Hold my pint: Mentioning the 'B' word

It has been strictly avoided. A bit like the plague. Or COVID-19 (fingers crossed, until now at least, on a personal level). But there comes a time when the word must be spoken, when the reality must be faced. And that word is ... Brexit.

That’s right, people. Brexit. BREXIT. The absolute bloody clusterfuck that is Brexit.

 

‘Why now?’ you ask – perhaps warily, if you yourself are familiar with the shambles, and are aware that I have avoided it on this blog, choosing indeed to tread lightly because of the divisiveness of the issue.

I made no mention of it at the beginning of this year. I have not said a word here about the UK government having screwed UK fishing communities – and now preparing to screw UK farming communities (and the irony that both these are traditional parts of the constituency of the Conservative Party).

 

That avoidance has been five years in the making – not least because I have also spent a lot of that time trying to understand it through the prism of my Brexit-voting parents (who then died in 2017 and 2018, without hanging around to see the godawful mess that their votes had helped to create) and finding that my attempts to understand them (and myself) is still, even now, largely bound up in trying to understand Brexit and English exceptionalism.

 

So why now ... why today?

 

Because Tim ‘Not-Very-Nice-But-Definitely-Very-Dim’ Martin has decided that, in spite of having been one of businesses’ few high priests for the cult that is Brexit, he now needs EU economic migrants to pull the pints in Wetherspoons, the chain of pubs that he founded, and wants regulations ‘liberalised’ in order to allow that.

 

To be fair, he has a BA in law from the University of Nottingham and qualified as a barrister in 1979 (though has never practiced) so is clearly a Brain of Britain candidate.

 

Not.

 

In 2018, on Brexit, he said that his pubs would stop selling EU-sourced products ... because, well ... The EU! Nose, spite, fucking face.

 

But honestly, this is from an individual who was reported in The Guardian on 30 March this year as having recommitted to a massive, 10-year expansion of ’Spoons, including 75 projects, made up of 18 new pubs and 57 major extensions to existing venues, creating 20,000 jobs.

Oops ... what if you can't fill those jobs, Mr Martin?

 

So it’s hardly difficult to see why he’s suddenly had a change of heart about immigration – okay, less a “change of heart” and more an ‘OMG! My personal pocket!’ religious conversion.

 

And this, girls and boys, is just part of why Brexit is a clusterfuck – because it has been guided by imbeciles and private profiteers who aren’t even intelligent and/or self-aware enough to recognise the impact on their own businesses and profits. Never mind on anyone else. They can't even managed enlightened self interest!.

This is not written from a position ofsnobbery. ’Spoons often do really good cooked breakfasts at a really great price (I’ve enjoyed them before a match in Manchester more than once and in Cardiff during Millennium Magic). And the beer they sell isn’t just dross, such as that 'brewed' by Interbrew.

 

But Martin’s comments illustrate that, while Wetherspoons is essentially a (socially) working class brand, he doesn’t give a toss about that group of people (however you would categorise the working class) and only about his own pocket.

As is clear, given that this is an employer who refuses to pay his own staff extra for working on bank holidays or allow them to have a soft drink while working on really hot days (like today).

 

Brexit in a fucking nutshell.

Sign a petition too get Wetherspoons to pay its workforce for bank holidays