£350 million a week, a lifetime in prison in Brexistential Breakdowns

It’s been a while since we’ve had a Brexit entry and that’s honestly because the longer I’ve left it the more that’s happened and thus the amount of things I’ve felt that I needed to include grew. I mean, there was Theresa May’s deal that she worked out with the EU that failed to pass through Parliament three times with her first attempt resulting in the biggest commons defeat for a sitting government ever, then there was the tentative deadline extension on condition of May’s withdrawal agreement passing which was then grudgingly extended on the condition that we ran European Parliament elections (which we did last week with the rest of Europe), then there was Theresa May announcing she would be stepping down in June which initially sounds like great news until you realise that people like Dominic Raab, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom are currently candidates for the position and each seems worse than the last like they’re all in some Dickensian Workhouse version of Top Trumps (or “Toff Trumps”, if you will). But the thing that broke the silence and brought me back to the never-ending nightmare that is the grinding catastrophe of Brexit, the one news event that gave me voice and drive and an orgasmic joy-induced erection, is this:

(priapism /ˈprʌɪəpɪz(ə)m/ noun (MEDICINE) persistent and painful erection of the penis. Also what happened to much of the UK populace when news of Boris Johnson’s court summons was announced)

You may remember that one of the more contentious issues surrounding the referendum was the amount of money we paid to be members of the European Union, and a specific amount was regularly cited by the Leave campaign as being better spent elsewhere. Obviously, nobody actually gave any guarantees that it would be spent on the things they promised it’d be spent on, with Farage denying it’d be spent on the NHS literally an hour after the referendum result came in (though, in all fairness (and I can’t believe I’m actually going to bat for Farage) his defence was that his campaign to leave the EU didn’t ever make that claim, which is true, but they didn’t exactly do anything to dissuade the other campaign from repeating it or distancing themselves from it or the sentiment it invoked either, so I still think they’re somewhat culpable for shamelessly riding the cresting wave of Johnson and Gove’s dodgy maths). You may also remember that this number was plastered across the side of a bus which Johnson, Gove and chums drove around the country, spreading the lie and constantly dismissing people pointing out that it was a lie by claiming it wasn’t a lie, despite being told repeatedly by many different sources that it was a lie and that they should stop spreading it.

And a lying liar can be observed lying about the number on that bus while on said bus here:

This, as a crowd-funded legal challenge has pointed out, technically constitutes misconduct in public office, a serious offence which can result in up to life imprisonment, and I still can’t believe that I get to write that about Boris Johnson. Seriously, it’s like banging Nigella Lawson and then a week later you’re chilling with your mates and you suddenly remember that you banged Nigella Lawson and that “I’ve had sex with Nigella Lawson” is actually a thing you can legitimately say, it’s fucking amazing. Sadly, I haven’t banged Nigella Lawson and I never will (and also if I did I would never shut the fuck up about it), but a man can dream and in the meantime I do get to do the next best thing, which is write about Boris Johnson currently being summoned to court over misconduct in public office which is a charge that carries up to a life sentence.

He won’t get life, obviously; he’s a rich white man, but it’s still nice to actually see something fucking happening to someone who’s made a career out of lying through his teeth and getting away with it for decades. Even if it’s just the threat of consequences, the fact that it’s an actual, tangible threat of consequences is delicious and things have been so shit here recently that I’ll fucking take whatever I can get. But anyway, yeah, a summons: a legal case was brought before District Judge Margot Goldman who reviewed it and, despite Johnson’s protestations that the case was a “politically motivated attempt to reverse Brexit” and “a stunt”, she found that “there is ample evidence that the proposed defendant knew that the statements were false” and thus there was sufficient evidence of an issue, and so a trial can proceed. A summons is a legal order to attend court, and failure to do so may result in an arrest warrant being issued, another sentence about Boris Johnson which gives me a tingly feeling in my genitals every time I remember I can write it. Johnson and his lawyers are probably going to attempt to appeal literally everything they can in order to avoid his day in the dock, but the fact that legal proceedings are taking place and it’s someone as significant as Boris Johnson is a reassuring sign nonetheless, and we should all take a moment to enjoy it and bask in the radiating glow of justice being delivered to the mop-haired skidmark of a human being.

Now if we could do something about Farage too, that’d be better than winning the lottery on the same day weed was legalised and Nigella turned up on my doorstep with a freshly-baked space cake and some naughty underwear…

BONG!

