Post-Brexit Food Supplies: Why You Should Stop Worrying

I hate the silly season these days, I really do. The dog days when Parliament is in recess so hacks do not get easily digested stories to regurgitate and have to invent stuff used to be fun, but now it has become tiresome. The main reason for this tiresomeness is the nonsense that the EU will blockade the UK and try to starve us into submission. If you think about it, this is not just tiresome, it is wank of the highest order.

A blockade of Britain such as the Federasts fantasise over is one step away from a declaration of war. For that reason alone, the EU is highly unlikely to even consider such a move. Wars have begun over less as one side tries to pressure the other and the end result is a lot of dead people. The USA tried to pressure Japan into withdrawing from Manchuria in 1941 by cutting off Japan's supplies of iron and oil. The Americans wanted Japan to back down but what they got instead was Pearl Harbour. No, the EU may be many things, but it is is not as stupid as to do that.

Another reason why a blockade is pretty much out of the question is that it would hurt an awful lot of peasant-type farmers in places like Spain who would see their major market suddenly drying up. They may very well be peasants but even peasants have votes these days so do you really believe that all those voters would just shrug their shoulders at the thought of seeing their own families go hungry and their farms declared bankrupt, just to please the EU hierarchy? 

So, exports to Britain from the EU will continue, but the problem is that the EU is quite likely to make life difficult for British exports to them. In theory, we could end up with chaos at out ports because exporters' trucks are jamming up the facilities and imports cannot get through. That is not the fault of the EU if it happens, and the blame can be placed on our government.

Given such a crisis, exporters will have to be prohibited from approaching the port unless all their paperwork is in order before they leave home. If that is done then, as the blogger Richard North pointed out, the posts should remain open for imports and supplies will get through speedily. Given that this is the same Richard North whose alarmist posts on the possibility of imports not arriving probably helped encourage the press to start their fearmongering campaign, it is good to read common sense like this from him.

Leading from all this, British farmers who export to the EU will probably dump their produce on the home market, especially if the government pays them a subsidy to encourage them, so many food items can be expected to fall in price and that is even before we start receiving supplies from the wider world. 

The only problem we have is do we trust this government not to cock-it all up? Can they be trusted to ensure that exporters do not panic and block the ports, for instance?

The question was rhetorical because of course, we can't. This government is a shower and there could be a short period when supplies do get disrupted because the shower has reverted to type and failed in its duties. For that reason, as I recomended in A Sensible Prepping Guide, it is the responsibility of all sensible people to keep a small stock of non-perishable food in the pantry to tide a family over if there are short-term disruptions to supplies for any reason.

What that means is do not wait until March next year and then panic-buy. Start now and add a few extra items to your weekly shop and you will have your supplies ready and waiting for whatever problems do occur. If nothing happens, which I still feel is the likeliest outcome, then you can rotate them though as part of your normal family meals, but do continue to keep your larder well stocked.

You never know when we might have another vile winter when you will need that pantry, and weather concerns me more than fearmongering from the press over Brexit.

Enjoy the Weather With Sensible Preparations for Next Year's Brexit Day

When I wrote A Sensible Prepping Guide earlier this year, the theme that ran through the book was the need to prepare for life's little vicissitudes by planning ahead.  That does not mean investing in a tinfoil hat and fantasising about the end of civilisation as we know it, rather it just means being aware of the stones that life tends to hurl at us and doing our best to avoid them.

In winter it gets cold, and sometimes when the thaw arrives the water pipes tend to burst, so keeping a couple of gallons of water in a cupboard makes sense to me. Similarly, the just in time system of distribution will tend to fall down in extreme weather conditions so having a pantry that is stocked with a month's worth of dry and canned foodstuffs is also a sensible way to live.

What you can't do is deal with an emergency on the hoof. Well, you can try, but it will probably end in tears or a great deal of hard work. It's being reported that shops in many parts of the country have sold out of their entire supply of electric fans and given the tropical weather that we are enjoying this year that is hardly a surprise. What is a surprise is that seemingly everyone is trying to buy their fans now, an attitude that I find completely ludicrous.

I bought my nice, 14" table fan in the late autumn of 2011. It was put in storage and every year in about May it gets hauled out and plugged in. Most years I only use it for a few days, but this year it has been running pretty much all the time. Come October it will go back into storage for another year, and that's the way to do it. My bedroom is kept cool with a fan heater that has a cold setting and that keeps the bedroom nice and airy by the way.

