As Eric Idle once said, “Always look on the bright side of life”. As a clinical depressive, that has always run contrary to my attitude on life, mine being the other line, “Life’s a piece of shit, when you look at it!” So in these strange and chaotic times, I am trying to look on the bright side.
My current wife and I were trying to come up with positives about our impending Brexit. It’s easier than you might think. The first one we – well, she – came up with was duty free goods at the airport. It has long been a source of irritation to me that if you travel within the EU you can’t buy duty free booze. You can still buy booze but it’s at supermarket prices. So that’s one bit of good news. If we still has jobs and assuming we can afford the inevitably dearer holidays in the years ahead, at least we can get a few quid off a bottle of Scotch before flying off.
As basic arithmetic is not my strongest suit, when the pound has parity with the Euro and the Dollar, I will no longer have to mess around with a calculator trying to work out how bloody expensive things are abroad. I appreciate that this is not good in the economic sense, but it will save me great stress in trying to work things out.
Schadenfreude is not usually something I recommend, but to hell with it when it comes to Boris Johnson. The twisted politics of this country has, I suspect, had an impact on how some people voted in this referendum. I do not agree with the constantly parroted assumption that politicians “are all as bad as each other” and “in it for themselves”, but I do feel a substantial minority are as bad as each other. For instance, David Cameron has inadvertently taken us out of the EU whilst he was engaging in Tory Party management, of trying to shut up his swivel-eyed backbenchers whose entire raison d’être (not a good term in this context, I admit) is to bang on about Europe. He has been comprehensively defeated by Boris Johnson whose entire raison d’être is getting himself into Number Ten. And in the ultimate cynical act, Cameron has quit, handing Johnson a poisoned chalice for his first days as prime minister by having to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to start the process of taking Britain out of Europe. “You’ve created this mess,” said Cameron, “so you clear it up”. It will be comically awful watching Johnson, never known for his grasp of detail, negotiate his way out of this one.
The last country to leave the EU was Greenland in 1985. And boy, have they done all right. Things are booming in Greenland and if we, like them, had an economy entirely based on selling fish, we’d be laughing all the way to Billingsgate. As it is, our economy is somewhat more diverse. Still, it is likely that house prices will fall as a result of Brexit, so at least the younger generation might at last be able to get on the housing ladder, assuming they still decent jobs. Okay, inflation will go up a bit, but if we can just undiversify (I think I may have made up that word) and concentrate on fish, we should be okay.
So, duty free, a much easier way of comparing currencies, the hilarity of watching Boris Johnson spend the next few years negotiating the unravelling of EU membership and the next two negotiating new deals with the very same people and basing our economy on fish.
Brexit, then, wasn’t quite so bad after all. Was it?
