Citizen Cuddis on the Brexit trail
Brexit is going to be as devastating to the body politic as hacking off your own foot with a breadknife. And there’ll be nothing against the pain, save biting down on a rolled-up copy of Downing Street’s new White Paper. Luckily, the British Establishment’s Science Cavalry is about to gallop to the rescue, bugles blaring. ‘Brexit’s coming home!’
An FOI request has just revealed that Boffins In Union, a quango working for the UK government on the, quite literally, magical technology for avoiding a hard border in Northern Ireland, is simultaneously working on a slew of equally macaroni-and-cheese-pie-in-the-sky technologies for May & Co.
Butcher’s Apron World
Boffins In Union, members of the Tory think-tank, the Jam Tomorrow Alliance, had been helping Doctor Who and his fellow Gallifreyans create a sonic screwdriver with a Phillip’s head with which your average Gallifreyan could assemble a flat-packed chest of drawers in under thirty seconds. But with trials not scheduled until spring 2080 they agreed to help make Brexit a success while they were shuffling their feet.
Boffins In Union’s unique brand of visionary science created the mish-mash of unicorn mounted leprechauns, bar-codes tattooed on delivery drivers’ foreheads and tin-foil-hattery that will apparently prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland. Can they similarly dirl the fidget spinner of innovation once again for post-Brexit Britain?
Monocled mutineer, Jacob Rees Smogg certainly thinks so. ‘Technology will not only give expression to ‘Brexit means Brexit’. It will transform our precious post-Brexit union of nations into a high-tech, utopian theme park — Butcher’s Apron World,’ he says. Havering lunatics at either extreme of the Tory party are keen to endorse his opinion — provided it keeps them on the gravy train.
‘We’re not freezing your benefits madam, we’re freezing you.’
But how exactly are the glorious sun-lit badlands of Brexit Britain to manifest themselves? If we are to have tomorrow’s technology today, what should we expect? The answer in a single word is ‘cryogenics’, the technological saviour of the post-brexit realm.
Cryogenics lowers body temperature to levels where so little is going on that life itself is barely detectable. Activity at this metabolic low water mark is widespread in the House of Lords, for example. The idea is that people inconvenient to Westminster — the jobless, the homeless, Universal Credit applicants, separatists, and folk they just don’t like — can be deep frozen like Bird’s Eye peas and thawed out again later as Tory policy dictates.
Brexit dividend means big erections
Boffins in Union plan to store various ‘wasters’ in special warehouses (wasterhouses) currently being erected at ports around the realm as a hard Brexit precaution, to stockpile tinned peas, piccalilli in glass jars and Tena Lady by the tonne for when voters piss themselves with fear once the reality that we’ve been tipped down the economic laundry chute into the below-stairs world of WTO terms grips their gonads.
To ease the impact of crashing out of Europe (which some have likened to a budgerigar being blasted out of the sky by a Rocket Propelled Grenade), Boffins In Union will cryogenically freeze various wasters until post-Brexit economic conditions reset to the full-employment halcyon days of the 1950’s when ‘the few’ wore moleskin toppers and each of the many wore a flat cap with a user-friendly ‘doffer’s peak’, designed to make deference to their betters easier than curtsying to the landed gentry.
The moment Boffins In Union realise the technological pipe-dream of functional cryogenics, a long snagging list of Tory problems will melt away, including long-term unemployment, the sluggishness of Universal Credit, and failing pension pots.
Remoaner critics remind us that little progress has been made in cryogenic science since Walt Disney had his napper deep frozen in 1966. Yes, when Sigourney Weaver woke up after 200 years in the inter-galactic chiller, she got away with running a comb through her hair and touching up her lippy. But that’s the movies. The chances are that anyone cryogenically frozen this week is likely to emerge from the de-frost cycle looking like a blow-up sex doll left in an industrial tumble dryer for an hour at gas mark four. For people who already look like that it’s not a problem; for the rest of us it’s a step too far.
Post Cryogenic Welfare
A government spokesperson said, ’If it works, the political appliance of cryogenics will be a paradigm-busting game-changer that breaks the mould of what has come before. And then some. On so many fronts.’
‘Universal Credit will be transformed. The current six week gap between applying and getting the Dickensian pittance which UC amounts to, during which applicants either get rickets or starve to death, could be mitigated by freezing applicants before they’ve completed the paperwork, holding them is suspense until some pen-pushing bar steward makes an arbitrary decision about the rest of their lives.’
‘State pensions will also be liberated. Freezing pensions is one thing, but freezing pensioners! That’s genius. People could be ambushed at the Post Office counter the first day they try to draw their pension, then frozen. By the time they’re re-animated, their pension pots will be emptier than Mother Hubbard’s dog.’
Never Rush a Good Thing
Tests on family packs of Bird’s Eye fish fingers (with Omega 3) are even now underway. Will freezing these Ruskoline-coated beauties with liquid nitrogen somehow prove analogous to how a middle-aged berry picker from Blairgowrie, made redundant when her employer shoved off to Provence to avoid the Brexit tsunami, might react when ‘jeeled tae the marra’ in an effort to avoid paying her Job Seeker’s Allowance? Who knows?
But while Boffins In Union hammer out the kinks in the technology, there’ll be time aplenty to freeze all the long-term unemployed and stow them in wasterhouses too. And even though their spell in cold storage will undoubtedly leave dishes unwashed and carpets unswept for the foreseeable future, there’ll be no need for food banks because they’ll have no need for food.
That will create a space for up-skilling the short-term unemployed, training them perhaps to unravel Xmas jumpers and re-knit them into something useful, like a job.
Tomorrow’s World
The Tories think technology will save their Brexit bacon. But a word of caution. Prediction is a dangerous game. In 1969 Tomorrow’s World predicted that by 1980 we would all be commuting to work in private gyrocopters and living off quinoa grown in goldfish bowls full of hydroponic gloop. At that implied rate of progress we should long ago have been able to order anti-gravity trousers and graphene socks off the Inter-web via Amazon. And we’re not.
But Mrs May’s mob still pray for a breakthrough. As a government source said, ‘Remember, our galaxy was like the Wild West until Dan Dare got his hands on a ray gun. The Brexit ray gun is coming! Keep the faith’.
