There is nowhere for Britons to turn as catastrophic Brexit looms
Shades of the Second World War, drugs with a short shelf life will be flown in, the government says, which sounds as if they mean under the radar, like bombs and food parcels.
Britain — nothing Great about it lately — is heading for a Brexit so self-destructive that it’s like a national case of sepsis.
Every day brings worse news about how bad it’s going to be if there’s no deal with the European Union by March or, even if there is a deal, how it will be a criminally hasty one.
It will mean chaos. Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, I imagine reluctantly, has sent out 24 of 80 government papers on what life will look like if there is no EU deal — imagine bullet points but with actual bullets — and they’re dire in the extreme. I am plucking the strangest bits out of the BBC and Guardian summaries. They are extraordinary.
The latest bombshell, unexploded until next spring, is the government request that medicine not be hoarded, neither by pharmacies nor patients. They will be kept at normal levels with an extra six weeks tacked on for safety.
What that says to an ill person is, “Get all the medication you can and keep it in the fridge.” Casually ask your vet if dog medication works on humans.
Shades of the Second World War, drugs with a short shelf life will be flown in, the government says, which sounds as if they mean under the radar, like bombs and food parcels.
The government shouldn’t have mentioned hoarding in the first place. Everybody had been thinking about food, and now this.
U.K. citizens in the EU may lose banking services. Brits at home will pay for more for them. Everything will cost more, everything.
The British organic food industry will wither for at least nine months because EU recertification can’t even start until after Brexit. May says she’ll keep paying farmers the EU subsidies that made organic farming possible, but only until the next election in 2022.
Similarly, May will fund student exchange programs with EU universities, but again only until 2022. The EU will stop funding British non-governmental organizations working on aid projects, and May probably won’t step up, not for foreign projects. Britain will be shut out of science research grants and infrastructure funding.
Happily, smoking will cost more because Britain will have to replace the EU’s illustrated warnings about the Grim Reaper on its cigarette packages.
Britain is suffering intensely from the Conservative austerity policy that is hacking at the National Health Service and its free medical care, local libraries, schools, affordable housing, university education, welfare, and basically everything established in postwar Britain to make it less medieval in the class sense.
The Conservatives have been doing this for decades, as is their right, and Tony Blair’s New Labour did try to repair things, as was their responsibility, but it leaves the nation facing a huge problem. Why did May retain austerity if she knew EU cash handouts would vanish? It’s austere austerity. Faux-EU till ’22 — is that her slogan?
Voters have nowhere to turn. Both Conservatives and Labour favour Brexit, each for their own reasons. The extreme-Brexit wing of the Conservatives is easily as ideological as the hardline Corbynistas on the left. Both seem willing to trash the nation to make a point.
The only thing that sustains the Conservatives is the thought of Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left Labourite caught in the past. In many ways he’s like Trump, so sensitive to unfavourable media coverage that he wants to gradually replace the BBC with something Orwellian called the British Digital Corporation, a publicly funded government version of Facebook.
Although calls grow for another referendum on the actual Brexit deal, it might not help. There is no middle ground for reasonable people. Labour and Conservative extremists resemble the Red Guards of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, if the Red Guards had tweeted.
And this is why Brexit will happen. There is nowhere for Britons to turn to make it not happen. If you don’t like Corbyn, stick with May, a nicer Thatcher. Sick of May, vote for a man baked in 1970s macramé populism but with more misogyny. That’s two deplorables.
Brexit is disgracing almost everyone. Meanwhile, there are dozens more warning papers to go, and I do mean downwards.
Heather Mallick is a columnist based in Toronto covering current affairs. Twitter: @HeatherMallick