Brexit: Britain's Great Leap Forward"
By Luke Haines
For a nation that prides itself on stoicism and a stiff upper lip, it's still possible to provoke a reaction from English people.
For the older generation, the fastest way is to point out that currency and units of measurement from their youth didn't make any sense, at which point they will bang their hand on the table and shout "Look, it's perfectly simple!" Before expalining that there are three Barleycorns to an inch and there were two shillings in a Florin and twelve Pence in a Shilling. There were twenty Shillings in a Pound and you wrote 'pounds/shillings/pence' as 'L/D/S' because for some reason the abbreviations were in Latin. (Yes, really.)
If you want to upset English people of any generation, you can put milk in a cup of tea before you put the water or the tea bag in, although we've largely had people who do that rounded up and shot, so it's less of an issue now.
Finally, if you really want to upset all British people, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish included, who are my age or younger, you can simply ask them how Brexit is going.
It's hard to know what to do in the face of the slow motion, xenophobic disaster that Brexit was always destined to become. Some people attempt grass roots political action and some run for office, but I think the most useful thing to do at this stage is to get everyone under the age of forty to donate some money so that we could write "WE TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN" with lasers in the sky.
The most recent problem is that parts of Britain are - forgive me if this is getting technical - running out of food. Supermarket shelves are increasingly bare in some parts because most of the truck drivers who deliver are European and it's proving a massive headache to export goods from the UK. This means that European companies don't want to send a truck full of food and have it drive back empty, thereby halving their profits. They've gotten around this neatly by not sending trucks at all, preferring to send their stuff to other countries that haven't for some lunatic reason* imposed a bunch of trade barriers.
This means there is a massive shortfall in British truck drivers and it turns out that nobody wants to fill the gap. This is to say nothing of how British food is generated in the first place - the people who traditionally do things like fruit picking and meat packing tend to be the sort of low-income migrant workers Brexiters just drove back to their homes in Eastern Europe on the shaky logic that they didn't like people from Syria. Britain has a shortage of farm labour and nobody to transport the food when it's ready.
Of course, according to Boris Johnson and his government, any and all problems are the fault of Covid and not Brexit, which would be more believable if the south of Ireland, still part of the EU, wasn't completely free of transport and logistics problems. A man who oversaw the worst Covid death toll in Europe blaming the Brexit problems he caused on the virus he failed to stop is vintage Johnson.
With all of this bad news, it's a reassuringly British dose of extra gloom to learn that things are about to get a lot worse. In about a month's time, we exit the "transition" phase of Brexit, when regulations on food import and export get REALLY tough. The thought that we might well look back fondly on a summer of under-stocked supermarket shelves in the middle of a pandemic as "the good old days" is a pretty good indicator of how bad things could get.
For my own part, I will be looking for work over the autumn and, despite the demand, I STILL don't want to be a truck driver. This is partly because the financial organisation of modern society is almost perfectly backwards. Consider that I've worked all through the pandemic in the kind of old fashioned general store that provided essentials like freezers and ovens, and also gardening implements for people who were off work for long periods, as well as cleaning supplies and all the other mundane things people needed to get by. I was, according to the government, a Key Worker.
Now bear in mind that Coca Cola and Pepsi spend an estimated four billion dollars between them on advertising, every year. Why the hell am I presumably getting a fraction of the wage of the head of marketing for drinks that literally everyone on earth has heard of?!
I've spent eighteen months, forty five hours a week risking a life-threatening infection so that little old ladies could buy means to cook their food. I've been out there, selling boring but essential shit like light bulbs, while people who sit in an office and take occasional meetings got six months off work and then go back to making probably five times what I do. Don't even get me started on doctors and nurses and ambulance drivers and care home workers, who have worked themselves to the point of breakdown and beyond for a pittance while Jeff Bezos - a man who admits that he takes his first meeting at 10am and likes to be done by five - became wealthier than any human in history.
From now on, I'm proposing we restructure how payments work.
First off, Doctors and Nurses and teachers get paid in line with what professional sports people currently make. Couple of hundred thousand a month, that sort of thing. Next down the chain are the other people essential to the function of society like the truck drivers and garbage collectors and anyone else that we all obliviously rely on to get through our day.
Next tier down is anyone with a job you understand when they say it. If you tell me you're a carpet salesman, great. I don't need any further information to understand your job. You at least appear to be doing something, even if it's not strictly essential.
The lower pay should be going to people who currently sit in offices doing things like "making sure people have heard of Pepsi." You're welcome to have a cushy gig where you sit down and answer emails and get an hour for lunch, but by Christ the money isn't going to be very good. Same thing for the athletes whose wages we gave to the nurses earlier on. You can keep playing sports for a living, but you're doing it for twenty five grand a year, max. If you don't love the sport enough to do that, go and be something useful like a plumber.
However, the real genius of my plan - at least in the UK - comes when we hit the monarchy. The people with easily the best wealth to effort ratio. Obviously, we get rid of the current lot; the Queen is on her last legs and the rest of them are useless at best and Prince Andrew at worst, but we keep the crowns and the sceptres and the palaces, and then we CHARGE PEOPLE TO BE ROYALTY. Because what Bezos and all these other billionaires don't want you to realise is that it isn't about the money. They have more money than a human brain can conceive of. For them, it's about desperately trying to fill the aching void in their souls and prove that they are special. People like that would absolutely pay to sit on a throne and wear a crown. Sure, we'd all have to wave as they were drawn past in a golden carriage, but a lot of people already do that for the current Royals, so we could just tell those weirdos to stick at it.
The key thing here is that only the people who pay the most get to be the King or Queen. Don't tell me Zuckerburg and Musk wouldn't get into a bidding war over who got to wear a magic hat for cool points. Then the next week we open the bidding again, and every enormous winning bid goes to fund the wages of the people who actually do things. Once these billionaire parasites have bankrupted themselves - and they will - and when they still don't feel any happier - and they won't - we make it a rule that we don't have any more billionaires. Ever. Anyone who ever has more than a hundred million gets taxed at 500% until they're back below the line.
It's not a perfect system, or even a likely one, but it would go a long way towards solving the lack of farm labourers and truck drivers, so let me dream. Because if things keep going the way they are, by November, dreams might be all I have left to eat.
*Racism. The reason was racism.
Copyright©2021 Luke Haines
About the author:
Luke Haines is a British writer based in Wales. You may see more of his work at: lukehaines85.medium.com
He notes that he is "a British writer who identifies as male, which is why he's often found thrown haphazardly onto someone's porch. He realises this joke only works out loud."
The opinions expressed here are his own and may not reflect those of anyone else involved with this blog.
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