citizen of nowhere

Madame Brexit was delighted with her sheer cleverness in landing three of the foremost leaver loons with the mind-bending complexities of managing Brexit. The people had spoken. Brexit meant Brexit, but what was it? Nobody had a clue, least of all the Brexiteers. It was best to play along with the nutters who promoted the daft idea. Let them take responsibility for it and, if it failed (more than likely), on their heads be it. Boris Brexit settled himself at his Louis quattorze desk at the Foreign Office, a grand Palladian structure dripping with hidden signs of European influence. A crowd of shifty-eyed Herberts crept around the place, kissing bottoms and crafting policies of mass delusion. Liam Brexit had been making a nuisance of himself, laying claim to large parts of the Foreign Office on behalf of the new free trade Kingdom of Brexitannia. Boris repelled these attacks, but at some cost. Madame Brexit agreed to slap the upstart Liam down but she insisted that Boris should mak...

It was amazing to think how much had changed in the year since Jez’s first elevation to the leader’s chair. His enemies were scattered in confusion. The first triumph was ..... triumphant but now, having been rudely dethroned by his enemies, he was back, elected for the second time with an even larger majority. The ranks of nay-sayers, closet Tories, pinkoes and Blairites were in despair. They threw everything against Jez not once, but twice. The members, swelled by massed ranks of entryists, Tory running dogs and registered hangers-on, carried him to victory a second time. Halleluia, truly the future was Jez’s. Who now remembered the Lady Yvette, the upstart Burnham, and the arch-Tory Kendall? They were forgotten, languishing in obscurity on the BBC sofas and the Daily Politics show. A new generation of rebels came after them, Eagle and Smith (who?). They were dispatched even more emphatically than the first lot. Jez reigned supreme. Look on my works ye mighty ...... While Jez batt...

4. The raven haired witch Kendall shrieked and rent her garments in fury. The cheek of it! First the left-wing press, or what remained of it, dismissed her as a Tory cross-dresser. Then the misogynist Tories wrote her off as a serial loser and now they were asking about her weight. How dare they? When did they ever ask a male candidate such personal questions? Anyway she was a dedicated follower of the Fearnley-Whittingstall low carb snail porridge diet. Before that she was a long-term user of the Jamie Oliver school lunch plus regime. She had nothing to fear from their questions. Vile scum. She would ban such questions when she was elected supreme leader. She would impose strict quotas on male journalists and their impertinent interview techniques. Only leftish female journalists would be allowed to interview leftish female candidates asking only leftish female questions. Smelly overweight male journos would have to retrain as burger flippers on zero hours contracts at Wimpey, cooki...

3. Even as Jez scorned the ways of his enemies the dark Lord Blair thundered in the Tory press. The proles would regret their flirtation with this lunatic. They needed their heads examined. They should have heart transplants, in privatised market-driven clinics using state of the art financial management and gold-card contactless payment. The economy would collapse within forty five minutes of the election of the mad prophet Jez. He had concealed arguments of mass destruction ready for use at a moment’s notice. He used personal chemistry as a weapon to subdue his enemies. He would lay waste to civilisation as we know it unless he was stopped. There would be no-fly zones over the trackless wastes of Tyne and Wear, there would be shock and awe in Manchester and lightening commando raids by political task forces in Birmingham, Liverpool and Tower Hamlets. No matter how much the dark Lord Blair and his acolytes railed against Jez, it was no use. The public mood was utterly changed....

2. The prophet Jez warned his acolytes. “Let there be no personalised attacks against the false prophets Burnham and Cooper nor the dark eyed witch Kendall nor their misguided revisionist supporters.” His followers murmured their agreement and they launched fresh attacks against their opponents on the Twit message boards. Jez travelled far and wide, wearing a shirt from the bargain rail at the Oxfam shop, a tweed jacket from rejected donations at the Sue Ryder store and open sandals which allowed the unfettered odour of his toe-juice to waft over his followers. The followers of Jez, and there were many, were beguiled by his simple unaffected manner and his unadorned appearance. He spoke the honest truth of a mind freed from the conventions of economic rigour, arithmetic or sanity. What was it to Jez if the sums didn’t add up? That was a mere detail, a weapon of distraction used by the Tories to confuse the working class, especially those who had never experienced the shock of a d...

1. And Lo the prophet Jez bestirred himself and went into the town to confer with the people who would see him right for election as leader of the elders. He addressed a throng of paid ticket holders while a multitude waited outside in the rain, straining to hear a word. Jez stroked his beard, held his arms aloft and spoke at length to the chosen few. They listened, spellbound, to every word. They rose in thunderous applause when Jez finished. He smiled mysteriously at them and he passed slowly through the hall to the multitude outside. He climbed onto a fire engine, looked down over a sea of expectant faces and he spoke. “Yeah though ye shall travel through the valley of the shadow of darkness, so shall ye be crammed together like sardines with your nose pressed into a stranger’s armpit in standard class while the Tories and their dissolute followers disport themselves in wanton comfort, making jokes about your plight, sipping filtered water from French volcanoes in the first class ...

The coffers are empty. The kingdom is bankrupt. Emergencies have broken out everywhere. The state demands more taxes so the citizens, regardless of what burdens they already carry, must pay more, and more, again and again. Their burdens will increase until they can carry no more and then the state will pile still more on them. These words would serve as a reasonable description of conditions at many times in ancient history, in the age of Savanarola, during the black death, at times of shortage or war or during the great breakdown of European civilisation in the 20th century. Who would have imagined we would find ourselves here again? Surely this is some nightmare, some fantasy that will pass in a little while? No. We find ourselves suddenly cast back into a dark and unexpected age of fear. The language of the age of optimism, just ended, is of no use now. Thoughts of prosperity or hope are behind us. We must turn our minds to survival. Most public thinking has been devoted to one que...

Stone broke How things have changed! Last year it was known as the Celtic Tiger. Now it's a sickly creature living on borrowed time. Ireland is, according to figures published by the Irish central tatistics office (CSO), the world's most indebted country, as a proportion of GDP. The government has an urgent need to replace a sudden and severe loss of revenue from income tax, VAT & property transaction taxes. Various measures have been proposed , mostly focussing on sharp increases in income & property taxes. This may help to rebalance public finances in the short-term but also risk a further sharp contraction in consumer confidence and economic activity, with further weakening of state finances in due course. Reliving the past In previous economic cycles elevated income taxes have coincided with reduced consumption, severe loss of confidence, recession, unemployment and emigration. There is a real danger Ireland will return to past failures if measures to repair governm...