We’re gonna need a bigger bus
There’s a reason it’s not the Spare Bedroom of Shame: we knew we were going to need plenty of space. And indeed there are already three Theresa Mays blundering robotically around in there, exchanging strong-and-stables and tripping over dropped manifesto pledges. Nevertheless, we underestimated. We’re gonna need a bigger hall. Because this week it needs to accommodate the entire Conservative Party.
Having found £1 billion under the magic money tree to buy ten crucial homophobic votes from the fundamentalist Democratic Unionist Party at a very reasonable £100 million per climate-change-denying MP (or about 3,000 nurses or firefighters in old money), this freshly-spawned Coagulation of Chaos has promptly voted unanimously to retain a pay cap which will prolong austerity for those nurses, firefighters and millions of other public sector workers.
To be fair, without this pay cap, it’s hard to see where the money would come from to buy the seats to vote through the pay cap that paid for the seats. Perhaps this infinite loop was what George Osborne meant when he used to talk about a long-term economic plan?
But what, you so rightly demand, has this got to do with Brexit? Well, Chuka Umunna claimed – shortly before his proposed amendment to the Queen’s Speech became the Coagulation’s next victim – that leaving the Single Market could cost public finances as much as £31 billion. At the current exchange rate that’s the price of 310 MPs or just short of one parliamentary majority. As luck would have it, we happen to have one of those, and it seems to be rapidly approaching its sell-by date.
Orange Ordure bus graphic by Alexis Taylor
