Is There No Pragmatism in Albion?

Much like women and wogs and working for a living, and somewhat to the chagrin of the People's Haystack, bridges are a bit more complicated than they first appear. Apparently the process of building a bridge does not altogether start and end with looking at two Imperial-pink blobs on a map and then giving orders to join them together by chucking up some sort of a thingy. The People's Haystack has employed this methodology a couple of times before, and on both occasions came a bit of a cropper. The first was the London garden bridge, one of many blanched pachyderms for which the taxpayer was privileged to pick up the elephant dung during the Haystack's tenure as mayor of London. Rather like the People's Haystack himself when the accounts are due, it was distinguished by its ability to cost a great deal of time, energy and money without ever putting in an appearance. Then there was the bridge over the Irish Sea, which was to unite two of England's Celtic provinces, thereby dispensing with the need for a Brussels-made backstop and licensing much robust British humour at the expense of those enemies of the people who think international treaties carry some sort of weight. That project never got beyond what may loosely be called the planning stage, probably because of worries about swarming Pictish hordes.

Never one to be twice shy when others can be bitten in his place, the Haystack has now decided to save the great British holiday by chucking up some air bridges, only to be met with the inevitable chorus of crypto-foreign pessimism. There are the medical pessimists who proclaim that some lesser breeds are less inclined to take the pandemic on the chin, and may therefore prove hesitant about letting in bearers of Her Britannic Majesty's blue passport; there are the structural pessimists who point out that even the airiest British bridge must have at least one end on foreign soil if people are to muddle across it without getting wet; and there are of course the expert pessimists who want to suffocate the entire entrepreneurial inspiration in a technocratic plethora of piffle by demanding, of all things, how it would work. Well, really.