• Contact
  • About
  • Authors
DONATE
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
  • Login
Yorkshire Bylines
  • Home
  • News
    • All
    • Brexit
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Health
    • Home Affairs
    • Transport
    • World
    Johnson and Macron

    Mais oui, mon ami: Johnson and Macron display ‘le bromance’ and discuss a European Political Community

    Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O'Neill, right, and Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin

    Northern Ireland Protocol Bill: a hopeless case and a dangerous one?

    SAY NO TO PUTIN

    War and no peace: Putin’s war with Ukraine threatens us all

    Prime minister PMQ prep

    Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

    The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

    Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

    schools bill

    Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

    Emmanuel Macron

    French parliamentary elections 2022: shockwaves across the Channel

    Rail strikes

    Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

    cost of living march london

    Trade union movement marches to demand better

    Trending Tags

    • Johnson
    • Coronavirus
    • Labour
    • Starmer
    • Northern Ireland protocol
    • Brexit
    • Culture
    • Education
    • Environment
    • Home Affairs
    • Transport
    • World
  • Politics
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
    • All
    • Culture
    • Dance
    • Food
    • Music
    • Poetry
    • Recipes
    • Sport
    Nostell Priory, Wakefield

    Glastonbury? What’s Glastonbury? When the music world came to Wakefield

    Headingley Cricket Stadium

    A view from the Roses match: is everything ‘rosey’ in English cricket?

    Bettys' Fat Rascals

    Scallywags, scoundrels and rascals abound in Yorkshire (we do like our scones)

    'Woke' beliefs

    Woke and proud: Compassion must never be allowed to go out of fashion

    Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

    What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

    Red Ladder

    Climbing the Red Ladder – bringing theatre to the community

    Kaiser Chiefs in Doncaster

    Kaiser Chiefs never miss a beat in Doncaster

    Bradford Council leader Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, second from right, is joined by Keighley Creative representatives, from left, Georgina Webster, Jan Smithies and Gemma Hobbs.

    Bradford announced as City of Culture 2025

    Queen cakes fit for a Queen

    Queen Cakes fit for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

    • Food
    • Music
    • Poetry
    • Sport
  • Business
    • All
    • Economy
    • Technology
    • Trade
    Freya Osment from Northern Gas Networks

    International Women in Engineering Day 2022

    Rail strikes

    Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

    conservative party

    The Conservative Party: fiscally irresponsible and ideologically incapable of addressing the current crises

    Yorkshire cows

    British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

    cost-of-living-crisis-in-voluntary-sector

    Cost-of-living crisis looming for the voluntary sector

    Money on the floor - £20 notes

    The huge cost of Brexit is being seriously understated

    Financial problems

    Surge in bad debt and late payments indicate mounting business distress in Yorkshire

    An evening photo tour of Drax power station near Selby, North Yorkshire, with excellent light towards sunset.

    Winter blackouts and rationing for six million homes as government plans for disruption to energy supply

    Jar with money cascading out of it

    Boosterism doesn’t put food on the table

    Trending Tags

      • Economy
      • Technology
      • Trade
    • Region
    No Result
    View All Result
    • Home
    • News
      • All
      • Brexit
      • Education
      • Environment
      • Health
      • Home Affairs
      • Transport
      • World
      Johnson and Macron

      Mais oui, mon ami: Johnson and Macron display ‘le bromance’ and discuss a European Political Community

      Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O'Neill, right, and Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin

      Northern Ireland Protocol Bill: a hopeless case and a dangerous one?

      SAY NO TO PUTIN

      War and no peace: Putin’s war with Ukraine threatens us all

      Prime minister PMQ prep

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      The small number of trees shows that even the high uplands of the Dales was a woodland environment. Much has been nibbled down to the ground by heavy populations of sheep. Photo by Andy Brown

      Government policies destroying upland Yorkshire farming with no regard for the land or our health

      schools bill

      Johnson’s education power grab: from ‘liberation’ to dictatorship in one generation

      Emmanuel Macron

      French parliamentary elections 2022: shockwaves across the Channel

      Rail strikes

      Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

      cost of living march london

      Trade union movement marches to demand better

      Trending Tags

      • Johnson
      • Coronavirus
      • Labour
      • Starmer
      • Northern Ireland protocol
      • Brexit
      • Culture
      • Education
      • Environment
      • Home Affairs
      • Transport
      • World
    • Politics
    • Opinion
    • Lifestyle
      • All
      • Culture
      • Dance
      • Food
      • Music
      • Poetry
      • Recipes
      • Sport
      Nostell Priory, Wakefield

      Glastonbury? What’s Glastonbury? When the music world came to Wakefield

      Headingley Cricket Stadium

      A view from the Roses match: is everything ‘rosey’ in English cricket?

