No.97 - It's Dark Out There, James. You're Going to Need your Raincoat!

Dear James,

You can’t be a very happy bunny, having to brave this awful weather in this, our ‘Election of Discontent’. It was a desperate gamble by Boris to go for a winter date. Already the rain has brought floods to the north and on Tuesday he was seen belatedly visiting a small village, now flooded, in Yorkshire. What a grilling he got.‘You’ve not helped us. I don’t know why you’re here today!’’, scowled the locals to the poor man’s face. It was five days since the area was inundated. He refused to apologise for his neglect and I am reminded of poor Mrs May’s first visit to Grenfell Towers. 

Ahead of us we have another month of campaigning. The airwaves are full of empty promises and a constant stream of anti-Corbyn invective from Tory HQ. Groups of bedraggled party workers gather on dark street corners around the country before heading out into the suburbs to push leaflets through countless closed doors. At least we now have motion sensor lighting so doorsteps are temporarily lit as the letter flaps snap hard onto the leaflet pushers’ frozen fingers. Behind the doors the country is utterly depressed. It has been three years since the Referendum and still we are nowhere near a resolution. People feel stretched thin in their various beliefs. It is a little like being on the rack I guess. Every day we get stretched ever more until the pain of our expanded joints is no longer felt. We are now beyond pain. We are demi-comatose, semi-catatonic, pre-narcoleptic. Even our passions are dulled. It will be interesting to see the turnout figures on December 12th. 

Yet the main political parties continue to flail at us with their ever more vacuous promises. £4bn p.a.more for the NHS from the Tories. £6.5 bn p.a. from Labour. Their cups runneth over with bounteous largesse. But surely they should be starting with Brexit? The NIESR predicts that, compared with staying in the EU, GDP will be at 3.5% lower after 10 years if we leave. National coffers will be worse off by £70bn p.a. Surely that’s what we should be talking about? Think how many schools, how many doctors and nurses, how many new transport links could be built with such sums! But the Brexit parties continue blindly to cut off the wherewithal by its legs. 

James, we are all jaded by your empty pledges, by off-the-cuff policy, by the mudslinging and the constant threats about Corbyn ‘getting the keys to No.10’, and yet Boris’s fevered imagination continues to attempt to excite us into engagement. On Tuesday his speech at a Coventry taxi factory was pre-briefed as likening Labour’s approach to Brexit to “self-obsession and onanism.“ Ona who? Helpfully, the BBC explained that he was referring to ‘self-gratification’. Apparently he does this regularly – speaking about it, I mean. According to the Guardian, Diana Birkett, a London psychotherapist, says Boris’s ‘tendency to slip into sexualized, abusive language, suggests a disturbing lack of maturity in one standing for the highest office.’  Anyway, by the time of his actual speech the sentence had been cut. Carrie will be relieved to note that Boris is still just about able to restrain himself at key moments in his ‘colourful’ career.  

Yesterday another voice joined the fray. It was one of Boris’s ‘Friends and Partners’ in the EU, one named Donald Tusk. Making his farewell speech to the EU in Bruges, he said that on his trips around the world he has heard the same head-scratching question everywhere. ‘What’s wrong with Britain’? The `Brexiteers’, he said, always claimed that leaving the EU would make Britain global and truly great once more. ‘The reality’, he said, ‘is exactly the opposite.’ ‘Britain would become ‘an outsider, a second rate player’ in the battle of the great blocks, America, China and the EU. 

Not words that you will want to hear James as you stand in the lantern lit porches of your better off constituents? You prefer the idea of a Britain, standing alone, in the Dunkirk spirit, ready to release its full potential upon the world. Up to a point, you’re right. We do have huge potential!  But what better way to release it than through the huge multiplier effects of the EU? 

James, the British empire ended 70 years ago. Unfortunately, its memory hangs on in myth, in our public schools and in the rump of what was once a broad church Tory Party. You have allied yourself to this rump and to its ageing supporters in your constituency. Time is not on your side. Nor is history. 

It’s dark out there James. It’s cold and wet. You’d better get that raincoat out because you’re going to need it as you continue to plead the Brexiteer’s nightmare to an ever more sceptical nation! 

Happy canvassing! 

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent