Building A Wall? – Revisited

Have you ever checked your spam folder? I take a look at mine often, to keep it to manageable levels. It is also a source of occasional amusement and seemingly never-ending offers from young women to come and play with their cats. Well, I think that’s what they mean, anyway. One thing I’ve never understood is how these spam comments attach themselves to particular posts. In my case, it is often my About Me page or this post, which I’m resharing now.

I wrote this three years ago, when I was feeling gloomy about the UK’s post-Brexit prospects. In these pandemic days it is a reminder for me that there will at some point be a return to pre-Covid days. I’m sharing it again for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, it may come as a surprise to newer readers that I’m actually capable of thought and of producing a fairly coherent ‘serious’ piece, and

Secondly, that it was interesting to me to see how little has changed, in some ways.

History shows that May’s election gamble backfired in spectacular fashion, losing both her Parliamentary majority and, ultimately, her role as Prime Minister, after several failed attempts at getting agreement from Parliament on the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. Amidst all that we are currently enduring it is easy to forget that the UK did finally leave the EU on 31 January this year, and that we are now in a ridiculously short 11 month period of negotiation on the terms of that departure.

I saw a piece in the paper yesterday that said that trade talks with the US are due to take place next week – those will go well, won’t they! We are now less than two months away from the practical deadline by which the UK must ask for an extension to the transition period with the EU, and most member countries have been – and will be – too preoccupied to think about that. The likelihood is, therefore, that we will stumble into a no deal Brexit almost by default. Some, including me, suspect that this has always been Johnson’s aim, which is one of the reasons why he appears to be doing little to prevent it. Anyone with some common sense, who wanted to negotiate the best deal, would recognise that an extension would be the only sane course to take, given all that we and other countries are facing in these pandemic days. A conspiracy theorist might even suggest that Johnson had encouraged Covid into the UK to ensure nothing could stop a no deal Brexit. It has certainly provided him with an effective smokescreen – how else can he explain the Government’s initial lethargy and inaction when it was clear that the virus was coming? It’s a thought, at least!

Conspiracy theories aside, I am offering this post to you again as a reminder that events other than the pandemic will be affecting our lives in the months and years ahead. I retain the faintest of hopes that reality will dawn on those allegedly ‘leading’ our country, but I’m not holding my breath.

Take It Easy

With apologies to Pink Floyd:

“We don’t need no new election,

We don’t need no thought control;

No deeper schism in our country,

Leader, leave us plebs alone!”

I really don’t think of myself as a particularly political person, far less a political blogger, but for the second time this month I feel I just have to vent my thoughts on what is going on. A few days ago, our Prime Minister, Theresa May, called a snap general election. This was despite her saying publicly on five occasions that she would not go for an election any sooner than 2020, as required by law. May became Prime Minister after the debacle of our referendum last summer, and was anointed by her party without an election, as the other candidates engaged in collective self-destruction. She faced pressure at the time to hold a general election, to ratify her credentials to lead…

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