      Bettys' Fat Rascals

      Scallywags, scoundrels and rascals abound in Yorkshire (we do like our scones)

      'Woke' beliefs

      Woke and proud: Compassion must never be allowed to go out of fashion

      Eurovision 2022 stage - photo by Michael Doherty on Wikimedia Commons licensed by CC BY-SA 4.0

      What does Ukraine’s Eurovision win tell us about the politics of solidarity?

      Red Ladder

      Climbing the Red Ladder – bringing theatre to the community

      Kaiser Chiefs in Doncaster

      Kaiser Chiefs never miss a beat in Doncaster

      Bradford Council leader Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, second from right, is joined by Keighley Creative representatives, from left, Georgina Webster, Jan Smithies and Gemma Hobbs.

      Bradford announced as City of Culture 2025

      Queen cakes fit for a Queen

      Queen Cakes fit for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee

      • Food
      • Music
      • Poetry
      • Sport
    • Business
      • All
      • Economy
      • Technology
      • Trade
      Freya Osment from Northern Gas Networks

      International Women in Engineering Day 2022

      Rail strikes

      Millions affected by biggest rail strike action in 30 years

      conservative party

      The Conservative Party: fiscally irresponsible and ideologically incapable of addressing the current crises

      Yorkshire cows

      British farmers are being offered a lump sum payment to leave the industry – but at what cost to agriculture?

      cost-of-living-crisis-in-voluntary-sector

      Cost-of-living crisis looming for the voluntary sector

      Money on the floor - £20 notes

      The huge cost of Brexit is being seriously understated

      Financial problems

      Surge in bad debt and late payments indicate mounting business distress in Yorkshire

      An evening photo tour of Drax power station near Selby, North Yorkshire, with excellent light towards sunset.

      Winter blackouts and rationing for six million homes as government plans for disruption to energy supply

      Jar with money cascading out of it

      Boosterism doesn’t put food on the table

      Trending Tags

        • Economy
        • Technology
        • Trade
      • Region
      No Result
      View All Result
      Yorkshire Bylines
      No Result
      View All Result
      Home News Brexit

      Descending into the Brexit abyss

      The country seems to be descending slowly into the Brexit abyss, with the government now helpless against the forces it has unleashed.

      Anthony RobinsonbyAnthony Robinson
      06-10-2021 14:20
      in Brexit, Opinion
      Brexit abyss. Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay

      Brexit abyss. Image by Darkmoon_Art from Pixabay

      5.1k
      VIEWS
      Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
      ADVERTISEMENT

      We seem to be staggering from one crisis to another, each more serious than the last, with the feeling that Britain is slipping into a terrible abyss of its own making. The government has virtually abandoned any pretence of exercising any control and watches on helplessly as the damaging forces unleashed by its own Brexit folly, career through the economy.

      Half the population is desperately worried and the rest oblivious to the growing disaster. The prime minister himself is either ignorant or indifferent, probably both.

      Johnson’s conference speech

      Johnson’s speech to the Tory conference today was full of optimism and at times delivered like a campaign peroration on speed. The hacks listening to it could barely keep up.

      It appeared to ignore the grim reality of a week full of images of empty supermarket shelves and queues of panicking motorists trying to buy fuel. It was as if he was speaking to us from the surface of a distant planet, unaware of the conflux of crises gripping the nation here on earth.

      He is in serious danger of looking like a fast-talking Jerry builder trying to hide the flaws in the rickety extension behind him so he can get paid before it all comes tumbling down. One almost begins to worry about his mental health.

