Slogan-writing is bucking the pre-Brexit trade slump. The demand for witty, memorable yet ultimately vacuous soundbites has gone through the roof.
“There have been so many in the last few years!” gushed Ray Diofour to LCD’s Proper Gander correspondent. “Strong & Stable, For the Many not the Few, and the daddy of them all, Brexit means Brexit!”
We asked Diofour why he thought that business was so good.
“Brexit has consumed politics for almost three years now,” he replied. “Nobody understands it. Well, the EU does, but they don’t really count, do they? Our leaders have been too stressed out trying to get their heads around its complexities, so it has created a vacuum so huge it should have ‘Hoover’ printed on it. Into the breach come the slogans, so the politicians can convey the impression of knowing what they are doing.”
Diofour disclosed that his employer, the BBC, was in the process of being formally absorbed into the government, as the Ministry of Information. Meanwhile, it is obliged to repeat these slogans on a loop “to keep morale up”.
The irony is that the most famous of these slogans, Brexit Means Brexit, has the rare distinction of being both a tautology and a contradiction. It is the ultimate self-fulfilling paradox, since Brexit – should it still happen – will certainly not mean Brexit.
Brexit should mean a complete, clean break from the EU. No Customs Union, no Single Market. Unravelling these tangled threads is a long and delicate business, and the current government has neither the skill nor the stomach for it.
So it looks like the remnants of Brexit will merely be a fudge. No sweeteners, a nasty taste in the mouth, and it will leave us all feeling sick.
The time limit placed on the process simply makes it more difficult. The UK will tear itself away from the fabric of Europe, and wonder why it can’t clean up like it used to. It’s a rip-off.
Only the sloganeers are happy. Whether Red, White or Blue, we got our slogans back.
We’ve had enough of slogans. It’s that simple.