Both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak are currently promoting the benefits of the deregulated “special economic zones” known as freeports, despite evidence that they encourage organised crime, money-laundering, drug-trafficking and terrorist finance, though admittedly the first three of these supposed problems appear to be common leisure activities for most Tory MPs. I’m here all week! Try the Colombian!!
Joined-up thinking, or paranoia depending on your point of view, suggests the next logical step from freeports is “charter cities”, allowing whole regions to be run as “corporate fiefs” by big business, stripped of tiresome regulations in the pursuit of profit. As long ago as 2010, the rightwing Tufton Street-based Taxpayers’ Alliance thinktank proposed that Hull “became our own version of a charter city [with] minimum wage, working-hours regulations, social benefits for working-age citizens, and central government planning regulations abolished”. Businesses that have made themselves useful to the Tories will doubtless be the beneficiaries here, just as they were when the PPE billions were doled out with due diligence.
Could Boris Johnson’s wedding venue donors at Daylesford Organic be given a south Devon section incorporating the whole of Dartmoor and the entire South Hams region? Could Ultimo, the lingerie company formerly owned by the Tory peer Michelle Mone, be handed the entire east Midlands from Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton? Will the Tory-adjacent businesswoman Jacqueline Gold’s Ann Summers organisation be left to run the Humber sector from Spurn Head to Howden, including Hull? Can Matt Handcock’s local pub landlord be allowed to do whatever he wants with both Needham Market and Clacton-on-Sea? And if this is the case, can these companies be trusted to respect the rights of the citizens of whom they will have dominion, when there are no regulations to protect them?
Should the people of Chagford and Yelverton be made to eat deregulated Daylesford Organic pork pies, which could possibly fuse with their genes at a subatomic level and turn them into half-human pig creatures? Should the people of Corby and Kettering be forced to wear untested Ultimo corsets, which could explode on contact with back sweat? Should people from Hull, and their orifices, be used as guinea pigs for untried, and potentially unsafe, Ann Summers sex toys, such as a turbo-charged, post-Brexit version of the Ann Summers bestseller the Anal Training Kit? As if Brexit wasn’t enough of a disaster as it is, are these some of the new “Brexit benefits” currently rolling down the sewage outlet of post-Brexit Tory deregulation?
It’s fun, isn’t it, to joke about the Brexit Tories’ attempts to turn Britain into a horrible dystopia designed to make money for their friends at the expense of the environment, the arts, education, human rights and so forth. Ha! Ha! Ha! But, here at the Edinburgh fringe, I popped out between my own shows to see two Ukrainian standups in From Ukraine With Laughs. Pavlo Voytovych presented a slick club set with cosmopolitan, pan-European reference points that would chime in his adopted Berlin; Dima Watermelon’s deadpan absurdity was darkened by attempts to deal with the systematic stealing of his homeland, the militarised erasure of the culture he grew up in. It made me think about what it would be like to lose the country you loved. And I realised I was.
It’s hysterical, of course, to compare the Brexit Tories’ stealthy but determined dismantling of the Britain we cherish with Putin’s physical assault on Ukraine. But if you’ve ever shown an interest in architecture, gardening or nature, doubtless the infiltrated algorithms of your social media feeds are steering you towards the respectable-looking Restore Trust organisation, which is reminding National Trust members to renew their memberships before 26 August, so they can vote in the charity’s autumn AGM. All well and good, surely?
Nominally a “forum where members and friends of the National Trust can discuss their concerns about the charity’s future”, the innocuous-sounding Restore Trust is in fact designed to stem the National Trust’s drift towards “wokeness” (by addressing links between its sites and slavery, for example). Restore Trust backer Neil Record, for one, is a financier and sometime Tory donor who has funded the climate-denial lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, also based on Tufton Street, and chairs Net Zero Watch, a thinktank spin-off on the same street lobbying to scrap net zero commitments. This is a worrying development given the vast tracts of land the National Trust manages and the millions of non-politically affiliated invertebrates in its keep. Butterflies don’t care about unisex toilets. They just want the plants they lay their eggs on to flower when they are supposed to.
In last year’s National Trust board member elections, one of the six preferred candidates that Restore Trust’s supporters hoped to vote into a position of influence was the self-styled “reverend” Stephen Green, who has supported the death penalty for gay sex in Uganda, believes all Muslims are going to hell and, when he was campaigning against a theatre piece I worked on decades ago, refused to shake the hand of a gay journalist because he knew “where it had been”. It is not known if Green believes garden design in National Trust properties should reflect one specific period in the house’s history or attempt to illustrate many simultaneously. We do know, however, that he thinks it is impossible for a husband to rape his wife.
It seems bizarre that it is suddenly necessary for reasonable people, who probably only joined the National Trust because they like carrot cake and a firm hanging buttress, to make sure they vote in the organisation’s 5 November AGM to prevent fun days out in historic locations becoming weaponised as yet another front in the far right’s culture war against everything nice. But we are where we are.
Stewart Lee and director Michael Cumming introduce their film King Rocker at the Cameo Edinburgh on Wednesday 24 and Friday 26 August; Stewart Lee is a guest of John Cooper Clarke at his Edinburgh Playhouse show on Wednesday 24 August