Sovereignty delivered early on the longest night of the year

Sovereignty, such a many-splendoured thing. The right to do what you bloody well like regardless of Johnny Foreigner. Taken all the way you get to Juche in North Korea, but it is what a small margin of our fellow Brits wanted in that Brexit vote.

Its core idea is that North Korea Britain is a country that must remain separate and distinct from the world, dependent solely on its own strength and the guidance of a near-godlike leader.

The opportunity to make our own laws, and to eat our own fish, even if in fact we don’t really like most of it so we flog it to people who do. I am old enough to know what Britain was like before we kowtowed to the EUSSR, back in ’73. As a child there was a fix¹ for fish we didn’t like, we called it Rock Eel/Salmon in fish and chip shops, and it’s what poor people had. Used to be catfish back in the day, nowadays it’s random shark, even stuff on the IUCD red list of endangered species, because, well, capitalism is rapacious like that. Expect rock eel to come back to a chip shop near you, along with warm beer and the sound of willow on a balmy summer’s day. Oh, that’s the wet dreams of the aristocracy who funded Brexit. More from them later on.

The initial juche Brexit ideal of “self-reliance” centred on three elements: ideological autonomy, economic self-sufficiency, and military independence.

There always was a fractious relationship ‘twixt les rosbifs and the French back in the day, and it’s returning to form. Agence France Presse have syndicated that les rosbifs can keep their damn ros bif out of the EU, indeed they can keep their biohazard sarnies in Blighty. I don’t find that such a terrible thing, it’s how things used to be².

It’s not unheard of – you need to eat your ham sandwiches and indeed anything organically live before you touch down in JFK³ coming from Blighty, because else it’ll cost you no end of hurt. The French need the rosbifs’ money to make the otherwise twisted wasteland of some of their northern districts work, but they also need something to push back against. As do we.

Wonders will never cease, eh? Brexit comes early on the longest night.

Johnny Foreigner to UK: Brexit – you wanted it, you got it. Christmas come early. Enjoy. Love and kisses, J.F.

The new strain of pestilence has brought the opportunity of Brexit forward to the longest night, while the Tory press and the backbenchers have got the knives out. Because.. Sweden. Unherd. The Great Barrington Declaration. I can understand their point of view. If you are rich enough to steer clear of the plebs then you can probably afford to take your chances in the shires. It’s the modern version of let them eat cake.

If you were in London I’m sure Carruthers can chauffeur you in the Daimler out to your estate, and who stays in the Great Wen over Xmas anyway, dahlink? The pheasants aren’t going to shoot themselves over Xmas y’know!

You probably got out before the coppers start throwing up roadblocks, and anyway, they’re not stopping a Daimler. They couldn’t be arsed to do ‘owt about the slob Cominic Dummings so they aren’t going to stop someone in a black limo with a gammon in Harris tweed sitting in the back.

Toffs to masses: our entitlement to Christmas hugs⁴ is more important than your right to live, and generally waaaaah. Actually they rephrase that as preserving your right to work some crappy job because they set up the system for high rents and shitty jobs, but that’s another thing. Pandemics shine a harsh light on societies. When Jacob Rees-Mogg is fulminating about UNICEF, perhaps he should have checked his privilege before sounding like an arse.

Let ’em eat cake, eh, Moggers? Those kids had it coming to ’em. Who the hell do they think they are – Oliver Twist? There’s only one political offence to be made in this direction Jake, and that is to incontrovertibly prove that there were no kids or that they had enough to eat before UNICEF came along. Else STFU Jacob, for some reason people get uptight about hungry kids.

While on the topic of privileged wingnuts, let’s hear it from Dezza

Dezza. Looks just the sort, eh? Science? I don’t need no steekin’ science tellin’ me what to do

Former minister Sir Desmond Swayne said ‘it does have all the characteristics of the Government being bounced by the science, as it was right at the beginning of the arrangements when we first went into lockdown last March’.

Science, eh? Miserable shit that it is, buggering up your Christmas. That’s the funny thing about science, innit? It keeps on coming, like the Terminator, or the moving finger – “having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it“. There seems to be a macho pissing match going on here. After all, it was perfectly acceptable to ride roughshod over protocol last year when it was a case of getting Brexit done, but suddenly when you get to eat a whole Christmas turkey all on your own it’s soo terrible. Dezza I’m sure you have a big freezer out in some barn on your estate, you don’t have to eat it all at once.

There may well be a debate to be had as to who is bearing the cost, and if we decide that it’s fair enough to kill some people off for the greater good, then let’s man up and say what price we are going to put on our marks’ heads, and look the blighters in the eye when we tell ’em your end of the boat is going down for our end to go up.

We should beware of going too far down that direction, because it doesn’t usually end well. Nature has been doing it all the time but it goes to some very very dark places when the decision of identifying some group of people as a general load on society put in the hands of human decision-makers.

But you won’t get that sort of debate in today’s febrile political environment. Nevertheless, Desmond, me old mucker, when you end up railing against Science for having cancelled your Christmas then you really ought to go the whole hog and throw out electricity in your stately pile, reject cleaning products, the germ theory of disease, and die early as they used to before science did something about pestilence and people listened up. But at least you get to eat all your turkey, what-ho.

Good old Marx,  history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Quite so, old boy. Happy Winter Solstice to y’all. It’s all up from here as the light returns. It couldn’t get any worse. Could it?

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1. No idea what people did with herring back in the day. We don’t really like it, so we sell it to the Scandinavians, and if you’ve even been to Scandinavia you will observe that what they do with herring is very strong food indeed. Bear in mind that 50 years ago a Vesta curry was considered the height of exotic cuisine in the UK. ↩
2. As a child I wanted to bring a seed from a German forest to grow in the garden, and my parents told me i need to keep it on the QT entering the country. As it was it didn’t take in the clay London soils. ↩
3. Not sure what the USDA APHIS do about Canucks taking some home cooking over the border to the US, or whether this is regarded as a North America thing ↩
4. British elites often come from independent/boarding schools which turn out bad people and great novels. It’s possible that because of this childhood trauma some of these guys are so sociopathic they can’t understand other people other than incidental landscape. The great independent/boarding schools of Britain were designed to craft Imperial leaders operating in a time of poor communications. Efficacy is valued over scruples. q.v. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Westminster School, Eton College ↩