The Sunday Times - UK (2022-04-03)

14 The Sunday Times April 3, 2022

COMMENT

Rod Liddle

W

elcome, then, to awful

April — the cruellest

month, breeding Sunaks

out of the dead land and

so on. The month that

begins our terminal

descent into penury and

the workhouse.

Economists and politicians have been

telling us, with a certain kind of smug

jubilance, that we face the biggest

decrease in our standard of living for 70

years. Inflation is expected to hit double

figures come autumn, with wages

limping along laps behind and energy

prices rising by more than 54 per cent.

Food may double in price and will in any

case be difficult to get hold of because

the thoughtless bloody Ukrainians aren’t

paying attention to their wheatfields.

Already we are being given helpful

advice by people who, when the

revolution comes, will be the first to be

seen swinging gently from the

lampposts. By which I mean energy

company bosses telling us to put on a

woolly jumper, or to turn down the

thermostat. Soon it will be “have a bath

with a friend”, a gruesome injunction

that first surfaced during the water

shortage in the summer of 1976.

All this advice is either stating the

obvious, beside the point or just plain

wrong. For example, the poverty chef

Jack Monroe telling people to “cook” fish

in a tin of pineapple chunks: the acid

content will turn the flesh of your

pollock white and will thus spare you

turning on the expensive grill. Yay —

chav ceviche! Just what we wanted.

The problem, Jack, is that a tin of Del

Monte pineapple chunks costs £1.10,

whereas using the grill for five minutes

costs less than 8p even now, so your idea

is stupid and self-defeating. Not to

mention what it does to your soul and

sense of self-respect to eat fish with

pineapple chunks.

What follows from me, then, is a

range of measures you might take that

really would lessen the misery. I accept

that some of them are actually illegal and

all of them, more or less, are grotesquely

immoral. The illegality stuff I will leave

you to wrestle with. And the immorality?

Morality is an ectoplasmic, endlessly

shifting entity. Just for now, pay it no

mind.

1 Open a food bank and siphon off all the

good stuff. I bet they do that already,

anyway. If you open your amenity in,

say, the Cotswolds, you’ll probably be

donated 00 grade pasta flour, so you can

still have homemade linguine. Leave the

30p packs of spaghetti and those cheap

supermarket own-brand tinned

tomatoes, which seem to be almost

entirely water.

2 Get heavily into debt. Now.

Immediately. Max out every card you

have. Borrow a very large amount of

money and buy food for the freezer,

alcohol, box sets, fuel supplies, bog roll,

rifles and ammunition. The worse

inflation gets, the less your debt will be,

so pray it reaches Weimar or even

Zimbabwean proportions. Hoard loads

of bog roll and later flog it off at triple the

price to idiots who, at times of national

crisis, care about nothing more than

having a clean arse. The worse the

economy gets, the more you should

borrow. This is a Keynesian solution to

our problems.

3 Cancel all your monthly direct debit

payments to charities. Unless you are a

halfwit, you will be well aware that the

money ends up paying vast salaries to

sanctimonious and usually incompetent

lefties, as well as funding their expensive

city centre offices and the Mercedes

4x4s they use to cruise across Africa

lecturing the locals on the need for

non-gender-specific lavatories. You only

agreed to those donations because your

conscience had been pricked. Well,

henceforth you can’t afford a

conscience.

4 Embrace the concept of tax evasion

and defraud the Inland Revenue. I don’t

know exactly how — ask a rich person

how they do it. An inordinate amount of

your hard-earned cash is spent cosseting

dimwitted ne’er-do-wells, or on Europe’s

most useless health service, or building

Barratt homes for economic migrants on

the scant remaining green spaces of the

southeast of England. Tell yourself that

you’ve spent enough, over the years, or

that you are a pacifist and object to

defence expenditure. It won’t help in

court but you will feel better.

5 Get rid of your pets. There must be a

river or lake near by. The amount my

household spends on our dog’s arthritis

treatment alone would feed most of

Moldova for a year. Pets are fabulously

expensive.

6 Take in some Ukrainians (£350 a

month from Rishi) and put them to work

making souvenir tat.

I accept that some of these suggestions

might not meet with the approval of,

say, Justin Welby or Keir Starmer. But

needs must. It’s just about you now.

Your shadow at morning striding

behind you. Or your shadow at

evening rising to meet you.

lLincoln City’s footballers will no

longer come on to the pitch to the

sound of The Dambusters because the

club has decided that, given the war in

Ukraine, the tune is inappropriate.

The fans don’t quite get the

connection, but I’m sure President

Zelensky is appreciative at this

difficult time. Incidentally, during the

first Gulf War, the BBC banned

67 songs from its airwaves. These

included Lulu’s 1969 joint Eurovision

winner Boom Bang-a-Bang, Midnight

at the Oasis by Maria Muldaur and,

of course, Walk like an Egyptian

by the Bangles.

Biden gaffes latest

PHOTOBUBBLE: NICK NEWMAN

A few little ideas to beat the cost-of-living

crisis. Don’t tell Plod they came from me

Don’t wake him

up — he might

say something

At the end of another depressing week,

Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader,

decreed that it was not acceptable to

ask a transgender person if they have a

penis. One by one, life’s harmless little

pleasures are taken away from us.

Still, it is OK to ask men if they are

pregnant, according to Ange... but

what if they are obese? Wouldn’t

that simply be a rather snide form

of fat-shaming?

One day — quite soon, I think — the

liberal left will entirely implode under

the weight of its manifest

contradictions, with the sound of a

cigarette being extinguished in a cup of

almond milk latte. Just a quick pphht,

and then gone for ever.

Embrace the

concept of

tax evasion —

ask a rich

person how

they do it

Pphht — like that

the party’s over

Police horses in London are being given

training to help them to circumnavigate

the new rainbow-hued pedestrian

crossings, installed to demonstrate the

capital’s support for the LGBTQETC

community. According to the trainers,

the horses find the bright colours of

these crossings discombobulating and

refuse to go near them.

This is an expedient lie. The truth is

that horses, naturally rather bigoted

animals, find these road markings

morally repugnant, which is why

they rear and make an appalled

whinnying noise.

I have a solution. Why does Sadiq

Khan not demonstrate his regard for

racial equality by installing pedestrian

crossings that are marked out in

alternate and equal colours of black and

white? They could call them “I have a

dream” crossings.

Look out: terrified

horse crossing