Lara Maiklem is an archaeologist who in recent years has spent many hours walking along the banks of the Thames and rummaging through its mud. She has published a very interesting book about her experience, where she explains that she has found many objects from Roman domination, including a particularly valuable one such as a second century soldier’s scabbard. And it is that as much as it hurts them, the current England was for four centuries a province of the empire. So, when they disgust Europe, they should remember that they are somehow children of romanization.
I thought about it after seeing the joke in The Times, in which, under the heading “three years later”, Boris Johnson is seen as the driver of a bus that has just crashed into a lamppost, where the famous – and false – anti-European advertisement: “We send the EU 350 million pounds a week that we do not control”. Next to him, Rishi Sunak travels with a puzzled face. Johnson tells him that the war in Ukraine is to blame for the accident and Sunak adds: “And the covid.”
The UK is a ship adrift and the Tories bear all the responsibility. They were the ones who pushed for Brexit and they don’t want to admit that it was the worst decision in their modern history. This is how the country is upside down, with three prime ministers in one year and all without a road map. Great Britain is the worst economy in the G-10 since the Brexit referendum, it has the worst inflation in Europe and half the country is on strike (from teachers to nurses to train drivers). More data: the International Monetary Fund has predicted that the British economy will be the only one that will contract in 2023 among the reference countries.
Three years after the transition period, 60% of Britons believe that Brexit was the wrong decision. One of the main donors to the Conservative Party, Guy Hands, has broken the pact of silence on the subject: “The exit from the EU has been an absolute disaster.” And the good joke is not the one in The Times, but the one that Sunak explained, when he told the country that Brexit offers many opportunities. That joke wouldn’t even top Mr. Bean.