Because that bus has been a key component of this whole debacle I thought it might be nice to briefly review its legacy and what it’s gone on to do in the years since the referendum. For starters, basically everything a politician drives round in nowadays is a “battle bus”, even when it’s technically a coach, so we have it to thank for introducing that particularly cringeworthy piece of slang into modern vernacular. Further, it’s also been a gift for uncreative advertising executives trying to raise awareness of whatever it is they’ve been commissioned to ram down the public’s throat, such as when Channel 4 wanted to promote its docudrama “Brexit: the Uncivil War”. Now, to be fair to Channel 4 it makes sense that they’d use a bus to promote a drama about Brexit, and they also had the incredibly witty slogan “take back the remote control” which does a wonderful job of tickling the area of my brain that loves shit puns and crap wordplay (that’s the Prepuntal Cortex, which is located in the Occipuntal Lobe).

It’s also a tactic that’s been lovingly adopted by the few remaining Remainers who haven’t given in to despair and resorted to drinking themselves to sleep every night to rid their minds of the grinding and relentless horror of realising that there might be more racists in the country than they’d previously imagined, namely the people who’ve been campaigning for a second referendum under the unabashedly blunt slogan “Bollocks to Brexit”.

Since crowdfunding seems to be the only way to actually even attempt any form of change, a successful campaign saw the Bollocks to Brexit group able to afford a brief tour around the country during December, which they started by photobombing a BBC News live broadcast and finished by photobombing an ITV News live broadcast, both of which took place outside of parliament and both of which you can view here. There would’ve been a sweet irony had the bus they used been the bus, but sadly the bus was busy elsewhere. It had been acquired by Greenpeace, who covered the bus in questions about Brexit from both Leavers and Remainers which mainly regarded the effects of Brexit for the environment and our environmental legislation and then parked it outside of Parliament for a bit. Following that it was given a quick paint job and used to transport the Pakistan cricket squad to their Champions Trophy match against South Africa when that took place in Edgbaston, West Midlands. Shortly after that it had another fresh coat of paint to advertise new financial start up Monese and their expansion into mainland Europe. Like Channel 4 they also couldn’t resist the lure of its previous occupation and so the bus proudly bore the slogans “send €350 million with zero fees” and “take control of your finances” which isn’t as witty as Channel 4’s but you can’t really blame them for giving in to temptation, can you?

Since then I’ve not been able to find much about the bus’ whereabouts, but its legacy remains in the cheap advertising stunts, language of lazy political editors, and the sword of Damocles which currently dangles above Boris Johnson and his legal team. Oh, and a free browser game which challenges you to ride the value of the pound from May 2016 to 2017’s budget without crashing, which you can play here.

I did it in about 84 seconds, but to be fair I’m shit at Trials: Fusion anyway and also nearly crashed it just before the state visit of Donald Trump.

BONG!

I promise not everything will be about Brexit-related busses but we’re going to linger in this subject area for just a little while longer. How much longer? About the same length of time as Nigel Farage spent trapped on his Brexit Party bus because there was a crowd around him and someone thought three of them were carrying milkshakes. Seriously.

Police also spoke to two people who had shouted anti-Farage slogans and also happened to be holding iced lattes. Again, seriously.

Farage would later tweet that “some remainers have become radicalised, to the extent that normal campaigning is becoming impossible”, and I’m just going to leave a link to this article about Farage claiming if Brexit wasn’t delivered he’d “don khaki, pick up a rifle and head for the front lines” here for no related reason whatsoever.

During campaigning for the European elections there was a brief trend of throwing milkshakes over right-wing political figures, inspired by two incidents involving ongoing trial disrupting, court order violating and parasite-infested slug in the cabbage patch of humanity Stephen “Tommy Robinson” Yaxley-Lennon and a couple of large Maccy D’s milkshakes, with the first happening in Bury and the second in Warrington.

The paranoia which kept Farage trapped on his bus (which was actually a bus, to be fair) was inspired less by this and more by the £5.25 banana and salted caramel shake from Five Guys which he found dripping down his suit when campaigning in Newcastle, generously donated by the man in a white shirt you can see being bundled off by security on the right of this photo:

who was then arrested on suspicion of common assault, because Patreon money can’t buy you much security but dark money from Russia and a few hundred thousand from Arron Banks can apparently secure you the services of the police, and we know about the effects of such a funding disparity because alt-right YouTube anti-feminist shit-for-brains and bearded thumb for a head Carl “I wouldn’t even rape you, Jess Phillips” Benjamin (who you may know better as “Sargon of Akkad” if you’re unfortunate enough to have been a victim of YouTube’s recommendation algorithms) received four dairy showers in a single week while out campaigning as an actual member of UKIP in Russia’s favourite holiday destination Salisbury.

