Dual Standards

I noted with somewhat grim amusement in today's bumper summer fun edition of The New Statesman, a piece by Nicholas Harris about the first Wetherspoon's pub to be opened outside of this archipelago, in Alicante, España. What makes this particularly of note is not the part of Spain chosen - pretty predictable given that it is a traditional holiday destination for package-holidaying Brits, but rather that it has been opened in an EU country. Consider the fact that the founder of the cheap booze at breakfast, lunch and dinner chain of pubs, Sir Tim Martin is virulently anti-EU and campaigned vigorously and vociferously for Brexit. What manner of business brain comes up with that combo, one might ask? First you and your political ilk manage to convince half of the population to vote for a restriction of their rights to free movement within Europe, and then later decide to open bloody pubs within the economic union you apparently loathe, to serve those very people.

It adds to the company's growing portfolio of outlets which already includes several in the Republic of Ireland, another EU country. Not that I've any particular beef with Wetherspoons itself, or indeed its owner, particularly; Brexit excepted; but apart from the iffy business planning side of it, it does rather smell of crass and quite hypocritical opportunism to me. Much like Nigel Farage, who has close personal ties to both France and Germany, with two of his children having dual German/British citizenship and a partner in the far-right French politician Laure Ferrari: a man who attended Dulwich College and professes to be a 'man of the people'. Does he drink cheap bitter in Wetherspoons, one wonders? These people are the absolute giddy limit and symptomatic of exactly what is wrong with the UK at the moment: ruthless political and business avarice shrouded by an invisibility cloak of moral certitude and wrapped up in a thin tissue of specious propriety...