      All of the Brexit-related problems we were warned about are coming true. But charges of scaremongering have turned to bizarre claims that they are in fact the demonstrable effects of Brexit working as planned, and the ‘growing pains’ or the ‘stresses and strains’ were all anticipated and are simply the minefield we must crawl through to reach the sunny uplands.

      He defended tax rises and told delegates, “We are not going back to the same old broken model with low wages, low growth, low skills and low productivity, all of it enabled and assisted by uncontrolled immigration”.

      Instead, he will give us a new, more expensive – and much harder to repair – broken model of high wages and no growth at all. They cheered him on, as outside the conference hall the nation stared into the abyss.

      The Brexit abyss

      His speech came just days after the army started distributing fuel and the pig industry began a cull to destroy 150,000 pigs that abattoirs are unable to cope with, as a result of the lack of EU workers. The prime minister’s response was “let’s see what happens.”

      The fuel shortage may ease eventually, but looks certain to be replaced by shortages of food in the run up to Christmas. Stocks are low and supply chains stretched to breaking point. Energy bills are soaring as the government adds to the crisis by increasing the tax burden to record levels amid rising prices, a worrying surge in inflation, stagnating output, and the biggest cut in welfare payments since 1945.

      Brexit may not be the only factor involved in these events, but it is certainly amplifying the difficulties.

      Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Police faces a collapse in public confidence after one of its own, a serving officer, is found guilty of the most horrific murder which is now revealing a culture of misogyny to add to the institutional racism and institutional corruption that previous independent enquiries have found.

      And as a backdrop to it all, cases of covid, hospitalisations and deaths remain alarmingly high, preventing the NHS driving down the huge five million long backlog of patients – the longest since records began – who are waiting for treatment.

      It is a recipe for a bleak winter of social discontent and the Tory poll lead may yet prove as fragile and temporary as any Johnson pledge.

      Prime minister PMQ prep
      Brexit

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      byAnthony Robinson
      28 June 2022

      Johnson is bending the political system in his favour

      Even Andrew Neil, fresh from his failure at GB News, predicts trouble ahead, asking in The Daily Mail how long Boris Johnson can defy gravity. While cataloguing our current woes, he avoids attributing any of them to Brexit, which he says the prime minister has delivered as best he could, “given the weak hand Johnson inherited from Theresa May”. You can see which side Mr Neil is on.

      Johnson, surely the most accomplished liar ever to occupy Downing Street, is also keen to ensure he continues to defy gravity.

      He already avoids any genuine scrutiny like the plague and has appointed Tory supporters to key posts to moderate any criticism. But now, as if recognising the looming problems and to help cling to power when the population realises it has been conned by his Brexit, Johnson is lining up a series of authoritarian parliamentary bills that Belarus’ President Lukashenko would be proud of.

      There is one to restrict judicial reviews of potentially unlawful or unconstitutional acts by the government; another – the police bill – making it almost impossible to stage any sort of protest; and an elections bill designed to make voting harder for those without ID, which is mainly those likely to support the opposition.

      Johnson also wants to extend the Official Secrets Act to cover more areas and increase penalties without any kind of public interest defence for journalists or their sources. Coming from a government that refused to act on the intelligence and security committee report into Russian interference in our democracy, it can only be intended to deter genuine whistle blowers.

      Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian has a much better account of how Johnson is quietly circling the wagons in Downing Street.

      The world is watching

      The world’s press looks on in bewilderment, unable to comprehend how a once-respected nation has managed to inflict such disruption on itself in order to break away from its friends, allies and neighbours to face a sea of troubles alone.

      CNN’s Luke McGee says Johnson’s reign is becoming one long crisis, and adds that while the fuel crisis has damaged Johnson badly, it hasn’t handed the Labour Party any real polling gains.

      NBC News says many will see the irony in government efforts to get 5,000 EU truck drivers to return to help solve a crisis their leaving created, and suggests that Brexit was “motivated in part by a desire to curb immigration and stop as many foreign workers as possible from competing for British jobs”. Now the UK is in trouble, it wants foreign workers to save it.

      The Guardian has a good if somewhat depressing summary of the global reaction to Britain’s fuel, food and labour crises, which seem universally accepted as being caused by Brexit.

      Perhaps the best comment on the HGV shortage came from Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, which published the cartoon below. It is not the abyss that is going to sting, but the fact that the world is laughing at us as we descend into it.

