Brexit

I’m on holiday, so no deep analysis of today’s excitement. Have a poem instead.

Theresa May, Strong and Stable,
Put a plan upon the table.
Davis ran, he wasn’t able,
To sell the EU that hand-picked fable.

In went Raab to fix the plan.
Not much road left to kick the can.
In Barnier will he find a fan,
or will he sink like an uncooked flan?

Boris Johnson, hair a flutter,
slid out the door as if made of butter.
Rumour now is just a mutter,
he may be back from the gutter.

Hunt pushed in to fill that chair,
from wrecking health without a care.
Courting trade deals, he now must dare.
The NHS, will he “share”?

And here comes Farage, that baleful vole,
sniffing around an open goal.
If you think he speaks with soul,
to the Geordies, I’ll sell some coal.

The government now does swing and sway,
In the wind, no clue which way.
Who’s to blame? We all can say.
Strong and Stable. Theresa May.

The UK Government phoned me last night. They are getting that desperate. The Brexit negotiations are well past being called a “shambles”. It’s a constitutional crisis of a kind that the UK hasn’t seen in decades – perhaps ever. The government is simply not equipped to deal with this kind of thing. Iain M Banks coined a term for this. An “Outside Context” problem. An event where nothing in the subject’s frame of reference or prior experience can possibly lead them to a solution. Banks described this kind of problem as one that civilizations encounter only once and in the same way that a sentence encounters a full stop.

But there is a solution to the Outside Context problem and that’s to expand one’s context. To find someone from outside one’s one cognitive bubble who can see the problem in a different light.

And so the UK Government phoned me. I don’t know if I was first on the list, or last, or anywhere in between. I don’t suppose it really matters.

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The Common Green

Dr Craig Dalzell

Today in Parliament

Battening Down the Borders