Downing Street has moved to smooth ruffled feathers today with the reassuring news that they are in negotiations with Southern Rail to replace the ‘Open Skies’ agreement between the EU-US with a rail replacement bus service.
“There is absolutely nothing to worry about,” transport minister Chris Grayling said, “British planes will still fly after Brexit, they just may not fly very far.”
Under the scheme being negotiated between the UK government and Southern Rail, scheduled “aviation events” will be cancelled or delayed at the last minute to “bring some of the excitement of modern rail travel in an industrialised country to the mile high club”.
“It’s mostly about getting the language right to sell it to the flying public,” Grayling continued,
“what do you call it when you pull the United Kingdom out of a marriage in its fifth decade, with all the planning usually given to planning a morning walk of shame after pulling while drunk?
You don’t plan that walk until you have to do it, at least that’s what I’ve heard. Why should Brexit be any different?”
Grayling went on to illuminate (first time for everything) that you did it by quickly glancing at Wikipedia and ignoring “the bores in the civil service and their endless piles of tedious paper covered in strange symbols.”
But what does the aviation industry think of the looming loss of the EU-US Open Skies agreement, imperilled by the shamble-funicular that is the governing Con-Lab supply and demand agreement at Westminster?
“We’re bloody terrified! What do you expect? We have to know what we’re doing at least a year in advance or we can’t sell tickets. We need to know by the end of March. Time is fast running out for the U.K.,” an aviation representative said,
“The UK doesn’t know what it’s doing tomorrow, let alone the minute after the country’s engines drop off and it plummets headfirst into the mountainside that is currently life after Brexit.
And that mountainside, it’s heavily forested, and that forest, it’s on fire!
Adopt the position they advise you to when in a plane that’s crashing? Good luck with that!”
So worse than leaves on the line?
“Look. In public we’re making polite, slightly strained little noises like every industry.
We don’t want to appear to publicly interfere with the democratic process, while privately we lobby the hell out of the democratic process of course.
But behind closed doors we’re shouting in rage and incomprehension at these complete and utter idiots who are crashing the UK.
And do you know what the say in response, in private, your government ministers?
They tell us it’s our patriotic duty to make a success of Brexit. It’s eyewateringly insane.
Labour are no different.
They just smile serenely at us while they daydream about nationalising the production of platitudes.
We’re planning how to cut the UK out of our future. As much as we can.
Just look what’s happening with the Irish ferries, that’s your heads up pal.”
We asked Chris Grayling for a comeback to the aviation representative’s statement, but he couldn’t talk again, as he was busy having lunch with the CEO of Southern Rail, while they finalised how to get a bus to fly.
LCD Views advises everyone not to panic and to trust in the overwhelming mandate delivered by the British people on the 23rd June 1816 to colonise the world and build a new empire by staying at home.
Brexiters are presumably pleased at the potential of the U.K. crashing out of Open Skies, because in many ways it made travel over borders much easier. So at least someone can be happy.