How are matters progressing five years on from that referendum and over 6 months since the end of the Brexit transition period?
In simple terms, what was dismissed as Project Fear has very much become Project Reality.
Crops are rotting in the fields due to a lack of seasonal workers to pick them, whilst a shortage of lorry drivers means that any fresh produce that does get picked might not be delivered to shops and supermarkets.
Floreat Brexitannia!
This blog has written before about the changing messages that appear on a garage wall at the apex of the junction of Russelltown Avenue, Cannon Street and Whitehall Road (posts passim).
The message has now changed again and reads as per the photo below.
According to Urban Dictionary, bumbahole is a synonym of arsehole in British English and asshole in American English.
One can safely assume that the Boris being referenced is none other than the superannuated Billy Bunter-like figure of one certain Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, who has been inexplicably promoted beyond his competence to the office of Prime Minister of the English Empire, a job he fulfils to his own satisfaction on a part time basis.
Among the less favourable characteristics of Bunter’s personality are gluttony, laziness, racism, deceit, sloth, self-importance and conceit, all of which have been extensively documented down the decades by others more eloquent than your ‘umble scribe (e.g. his former employer Max Hastings) as also being present in the part-time alleged prime minister’s character.
Since the widespread dismissal from newsrooms of sub-editors, the very people who would have spotted and corrected any inaccuracies and/or anomalies, many more hidden exclusives are being reported nowadays by our free and inaccurate press, provided one knows where to look and reads carefully.
Last week, the Shropshire Star had a hidden exclusive buried deeply in a piece on towpath repairs to the Shropshire Union Canal and local traders’ fear of loss of footfall in my home town of Market Drayton.
The Canal & River Trust, which manages the waterway, is planning to close the towpath through Market Drayton for repairs lasting two months. This will also entail a loss of moorings during the works.
The fact that is has chosen do these works in the ten weeks from July 5 to September 10 hasn’t gone down too well with the director of one local boatyard, who is quoted as intimating that the closure would be a hammer blow to the summer trade, preventing visitors from mooring in the town and visiting shops and restaurants.
In a quotation in the report, she said the following:
It is basically the full length of the canal that goes through the town. Boats that would normally moor up and walk round the town, they won’t be able to do that.
Boats that would normally moor up and walk around town?
These two actions surely would be consecutive and not concurrent?
When did boats evolve the means of locomotion to be able to walk round the town?
Why have the national and international media not picked up the Star’s exclusive? After all, it is not every day that aquatic craft evolve enough to generate limbs.
If you have an answer to any of the above questions, please leave them in the comments below. 😀
Forget-me-nots (Myosotis) are a genus of flowering plants. The name Myosotis derives from the ancient Greek μυοσωτίς meaning mouse’s ear, which the leaves are said to resemble.
According to its English Wikipedia page, the colloquial English name of forget-me-not has been in use since the late 14th century and is a direct translation from the German Vergißmeinnicht.
However, it is to the French Wikipedia article on the foget-me-not that one needs to turn for the presumed origins of this commemorative colloquial plant name.
According to one legend, a knight was walking by a river with his lady. He bent over to pick her a flower, but toppled over due to his armour and fell into the water. While he was drowning, he tossed the flower towards her crying out “Forget me not!”
It goes without saying that the legend fails to explain why the hapless knight felt the need to don his armour for what was ostensibly a safe situation. No health and safety risk assessments or technical standards for PPE in those days!
Talking of risky situations, the forget-me-not has become a flower of remembrance in the Canadian provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador where it is used to commemorate those who were killed in the First World War.
Similarly in Germany the forget-me-not became a flower of remembrance for those who fell in conflict from WW1 onwards.
In other countries, the forget-me-not has assumed a different commemorative function, one dealing with those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, as happens in the Netherlands and New Zealand.
Brexit opportunities.
Of course, Britain’s departure from the EU is such a shining success, particularly in the light of the fact that, in the words of one Michael Gove, “we hold all the cards“.
No further comment is necessary.
