WELL, at long last we've finally found out what those elusive Brexit benefits are. The Conservatives have now unveiled exciting plans to reintroduce imperial measurements. Just imagine how much of an improvement it's going to be to go into your local supermarket and see all those empty shelves labelled in pounds, ounces, pints, gallons, and fluid ounces instead of that vilely logical metric system.
Give the Tories a 2.54mm Brexit and they'll take 1.6 km. It's Back to the Future with Boris Johnson. Nothing says "Global Britain" better than returning to a system of weights and measures that are only used by the USA, Liberia, and Myanmar.
In order to complete that truly 1970s British experience, thanks to a new Culture Secretary who is as cultured as a yeast infection, the telly will be chock full of Carry On movies, racist and homophobic comedians and every sitcom will probably have an obligatory episode with at least one character in blackface doing a poor imitation of a Jamaican accent. If Great British comedy before lefty snowflakes ruined it isn't your thing, there will also be wall-to-wall Great British reality competitions in which contestants vie to create the most patriotic room makeover out of whatever they can rescue from a looted sportswear store that has been burned out in a riot. Next up, the Tories will be reintroducing compulsory hat wearing, or caps for the working classes, because they're easier to doff.
What we have now in the UK is government for geriatric racists who are nostalgic for the Empire. British Government policy is primarily driven by making the pensioners who voted to get out of Europe feel that they've got one over the French or the Germans before they apply for the social care that the young people whose futures they've stolen have been forced to pay for. Welcome to the UK, the world's largest nursing home for xenophobic bigots.
Let's be very clear here. If you think that returning to imperial measurements is some kind of triumph, then you are the problem with the UK and a reason why it will not last much longer. A return to imperial measurements is the senile drool on the face of Brexit Britain. There's no real benefit to the reintroduction of an arcane and illogical system of weights and measurements that few under the age of sixty understand.
READ MORE: Are dated sitcoms really the epitome of the 'Britishness' the Tories want?
The only reason this is happening now is because the Tories want to fetishise symbols as a replacement for the lost benefits of being in the EU. You can no longer go and live and work in France Germany or Spain, but you can buy a bottle of dandelion and burdock in fluid ounces with none of those pesky centilitres on the label. If you can find any in the shops that is. We shouldn't really worry about it anyway. The measurements that are used on the labelling of goods that are out of stock because of the delivery problems caused by Brexit is as irrelevant as a Scottish Conservative MP.
I'm pushing 60, but I was educated in the metric system all the way through school, so you'd have to be well over 70 to be comfortable with the imperial measurements that the Conservatives want to bring back. Like me, you're probably a bit hazy on some of those measurements so beloved of the Tories. How many yards in a chain? How many fluid ounces in a pint? How many gammons in a Tory? So here is a brief guide.
READ MORE: How Westminster struggled to impose imperial measures on Scotland once before
There's an infinite number of lies in a Brexit. There's 4.3 million poverty stricken children in a Global Britain. There's £20 less than you thought there was in the income supposed to provide a safety net for the poorest families. There's limitless embarrassment in a Great Britain. There's a dozen knobs in a Cabinet. There's 363 spineless and craven MPs in a Tory party. And there's shortly to be three independent countries and a united Ireland in a United Kingdom.
As senior Tories obsess over reintroducing imperial measurements, 14.5m people live in poverty, 4.3m of whom are children. The Tory priorities are flags, royal yachts, pounds, ounces, gallons and pints as they claw back £20 a week from the poorest, snatch away a future from the youngest generations and take the UK ever further into international isolation and ridicule. This is the so-called Global Britain that Scotland was told it would be Better Together with. It's not global, it's not world-beating. It's just backward looking, obsessed with the lost glories of a golden age that never was, pathetic and senile in its decline.
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