Suzanne Harrington: England has gone psychotic – so can it topple itself?
Picture this. A windswept hill, driving rain. Two women and an old banger of a car. One holding a large plastic bottle, formerly containing chilli, which has had its broad end cut off with a kitchen knife, and a length of garden hose gaffer taped inside the pouring end to make a workable funnel. Like a bong.
The other woman holds a container sloshing with five litres of rare and precious liquid. Petrol. It splashes all over her hands as she tips the homemade bong into the car’s empty tank. Careful now. If this doesn’t work, the only other option is mouth-to-hose.
Where is this – up a mountain in Albania? Somewhere bombed out in Afghanistan? The Australian outback? No. This is outside my house on Sunday. We have managed to get some petrol by selling my daughter’s kidney. Kidding – how can you transport live organs when nobody has any fuel? No, we just prostituted her instead. How else are we going to drive to the supermarket to scavenge for food from empty shelves, wrestling strangers to the ground for the last head of broccoli?
Welcome to Brexit Britain. It’d be hilarious if I didn’t actually live here. Also, nobody’s welcome, except mad people fixated on blue passports. I say Britain – I mean England. Wales and Scotland should not be dragged into this; like Ireland, they are innocent bystanders, watching their neighbour thrashing around on the ground screaming unintelligibly about taking back control. England’s gone psychotic.
Instead, English people express their frustrations via tuts, tweets and memes, which are funny but unlikely to bring about regime change. Yet the UK is now the kind of place that it would traditionally invade in the name of human rights – so can it topple itself?
Don’t be daft. Instead, native wags tweet things like, “All you people moaning about petrol shortages caused by Brexit….I saw this coming and had my car converted to run on sovereignty. I get about 25 furlongs to the tugged forelock.” Memes of the red Brexit bus abound, highlighting not just the lack of petrol, but the lack of drivers. Brexit Britain has murdered parody and satire, and turned it into real life. Cheers.
Please, please, Mr Latvian lorry driver, come back and drive our petrol around. Bring the foreign poultry workers with you to murder our turkeys for Christmas, and then you can all eff off back to the EU again. Otherwise, we’ll have to retrain the natives as HGV drivers, but that would take ages so we’ll skip the bit about how to reverse a 44-tonne lorry into a 3-metre gap at the back of a supermarket. What could possibly go wrong - that hasn’t already? Is this entire omnishambles being scripted by the guy from The Thick Of It? I want a refund.
