Worst Opinion of the Week: Wales Is 'Hard Left', According to Jacob Rees-Mogg

Story: The Welsh government are putting in measures to stop people from COVID-19 hotspots in England travelling to Wales.
Reasonable take: Seems like a reasonable and logical step, considering many Welsh communities can’t travel around Wales either and people from Tier 2 and Tier 3 are also being advised not to travel around England. So…
Brain rot: “There is no border between Wales and England. This is unconstitutional!” – Jacob Rees-Mogg

An Englishman’s God-given right to go to travel to Wales, take in its stunning natural scenery and bitch about its people, language, and ways of doing things is as old as England itself. Didn’t the Magna Carta enshrine an English common man’s right to “beest the greatest cunt imaginable in anoth'r's landeth”? I might have made that up, but since we’re living in the age of unaccountability, I shall press on.

This week, Wales’ First Minister Mark Drakeford announced that he was giving Boris Johnson “one final chance” to respond to his previously fobbed-off letters demanding travel restrictions to stop people coming into Wales from areas in England with high infection rates, before the Welsh government implemented their own restrictions on Friday at 18:00. While sentiments within Wales erred towards Drakeford being too reasonable, if anything, it came as no surprise to see Victorian ghoul Jacob Rees-Mogg summoned in the House of Commons to accuse Drakeford of erecting an "unconstitutional border” between Wales and England.

(There is, of course, a literal border between Wales and England. I’ve seen it on a map. The English love to shift it around from time to time, but it’s definitely where they last left it.)

“What would you expect of a hard-left Labour government?” Rees-Mogg said on Thursday. “The approach to putting a border between England and Wales is unconstitutional and will place the police in an invidious position considering that they serve the whole of the United Kingdom.

“We are one single United Kingdom and we should not have… borders between different parts of the United Kingdom. And I'm afraid that is what you get when you vote for socialists."

The absolute nerve on this Brexit cunt suddenly questioning the existence of borders and paraphrasing “Imagine” by John Lennon in Parliament like he wants a brotherhood of man. It would be ideologically incoherent enough, without the fact that this freak is also currently trying to create a new border in Kent like he’s playing Age of Empires.

Let’s also take a moment to admire Mark Drakeford being labelled as “hard left” – a statement so ridiculous it was met with proper belly laughter in the Commons. This is a man who only ever seems inspired when talking about cheese. A man who looks as if you’d find him in A&E after accidentally gluing the chassis of a model Triumph TR to his forehead. A man whose idea of premiership is to keep writing unanswered letters to someone for weeks on end in a time who crisis who barely knows he exists, quite literally, like Stan.

To anyone uninitiated with Welsh Labour, the way the UK Labour Party has shown its arse recently is essentially how things have been done in Wales since the turn of the millennium. This is a party that happily votes in favour of dumping nuclear English mud into the water of the country’s capital city for no tangible benefit or reason. Bureaucratic middle-men, special advisors and Lyle Lanley-types are the three wise men of the land, still worshipping at the altar of Tony Blair.

To be fair to Drakeford, this is arguably the first time in two decades that Welsh Labour have stood up to Westminster, albeit in a timid and protracted way that was only prompted after a lethal virus and weeks of ghosting by Boris Johnson. The imposed deadline was also seemingly designed to ensure the holiday homers in COVID-19 hot spots have just enough time to commute to their Welsh hidey-holes for a long weekend. But it still kind of feels like watching a WorldStarHipHop video of some kid finally levelling a bully with a textbook right hook.

I’m not bewildered that Jacob Rees-Mogg would argue there isn’t a border that separates Wales and England, as it fits perfectly into the ahistorical nonsense you might hear in a gift shop in Bath when some cunt detects a Welsh lilt in someone’s voice as they declare that they “really enjoy their time in the principality in the summer months”.

Opposition to the Welsh government’s plan to protect rural communities seems to have risen solely from the horror that part of the “United Kingdom” was doing something that wasn’t okayed by England for possibly the first time in its existence. Former Welsh Secretary Stephen Crabb said Drakeford was "wrong to whip up anti-visitor (English) sentiment", Welsh MP Alun Cairns said the policy was “more to do with being anti-English than anti-COVID”, and former Welsh Conservatives leader Andrew RT Davies commented on the “Welsh wall” by stating that he “never had Mark Drakeford down as a Donald Trump enthusiast, but I guess you learn something new every day!”

Of course, this reaction is more about safeguarding the carte blanche privilege of the middle classes than anything else, which has been the case throughout the pandemic. The closing of any sort of loophole that allowed wealthy Englanders to fuck off to another country was always going to be met with harsh rebuttal by a class of people whose lockdown has largely just meant more precarious workers delivering parcels to their houses.

For Jacob Rees-Mogg and those like him, there isn’t a sliding scale of leftism. Whether you’re a poster job for neoliberalism and war or want to give a child a free glass of milk, you are indistinguishable with Fidel Castro.

The reality is that these new measures haven’t come soon enough for people in Wales, the majority of whom can’t leave their own counties, let alone venture into other countries, yet are just expected to deal with an influx of “exception to the rule” pricks who’ll go on to write an Observer piece about how some old Welsh nan talking in their native tongue in the Nisa Local oppresses them. We’ve been expected to talk to our families and friends through PVC windows like Hannibal Lecter, while people from Essex climb Snowdon in a fucking deep diving suit.

But no, of course, the “lefties” have “won” and it will finally become illegal to be English (and spread a deadly virus). Will somebody please think of the English!

@MULLETFANNEO