You can't make this stuff up

This Green and Strangely Pleasant Land : the war on satire

Before the season for reflection and alleged goodwill expires let us address the existential question of whether satirists will be facing a new year as cruel as last year. Put bluntly: a crisis point has been reached where reality is overwhelming the capabilities of satire.

The challenge is most evident at the top of government where the Small Rich Fella at Number 10 has appointed a minister of common sense to address social issues. Officially Ester McVey is a minister without portfolio in the Prime Minister’s Office but her brief is more specific. Presumably this is to acknowledge that other members of the Cabinet are incapable of mustering common sense or  unable to mount a convincing show of expressing it.

Surely there was a time when all cabinet ministers were required to have a modicum of common sense but right now it appears to be something of a specialist subject. Maybe the next step will be to appoint a minister responsible for telling the truth (probably too ambitious) or one who can stop fellow members of the cabinet being disobliging to each other, at least to the extent of not flooding WhatsApp with their embarrassing messages.

Yet they are doing less harm slagging each other off than in peddling legislative plans to declare that Rwanda is a safe country for deporting would be immigrants to the UK.

Having suffered the indignity of a High Court ruling which determined precisely the opposite, the looney tunes in government seriously think it is a good idea for Britain to have a law declaring that any  country, let alone Rwanda, is a safe place.

The people of Rwanda are about to embark on a rigged election, opposition figures regularly enjoy the hospitality of the nation’s jails and asylum seekers from elsewhere have found themselves being sent back to the places they were escaping.

If any of this seems at all troubling, many members of the Conservative Party want to go even further by plotting to withdraw the UK from the European Court of Human Rights because it might rule unfavourably on some of their treasured plans. They seem to think that there is merit in putting Britain on a par with nations, such as North Korea, who are notably touchy over international jurisdiction extending to their activities.

But let it not be said that the sole legacy of this government will be to have trashed the rule of law because that would overlook the singular triumph of confounding those Johnny Foreigners in Europe who insist on all this metric nonsense.

We can also celebrate the right of Britons to once again buy both wine and champagne in pint bottles. What a triumph! Indeed why not, as some very influential people are suggesting, abolish all metric measures and go back to the imperial system. There is something hovering around zero public support for this reversion but under the imperial system that comes out at 100% .

In case anyone thinks that Brexit has produced no other tangible benefits, let them consider that 71 trade deals have been signed since liberation. Only pedants will point out that 68 of them are nothing more than rollovers from the trade status Britain enjoyed inside the EU, but that leaves a grand total of 3 that are new. One of the biggest is a trade deal with Australia which is estimated to result in an impressive 0.08% boost to Britain’s GDP by 2035, only a decade away.

Meanwhile the man responsible for getting us out of the EU is back in government. And please don’t think that David, now Lord Cameron can be excused because he got us into this mess, not on purpose but because at the time he was preoccupied by the unending civil war within his party and thought a little referendum would put it to rest. In the topsy-turvy world of the Little Rich Fella’s government his lordship’s return is viewed as a sign of getting things back on track.

Meanwhile there is endless speculation about when the next UK election will be called. Could it be after taxes have been lowered? Or after the economy stages what passes for a recovery? Or, most likely, after dreaming up a new way of being beastly to immigrants?

Obviously I don’t know the answer but does anyone seriously doubt that whatever date is chosen the Tories will still be dust. Yet in the increasingly mad world engulfing the liberated Kingdom, some jokers are suggesting that the Small Rich Fella can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. That will happen on the day that  Boris Johnson owns up to the number of children he has fathered.