Express & Star

Peter Rhodes on the Brexit logjam, dodgy call centres and ducks with their tails up

Read today's column from Peter Rhodes.

Published
Brexit - flagging?

STRANGE sight in our local park where the ducks were up-tails all, heads fully immersed in the lake. A lady asked what was happening. I explained that someone had chucked a few handfuls of grain into the lake and, as the grain sank, the ducks had no option but to dive for it. "You mean they have to sink for their supper?" she asked. I wish I'd thought of that.

I BET we all punched the air with joy to see arrests in a police raid in India on call centres accused of massive fraud against UK residents. I wonder if the people we saw included the ones who have called me time after time from "Windows Technical Support," adopting the daftest false names. Did they never stop to think that someone with a strong Kolkata accent is most unlikely to be called David, Darren, Wayne or Christopher?

FOR sheer brass neck, I remember the call-centre crook who assured me several times he was called James Fraser. "If your name is James Fraser," I told him. "Then my name is Mahatma Gandhi." He seemed surprised his cover had been blown.

JUST before the 2016 EU Referendum I wrote: " If we vote In, we stay in the EU. If we vote Out, we stay in the EU. Simple as that." At the time it was a bit of a joke. Three years on, nobody is laughing.

AND it's all so heart-breakingly unnecessary. All the endless logjams in the Commons, all the snarling in TV debates, all the rows ripping families apart, all the vile Twitter-abuse heaped on MPs need never have happened. Just supposing back in 2016, after 17.4 million voted for Brexit, we'd had MPs with the wisdom, magnanimity and grace to say: "It's not the result we wanted but it's what the people want and it's our duty to make it work." By now, with goodwill on all sides, we could have been out of the EU yet trading happily with it and with the rest of the world. The tragedy is that our political system does not promote people with wisdom, magnanimity and grace but super-egos, self-seekers and lobby-fodder. Another general election will probably produce another paralysed Parliament. And I can't see any way towards serious parliamentary reform because turkeys never vote for Christmas and the usual route, through a Royal Commission, would simply kick this ball even further into the long grass. It might even take longer than Brexit.

ANOTHER blank screen, another failure of the BT Yahoo email system. This time, according to online chatter, it lasted for some hours and covered much of Britain and Europe. What made it more irritating was the unhelpful onscreen message: "Yahoo will be right back..Our engineers are working quickly to resolve the issue." Maybe the service would be more reliable if the engineers worked not quickly but thoroughly.