101 YEARS OLD AND STILL AS WISE AS A SLOTH...
THE year was 2018 and the Great Battle of Brexit still raged after years of conflict. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, no resolution was in sight and the sides were as far apart as ever. There was only one person who could solve the dispute, one superhero who could cut the Gordian tangle of intractable knottiness caused by the issue. So the heads of the pro-Brexit, anti-Brexit and EU agreed: we must call Slothman!
As soon as the Slothsign was beamed into the sky, the superhero known as Slothman ambled towards his hot air balloon, waiting for the wind to change and headed towards Westminster.
“Sorry I’m late,” he said when he arrived. “These Thameslink balloons are rubbish. Now what seems to be the trouble?”
“Brexit,” said the PM. “Can you solve it?”
“What exactly is the problem?” asked Slothman.
“We had a referendum and voted for Brexit but now everyone’s arguing about how to do it,” the PM said.
“Show me the figures,” said Slothman, and the PM handed him the referendum results. “I see I was in the majority,” Slothman said.
“You mean you voted for Brexit,” the PM said. “No,” said Slothman. “I didn’t vote.” “I don’t understand,” the PM said. “You say you were in the majority but the majority voted for Brexit.”
“No they didn’t,” Slothman said, pointing at the figures. “There were 33,551,241 votes of which 17,410,742 were for Brexit. You may say that’s 51.89 per cent of the vote, but only 33,551,983 people voted out of 51,356,768 who were eligible to do so. The rest either registered but didn’t vote or did not even bother to register. So the number of people who, like me, didn’t vote was 17,804,785 which is almost 400,000 more than those who voted for Brexit. We apathetic types therefore outscore both the Brexiteers and Remainers.”
“But people may have had different reasons for not voting. They may have been too lazy, or too indecisive, or didn’t trust themselves to make the right decision,” said the PM. “What was your reason?”
“Not laziness, that’s for sure,” said Slothman. “I suppose I thought it over and decided that no vote was better than a bad vote, so to avoid casting a bad vote, I didn’t vote at all.”
“I can understand that,” the PM said, “but what do you advise now?”
“Well what these figures tell us is that the don’t cares and don’t knows outnumber any other group, so whatever action we take doesn’t really matter because whatever we do will probably be wrong but we’ll muddle through somehow. So it’s best to do nothing at all and see what we end up with. That’s the Slothman philosophy.”
“We think alike,” the PM said with a smile, shaking Slothman warmly by the three-toed paw of his sloth suit and everyone cheered.
[We should point out that the policy outlined above is not necessarily that of the Daily Express or Beachcomber himself but is definitely what Slothman thinks and that’s what matters.]