Brexit blog/ Substack newsletter

Politics, society, culture, life, work

When Christina left The Independent, everyone said she should write a blog. At first, she wrote, sporadically, about whatever popped into her head. Her blog On the death of journalism – and my Indy career, for example, went viral, and ended up in Index on Censorship and mentioned on the front page of Press Gazette. In the years leading up to Brexit, she wrote widely about the surreal events at Westminster and beyond.

Now she writes a Substack newsletter called The Art of Work. It's broadly about how we find fulfilment as we pay the bills, but actually about pretty much everything.

You can subscribe here. It's currently free.

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Party time in pandemic Britain!

A Martian would also be interested to see that the government is currently planning to “relax” restrictions as soon as the “most vulnerable” have had their first jab, which will enable everyone else to be a giant petri-dish for the new variants. Kent sparkling, South African chilled or Brazilian Caipirinha? It’s party time!

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Coronavirus blues

This must be what war is like, when the world suddenly flips into something so alien that your mind does somersaults all the time, trying to catch up. At night, you sleep and wake and sleep again, and every time you wake you think this can’t be happening in this country, this can’t be true. And then you wake, as daylight finally streams through the curtains, and you switch on the news and you realise, with yet another punch to your stomach, that it is.

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Happy Brexit day? Enjoy your spotted dick

Friendships turned sour. Relationships turned sour. Our country turned sour, and still is. The Labour Party, which had elected as its leader a man who seemed to want to turn the country into Venezuela, decided to copy the country and tear itself apart. Racism? We can do that! Division? Bring it on. Xenophobia and protectionism from a bunch of bullying old dinosaurs? My name’s Len. How can I help?

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Pour yourself a nice big glass. You’ll need it.

If Northern, male, working-class voters are the path to the 10 years plus he wants, then sure, he’ll throw whatever cash at them he can. He’ll do whatever it takes. He’ll abolish the BBC and Foxify the United Kingdom, or whatever’s left of it once Ireland has been reunited and Scotland has voted for independence. He’ll castrate, or at least politicise, the courts. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes.

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Yes, Attila, we have our own Viktor Orban

I was due to see a man called Attila, who would do something called a “sinus-lifting bone graft” and a “bone augmentation”, before screwing some “abutments” into newly drilled holes. It didn’t sound nice. It sounded even less nice when Attila the Hun-garian told me he had bad news. I know, I wanted to say. Our political situation is now almost as bad as yours!

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The day our Government went rogue

Oh. My. God. The headline I have seen has just made me gasp out loud.

We are, of course, all used to surreally shocking headlines. Trump wants to buy Greenland. Bolsonaro turns down more than £16m of aid because he would rather see the “world’s lungs” burn. Our Government has told another porky pie. *Stretches*. *Yawns*. Time for another coffee. Almost time to start thinking about lunch.

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Brexit is not a trip to the dentist

While Theresa May tries to hang on long enough to “deliver” Brexit, any kind of Brexit, half her party are parading their wives, fancy new suits and egos in front of the press, hoping to take her seat when the music stops. Their narcissism is literally breath-taking. Many of these people barely know what a customs union is and they still think they can lead us out of this quagmire to a city on the hill where the streets are paved with gold.

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The rush to flush our country down a giant toilet

About half those men and women want to flush the country down a giant toilet. The other half don’t want to, but aren’t prepared to do anything at all to take the toilet away. The leaders of both the main parties think “the people” voted to be flushed down that toilet, but can’t find a way to pull the chain. At the moment, their parties are “in talks”, but they can’t agree about the colour of the chain.

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The United Kingdom is now run by a sociopath

Faced with a line-up that included a man whose idea of diversity and inclusion is to talk about “picaninnies” and “watermelon smiles” and a woman who didn’t know that journalists record interviews, Theresa May felt like a gift from on high. Solid. Stalwart. A safe pair of hands. She was not going to miss her slot on the flower-arranging roster at church. She was not going to rock any boats.

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Vote Leave and Die

It’s Lent. Time to give things up, as we wait, hope and pray for our glorious Promised Land. On the radio, there are helpful lists of suggestions. Unchlorinated chicken. A few more car companies. A few more thousand jobs. Cancer tests. Cancer treatments. Yup, this is the country formerly known as the United Kingdom on 7th […]

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May’s mandate for a masochistic Brexit

“The country,” said Theresa May on the steps of Downing Street last week, “is coming together, but Westminster is not.” She was saying that this was the reason she had decided to have an election. She said it with such authority that you would almost think she hadn’t got it the wrong way round.

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Whoops, I slipped on a banana skin and broke Britain.

On Saturday I went to Chartwell. I saw the desk, and books, and clothes, and letters of the greatest leader of the twentieth century. I saw the uniforms, and robes, and velvet onesie of a big, big man who led our country through the biggest war in history, and who won that war and showed us that Britain was great. If that man had seen what had happened to our country in the past ten days, I think he would have hung his giant head in shame.