Listing to Port

Q1. What do you believe is the main problem affecting the country today?
A1. The economy
A2. Jobs
A3. Crime
A4. Kids these days
A5. Health
A6. The cost of Marmite

Q2. What do you believe the cause of this problem is? (Note: we agree. Absolutely. You are so right. Thank goodness we can at last frankly and fairly talk about the thing you think is the cause of the problem!)
A1. Immigrants
A2. Badgers
A3. The French
A4. Poor people, but only the bad sort of poor people of course
A5. So-called experts
A6. The sneering liberal metropolitan elite

Q3. What solution to this problem will make you vote for us in 2020?
A1. Building a great big fuck-off wall in the sea and instructing geographers that we are now part of the North American continent
A2. Issuing blue passports to the tiny percentage of the population who can afford to go abroad
A3. Naming and shaming
A4. Send them back to where they came from, unless they had the temerity to be born next door in which case send them somewhere else
A5. Something involving detention centres but only in a very polite and British way support our troops look here’s a big flag
A6. Let’s get something nice for the Queen, like a yacht or a gilded cupcake or Easter Island

1. Po from Teletubbies. I feel this choice would improve Prime Minister’s questions immeasurably. PMQs could start with a rousing round of ‘Eh-oh!’ and proceed thereafter as a game of peek-a-boo with the Shadow Cabinet (by that time likely consisting of Jeremy Corbyn plus fifteen-odd glove puppets). Political engagement among future generations would skyrocket.
2. A small round of camembert. The unity candidate, with a strong hope of patching up relations with France. Why pay a 150,000 pound salary when you could pay one pound twenty at Sainsbury’s for a Prime Minister who is not actively trying to trash the economy?
3. The giant pacific octopus (Enteroctopus dofleini). If we are going to have someone who squirms out of tough decisions, let’s at least get an expert squirmer. Plus probably a lot of signing stuff is going to be needed in the next few years, which will be faster with eight arms. The giant octopus’s cthulhoid appearance may also strike terror into the hearts of Britain’s negotiating partners which, on balance, is probably better than derision.
4. Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527). Bear with me here. Machiavelli’s main qualification for the post is that he is dead. OK, there may be some minor diplomatic issues involved with going to Italy and digging him up. But on the plus side, we would have a Prime Minister with global name recognition who is nevertheless, at present, completely unable to lie, backstab, make incompetent power grabs or stir up popular prejudice for personal gain. And after 500-ish years dead, he’s probably not even smelly anymore.

1. Tick this box to show you’re not racist
2. Tick the other box to stick two fingers up at the establishment
3. Should we send current immigrants home?
4. Are you dissatisfied with your life right now?
5. Do you want Boris Johnson as PM? [OK, the only person who believes this was the question is Boris]

Normal service will be resumed shortly on t’blog, BTW. Having trouble with non-brexit ideas right now.

1. Boris Johnson becomes the new Tory leader, with Gove as chancellor. They campaign for a November general election on the basis of carrying out the popular mandate given to them by the referendum, including migration controls which necessitate leaving the EEA. The left is fragmented, with a significant vote in Leave bastions for a UKIP which is now campaigning to actively send non-UK citizens home. The Tories win a majority. They continue with the populist, don’t-believe-experts tone of the Leave campaign. Government without expert advice works about just as well as you’d expect. Scotland votes for independence and becomes a fast-track candidate for EU membership.  
2. Theresa May wins the Tory leadership election and negotiates an exit from the EU which involves remaining in the EEA. As it becomes apparent that freedom of movement is being retained, there is significant unrest in some of the main Leave-voting areas. The country remains divided, but there is now also a narrative that economic hardship is an establishment punishment for voting Leave. The second Scottish referendum comes out narrowly on the side of the Union. The Tories hang onto power until 2020, at which point they are replaced by a series of messy and weak coalitions.
3. Following the Leave campaign’s repeated backtracking on its promises, a non-Leave candidate wins the Tory leadership election. A coalition of left-leaning parties wins the subsequent election, having campaigned on a slow and reasoned exit from the EU. They promise to invoke Article 50 only when a set of economic/stability tests are met. These tests are never met. Occasionally EU officials threaten to chuck the UK out, or other parties demand that exit happens at once. Then the markets go belly-up and everyone quietens down again. Eventually the non-invocation of article 50 becomes a long-running background political issue. The constant uncertainty around it is a perpetual economic and social problem.  
4. Just as both major parties are tearing themselves to shreds in preparation for leadership elections, a large meteorite lands in the Mediterranean just North of Algeria. A large area surrounding the Western Mediterranean is devastated, including much of Spain and Italy. Negotiations are abandoned as everyone attempts to deal with mass movements of refugees across Europe and Africa. Russia uses the situation as a pretext to invade Ukraine in the name of regional stability. By the time the dust has settled, Europe is so changed, physically and politically, that Brexit is barely a footnote in history.
5. 2016 is recalled for faulty components and poor performance. It turns out it was supplied with the ‘0’ upside-down and that what we thought was a 1 is actually a cut-up letter l. Following a stern letter to the Years Commission, the world is awarded substantial compensation, including the return of David Bowie and Prince, a complementary Truth upgrade on all politicians, a nice biro and five months of amazing sunsets.

