The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, is an interesting (if only sort-of) example of what happens when life follows art. In her case, the art was the film Trading Places, in which a born loser, almost by random good luck, becomes a successful stock market trader. However, in Reeves’ case, she has become a daily, one-person Wall Street Crash, a sort of incompetent Bugs Bunny caricature who ends every episode surrounded by rubble and fiscal corpses with cartoon question-marks over their heads, and her cackling dementedly, “That’s all, folks.”
This, not once, but daily, a ghastly fusion of filmscripts, as Trading Places meets Groundhog Day, and not a nightmare, from which dreamers wake up, but real life and real ruin for real people, with no escape possible. This is tragedy as understood by the Greek dramatists, and most of all within Anglophone culture by Shakespeare. And yes, I know I’m mixing genres here, but with good reason, for in Britain these days, seemingly pointless confusion is now the prelude to unbearable tragedy.
We get a sense of this from the three witches on Macbeth’s blasted heath, namely Reeve’s party colleagues, Angela Rayner, Yvette Cooper and Lucy Powell. No scriptwriter would ever put these three shrieking termagants into a Hollywood screenplay because the resulting film would be savaged for its irredeemable misogyny. But that is their (more genre-mixing ahoy!) get-out-of-jail card. They can caterwaul, howl and yowl because to employ these verbs to describe their histrionic incontinence would be a professional death-sentence for any journalist. (Here sounds Handel’s “The Dead March” from Saul over my career).
However, the three are mere harbingers of doom, the architects of which are men, with the current lead being played by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, a sort of Macbeth on the ramparts, but with all the moral certainty of Hamlet, aided by Cornwall’s visionary skills at Dover. And yes, I know this is very confusing for you, but not nearly as confusing for me. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it gets worse. Much.
Time to throw in the First World War. A standard measure of a British army battalion’s morale in the trenches was the sick-list. The longer it was, the worse the unit. By those standards, the British people deserve to be court martialled and executed for malingering, because some 20 million of them are drawing state “benefits” (and more on that amusing word in a moment). Put that 20,000,000 (better as digits, don’t you agree?) in a single queue, with the obligatory social-distancing that the submission-fanatics demanded of us, and Britain’s malingerers would reach right around the globe from the north pole and back again, or half way round for the women, if they were all laid end to end.
But that would only happen if the British men were up to the task, and they’re not. British towns echo to the put-put-put sound of mobility-scooters bearing their obese male cargoes to collect their welfare-benefits. The GP examinations to qualify applicants for these welfare benefits are of the “virtual” variety and done over the phone, with the doctors never seeing their patients before putting them all on lifelong state-parasitism. This is available not merely to all able-bodied Britons, but also to anyone who has arrived in Britain illegally, a provision created by the caste of indoctrinated judges that now rule there. Indeed, the English High Court recently ruled that border guards had violated the human rights of of illegal immigrants when they took mobile phones from 32 of them, and duly awarded the lot £210,800 in damages.
A further glimpse of the ruin wrought on Britain by uncontrolled immigration is available in the Birmingham electoral ward of Sparkhill, ward being a useful term here, as it also connotes a mental hospital. Over 90 per cent of the ward is, in that delightful British euphemism, BAME: black, Asian, minority ethnic, 80 per cent of the total being Muslim, and just eight per cent white. Sparkhill led the opposition last year to an Israeli football team playing in Birmingham, and the local chief police Craig Guildford obligingly told a few untruths (ie, a few porkies) to get a ban on the team’s supporters attending the match. (I apologise unreservedly if I have offended anyone by referring to the common but unclean English slang, “pork pie”, for telling untruths).
Unsurprisingly, Sparkhill’s MP, Tahir Ali, has been campaigning for a new airport to facilitate travel between the area and his constituents’ homeland. This airport is not in England but in Kashmir, and no doubt Starmer’s government will soon build one for them. Naturally, a convicted Islamic terrorist, Sahid Butt, this May is standing for election in Sparkhill, though “terrorist” is perhaps a little unfair, since he was merely guilty of plotting to blow up the British consulate in Yemen, plus an Anglican church and a hotel, plus the various unbelievers within them. Mr Butt might quite reasonably maintain that these are perfectly commonplace activities in modern Britain. Indeed – as Joan Baez might once have so melodiously warbled, “There Butt for fortune go Jew and I…”
Birmingham is merely the shining jewel of multiculturalism to which the Manchester United owner Jim Ratcliffe was referring when he said that Britain was being colonised by immigrants. Cue outrage from the predicable quarters, led of course by (and here I lose the will to live) Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who clearly has nothing better to do as the prow of the SS UK slides beneath the waves. He was joined in his indignant caterwauling by a woman MP called Cooper, not Yvette but Daisy. None of the three seem to have said much about the Afghan “asylum-seeker” who was found guilty of abducting and gang-raping a twelve-year-old English girl in Warwickshire on the very same day as Ratcliffe’s off-the-cuff remarks about “colonisation.”
Twelve. Gang-raped. And silence…
Silence is sometimes also a symptom of death, but only if the latter is peaceful. Neither terms applies to the fate that now awaits Britain, unless that is, a miraculous twist in the plot occurs, and The Sixth Sense finishes with the final footage from The Sound of Music. Let us wait and see.
Meanwhile, more popcorn, anyone?
Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.
Mandelson’s serpentine charm bewitched halfwit Starmer