Brexit Explained
Since well before the calamitous event, I have been waiting for an explantation. On Friday 16 July, I thought perhaps it had arrived. To which purport:
16 July 2021 At Home with the FT: Rocco Forte on Lockdown ‘nonsense’, ‘dreadful scientists’, and a penchant for clutter - by Alice Hancock
I was quietly taking advantage of my about to renew subscription to the FT Online, (the best value 260 odd squids I spend all year), when Alice’s headline caught my eye. And an eye catching headline in the current climate if ever there was one! Alice and her fellow FT columnists, together with the Washington Post opinion writers, create my idea of a balanced perspective on what’s going wrong with the world. Balanced that is, apart from Henry Olsen, who as the Post’s token Trumpian GOP opinion writer, sticks out like a veritable sore thumb. Why Jeff puts up with such a loony on the staff is beyond me, and just ever so darned annoying when he writes alongside star of the firmament political analyst, reformed Republican and lawyer, Jennifer Rubin. Anyway, the aforementioned article by Alice captured my attention.
Now I have always had a bit of soft spot for Rocco. I couldn’t say that our families are close, but I did happen to grow up in the same village as one of his relatives, who had a super nice ice cream parlour in Craig-y-Don, Llandudno, North Wales. I am pretty sure her name was Rosemary Forte, and the ice cream was pretty cool as well. I also quite like his hotels, and was filled with admiration for the projet I read about in the FT a year or two ago, a magnificent new construction on an ancient site on the outskirts of Rome. Having said that, personally I would rather stay with his sister Olga at Tresanton, St Mawes, Cornwall, any day of the week.
The FT interview with Rocco took place in his English country cottage. It is an unusual cottage, that sits in 1,800 acres of prime Surrey commuter belt, and is a sort of cross between country cottage and imported 17c Italian palazzo, taken over for the weekend by 1stDibs.
To the point. Rocco it seems is a Boris supporting flag waving Brexiteer. My hopes were immediately raised. Ever since Brexit loomed on the horizon, I have been waiting to read something that tells me what the benefits are for those who voted in droves to support it. And bearing in mind that Rocco is of Italian descent, with an Italian missus, I might perhaps be forgiven for thinking that this was the man who would bring enlightenment to a space where so far I am sure there must have been a press embargo. It was therefore with an accentuated interest that I absorbed his first justification for the UK leaving the Bloc - ‘taking back control of our laws’. Pardon?
Now I appear before British judges on a regular basis, and I have yet to experience this pernicious and long reaching hand of Europe rendering the judiciary impotent and unable to function through fear of an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. On behalf of one of my clients, I recently thought about engaging the concept recognised in European human rights law as a Defendant’s right to ‘equality of arms’. I was laughed out of court. Not a chance a British Judge would be influenced by such wishy washy mumbo jumbo. Put the text book back on the shelf my boy, I heard a voice say, you might as well get the white flag out now.
To give Rocco his due, he is a serious sort of chap, and with four large self-portraits in the cottage, he certainly takes himself seriously. So I surmise that in the refined circles frequented by Rocco, and those that employ mega numbers of honest toilers to provide their occasionally taken for granted lifestyles, this phrase ‘take back control of our laws’, may perhaps be code for something else. Perhaps Boris is planning a Polish style assault on judicial independence, out to grass for any of Your Lordships not willing to follow the party line. Or a dastardly plan to strip away the employment protections of those without country estates. Doing away with the minimum wage, and (subject to a new set of working hours regulations) allowing 10 year olds back down the pits, is the end goal. However, the British were not willing to clean rooms, or serve on tables, even before the minimum wage, and were content to allow these menial but necessary tasks (which are often taken for granted) to be taken up by our hard working and efficient Polish friends, who are now required to return to a country fast in danger of becoming a totalitarian state. However it is this very influx of European labour over the past 25 years, that brought UK service industries and restaurant standards up to the more than acceptable level at which they used to operate pre Brexit. Soon our Polish friends may be able to apply for political asylum, rather than be forced out of the country where their children go to school.
And to cap it all, with hero status fast fading, Rocco starts off on a very un-British whinge, about the difficulty that his businesses are now facing getting staff, (which at the moment is something of a secondary concern to getting some customers to stem losses running at £6.5m per month). Complaining that Brexit has deprived his crisis struck businesses of all those Poles, Romanians, and general unwanted immigrants, trying to earn enough to set up their own ice cream parlours, and who made up the bulwark of the team that kept his empire in business, suggests to me that Rocco may have just slightly lost touch with his antecedents.
Sorry Rocco, I think a couple of months off the golf course serving ice cream cornets in Brighton would do you a power of good, possibly combined with a short course on virology and the British system of justice.