Happy bad day

For the past three decades, every year on her birthday I’ve written a letter to my mum, who died in 1989. (Every year except 2017 when, instead of writing to her, I wrote about her.) It’s a catch up, checking in with her at the great cocktail party in the sky to let her know what I’ve been doing for the past twelve months.

If I was going to write anything today, that’s what I should be writing, but January 31^st is no longer just my mum’s birthday, so I guess a hybrid is required.

Dear Mum,

You’ll never believe what the powers that be in Britain have organised for your birthday this year. Brexit.

What’s that you ask? Well, three and a half years ago, the British prime minister David Cameron (you would have hated him), in a sop to the frothing-at-the-mouth Eurosceptic wing of the Tory party, held a completely unnecessary referendum about the UK’s membership in the European Union. It should have been a no brainer. The benefits of EU membership (as I know you would agree) were myriad. Yet somehow, after all the votes were counted, a slim majority of people (mostly in England) had voted to leave the EU. I say “somehow”, but, truth be told, there was a lot of misinformation and many downright lies (some from Russia, believe it or not) circulated by the Leave bastards. And the Remain campaign was pretty bloody lacklustre. The day after the votes were counted, that cowardly little shit David Cameron quit and ran away.

The UK then got its second female prime minister, a woman named Theresa May, who inherited the thankless task of trying to negotiate a separation agreement with the EU that wouldn’t completely destroy the British economy. Given that she’d almost certainly voted to remain in the EU, I don’t know how much of her heart was really in it, but I’m sure she did her best. Then she did something really quite stupid. She called a general election, clearly believing she would win a nice majority she could hold up as her mandate to take the UK out of the EU. Instead the Conservatives came up six seats short on a majority and she had to make a deal with the Ulster Bigots Party in order to govern.

By the time Ms May was ready to present her Brexit agreement to Parliament for a vote, there’d been a bit of a sea change. A lot of people had woken up from their Leave-related hangovers and begun to wonder if they’d voted the right way. More than half the population wanted a do over, but Ms May was having none of that. Her deal, which would have allowed the UK to continue trading fairly freely with the EU never had a chance. Labour and the Lib Dems and the Scottish National Party were against it, because they didn’t want any deal. They wanted another referendum. The hardcore Brexiteers on the Tory backbenches wanted none of the prime minister’s negotiations, because they wanted Britain to jump off a cliff with no safety net tying the country to the EU. Ms May tried and failed three times to get her deal through Parliament, then threw in the towel. She could, just for the satisfaction of screwing over the backstabbing backbenchers, have legislated a second referendum before she went,  but she didn’t. (Shame on her, right?)

So, with the clock ticking down on a no-deal, hard Brexit, it was time for yet another Tory leader and prime minister.

Enter this clown.

As one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, he drove around the country in this bus. The claim that the UK sent £350 million a week to the EU was false. And pretty much the day after the narrow referendum win for Leave, this clown and his co-conspirators freely admitted they had absolutely no intention of pouring hundreds of millions of pounds a week into the National Health Service.

Now the clown is prime minister and thanks to him the UK ceased to be a member of the European Union ten minutes ago. Big Ben is currently out of commission, so was spared the ignominy of ringing in this tragic event.

Oh, by the way, Labour’s collapsed, so the clown, who won a huge majority in a snap December election (honestly, Mum, you wouldn’t believe the red ridings that went blue) will probably be prime minister for a decade.

Well, that’s the bad news from Blighty, Mum.

Don’t get me started on the venal wankmaggot in the White House. You thought Nixon was bad? You really wouldn’t believe this asshole.

Anyway, happy birthday. Hope the cocktails are flowing freely up there. I’m going to have one myself in a minute to sadly toast the decline and fall of Britain’s future.

Cheers.