Also, so did Milo Yiannopoulos while he was out with Carl in Exeter, but since absolutely nobody gives a flying fuck about the paedophilia-endorsing transphobic Gamergate relic any more nobody noticed or cared, and frankly in that situation it really was just a waste of a milkshake. The craze of lactose for the intolerant reached such fever pitch that police asked one McDonald’s in Edinburgh to stop selling milkshakes while Farage held a rally nearby, a situation which Burger King took advantage of with a nudge and a wink:

There was also a reported incident of a milkshake being thrown at this old fella out campaigning for the Brexit party:

However, as many people pointed out, not only was there no evidence of the milkshake being thrown (compared to literally every other incident which was at least photographed happening if not directly caught on film and despite the man being accompanied by two other, younger men) but also that it only left a smear across the man’s shirt instead of the full-frontal splattering characteristic of a liquid being thrown at a target, as well as being of a thicker consistency than milkshakes and having what appeared to be bits of fruit in it. Forensic analysis (or “looking closer at the picture” as happened in this case) seemed to suggest that it was actually a cherry yoghurt smeared on the man’s shirt by either him or some of his cohorts with the aim of being able to similarly smear their political opponents on the left. It was further pointed out that the man is former soldier Don McNaughton, who was tried for the attempted murder of an unarmed man in Armagh, Northern Ireland while serving over there in 1974:

This incident has since become known as “Sundae, Bloody Sundae”.

Now, naturally, a lot of people on the right have been raising concerns about how the act of chucking a milkshake at a political opponent is assault and violence and differences should instead be settled through calm, logical and reasoned debate, but on the other hand considering things like what happened to Heather Heyer in Charlottesville - an incident Carl himself did much to spread conspiracy theories about, breathing the oxygen of an audience and publicity to the alt-right parroted lie that Heyer actually died of a heart attack and not that she was hit by a car driven into a crowd by an alt-right regurgitated spunkbubble - along with the rise in hate crimes since the referendum (to the point where even children are lightening their skin to avoid racial abuse and hate crimes) and the fact that Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death in the street by a man shouting “death to traitors, freedom for Britain” maybe the people on the right who are currently in histrionics over a strawberry facial can go fuck themselves.

Weirdly, there was mainly the opposite of condemnation of violence and assault from them when both Labour leaders Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Milliband got egged, but then again maybe they’d forgotten how John “Two Jabs” Prescott responded to his? Anyway, that happened in 2001 and I feel like a right old fart now so I’ll be wrapping this up shortly, but I’ll give the last word to the Facebook group Ireland Simpsons Fans, who have turned using screenshots and quotes from the Simpsons for political commentary into an actual art form.

BONG!

The “burn of the year and a bit since my last entry week award” has to go to the aforementioned former Labour leader Ed Miliband, about whom David Cameron tweeted this when campaigning for the General Election in 2015 was drawing to a close:

and who, upon the announcement of Theresa May’s resignation and thus the second Tory leadership change since that election, changed his Twitter name to this:

And you know what, Ed? Yeah, you’ve fucking earned that. Nicely done, mate.

BONG!

Considering it’s been more than a year since my last Brexit entry it’s inevitable that the vast majority of subjects and incidents I’d wanted to cover wouldn’t make it in, and given that it’s also currently nearly five in the morning and I’m somewhat knackered I’m going to have to call an end to this particular update, one which has singularly failed to actually address the state of the country and most of the more recent Brexit developments, so while a more general overview of things is actually on the cards and will be coming soon, I will instead leave you with this quick summary of the actual state of Brexit preparations: since the act of leaving the EU without proper agreements in place to allow for things like the transport of food and medicine into the country will cause major problems at points of entry such as Dover, Government preparations for coping with these problems has revealed that a number of important items will have to be stockpiled before the deadline in case of a No Deal Brexit, and amongst the items like perishable food and medicines with short shelf lives (such as radioactive isotopes used to treat various cancers) are the body bags that will also be needed.

So, yeah, we currently don’t have enough body bags to cope with the expected death toll of a No Deal Brexit.

That’s probably the best summary of the state of everything since David Cameron took office in 2015. Cheers Dave.

Last updated May 29, 2019