Give the Tories credit – Even the totally dysfunctional Trump didn’t manage to systematize total economic and revenue failure. The Tories have. The latest disaster is a risk of food shortages caused by utter incompetence on multiple levels.
To add some black humor – The monotonously off-planet pro-Brexit UK media, as slovenly a herd of substandard rats as you could ever wish to see, are predicting the food shortages. The Daily Express, also known for asteroid-spotting and various other enthusiasms, points out that lack of 15,000 lorry drivers is one of the problems.
So it is. Driving lorries to and from the UK is now a form of masochism for some. Brexit has created expensive delays. UK drivers can only deliver one way, and need permits for picking up other loads. Many drivers were EU citizens, driven out by the Brexit hysteria. These driver jobs cost too much time and money for independent contractors.
Many businesses are simply shutting down or relocating to the EU, disrupting the formerly easy management of food supplies. Long delays in checks don’t help perishable foods, either. The bureaucracy isn’t EU bureaucracy. It’s UK bureaucracy. The UK had to hire 50,000 new bureaucrats to enforce a check system it still doesn’t have in place, although all EU countries have adapted to Brexit border needs.
All this is after creation of the internal border and huge lorry facilities in Kent, which voted pro-Brexit. The lorry services are trying to remain solvent. The Brexit mess just keeps on spreading.
Systemic failure 101
In keeping with the low taxes, deregulation and anti-public sector insanity of conservative governments, the situation is now:
- Reduced trade due to Brexit
- Reduced revenue due to reduced trade and job losses due to Brexit
- Increased debt to cover reduced revenue due to Brexit
- Reduced ability to manage debt due to Brexit
- Increased imports due to shafting the UK food producers due to Brexit
- No clear path for economic recovery due to Brexit.
…See a subtle, almost invisible, pattern forming? Brexit was always going to be a shambles. All of this was predicted, years ago.
Johnson said before the 2016 Brexit referendum that leaving the single market would be madness. He then did everything possible to leave the single market and promote a hard Brexit. The inevitable disaster has been based entirely on political babble, not actual economics of any kind.
If that sounds like fun:
UK customs capacities have been effectively neutered. The new systems for checking imports are still dithering away.
Smugglers can effectively bring in anything, including food, and prices could be lethal. (Smuggling, by the way, is a centuries-old English tradition.)
The decades of Tory white-anting have also reduced the ability of the UK to regulate anything at all. The notorious “Nanny State” of Thatcher’s rabid ideology just happened to include food regulation. What are laws for? Guess.
The revenue black hole which is emerging from all this self-indulgence is already becoming visible, in the first six months of Brexit. Where’s the revenue to come from? They’re already talking about spending cuts.
New uses for the word Brexit
If nothing but disasters have come out of Brexit, there’s one positive. Brexit can now be used to describe many things:
- Tory incompetence
- Total ignorance of reality
- Conservative economic illiteracy on all levels
- The total separation of conservatives from the English language and all it may contain. (After, all, how would you know?)
- Populist hypocrisy
- Right wing media skankdom in all its maggot-like inglorious filth
- UK public idiocy – Since when, dating back to the Napoleonic Wars, have the Tories done a damn thing for anyone but themselves? (Who’s winning the class war – Them or you?)
It says so much that even a blank space like Trump, the lifelong Democrat turned Republican trash messiah, couldn’t achieve anything like Brexit. He tried. He turned trade with America’s biggest trading partner into an obstacle course. He cost American importers and consumers billions in tariffs. He just couldn’t destroy the national economy.
Brexit can destroy the UK, all the way to the flag itself. All that mindless Union Jack waving has so far accomplished nothing but disasters. The result is huge added costs, loss of business and massive uncertainties for the future.
There will always be an England – But not with those tiny little minds running it. Do something about that. You’ll feel ever so much better.
