If Brexit were a slapstick 1970’s movie, it would be funny. ‘Carry on Brexit’ would be a fitting title for this utter farce that is more ridiculous than I ever imagined it could be. When we left the union, I thought someone sensible might enter the room and fudge a deal that kept us in the EU in all but name. However, in my gut, there was a feeling that it would be a populist revolution to serve the few, not the many.

Who’d have thought on that fateful day in 2016, the government would, four years later, be laughing in the face of international law and annexing Kent? It’s utterly bizarre but it is happening. To make it even more surreal, it is happening during a pandemic that lurches from one costly omnishambles to another on a basis daily.

Test & Trace

Today, the government admitted that so far, they had given Serco £12 billion to mess up Test & Trace. God knows how much of that money has gone to Dido Harding who heads up Test & Trace, or her husband, who by remarkable coincidence, is a Tory MP and an advocate of NHS privatisation.

The limits of Harding’s hopelessness have no boundaries. Despite schools, universities and workplaces reopening, she was apparently taken back by the increasing testing demand. Meanwhile, people asking to get tested in West London, were told to register themselves with an Aberdeen post code. That is comedy gold.

The infection rates have started shooting up and people who were told not to go to pubs and restaurants after, only two months ago, being told to support them. The failure of the testing was not the government’s or Dido Harding’s fault, it was the fault of the masses for supporting pubs and restaurants in the August eat out bonanza. The government just about stopped short of saying it was the fault of everyone who didn’t vote for them.

Hauliers and Intellects

Whilst all this was going on, road hauliers were being told it was their fault for not being prepared if they ended up in a 3-day traffic jam on the M2. What the government are trying to achieve in Kent is so bizarre it’s harder to understand than a cryptic crossword printed in Russian. Try reading the proposal and see how long it takes for your brain to scramble.

Michael Gove always tries to make his whack job ideas sound like they are easier than defecating after an evening at a plum and curry eating contest, but they never are. They are full of contradictions and lies that beggar belief. I once read that Gove was supposed to be the intellectual heavyweight of the Tory Party.

Gove an intellect…Really? I guess if he is measured against Liz Truss, Gavin Williamson, Matt Hancock, Grant Shapps and Priti Patel, he could be deemed more intelligent. It’s a bit like saying Joey Essex is more intelligent than Benny from Crossroads.  By many accounts Gove is Murdoch’s man, and that is why you are seeing some bad press about Johnson in The Sun and The Mail (who Gove’s wife, Sarah Vine, works for).

Education and Double Downers

Where the government do deserve some credit is with their education policy. They have successfully taught over 35% of the masses to be so thick, they will still vote for the band of lunatics kicking them in the teeth. Johnson could kick their front doors down, have sex with their wives, have a turd on the carpet and take away their Sky remote control and they would still put a sticker in the back of their car saying, ‘I’M BACKING BORIS!’

One of the great psychological studies that will come out of this mess is how to solve the mystery of the double downers. The folk who have the disastrous consequences of a populist con trick punching them square in the face, yet they still won’t believe they have made an error of judgement voting for it. The more they are told they made an error the deeper they go into denial.

They are like the people who get emails saying that Paul Hogan (Crocodile Dundee) is making the banks run scared with his Bitcoin in investment, so they send £500 to a bank in Nigeria. When they never hear back, they still think they are going to be millionaires, and no one will tell them different. Serco getting the Test & Test contract is a £12 Billion scam, yet people will still tell you it isn’t, because they are backing Boris.

Anyone such as Keir Starmer, opposing this madness, must square the circle of denial and find a way of restoring normality. Pointing fingers and mocking people seems to put them further into denial. Trying a softer approach just allows the government to break the law and had out projects to their mates, unchallenged.

It appears that populism will run its course and we just wait have to wait for it to collapse and pick up the pieces. The people who created the ideology will be long gone. They will have raided public services contracts and run off to offshore tax havens where they are free from prosecution.

Just like the Nazi’s who ran off to Argentina when fascism was last defeated in the 1940’s.