THE protracted nature of Brexit negotiations with the European Union has proven to be unexpectedly useful for the UK’s No-Deal ninjas. This has allowed for a gradual lowering of expectations to take effect among the population. When Boris Johnson and the Faragists first emerged blinking into the daylight on the morning of
June 24, 2016, the talk was of Trafalgar and Waterloo and the start of a prosperous new age of empire free from the stultifying hand of Europe. Barely three years later, this bowl of cherries has been downgraded more than just a little.
When the UK Government admits that there are likely to be shortages of food, medical and fuel supplies for several months and concomitant “rising costs” in social care you know that the country will have to buckle up; well that part of the country at least which doesn’t live beyond gated driveways and employ the services of the Institute of Creative Accountants.
Add in some extra flavouring like “disruption” at ports; an expected rise in civil protests and the potential for “direct action” following a hard border in Ireland, well … we’re now in the realm of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the twin architects of Brexit Armageddon, each strove to downplay the significance of Project Yellowhammer, the leaked civil service document that painted the reality of No-Deal Brexit. Yellowhammer was accurate unto March of this year, yet Johnson and Gove said it was “out-of-date” and a “worst-case” scenario. When you consider some of the fictions that this pair advanced during the EU referendum campaign it might be fair to conclude that Yellowhammer might actually be a best-case scenario. Shortages of any basic materials used in the process of day-to-day living are the ultimate dream of capitalists. What could be better than a situation where privateers can corner the market and set prices accordingly? You won’t find Jacob Rees-Mogg and his fellow millionaires being overly concerned at adverse economic outcomes.
During this period of uncertainty the royal family will also be expected to do the job the British state pays them to do: provide an imagined sense of national unity and the fabricated feeling that we’re all in this together. This is also when those police wage increases begin to pay off and it all makes sense that the main areas of command of the British Army are all in the hands of the right sort. It’s when all those years of old Etonian newspaper proprietors demonising Jeremy Corbyn now seem worthwhile.
Somewhere in the bowels of Whitehall lies a document detailing plans for the Queen and her family to get the hell out of Dodge to a safe haven in Canada. Over the course of the next few weeks private banks will be cancelling all holidays to cope with the glut of transactions transferring the UK’s oldest money and assets to some familiar locations in the Pacific.
The former Prime Minister, Theresa May, whose ineptitude and arrogance helped bring this about, has already put in place plans for a Brexit Day. This will be a festival of national celebration to mark the day all European laws pass into the UK legislature. Her successor might want to rethink these plans.
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Today, it can be revealed though that a secret chamber of the UK civil service has been working on a radically different set of proposals in a bid to soak up all the emotions and high feelings of the immediate post-Brexit period. By stitching together snippets of snatched conversation late at night in the assorted members’ bars of the House of Commons, The National has been able to put together a blueprint for action when the balloon goes up and the lights go out.
This will be a light in the Brexit darkness and is designed to ensure Scotland and the rest of the UK come together during those teething weeks and months following a hard Brexit. They would take the form of a series of national Brexit Games, borrowed from the Roman circuses of wise old emperors like Nero and Caligula.
First of all, special disaster capitalism bonds would be issued that very rich people could see as investment opportunities. In return for investing heavily in good causes and local services these people would get to avoid prosecution and prison for anything they might otherwise get up to during this time of chaos and lawlessness.
And for an extra financial consideration they’d be granted a weekly purge where they’d be permitted to run amok for 24 hours while the law looked the other way.
If this took off it could be rolled out on a tender basis to private companies and become a state-supported lottery type game. Thus undesirables and illegals would be freed and given a week to escape into Britain’s great wild places while heavily armed teams of high rollers hunted them down. It would be a win-win-win situation: the stricken economy would receive a much-needed boost; it would create jobs in rural areas for squads of human “grouse-beaters” and it would ease the pressure in our overcrowded prisons.
On the council estates we could run weekly Rollerball competitions. As the supermarket shelves empty there would be a need for massive food depots in out-of-town locations where poor families can exchange ration tokens. Why not make a sport out of this? Each neighbourhood could provide teams of local champions on motorbikes with spiked wheels. They would all choose from a regulated list of chibs and then fight to the death as they roared round the food shelves seeking to feed their communities. The losing towns and villages would lose all their entitlements until the next game. Only the fittest and the hungriest would survive, thus removing at a stroke loads of benefit recipients and their families during a period when the UK economy is facing its greatest test.
In Scotland the Government could reach an accommodation with Glasgow’s drug gangs when the medicines run out. Some of the families that control this industry have a great track record in sourcing sensitive products in difficult conditions and bringing them safely to shore. At last their decades of expertise in this enterprise could be put at the disposal of the state and a national redemption would take place. They could also train the next generation of chemists and dealers to ensure that the nation need not fear any future apocalypse.
Let the games begin.
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