What wonderful Xmas presents.

First let me say Happy New Year and that the consensus of readers who were kind enough to get in touch was that they like a daily rant, but perhaps with a some longer, more thoughtful and better explanations too. So I will alter the mix accordingly, let me know what you think. Please!

Which brings me to the “news” that was released by the Government over the holidays.

First, champagne in pints, which was nothing more than a smokescreen. No one wants pints of fizz, no one makes them and it is doubtful many will bother producing them. You might have introduced 500ml bottles, but that isn’t quite a pint, and the far right would have screamed betrayal. The real news that was hidden by this announcement was that the government retreated on the red trouser wearing gammons wet dream of a return to imperial measures. A humiliating backdown on a policy that should never have been suggested, on the grounds that it was plain stupid.

Then we had the news that the UK was joining Horizon+ and Copernicus, which is of course a lie. The UK is re-joining the schemes after 4 totally wasted years because it makes sense, is a no-brainer and it should never have left in the first place. Only the idiotic incompetence of the Johnson administration (if you can call that bunch an administration) got the UK suspended until it agreed to obey the law and the treaty it had negotiated.

Then finally we had the PM himself announcing that from now on most foreign students won’t be allowed to bring family members with them when they come to the UK to study. This was announced as massive success in the fight against immigration but of course is no such thing.

Foreign students support the UK’s further education sector with huge amounts of money, they learn British ways, consume British products and hopefully become anglophiles for life. They then overwhelmingly return home, in fact some 97% do, the rest stay legally because we want and need them to stay. Illegal immigration by errant students is almost unknown. But now we have told millions of potential students to go somewhere else because the UK hates them. University vice-chancellors will be desperately trying to persuade them to still come, or they won’t be able to balance the books.

So, the government has seriously threatened the viability of the university sector for no gain whatsoever, has with its tail between its legs slunk back into Horizon and Copernicus, and has invented a new bottle size that almost no one can or will want to produce in order to hide the retreat on imperial measures.

All wrapped up as Xmas presents, triumphs of Brexit for swivel-eyed loons and racists.

It must have made some saddos very happy, but increasingly, as the polls show the vast majority see Brexit as a national embarrassment of titanic proportions. Which it is.

Jonty’s Jottings

Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.

By Jonty Bloom Media

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