Good Old-Fashioned British Fun

For many of its more hard-working ideologues, of course, Brexit is not merely a matter of wog-bashing and tax-dodging. Our approaching independence also has its lighter side, with the resumption of hanging and flogging high on the list of entertainments. Nevertheless, a Conservative colleague of some Jew-baiters and climate cranks in the European Parliament has felt obliged to row back a bit from a seemingly uncompromising call to protect British values and resume some of the traditional pastimes. David Bannerman, who defected to the Farage Falange and then, with Churchill doubtless in mind, defected back to the Conservatives a short but discreet time after they regained office in 2010, equated "extreme EU loyalty" with Islamist terrorism and proclaimed that the fourteenth-century Treason Act needed bringing up to date so that traitors, saboteurs and citizens of nowhere could be dealt with in true British fashion. The last use of the Act was, after all, in 1946, during that brief yet paradisal interlude between Britain's triumph over the forces of foreignness and the horrid letdown that was the founding of the National Health Service.

Bannerman later asserted that he would not wish to curtail debate and that, since our biggest trading partner is now a threat to rival the Great Novichok and the Heathen Chinee, only those who leak confidential documents to the Euro-wogs with anti-British intent should really be executed. Given the trouble everyone has had getting any Government documents at all on the subject of our impending freedom, it would be intriguing to know just how widespread the threat of execution is nowadays among the Farage Falange's servants in Whitehall. Perhaps the blithering prima donna David Davis, with his famously paperless style, was merely trying to protect the nation against its enemies and himself against the patriots.