Juncker who was trapped in the wine cellar in his underpants having gotten pissed out of his brains on ten bottles of Cognac yet again. They didn’t shout at him that they could smell the blood of Englishman, because they didn’t want to be a caricature of badness. They did want to teach him a painful lesson.

Jack raced back down the beanstalk, whilst they were still trying to negotiate it. They were slower than him as they had so many good meals at his expense over the years. Jack, as in the old fable, grabbed and axe and hacked the beanstalk down, and the 5 Presidents disappeared from view and from the UK for ever. The chopped down beanstalk deposited them in Germany, still alive but knocked about a bit.

So, what happened to Union Jack?

All the sages in the UK government, the Central Bank, the universities and big international business predicted poverty, isolation and unhappiness. They expected Union Jack to have a few bad years and then to beg to go back to the EU on worse terms than before. Instead, Union Jack and his mother flourished.

Spending all their money at home bought lots of improvements to public services, with tax cuts to give everyone’s income a boost. Catching their own fish meant they could have fish every day if they wanted to, or sell it to others if they didn’t. They also had lots of friends in other countries who wanted to trade more with them. Even the EU, after a hissy fit, agreed a free trade contract and accepted in the end the UK did not owe them any more money.

The people’s voices had been right, and all those experts wrong. Just as in the original tale, Jack and his mother lived happily ever after. They had rediscovered freedom, thanks to the voices of all those UK voters.

And what happened to all those so called experts? Well they did alright as well. They pretended they had not made such a big fuss and got it all so wrong. They carried on paying themselves lots of money and giving themselves lots of grand titles and honours as if nothing had ever happened.

The people grew less angry with them, because everyone was better off. But the people did have one last hurrah against the establishment. They voted out all the ones who had done most to stop them being free.

They felt much better for doing that.