      Charlie Hebdo cartoon
      Charlie Hebdo cartoon
      ADVERTISEMENT
      Previous Post

      Radiation at Chernobyl is increasing, but a repeat of 1986 is near impossible

      Next Post

      Time to let our young people shape our future?

      Anthony Robinson

      Anthony Robinson

      Anthony is a retired sales engineer, living in North Yorkshire. He has represented several European manufacturers of packaging machinery in the UK. Anthony is interested in politics, although not as an active member of any party, and enjoys reading, gardening and DIY.

      Related Posts

      Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O'Neill, right, and Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin
      Brexit

      Northern Ireland Protocol Bill: a hopeless case and a dangerous one?

      byAnthony Robinson
      29 June 2022
      Prime minister PMQ prep
      Brexit

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      byAnthony Robinson
      28 June 2022
      labour party conference
      Opinion

      Labour’s precarious tightrope walk to the general election 

      byJohn Heywood
      22 June 2022
      Money on the floor - £20 notes
      Brexit

      The huge cost of Brexit is being seriously understated

      byAnthony Robinson
      13 June 2022
      Imperial Measurements
      Brexit

      Inching ever backwards: the proposed return to imperial measurements

      byPaul Bright
      10 June 2022
      Next Post
      Image by Mary Bettini Blank from Pixabay

      Time to let our young people shape our future?

      Want to support us?

      Can you help Yorkshire Bylines to grow and become more sustainable with a regular donation, no matter how small?  

      DONATE

      Sign up to our newsletter

      If you would like to receive the Yorkshire Bylines regular newsletter, straight talking direct to your inbox, click the button below.

      NEWSLETTER

      LATEST

      Johnson and Macron

      Mais oui, mon ami: Johnson and Macron display ‘le bromance’ and discuss a European Political Community

      29 June 2022
      Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O'Neill, right, and Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin

      Northern Ireland Protocol Bill: a hopeless case and a dangerous one?

      29 June 2022
      SAY NO TO PUTIN

      War and no peace: Putin’s war with Ukraine threatens us all

      29 June 2022
      Death Star

      Wakefield by-election journal: volume 4 (tech, lies and video crews on the trail of Wakefield Man)

      28 June 2022

      MOST READ

      Prime minister PMQ prep

      Brexit isn’t working – something we can all agree on

      28 June 2022
      Sinn Fein Vice President Michelle O'Neill, right, and Sinn Féin President Mary Lou McDonald at the RDS in Dublin

      Northern Ireland Protocol Bill: a hopeless case and a dangerous one?

      29 June 2022
      Photo credit Robert Sharp / englishpenLicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

      The Davis Downside Dossier

      1 January 2021
      boris johnson clown poster

      Johnson, Nixon and dangerous duplicity: half a century of ‘gate’ scandals

      28 June 2022

      BROWSE BY TAGS

      antivaxxers Charity Climate change Coronavirus Cost of living Creative industries Crime Cummings Democracy Devolution Equality Farming Fishing History Immigration Johnson Journalism Labour Mental health NHS Northern Ireland protocol Pollution Poverty PPE Starmer Travel Ukraine
      Yorkshire Bylines

      Yorkshire Bylines is a regional online newspaper that supports citizen journalism. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in Yorkshire and beyond.

      Learn more about us

      No Result
      View All Result
      • Contact
      • About
      • Letters
      • Donate
      • Privacy
      • Bylines network
      • Shop

      © 2022 Yorkshire Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

      No Result
      View All Result
      • Home
      • News
        • Brexit
        • Education
        • Environment
        • Health
        • Home Affairs
        • Transport
        • World
      • Politics
      • Opinion
      • Lifestyle
        • Culture
        • Dance
        • Food
        • Music
        • Poetry
        • Recipes
        • Sport
      • Business
        • Economy
        • Technology
        • Trade
      • Donate
      • The Compendium of Cabinet Codebreakers
      • The Davis Downside Dossier
      • The Digby Jones Index
      • Newsletter sign up
      • Cartoons by Stan
      • Authors

      © 2022 Yorkshire Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

      Welcome Back!

      Login to your account below

      Forgotten Password?

      Retrieve your password

      Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

      Log In