No. 27 - 'A Special Place in Hell'
Dear James,
OK. Let’s face it. Donald Tusk shouldn’t have said it. You shouldn’t speak to your closest neighbour like that. Yet his intemperate language spoke for so many people in our country. Like us, he’s frustrated and angry due to Mrs May’s inability to tell the EU what we want.
Two and a half years ago a small majority (3.8%) of those who voted in the 2016 referendum, chose to leave the EU. Out of the total electorate that number became 37%. I remember the look on the faces of Messrs Johnson, Gove and Davis when the result was announced. Their flickering grins were like those of naughty schoolboys caught red handed doing bad things in the girls’ playground. Their expressions said it all. “Honest sir, it was only a game sir!’ Of course, they had been only been mucking around. They didn’t actually mean that we could plough back £350m a week into our NHS. We just got our arithmetic a bit wrong. They didn’t actually mean that we could have our cake and eat it. We just felt a bit peckish. It was just a bit of a prank. Honest Sir!
But In a fizzy fit, Sir David, the headmaster at the time, threw the keys of No.10 at them and told them to get on with the mess they had made. All they needed now was the deputy head mistress to bravely come forward to offer her assistance. The plucky lady had her own set of keys but threw these away the next year by asking the parents to come to her aid. They refused. It was her mess and she should sort it out. The boys continued to huff and puff over their simple arithmetic but one by one realised that two plus two always makes four even though they so desperately wanted it to make five. Mr Tusk got it right today! There is no plan. There never has been.
One of those naughty children is Dr Fox. He promised over 80 trade deals would be ready for signing by the time we left the EU. Currently there are none. This week the EU has concluded a free trade deal with Japan – the third largest economy in the world. This means that cars made in Japan will no longer have to pay the 10% import tariff into the EU. In a stroke, the advantage of building Japanese cars in the UK for the EU market was wiped out. At the same time Dr Fox was contemplating condemning our country to WTO rules should the head mistress’s deal fail to get through. That would actually add to our costs by 10%. That’s a 20% loss of advantage in a single week. No wonder Nissan pulled out of its investment in Its Trail X this week.
The arithmetic of Brexit never did add up and never will. Dr Fox should be put into a long term detention. This would all be laughable except that it involves us all. One of the problems with right wing thinking is that it almost always requires scapegoating. In 1930s Germany it was the Jews. In our country it was the West Indians, the Blacks and now, surprise surprise, it is the Europeans. It is all their fault.
This is where Donald Tusk got it wrong yesterday. He played straight into the hands of the scapegoaters. It was those awful girls sir. They tempted us. It was them sir, not us!
This state of affairs cannot continue. The government is rudderless, parliament is in a spin, the ERG continues to insist that two and two equals five while for most of us two and two will always equal four!
Please, James. Do the right thing. The only way to solve this problem is to put the question back to those who can count. I mean, of course, the people!
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent