“Promised you a miracle, belief is a beauty thing, promises promises, dooby dooby, blah blah blah.” So sang ‘galloping’ Jim Kerr on Sample Mounds’ 1982 hit Promised You A Miracle.
How apt those prescient words sound now as we contemplate the prospect of a government crushed into inactivity beneath the impossibly onerous task of delivering on the promises of Brexit.
It is perfectly understandable, under such circumstances, that AOB should have been sidelined, shelved or otherwise set aside until such time as someone comes up with an idea still more brilliant and likely to actually go somewhere than Mrs May’s acclaimed (if inevitably doomed) ’Check Us!’ deal, behind which fully 20% of the population has already come enthusiastically together.
By the time the country’s leaders get back from Tuscany or wherever they’re all heading for the summer now, something (a DExEU machina of some kind) may very well have turned up. A thus-far-resolutely-recalcitrant reality may perhaps have had a change of heart and reconfigured itself to vouchsafe us the pain-free Utopia +++ deal we’ve all set our hearts on.
If not, HMG will just have to spin it all out as long as possible until that dismal too-late klaxon sounds and it’s all over bar the blaming.
In the meantime, who could reasonably expect those in government to focus on everyday tasks like running the country – or, for example, enacting the urgently required personal injury claims crackdown for which insurers have been agitating all these years.
Kicking things down the road has become a habit for a government sadly in want of providential eventualities, the latest instance being the Justice Select Committee’s decision to push back the implementation of further PI reforms until 2020.
How telling that – rather than insist we should just get on with it, as any true patriot would surely require – some traitors have actively welcomed the delay. One such unwelcome voice was that of a pressure group called Axes to Justice (A2J), whose ringleader Andrew Trembly said his co-conspirators actually “welcomed the delay”!
Such unreconstructed Mañana-ism is sadly typical of a country whose natives an acclaimed 2012 report entitled Brittania Unchained (co-authored by the likes of Dominic Raab, Pretty Patel and Mad Lizzy Truss) justly accused of being “among the worst idlers in the world”.
“We welcome the government’s decision to delay implementation of the reforms until 2020 (five years after they were first announced)” weaselled the unspeakable Trembly, “to ensure that the proposed online solution for claimants is fit for purpose.”
What utter procrastinatory piffle! We’re never going to find out whether it’s fit for purpose if we don’t give it a try! It’s like Universal Credit: doomsayers were quick to predict all kinds of problems with that. But now (admittedly after one or two minor bumps in the road) it’s all on the verge of bedding down nicely.
“Injured people cannot be looked after on an ‘it’ll be alright on the night basis,” A J Trembly claims. Oh, yes, they can (although, sadly, without the now retired Denis Norden, whose laboured gloss is the nation’s loss)!
Further delays serve no purpose. We should implement now. Ask questions later. Maybe after Brexit, when we won’t have garlic-breathed foreigners peering nosily over our shoulders.
If it turns out the reforms are not working properly we can always just crank things up a bit until the spigot of personal injury opportunism is turned fully counter clockwise.
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