Yesterday, the right-leaning part of the population who seem to believe that culture as they know it is in danger of being cancelled (whatever that may mean. Ed.), was fulminating against yet another of those left-leaning organisations – English Heritage. Its crime: amending its online information about the children’s author Enid Blyton to reflect more accurately her writing and views.
While English Heritage’s blue plaque commemorating Blyton remains unchanged, the charity’s online information about her now details the problematic aspects of her writing and views.
In particular, the information on Blyton has been amended to describe her writing as including racism and xenophobia whilst lacking literary merit.
To illustrate Blyton’s racism, English Heritage’s online content notes that in 1960 Macmillan refused to publish Blyton’s children’s novel The Mystery That Never Was, noting her “faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia”. As a child, I can’t say I remember noticing the racism and xenophobia so much on the very rare occasions I picked up Blyton as a child (the golliwogs should have started the alarm bells ringing. Ed.), but the lack of literary merit was clearly apparent to my developing brain. Her work came across as simplistic and formulaic, but my brother loved her stories, a matter in which he persisted despite the mocking and urging from my sister and me that he read something less lightweight.
Although she did not specifically mention Blyton by name, it was clear that actor and comedian Joyce Grenfell clearly had Enid in her sights in her monologue Writer Of Children’s Books, as embedded below.
One of the staples of local news reporting is the activities of the emergency services – police, ambulance, coastguard, fire service – and in this regard Bristol Live – formerly the Bristol (Evening) Post is no exception.
Yesterday’s online edition reported on the fire service’s attendance at a possible incident on Colston Street (soon to revert to its original name of Steep Street after the city’s Victorian great and good renamed it after a slave trader. Ed.).
However, once again the reporter’s poor English is disappointing to read.
In the second paragraph readers are informed that
The alarm was sounded after what was believed to be an electric fire in Colston Street at around 8.22pm.
Where was the said domestic appliance left? In the roadway? On the footway/pavement?
Clarification was helpfully supplied by the fire service, whose spokesperson commented as follows:
Upon investigation, the issue was determined to be under the pavement and originating from an area of recently excavated electrical works.
So the fire, if it ever existed in the first place, was electrical, not electric.
As an aid to passing hacks wishing to improve their vocabulary, there follows below a handy pictorial guide to the difference between the two. 😀
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The outcome of the now-concluded G7 summit in Cornwall was to have been so different. Flying in the Red Arrows to impress the forrins with high-speed aerobatics, wheeling in Elizabeth Mountbatten-Windsor and her family in to schmooze and press the flesh; even the notoriously fickle English weather behaved itself.
Yes, the impression part-time alleged prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his organising committee wanted to do was show a reinvigorated English Empire, confident and occupying a major place on the world stage now Brexit had been done and the country had broken free of the shackles ostensibly imposed upon it by the Brussels Eurocrats.
However, what has emerged is the English Empire’s diminished role and importance in the world as a consequence of Brexit. The G7 media headlines have been dominated by the problems caused by Brexit and in particular the UK’s failure to implement the Northern Ireland Protocol, a binding international treaty signed as part of the divorce agreement between the EU and the English Empire, a matter which earned the part-time alleged prime minister a rebuke from US president Joe Biden.
However, Biden’s was not the only reprimand earned in recent days by Johnson’s government of none of the talents. On social media David Frost, the English Empire’s chief Brexit negotiator, who is also known as Frosty the No Man on account of his negotiating style, earned the displeasure of those on Twitter who can see further than the White Cliffs of Dover for turning up to a crunch meeting with the EU wearing tacky Union Jack socks.
In addition, Frost and other members of the alleged government have been widely quoted in the right-wing British media as calling on the evil EU to be less purist in its interpretation of the Withdrawal Agreement and Northern Ireland Protocol. Consulting an online dictionary, one of the definitions of purism is a strict adherence to particular concepts, rules.
That’s right. The EU is and always has been a rules-based, whereas Britannia has long preferred to waive the rules.
The above-mentioned meeting between the EU and the English Empire did not end well, with EU officials clearly exasperated by the attitude of the English Empire government.
