In order to deter the entire might of the Russian Federation (Theresa May confirmed yesterday) Britain is going to put 150 squaddies on the Polish border. There’d be no backtracking, she insisted: all 150 would go. Every last man jack of them will be issued with Derringer army surplus pistols – and Sheffield steel kitchen knives should hand to hand fighting ensue.
To be absolutely certain that the Devil incarnate Vladimir Rasputin is under no illusions here, all the troops will be facing towards Moscow. On the entrance to the British encampment, a sign will be erected saying ‘Last one in the Kremlin’s a Jessie’.
Is it me?
The Schäuble/Dijesslbleom/Draghi Troika is all set, it seems, to tax Greeks if they withdraw cash from a bank. This is because, you see, the Greeks are all ne’er-do-wells who steal lambs and cook them underground so they can feast on Kleftiko all day in their string vests. They don’t really need money: they’re just withdrawing it to pay artisans so those anti-social brigands can avoid the Holy Taithes of the Holier Than Thou European Empire.
Next year though, if all goes well, every Greek will be given a change of clothing absolutely free. The Zorbas at No 23 will change clothes with the Dragonas at No 17, and the Tsigantes on the corner will swop with Mr Stephanopoulus the Undertaker on the other corner.
As for the cash withdrawal tax, it is absolutely the only way to make a bailin work painlessly for everyone: if you want €60 in cash, no problem. You can have it – we don’t want to get silly about this. But there’ll be an immediate tax EFTPOS on the withdrawal, so all that will emerge is a receipt. The receipt is then yours to spend as you see fit.
I really, really thought we’d plumbed right to the bottom of the bollocks barrel when George Osborne said bank depositors would pay in the case of a bailin, because that would be fairer on the taxpayers who get stung in a bailout. To be a depositor you must also of course be a taxpayer: that’s the Law. So you’re a taxpayer in a bailout, and a depositor after a bailin. And you are get to play Waylene Fecknuckle in both roles.
But to pay tax on an income already taxed at source the second it tries to escape from the ATM machine……Jeez. Why didn’t we think of that?
Is it me?
Yesterday, I watched a BBC ‘in-depth analysis’ of how things are balanced in the Brexit saga. The narrator referred to the British Cabinet as “the Brexit-backing government of Theresa May”. ROFLOL, I said, while trying to stop my normally disciplined foot from kicking the telly seeing as how in these days of wall-hung flat screens serious and permanent injury could result.
65% of the Cabinet are Remainians. By next Thursday, HMG will have had five months to trigger Article 50. It says in the rulebook that’s what you have to do to get out of the aslyum but we haven’t done it. Lawyers are now saying we don’t need to do it anyway – and given just 15,000 hours at £150 an hour, they could prove it. But we could, you know, have Article 50’d just to shut Shulz and Verhofstadt TFup. As like, insurance. But we haven’t, and now Ms Mayormaynot says we won’t do it until the day after it gets seventeen times more difficult. Let’s take the North Face, why not – we Brits don’t do stuff the easy way.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer controls the spondooliks involved. Philip Hammond is not for Remain, he’s for Stayforever Slaveremain. He does not qualify for the Spartacus lapel-pin. He has done everything his dark dream of a brain could come up with to screw up Team Brexit: he’s leaked, he’s invented ‘the hit’ of Brexit (even though our trade deficit with the EU would keep Brazil out of insolvency) and he hopes we’ll be dead before anyone books the negotiation room. If Brexit ever looks like happening, Hammond is going to stock up with air rifles from our do-or-die Polish border troops, barricade himself in Number 11 and start a sniper campaign against Davis, Fox and Johnson. When the police arrive, we will hear a desperate man – but obviously not a terrorist – shouting from an upstairs window, “One false move out there, and the cat gets it”.
But this, says the British Broadcasting Corporation, is Theresa Shoehorn’s Brexit-backing government.
Is it me?
One tries to be even-handed – as with Trump Wall here yesterday – but one winds up wanting to transfer those hands to the necks – not of the people pulling this shit – but of those saying duyeer wassomadder snoflake souns gooderme yuk yuk or even worse, applauding it.
Talking of Trump’s Wall, the one truly great thing about the whole project is that Donald doesn’t want to build a gate. Otherwise it would become Tedious Rehash of the Gate Suffix #7,309. It’s amazing, is it not? It’s 46 long years since Watergate. There was no water and no gate involved – it was a hotel called Watergate. Pretty much everyone from the movie is dead: Nixon is dead, his secretary with the 27 foot back-facing legs is dead, and now even Castro is dead. But still, every plot is a gate.
For weeks, the Democrats tried to dub it Wallgate. Now the Trumpeters are giving the Clinton entourage a hard time with Pizzagate.
It should really, of course, be called Trumpwall. Mainly because I said so: knickers to democracy – I’m in charge, that’s what I say. It seems to have worked for every Establishment since the Assyrian Green Party, so why not?
But there is a flaw. However much I try to hear Trumpwall in another way, it always sounds to me like a seedy suburb of Birmingham. (For American readers, think Philadelphia with more rain and fewer dental implants).
Along those streets are lots of comfortable late-Edwardian and mid 1930s homes that have gone from confidently twee to quietly tumbledown. The streets of Trumpwall are multicultural, but nobody’s outnumbered and there are no hookers leaning on the rusty lampposts. It’s full of University lecturers and converted flats for students, older Volvos, even older Citroen 2vcs….with here and there a few older still old people. There are African doctors and Indian solicitors, younger white first-homers shipping in gallons of Farrow & Ball; and often there’s the strange bloke dressed in a tuxedo and bowler hat who cycles on a situpandbeg antique through the streets every day on his way to the local school, where he’s been head of the music department for the last 23 years.
Say what you like, I’d love to live in Huskisson Road, Trumpwall. And I wouldn’t want to insult the place by smearing it with Trump’s Wall. Trump’s problem with Mexican illegals is a sound one, but a fearless programme of sending them all back is a bigger priority than the Great Wall of Donald….which, let’s get real here, doesn’t have the same ring as Hadrian or China now, does it?
“Christ, a duck built this thing?” a kid might ask in thirty tears time. It wouldn’t surprise me.
But is it just me?
The Slog 