And what a week it was!
A week in which Theresa May lost a massive Brexit vote! A week in which Theresa May lost another massive Brexit vote! And a week in which… I’ve lost count – how many did she lose in the end?
Anyway – what else happened?
Let’s look back and see:
Theresa May has 24 hours to miraculously become competent
The vote on Theresa May’s Brexit deal is tomorrow. That means she has a mere 24 hours to reverse a lifetime of crapness. That’s another 24 hours, obviously. She’s been in this situation before and keeps re-scheduling the same vote.
Either she’s incredibly masochistic, or she has some sort of credible plan we’re all unaware of.
Or maybe just magic
Or yes – maybe she’s discovered some magical means of fixing her problem. According to one of her aides:
She’s been wandering around Downing Street rubbing all the lamps and saying: ‘Hello? Genie? Are you in there, Mr Genie?’ I asked her why she didn’t try the genuine genie lamp that the London Museum liberated from Mesopotamia, and she said it was ‘too ethnic’.
The desperation hasn’t stopped there, either. A Chinese restaurateur told Off The Perch:
When I opened up this morning I heard a strange noise in the store room. Going in, I discovered a squatting Theresa May opening my fortune cookies – presumably hoping for a lucky prediction. Upon seeing me, she hissed and then crawled out through the window.
Reality
It seems like May’s hopes of magicking her way through Brexit will be dispelled tomorrow. Unless she extends Article 50 and keep re-scheduling the same vote on the same deal – exactly the sort of curse we should be expecting at this point.
Theresa May’s ‘air-tight new deal’ emitting a very bad smell
On 11 March, Theresa May flew to Strasbourg to get some last-minute reassurances on her Brexit deal. Going by today’s headlines, you’d be forgiven for thinking she’d done that. But if that’s the case, then why is a very bad smell following her around?
The stench of success
May claims that if we’ve not come up with an alternative by 2020, then we won’t be trapped in the backstop. Even if that were true, what use is that? We’ve not been able to think of a solution in nearly three years – what’s another 21 months going to do?
The PM returned holding her deal up with salad tongs, having wrapped it in a sandwich bag. To everyone there it looked like a packed lunch that had gone feral. It also seemed to be emitting a terrible stench, but May claimed:
That’s just the smell of the European Union. The quicker you agree to my deal, the quicker we get out! Now sign it. Sign it now! QUICK! NO TIME TO READ IT – JUST SIGN!
All’s hell that ends hell
May tried to avoid letting anyone get a good look at her new contract. Despite that, she did eventually have to hand it over to the attorney general. When he looked at it, he confirmed:
Nothing has changed.
A furious May replied:
That’s my line!
She then went on to lose the vote and resign. Unless you’re reading this in the worst timeline, of course; in which case nothing has changed.
Oxford graduate fails basic comprehension test
Despite going to one of the most prestigious universities in the galaxy, Theresa May has the mental flexibility of a tapeworm. Never has this been more obvious than now – when having lost a record number of votes on the same fucking thing – she still thinks she’s right.
The thing is, May is far from the only graduate of an Oxbridge university to have this problem. So what the hell is going wrong?
Privilege
Off The Perch caught up with the head of Oxford University to ask some questions. She told us:
Here at Oxford, we instil our students with the confidence to go out into the world and shape it to their liking.
We asked if they also teach their students how to deal with making mistakes – with getting things wrong.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
We tried to simplify what we’d asked, but she still just looked at us – dumbfounded.
“Are you suggesting our graduates might be wrong about things sometimes?” she asked slowly.
We clarified that we did mean this, and she tossed her head back and laughed.
“Preposterous!” she cried. “If our students had flaws, then they wouldn’t have been born with parents rich enough to send them to Eton!”
Radicalised
Three of our last four prime ministers went to Oxford University, and every one of them was terrible – filled with an unflappable sense of their own correctness despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
So what the hell is going on in these universities?
It’s difficult to say, but we should probably stop treating them like they’re Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Doing so seems to make a lot of students think they’re literally the chosen one.
MPs’ brains to be GPS-enabled in case they go missing
by John Ranson
In a break from the usual procedure, an MP has had an idea which could actually have a useful real world application.