In particular, the words attributed to on EU official quoted have been interpreted as patronising by the Daily Brexit, which some still call the Express.
According to the Daily Brexit:
An aide to the EU chief told Channel 4 News that the tweet “was in English so that the British can understand it”.
This anonymous quote clearly falls into the definition of a studied insult.
In this context studied denotes an insult that is either the result of deliberation and careful thought or is based on learning and knowledge.
The quote is clearly aimed at the monoglot Brits’ ages-old reluctance to learn foreign languages (apart from Latin and classical Greek.? Ed.), even though a properly global Britain will need all the linguists it can get, but shows no signs of producing, with both the number of British universities still teaching degree modern language courses in decline and the number of undergraduate linguists also in decline.
Disregarding the current crowdfunded litigation against the government's awarding of PPE and other contracts during the pandemic, which was frequently characterised as less than transparent and evidence of a chumocracy, due to the frequent involvement of Tory party donors, I am reliably informed by Keith Flett’s blog that Johnson and his third bride Carrie Symonds recently spent a mini-honeymoon at Chequers, the grace and favour country house in Buckinghamshire provided at public expense for the use of prime ministers, alleged, part-time or other.
Keith Flett’s blog post also comes with the interest fact that William Cobbett, the pamphleteer, journalist, Member of Parliament and farmer, referred to such sinecures as Chequers as the “Old Corruption“.
Further delving into the topic of the Old Corruption took me to the website of St Stephen’s Chapel in Westminster, which reveals that, before the 1832 Reform Act, the “Old Corruption was a system by which the elite benefited from selling of offices, sinecures (jobs which paid a salary for little or no work) and pensions. Patrons also influenced the small electorate, often through monetary incentives, to secure election for their friends and allies to parliament“.
However, the sale of offices and other abuses did not entirely die out after the enactment of the so-called “Great” Reform Act of 1832.
Honours continued to be sold throughout the Victorian era, culminating in the actions of David Lloyd George when Prime Minister. Lloyd George made the practice of selling honours more systematic and more brazen, charging £10,000 for a knighthood, £30,000 for baronetcy and £50,000 upwards for a peerage, and by so doing prompting the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925. Furthermore, practically every single prime minister since has repaid favours with honours such as a seat in the House of Lords, knighthood or such like.
More evidence of corruption, neither ancient nor modern, but extremely blatant, emerged this past week and once again involved a certain Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, the other members of the cast being one Peter Cruddas, billionaire, and the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
In December 2020, it was announced that Cruddas, a former Tory Party treasurer, would be made a life peerage after a nomination Johnson, despite the contrary advice of the House of Lords Appointments Commission.
As reported by the Mirror, a few days later Cruddas made a donation of half a million pounds to the Tory Party.
The Old Corruption is perhaps not so old at all, but surprisingly contemporary
Bristol Live, formerly the Bristol (Evening) Post, aka the Temple Way Ministry of Truth, has an enduring reputation locally for the poor quality of some of its reporting.
The reputation was not diminished earlier this week with a report from the paper’s North Somerset correspondent on the temporary closure for improvements of the Water Adventure & Play Park, a facility managed by Weston-super-Mare Town Council.
The report gets off to a bad start with the headline boldly and falsely proclaiming Popular Weston-super-Mare seafront water park to close this month, making it sound as if the attraction is to close permanently, not temporarily.
Note too the use of popular, a term normally reserved by Bristol Live for failing cafés and restaurants.
However, the real howler in the piece occurs in the obligatory quotation from a Town Council spokesperson. In his second sentence he is quoted as saying:
We apologise for the incontinence and look forward to welcoming you back with new improvements ready for the summer holidays.
Whether the specified incontinence originated from any communication from the council, erroneous predictive text or any other source is unclear. Nevertheless, earlier in the piece readers are informed that “the water has remained off due to covid [sic] guidelines“, so the origin of any incontinence is unclear.
When the facility reopens, we are informed that the cost of admission is £2.50 per child.
In view of the purported incontinence, perhaps that ought to be raised to a Tena. 😉