What light cycle do mother plants require?

BREXIT: AN ACT OF DELIBERATE SELF HARM

A Scotsman, an Irishman and an Englishman walk into a bar. A really, really good bar. Then they all leave because the Englishman decides that’s what’s happening.

Funny. Not funny.

This, readers, is Brexit stripped right down to its essence. It seems very likely that the UK is destined to become a place where the obscenely rich can blatantly dodge and evade paying their taxes free from any sort of impediment. It also seems very likely that, in order to allow the aforementioned obscenely rich to squeeze even more wealth out of the population and into their bank accounts, that a whole range of hard won rights, from living wage to health and safety protection, paid holidays, paid maternity and paternity leave, restrictions on working hours, guaranteed working hours; all of that and everything else that might affect profits will go. We can say bye bye to free healthcare as well.

Pfft! Just like that, we’ll be seventy-five years in the past.

A surprising number of people (who are mostly quite intelligent and should therefore really know better) I’ve spoken to have told me that because we’re “taking back control” of our own laws, this means that we’ll be able to get a top to tail reform of our current drug laws and effectively legalise whatever we want, free from interference and restriction by Johnny Foreigner at the EU.

Really?

I don’t know how many times I’ve talked about this (and more than once in these very pages); the EU have quite clearly said that should any member state wish to overhaul or change their domestic laws around, say, the legalisation of cannabis, then this would be a matter for that member state and that the EU wouldn’t interfere.

The door for this has been open now for nearly ten years, but successive UK governments have chosen to ignore it, preferring instead to carry blindly on with their absurd “tough on drugs” road to failure.

The fact is that this very week (23/10/19), MP’s on the cross-party Health and Social Care Committee recommended that the government consider the decriminalisation of all drugs, in a bid to curb the soaring number of drug deaths in the UK, a situation described as a “public health emergency”. And with 2670 deaths in England and nearly 1200 deaths in Scotland (a country with a population roughly the same as London), they’re not wrong.

Completely unsurprisingly, the government has said that it has absolutely no plans for the decriminalisation of any drug. There will be no debate about the matter; experts and evidence will be ignored. Nothing to do with our friends in Europe, just blind and total inflexibility on the part of the government in London.

For most of the “leavers” (including those who aren’t just straight down the line racists), everything that’s wrong with the UK is the fault of the EU. I just wonder who they’re going to blame five when we’re no longer in the EU and the shit hits the fan.

Just in case there was any doubt about it: I’m Scottish. I didn’t vote for any of this. I voted to remain in the EU in 2016, and I voted for independence from the rest of the UK in 2014. Like almost every other Scottish person I know, I feel completely shafted and completely disempowered.

This is in all probability the last piece you’ll be seeing from me. Brexit hasn’t even happened yet, and already Soft Secrets UK is suffering from a lack of advertising revenue arising from the uncertainty around Brexit. This has meant that cuts have had to be made, and I’m one of these cuts.

But on the bright side, I’ll have a blue passport (in a final irony, these will be manufactured in France). See ya. Dr. John Dee