So the key to getting by is to make sensible plans for the future. It is not to start panicking as the readers of the Guardian are doing by worrying that food will no longer arrive in the country when we leave the European Union next year. Even if you are worried about a new version of Napoleon's Continental Blockade taking the Guardian's wanky, panicky advice is most certainly not a good idea and neither is reading the insane below the line comments from the paper's sexually self-sufficient readers.

So relax, enjoy the nice weather and if like me you don't really trust today's government or its system not to cock things up, then create a pantry for yourself with non-perishable foodstuffs that you enjoy eating and rotate them through the year, restocking as your supply gets low.

Live a sensible life, in other words, and stop believing anything you read in the Guardian.

The Guardian Protects Its Poly Readership

A question to the Guardian that will forever remain unanswered as the paper deleted it after about five minutes, but not before two good-humoured souls had upvoted it.

Actually, the writer in question is a woman and not a man, but it is probably safe to assume that she holds her degrees from a real, Russell Group, university and not a double glazing firm.

Unlike the Guardian's readership who get very shirty when they are reminded of just how third-rate they are.

AMLO Is the New Mexican President

Not the greatest photo that I've ever posted to head a piece, but an important one since it was sent to me by a Mexican voter seconds after she had left the polling station having voted in the most democratic presidential election in that country's history. Her thumb was stained by a special ink that will take some days to wear off to show that she had voted and prevent her from voting again.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known as AMLO to friend and foe alike, will take office on the 1st December this year for a six-year term having garnered roughly 54% of the popular vote. His coalition also has about two-thirds of the 300 seats in the House of Deputies, and may even have a majority in the 96-seat Senate. 

The importance of this election has less to do with AMLO's stunning victory and more to do with the reaction of the defeated candidates. For the first time since Mexico's first democratic election in 1994, the losers have accepted the result and congratulated AMLO on his victory.

Normally, they would do as AMLO did back in 2006 and try to use cries of foul along with street protests to undermine the new ruler. The fact that this has not happened in 2018 gives hope that Mexico has passed out of the transition phase from the old dictatorship and into a new, fully democratic era.

AMLO's victory will be greeted by the toy-town left in Britain, but it is quite likely that they will be in for a nasty surprise when they see what his policies are and where his votes come from. AMLO actually has more in common with Donald Trump than either man would like to admit, so hopefully, relations with the USA may even improve.

AMLO shares with Trump an indifference to foreign policy coupled with a dislike of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Furthermore, he was elected by people who loath it for the same reason that working people in this country hate the European Union: NAFTA involved dismantling the old, protected Mexican economic model and allowing American exports to flood into the country.

Today, thanks to NAFTA, American corn dominates the Mexican market, which is why the sons of Mexico's farmers are off a-wetbacking in the USA rather than doing as generations did before them, which was growing Mexican corn for Mexican tortillas, subsidised by Mexican pesos from the federal government.

Similarly, the days when just about any product sold in Mexico had to be made in Mexico have ended. Mexican cars may have been a generation behind what was sold in the USA, but their production guaranteed employment for tens of thousands of workers. Yes, NAFTA has led to new car plants that produce state of the art vehicles, but they do not employ the vast army that used to work in the old closed economy and nor are the workers' rights to permanent employment as guaranteed as they were.

Mexico's wealthy, and the growing middle-class who suck up to the wealthy, have done well out of the new dispensation, but the bulk of the population are as desperate for change as we were in 2016 when we told the EU to take its hook. The Mexicans want protectionism and will look to AMLO to start giving it to them, just as their counterparts in the USA look to Trump.

Another factor that may leave the western wankerati feeling left out is the fact that throughout the campaign, AMLO has said next to nothing about the social issues that the wankerati find so important. So, he is unlikely to push for a constitutional amendment that will allow abortion nationwide and nor will he seek to do anything much in the way of pandering to homosexuals, feminists and the like. Such matters will probably be left to the states and to Mexico City which has all the powers of a state, without actually being one.

Corruption was a big issue in this campaign, as was the undeclared civil war that has led to thousands of deaths. The former is something that Mexicans always say they oppose, but don't really want to do much about since they tend to dream about getting a tasty government job that will give them access to bribes. The drugs' war hopefully will be halted in the old way by calling the various participants in and offering them a deal in return for the government getting its cut of the action. That's the way that Mexico used to work, and AMLO is very much a man who believes in the old values of the country.