Tory MP Scott Mann’s ludicrous attempt to tackle the very serious issue of knife crime is tragically laughable:
It’s a plan so utterly unworkable and wide of the mark that it makes Theresa May’s Brexit deal look like a work of legislative genius.
But regular Off The Perch commentator and sometime government adviser Ken Chisel is pushing a different use for the technology.
Tagged
Fitting trackers to every dangerous knife in the country is obviously impossible. The government might as well suggest tagging every pair of underpants, so it can check people (except fishermen) are changing them regularly.
But, unlikely as it may sound, Mann has hit on something. Readers might recall 90s TV priest Father Dougal McGuire, a manchild so out of touch with reality and reason that he frequently solved problems by accident. We should perhaps think of Mann in similar terms.
GPS trackers could be the answer, not to knife crime, but to idiocy in politicians. A device fitted into MPs’ brains would initially help to locate them physically. It could even speed up the process of counting them through the voting lobbies. As the technology develops, the implants could transmit a warning whenever the MP is about to say something stupid, and also when the brain is just not functioning at all.
Zoned out
Chisel says the technology could transform parliament:
As any observer of politics knows, at any one time, only a fraction of MPs’ brains are actually switched on. The PM hasn’t had an original thought since calling the 2017 election. There are some Tory backbenchers whose vocabulary has regressed all the way to random shouts of ‘Ah!’. The implants could emit small electrical stimulations to jerk the wayward MP back into reality. Any member wandering off the point during a debate would also receive a mild shock.
Unfortunately, the technology can’t be used in the Lords as the voltages required for effectiveness would also be lethal.
‘Let paedos get away with it’, argues alleged political mastermind
The Tories have taken some awful positions on things over the years. Boris Johnson’s latest may be one of the worst, though:
Boris Johnson says spending police budgets investigating historic child abuse is "spaffing money up the wall". pic.twitter.com/6Xh9FOy3w2
— LBC (@LBC) March 13, 2019
Johnson himself has now clarified his thoughts on the matter.
Free the paedos
Johnson explained:
Look – I’m not saying we should let every one of these rascals get away with it – far from it. All I meant is that if someone has got away with it for this long, then that’s an achievement worth recognising. These modern offenders are unseemly fellows who seem more interested in getting media attention than anything. The old school British molesters spared us from hearing about their dirty deeds, and I say hats off to them.
When the gathered journalists had picked their jaws off the floor, one of them asked if Johnson – like all Tories – simply has a vested interest in awful people not being held accountable for their crimes. He answered with a string of Johnson-isms:
Pish posh. Tally nackle. Dimpsy wimpsy.
Hoodwinker
The former foreign secretary has now been spouting nonsense words for several straight hours. No matter how long he carries on manufacturing this folksy gibberish, though, it still won’t cover for the fact he described investigating historic child abuse as:
spaffing money up the wall.
Racists deny that racism leads to racism
There was a horrific, far-right attack in New Zealand on 14 March. In response, successful racists across the world scrambled to make clear that this latest racism has nothing to do with their racism. This begs the question – does racism lead to racism?
That’s a very difficult question. Or it is for the mainstream media, anyway. Largely because they employ so many racists.
The chain
The writer Paul Racism from Racism News had this to say:
Look – just because I said Muslims aren’t really people; and that they should all go back to where they came from; and that Islam is a religion of hatred that needs to be tackled like cancer, that doesn’t mean I condone violence against Muslims. I really can’t see how someone would take my practical, common sense racism and use it to justify a more active form of racism.
The writer Racismina Twillips said:
I think it’s important we acknowledge the real victims here – and that’s the racists who are wrongly being linked to racism despite all racism to the contrary. If we allow racism to stop racists publishing racism, then the other racists win.
Vicious circle
Of course, there’s an outside chance that the constant barrage of racism coming from the press isn’t encouraging people to become violent, fuck-headed racists. It’s basically the same chance that setting fireworks off in your trousers won’t lead to your groin getting minced.
Featured image and in-story images via pixabay / Annika Haas – Wikimedia / Averyaudio – Wikimedia / YouTube – Guardian News / YouTube – BBC News / kisspng / screengrab / CollegeDegrees360 – Flickr (images were altered)
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