In a bizarre speech at the Tory party conference the Tory Environment Secretary and militant Brexiteer Michael Gove proved what an absolute pig's ear the Tories are making of Brexit.
On the day after the Brexit vote Gove was one of the first to walk away from the "£350 million for the NHS" lie promoted by the Vote Leave mob, and ever since then the Brexiteer false promises have evaporated one by one as more and more people have been forced to come to terms with the fact that a successful Brexit would have been hard enough to achieve even with a competent government, but beyond impossible with the most amateurish, divided, economically incompetent, and directionless government in living memory.
Scrabbling around for literally anything to put a positive spin on the ongoing Tory Brexit farce for his speech Michael Gove grasped at the unlikely subject of pigs' ears.
Here's what he actually said (remember that these are the actual words of an actual government minister as you read them):
"There are some cuts of the animal that are hugely popular with the British consumer, others a little less. But some of those cuts are hugely popular elsewhere, say, for example, pigs’ ears are a delicacy in China." ... "one of the reasons why [Britain] has not been as successful as we might have been at selling pigs’ ears to China is that EU rules dictate that pigs, like all livestock, have ear tags."
He went on to say that because Brexit Britain could have its own traceability methods outside the EU without ear tags, "we can have pigs’ ears that don’t need to be pierced".
That the idea that after well over a year of the Tories cobbling together their shambolic, ever-fluctuating Brexit plan, increased pigs' ear sales to China is one of the best highlights of Brexit that a government minister and leading Brexiteer could imagine just goes to show what an absolute pigs' ear they're making of the whole thing.
Gove actually seems delusional enough to think that an increase in pigs' ear sales to China is remotely enough to offset the collapse in the pound; the stress and uncertainty of millions of workers across the UK and the EU; the flight of businesses out of the UK (especially the financial sector), the collapse in overseas NHS recruitment; the loss of British peoples' rights to travel, work, study or retire in over two dozen other states; the massive workload of duplicating or replacing thousands of laws, rules, and trade deals; the loss of British prestige; and the shocking upsurge in post-Brexit xenophobic and racist attacks.
Aside from the fact that Gove is clearly off his rocker to think that such a niche benefit to a niche market is remotely sufficient to counteract the chaos of Brexit, there's also the fact that he didn't even pick up on the fact that any journalist worth their salt would obviously use his mention of pigs' ears to create a "Tories making a pig's ear of Brexit" angle.
Before David Cameron appointed Gove to ideologically vandalise the state education sector by giving away thousands of publicly owned schools, for free, to unaccountable private sector pseudo-charities (many operated by major Tory party donors), he reportedly worked as a journalist.
That this former journalist didn't even pick up on the damning "making a pig's ear" angle before he started spouting such nonsense is a perfect illustration of the absolutely pathetic calibre of people Theresa May has surrounded herself to implement her anti-democratic hard-right vision of Brexit.
It's not that Brexit is impossible (I've always maintained that under the right circumstances, and with a coherent plan of action it would have been worth consideration), but giving the green light to a bunch of staggeringly incompetent and ideologically deranged charlatans like Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, the disgraced Liam Fox and bumbling David Davis to simply make it all up as they go along was always going to end up with them making a total pig's ear of the whole thing wasn't it?
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