Scorched Earth

Brexit’s gift basket to you:  barren agriculture and expensive imported fruit. Without freedom of movement, British fruit orchards and vines will rot. The Garden of England will be a wasteland. Outside the Single Market, the growing number of working poor will not be able to afford nutritious fresh food.

“The biggest potential impact of Brexit is on agricultural labour. Kent has had eastern Europeans picking fruit in recent years, but we’ll all starve if the labour issue is not sorted after Brexit….

Balthasar van der Ast Basket of Fruits c. 1625 Oil on wood, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
Image source: WGA

“We want a resolution to allow us to have freedom of movement for labour to pick the fruit. This is something that affects all fruit farmers across the south-east of England.

“I’m hoping it will be sorted out and I hope they won’t close the doors, as if there’s no one to pick the fruit, we’ll have to import everything”

Every day brings new evidence that Brexit will only favour the rich, eating and drinking what they like, paying low taxes at the expense of the poor, who will get poorer and unhealthier until they will be seen as sub-human, just as they were centuries ago. Brexit is retrograde and degrading.

Social justice, national health standards and equality of opportunity will be remembered dimly as an Arthurian dream. Our grandchildren will never taste an English apple or pear, and will think strawberries and raspberries were fantasy fruits.

Post-Brexit Unaffordable Luxuries: English raspberries and blueberries photo © MHP

Brexit risks sustainable and ethical food standards.

If you are British and care about Britain, take a bite out of the fruit of Knowledge and tell your MPs that you don’t want Brexit.

It is an obscenely stupid project, a stinking, rotting fruit that we are all being forced to eat from whether we voted for it or not, whether we’ve had second thoughts or not. It is shameful, humiliating, monstrous that we have brought our country to this nadir.

Abandoning the whole damned thing, licking our wounds, counting the wasted £billions, is better than acquiescing in the scorched earth policy of Brexit.

Samuel Palmer In a Shoreham Garden c 1830 watercolour. VAM. Image source: Wikipedia
THE GARDEN OF KENT BEFORE THE BREXIT FALL

This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,–
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Shakespeare, King Richard II

 

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Everything I love

is either dead or under attack

Gainsborough’s The Morning Walk (1785)

DAMAGED on 18 March, 2017

We congratulate ourselves on feeling so deeply about art that we must be good people or, at least, better than we thought we were a moment ago

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH ON ARTSY

GAINSBOROUGH IN High Society AT RIJKSMUSEUM