Suzanne Harrington: Brexit's really worked out if you don't mind the economy tanking, nurses strikes, and food poverty
I’m writing this on Brexit Day. Three years since the UK declared its splendid isolation, and made its residents all kinds of splendid promises about sunlit uplands – remember that red bus, promising to divert £350 million a week from the EU to the NHS instead? We do. And lo. Three years on, are UK residents richer, happier, freer, no longer enmeshed with those dreadful foreigners?
Well, if you look out the window today you’ll see the streets bouncing with school children, all having a day off as their teachers strike. 100,000 teachers out, their education budgets slashed, so that schools are running on unpaid overtime and bake sales. Placards saying things like If Tories Paid Taxes, Schools Would Have Glue Sticks. University lecturers have walked out too, as universities struggle without all those foreign students who pay top level fees.
What’s that – you’re having a heart attack? Terrible timing. You’ll wait 90 minutes for a 999 ambulance – and that’s on a good day. Nurses, paramedics, ambulance drivers, even physiotherapists, are striking because patients are dying and health workers are at breaking point, after years of defunding the health service to break it down and sell it off to private corporations. Jeremy Corbyn specifically warned about this, but we called him a mad old Marxist. Meanwhile, nurses are eating out of foodbanks, whose usage has increased 81% in the past five years. As well as food banks, there are now ‘warm spaces’, in libraries and churches, for people freezing to death at home. Sunlit uplands indeed.
Don’t try and get a train either. There are none. Transport workers, led by London-Irish trades unionist Mick Lynch – his dad was from Cork - are on strike for similar reasons as teachers and nurses. Mick Lynch is currently the only person in Brexitland not actively obfuscating the public with Orwellian doublespeak, to the horror of the right-wing media; they have repurposed him as a cross between Stalin and Satan, so he must be doing something right.
Meanwhile, the IMF has said that the UK’s economy is the only one in the developed world to be actively tanking. It’s performing worse than Russia under sanctions. The Chancellor – the one in charge of the money – has just been fired for tax fiddling; he was ‘careless’ and ‘forgot’ about his offshore millions. Easily done, Nadhim. Only last week I forgot I'd left a fiver in my other coat. Not that a Brexit fiver goes far.
Food prices are up an average of 16.7%, and there is a shortage of 330,000 workers to do low paid immigranty stuff like harvest food before it rots in the field. Inflation is at 10.5%, and a litre of olive oil has jumped from £5 to £8 in my local supermarket.
But chin up, campers. A full 9% of the population still support Brexit. They have no Bregrets at all. Boris Johnson, who is very rich and got Brexit done, urges us to “shrug off the gloom mongering.”
Quite right. Who needs food, heat, education and healthcare anyway? Pure indulgence.