Screwed, funted, fucked, staring down the gullet of a hungry python, up shit creek without a canoe, gone off a cliff on a pogo stick, covered in superglue and hugging an angry bear, proper bolloxed up, queuing for a ride on the Titanic, hanging from the gonads above a banqueting table of hungry lions, about to put on that hat that the audience know is full of seagull shit, not welcome in the club anymore, 30m beneath a herd of flying rhinos who’ve just had their first vindaloo, pissing on an electric fence right in front of a bull, proudly boarding Failship One for immediate takeoff, a little bit in the poo.

1. Brexit: in which Britain leaves the European Union.
2. Grexit: in which Greece leaves the European Union.
3. Glitter: in which Greece leaves the European Union whilst peevishly dumping all EU-related documents into the Aegean for Turkey to clean up.
4. Bribeary: in which a scheme to reintroduce the black bear to limited regions of Britain and Ireland is beset by systemic corruption related to payments to farmers intended to compensate for the inconvenience and peril of hosting a bear, with the result that both islands are overrun by farmed bear cubs.
5. UNIcorn: In which Uganda, Nigeria and Cote d'Ivoire undergo a combined agricultural and sexual revolution.
6. BALLSup: In which Belarus, Azerbaijan, Latvia, Lithuania and Sweden are struck by a series of unusually precise earthquakes, possibly the belated result of a secret Soviet geoengineering project involving millions of extremely slow mechanical moles, which has the end result of raising those counties approximately ten metres above their previous elevation.
7. BUMSout: In which Botswana, Uganda, Mozabique and South Africa exit the African Union in order to found a separate Southern African Union.

Upon the occasion of Brexit:
1. The UK economy will be officially replaced by a giant toilet, which we will be forced to lease from Brussels at extortionate rates since the Treasury will no longer have enough petty cash to purchase outsize bathroom goods. Following the Emergency Budget of July 2016, all residents will be required to ceremonially flush half of their life savings. The Toilet will be conveniently located in Rotherham, near the M1, and all flushed notes will be mulched and donated to newly destitute farmers.
2. The rest of the world will line up to point and laugh at Britain, before all going to a fabulous party to which Britain is not invited. The next day, they will all make facebook posts about how amazing it was and how all the best countries were there. Meanwhile, Scotland will have altered its relationship status to ‘It’s complicated’.
3. Workers’ rights and environmental legislation will be replaced by a series of bills obliging companies to fire employees if it would be funny, women to spend at least three hours per day in a kitchen, and all residents to do at least one large shit per year into a idyllic rural brook. A tax rebate may be obtained if you are able to shit on the head of a kingfisher. A brown flag scheme will be set up to inform swimmers of beaches where the raw sewage is uncontaminated by needles and condoms.
4. Houses will cost approximately 50p. No-one will be able to afford one because disposable incomes of more than 40p will be a thing of the past apart from for the super-rich, who will have got a bit bored of buying houses by then.
5. The NHS will collapse, turning thousands of patients on trolleys out onto the streets with their livers and suchlike hanging out. After listening to their desperate pleas for healthcare for an appropriately sombre period of time, a group of concerned Tory donors will set up an extremely lucrative private replacement to which the ill can contribute the remaining half of their life savings or, at a pinch, the promise of indentured servitude for the rest of their lives.

Upon the occasion of Bremain:
1. Seventy million Turks will descend upon the country with party bags to skin the entire population of Britain. Safely ensconced in British skins, the Turks will take over the country, leaving the original population the choice of going about without a skin on or using a discarded Turkish one and being deported to Turkey for the rest of their lives.
2. A committee of twelve faceless bureaucrats will arrive from Brussels and undemocratically confiscate the Queen. She will be put on display in a small museum in Bruges. It will cost extra to enter if you are British.
3. All billboards will be forced to carry large posters of Adolf Hitler looking at Britain and smirking a little bit, as if he is in on an amazing joke that you haven’t got yet.
4. Britain will be forced to accept an infinite number of suspicious-looking twenty-foot tall wooden asylum-seekers with large ‘DANGER: BOMBS IN TRANSIT’ tattoos on their faces. They will erect an inflatable mosque where Buckingham palace once stood.
5. The NHS will collapse, turning thousands of patients on trolleys out onto the streets with their livers and suchlike hanging out. After listening to their desperate pleas for healthcare for an appropriately sombre period of time, a group of concerned Tory donors will set up an extremely lucrative private replacement to which the ill can contribute the remaining half of their life savings or, at a pinch, the promise of indentured servitude for the rest of their lives.