If the dead could vote, who would they vote for? And what would the deceased community make of the Britain they have left behind? For example, in ye olden times Britain, before there were privatised water companies to keep us clean and hydrated, a famous warning cry went out when people threw their urine and faeces into the uplifted faces of those below. Gardyloo! The word, it transpires, is derived from the French for: “Look out! I am throwing my excrement into your eyes because Anglian Water doesn’t exist. Sorry.”
People who think everything was better in the past must be thrilled that we are returning to similarly simple times. Our assiduously asset-stripped privately owned water companies cut out the middleman of actual waste treatment and dumped raw sewage directly into our rivers and seas 300,000 times in 2022 alone, often in the spawning grounds of endangered salmon during breeding season. How would the typical Conservative MP like it if someone came and tipped a load of human excrement over him while he was having sex? We could always ask Conservative Friends of Russia founding member Matthew Elliott, as the KGB is bound to have some compromising photos.
As raw sewage saturates the ground of post-Brexit Britain, free from Brussels’s tedious environmental red tape, our nation is turning into a giant sponge of excrement. Should the group Madness perform any outdoor greatest hits concerts this summer, it’s suggested the downward pressure of 10,000 hefty ex-skinheads jumping up and down at the same time could cause massive geysers of human excrement to shoot up from the filth-sodden earth and overwhelm the emergency services. A Cobra committee has met to decide which of the group’s eminently danceable, yet simultaneously erudite, hits are literally too dangerous to perform, the instrumental moon-stomp of One Step Beyond singled out as being of special concern.
Everything is, literally, turning to shit. The Brexit checks on imports from the EU, which we have incompetently delayed for three years, finally landed last week, predictably threatening to ruin thousands of small businesses and further drive up the costs of both staple “red wall” remain voter foods such as raw liver and crispy pig fat, and things like serrano ham and olives that rich leave-voting Tories love to eat.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Tippi Hedren of this particular ideological bird strike, must recall with terrible woe how he himself described enacting the import checks as a colossal “act of self-harm”. Presumably, it’s a risk Mogg was prepared to take to get cheaper footwear for his inadequately shod North East Somerset constituents. Many of them had been reduced to crimping their loyal feet into stale pasty casings, in which to caper a celebratory West Country morris for their lord’s multimillion-pound Somerset Capital dividend payouts.
In 2020, the now disgraced then PM Boris Johnson told us there would be no non-tariff barriers to trade. And four years earlier, the European Research Group MP Dananiel “Bendy” Hannana, who still gets lucrative writing gigs at national newspapers, declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” And a year before that the lobbying-loving, windmill-hating MP Owen Paterson said: “Only a madman would actually leave the market.” And a quick Google will find a 2016 clip of the wicked sorceress Andrea Leadsom telling GB News’s foolish former chairman Andrew Shredded Wheat Hair Neil that we will not incur any costs by leaving the single market.
But on Wednesday, Leadsom was wandering around in the wilderness between morning news studios bleating, like Vote Leave’s sacrificial Leviticus goat, that we all knew what we were voting for, that businesses should have prepared and that florists need to start getting all their flowers from Britain. It’s Valentine’s Day soon. When it’s spring again, I’ll bring again, cowslips from Rotherham. And some Bovril! Drink it!! And shut up!!!
On Wednesday, Johnson triumphantly announced six benefits of Brexit, five of which even a lowly comedian like me was able to immediately identify as lies, the sixth being a “don’t know”. The Brexit lies finally bite, Rwanda runs aground and simmering scandals such as the Post Office, and the Teesside freeport funding funnel Michael Gove doesn’t want us to talk about, show how we are regarded essentially as barely sentient meat parcels to be farmed for liquifiable tax cash, serf labour and marketable data. Those future Tory votes are drifting away. But how to halt the haemorrhaging?
The Conservatives’ immediate plan is, of course, to cheat. But alarm bells ring at their attempts to loosen electoral spending limits, allow rich expats to vote and suppress unsympathetic voters with voter ID rules. But more worrying are plans that have come to light, floated on a leaked document, by the defence secretary, Grant Shapps; plans to extend voters’ right to vote even beyond the actual point of their death.
Surveys show that the Conservatives appeal to older voters and that the leave voters who secured victory by a narrow margin are now all dead. “And yet,” Shapps argues, “it is their will that has shaped the country we now live in, and their lifetime of taxes that paid for it. Would it be so very wrong to use AI technology to extrapolate the voting preferences of the dead and enact them? Rather than ‘wrong’, I would argue,” he concludes, “that it is in fact the moral thing to do.”
His shilly-shallying about a Gaza ceasefire may cost Keir Starmer the Muslim and traditional Labour peacenik vote. The numbers may yet stack up. But independent polling shows the majority of the decomposed would vote Conservative and if Shapps is able to mobilise the electoral power of the no longer living, then his zombie government may yet stumble on through one more term.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee tour is at Wrexham’s William Aston Hall, Sunday 4 February; Liverpool Philharmonic, Tuesday 6 February and Wednesday 7 February; Leeds Playhouse, Thursday 8 February to Saturday 10 February; and Newcastle Theatre Royal, Sunday 11 February
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