Going Postal

Image generated using GROK AI This week, the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum was overshadowed by the excitement surrounding King of the North, Remainer Andy Burnham’s, latest steps to take over the running of the country from the clump of the south, Keir Starmer. There isn’t even a Question Time to mull over the bloodless chopping of a prime minister – the sixth since the fateful Leave vote a decade ago. Nor will there be QTs during any leadership contest or coronation of Andeh.

Le Petomane Author Unknown – See page for details, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons Greetings pop pickers (from the hot and steamy Côte d’Azur on the stunning Mediterranean coastline of southeastern France) and please be welcome to tonight’s Fabulously Flamboyant Friday and yet another of our groin-polished googlies from the gasworks end of contemporary culture.

“Honouring My British Heritage” by DaPuglet is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. Britain has had a hundred years to perfect its own decline. The pound, which once measured a quarter of the world’s trade, now buys less than it did in 1900 even before the inflation adjustment. The country imports its food, its energy, its medicines, its industrial inputs, and an ever-larger share of its labour force.

Simon Dawson / No10 Downing Street, OGL 3, via Wikimedia Commons We are still in 2024 and this story caused quite a commotion when it broke. Who among us has ever turned down a gift. Aside from Xmas and birthdays I don’t remember ever getting a gift but it seems our dear leader has been on the receiving end of much largesse. So much so that his advisors got a bit wobbly in case it was seen as corruption.

For Australia I went to an upscale university. Sydney is, I think, the oldest one and along with Melbourne, New South and the ANU the most highly regarded It’s not Oxford or Harvard but the campus is beautiful University of Sydney Arewell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons The Economics and Law faculties at U of  S are well known for producing PMs and State Premiers – Albanese, Turnbull, Abbott, Howard, and Whitlam came out of there to be PM. State Premiers  like Wran, Greiner, Fahey.

Bryan Gould John Chapman, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Perhaps the one aspiration all parties bar the Greens hold is to try to engineer some growth into the economy. Most of the blame attaches to the Treasury but the country seems unable to accomplish the simplest project without being weighed down with competing policies, the non compliance with which leads to the interference by the courts and extraordinary delays.

A Visitor Happens By © Colin Cross, Going Postal 2026 I’d been pottering about in the greenhouse for an hour or so after opening up the shed and decided it was time for a drink of water. Much panicked flapping of wings greeted me, the result of an infant house martin (I think) which, having found its way into the shed, had decided that the window was the only way out.

“Honouring My British Heritage” by DaPuglet is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. The popular conception of politics, taught in schools and reinforced by every TV sofa politics show, is that the people elect representatives, the representatives debate the laws, and the laws are then administered by a neutral civil service. Anyone who has spent ten minutes inside a government department knows this is a children’s story.

Before George Stephenson’s name ended up on everything, a colliery manager from Newburn settled the one argument that decided whether railways would ever work. He won it with a hand-cranked cart, two iron engines, and a refusal to believe the experts. Then history moved on without him. Editorial Note: A word before we begin.

Burnham’s notable achievements: After leaving office, reports claimed that Burnham and his predecessor as health secretary, Alan Johnson, had rejected 81 requests for an inquiry sitting in public to examine the high rate of deaths at Stafford Hospital 4th in the list of top ten most outrageous expense claims – another ‘thief’. Credit: http://www.acumenimages.com.