Common sense, or paranoia depending on your point of view, suggests that the next logical step from freeports is ‘charter cities’, allowing entire regions to be run as ‘corporate fiefdoms’ by big business, free from tedious regulations to pursue profit. As early as 2010, Tufton Street-based right-wing think tank Taxpayers’ Alliance suggested that Hull had “become our version of a charter city [with] Regulations on minimum wages, hours of work, social benefits for working-age citizens and central government planning regulations were abolished.’ Businesses that have become useful to the Tories will no doubt be the beneficiaries here, as they were when the PPE billions were paid out with due diligence. Could the donors of Boris Johnson’s Daylesford Organic wedding venue get a section of South Devon incorporating the whole of Dartmoor and the whole of the South Hams? Could Ultimo, the underwear company formerly owned by Tory peer Michelle Mone, be delivered across the whole of the East Midlands from Burton upon Trent to Upper Broughton? Will Tory-neighbouring businesswoman Jacqueline Gold’s Ann Summers be left to run the Humber sector from Spurn Head to Howden, including Hull? Can local pub landlord Matt Handcock be allowed to do what he wants with both Needham Market and Clacton-on-Sea? And if that is the case, can these companies be trusted to respect the rights of the citizens over whom they will be sovereign, when there are no regulations to protect them? Butterflies don’t care about unisex toilets. They just want the plants to bloom when they’re supposed to Should the people of Chagford and Helverton be forced to eat unleashed Daylesford organic pork pies, which could potentially merge with their genes at the subatomic level and turn them into half-human porcine creatures? Should the people of Corby and Kettering be forced to wear untested Ultimo corsets, which could explode on contact with back sweat? Should the people of Hull and their mouths be used as guinea pigs for Ann Summers’ untested and potentially dangerous sex toys, such as a turbo-charged, post-Brexit version of Ann Summers’ bestseller, the Anal Training Kit? As if Brexit wasn’t enough of a disaster, are these some of the new “Brexit pros” currently running down the drain of post-Brexit Tory deregulation? It’s fun, isn’t it, to poke fun at the Brexit Tories’ attempts to turn Britain into a hideous dystopia designed to make money for their cronies at the expense of the environment, the arts, education, human rights etc. .etc Ha! Ha! Ha! But here, on the fringes of Edinburgh, I ventured out between my own gigs to see two Ukrainian standups at From Ukraine With Laughs. Pavlo Voytovych presented a stylish club set with cosmopolitan, pan-European benchmarks that would resonate in his adopted Berlin. Dima Watermelon’s deadpan absurdity was darkened by attempts to confront the systematic theft of his homeland, the militarized erasure of the culture in which he grew up. It made me think about what it would be like to lose the country you loved. And I realized I was. It is hysterical, of course, to compare the stealthy but decisive dismantling of the Britain we adore by the Brexit Tories with Putin’s physical assault on Ukraine. But if you’ve ever shown an interest in architecture, gardening or nature, no doubt the hacked algorithms of your social media feeds will point you towards the venerable Restore Trust, which is reminding National Trust members to renew their memberships before 26 August, so that they can vote in the autumn E.G.S. All good, sure? Nominally a “forum where members and friends of the National Trust can discuss their concerns about the future of the charity”, the innocuous Restore Trust is designed to halt the National Trust’s slide into “wokeness” (addressing links between its sites and slavery, for example). Restore Trust supporter Neil Record, for one, is a funder and occasional Tory donor who has funded climate denialist lobby group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, also based in Tufton Street, and runs Net Zero Watch , a spin-off of the lobbying thinktank on the same path to abolishing net zero commitments. This is a worrying development given the vast tracts of land managed by the National Trust and the millions of invertebrates not connected to politics. Butterflies don’t care about unisex toilets. They just want the plants they lay their eggs on to bloom when they should. In last year’s election for National Trust board members, one of the six preferred candidates that Restore Trust 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. he believes all Muslims will go to hell, and when he campaigned against a play I was working on decades ago, he refused to shake the hand of a gay journalist because he knew “where he was”. It is not known whether Green believes that garden design on National Trust properties should reflect a particular period in the house’s history or attempts to depict several at once. We do know, however, that he believes it is impossible for a husband to rape his wife. It seems strange that it is suddenly necessary for sane people, who probably only joined the National Trust because they like carrot cake and a solid dangling prop, to take care to vote at the organisation’s AGM on 5 November to prevent the days entertainment in historic locations. armed as yet another front in the far-right’s cultural war against all things beautiful. But we are where we are.
