MILLIONS OF ENGLISH LEMMINGS ARE STARTING TO JUMP AND JIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF. WHICH MEANS IT'S HIGH TIME FOR US SCOTS TO LEAVE THEM TO IT.

OK

So here's a small selection of recently released facts which are worth scrutiny. You know. Sit back. Light up a cigarette if that is your thing. Allow a bigger picture to take shape. To emerge.

First up, this week's super rich stuff. Here are the bare, gold plated bones. As of last week, the curtain has been drawn back. 26 multi billionaires now own the same share of the world's wealth as the poorest four billion. Planet earth is now home to 2200 billionaires and their collective treasure trove goes up by $2.5 billion a day.

Yeah. I know. Regular readers will know this is familiar enough turf. A couple of years ago the same stats showed 85 individuals owned more than half the world. Now it's 26. I guess in a couple of years time it will be less than ten.

And sure, it sucks. Unless mankind finds a way to discover some collective sanity, the only outcome will be revolutions all the way from New York to Newport. And it won't be pretty. It never is.

But the stinking pile of rotting fish nature of these statistics hides a more subtle point. Think about it. If the super rich of the world are shovelling in $2.5 billion a day's worth of extra treasure, where are they going to stash their troves. Surely this must be boom time for London, the long preferred bolt hole for the world's bent politicians and organised crime bosses. Surely the cost of those mansions in Belgravia must be rising as fast as the cost of a box of value range corn flakes?

Well. Actually.....

Well actually, no it isn't. Over the last year, property prices in Belgravia, Mayfair and Kensington have fallen by 25%. It seems like the 0.1% are stashing their cash elsewhere. Ouch. I mean that's got to hurt. Maybe after all these years, London's three card trick ain't working any more. And if the dirty money of the world suddenly stops beating a path to London's door, then what is actually left?

When Britain lost 90% of its Empire in the twenty years after the end of the war, those cunning boys of the City of London were quick on their well shod feed. They replaced a hard Empire with a new virtual Empire which needed neither soldiers nor gunboats to achieve it's ends. They created a place called 'Off Shore'. An archipeligo of treasure islands dotted around the world. 

Once upon a time to reap the benefits of an oil field in Nigeria, we would have boots on the ground and gunships in the bay to oversee the looting. In the virtual reality of the offshore world, such costly unpleasantness was no longer required. Instead all that was required was the right kind of good old boy from the right kind of school to pay a nice fat bribe to some local type, an lo and behold, all the profits came to us anyway. To the City. To Jersey. To the British Virgin Isles. And the local type in question would be shown a red carpeted road all the way to a nice multi million pound pad in Hampstead or Chelsea and never mind the nicities of the immigration paper work. A few billion quid earns you the absolute right not to have to do the paperwork.

Well, obviously.

And it has worked very nicely thank you for a good six decades. Until all of a sudden it seems to have stopped working. And the gilded mansions are dropping in price as quickly as a twenty four tonne load of fresh prawns stuck in a sixty mile traffic jam in Kent.

Attracting the dirty money of the world was enough to keep England afloat for over half a century. When you have all those tens of billions beating a path to your door, well, why bother with vulgar things like factories and coal mines and ship yards. The idea of industry was deemed to be so last century, no line of work for good chaps from good schools looking to make a quick buck.

But there's a pretty big problem with all this malarky. Basically the English economy is little more than a huge Ponzi scheme. So long as the cash pours in, all is tickety boo. No need for factories and all the boring stuff. Who needs to make money when you can provide a home for money other people have stolen? 

So long as they keep on bringing their cash..

What happens when they move on to pastures new? A 25% drop in house prices at the top end of the market, that's what happens.

In the post colonial era, the UK has relied on two areas of the country to raise the cash to pay all the bills. London and the South East of Enland have surfed the dirty money wave for all it's worth and imported millions of wide eyed Europeans to do the jobs any self respecting south easterner wouldn't go near. You know. Teaching and road sweeing and bin collecting and coffee serving and nursing.

And the other area? Us, of course. Scotland. The oldest cash cow of them all, and no matter how hard London has tried, it has never managed to do an India and rob us right down to the light sockets. We still generate lots of cash by doing real stuff. You know. Whisky and wind power and timber and beef and oil and prawns. We actually still do the exporting thing. Which probably explains why house prices in Edinburgh have gone up by 10% while Kensington has hit the bricks.

More to the point, we haven't gone down the road of blaming immigrants for everything. People with different languages and skin colours kind of like bringing their talents to Scotland. They find themselves welcome and appreciated as opposed to being told to fuck off home.

All of which brings me to fact number two. A Channel 4 news piece from a food distribution centre in the South East somewhere. An Indian owner with the world on his shoulders. He points to a forty foot container. Two years ago it would cost him £400 to ship the container from A to B. Now? Now it is £800. And why? Because nobody can find enough people to make it happen. Fork lift drivers and HGV guys and clerks in the office. He has a bunch of vacancies and no applicants. Why? Many of his European workers have heeded the word on the street and duly 'fucked off home'. Leaving no bugger willing to do the work.

Both of these completely unrelated facts tell the same kind of tale. The London con trick is unravelling by the day. The super rich are parking their money elsewhere whilst the aspiring poor are doing much the same with their ambition and energy. Net result? Violent crime up 20%. Prisons turning into Mad Max and A&E looking like something out of Vietnam. And every piece of bad evening news is prefaced with the words '....in England and Wales.'

So what of the man on the street? What is his or her reaction to this grinding deline into Christ knows what?

Well we see it on the news every night. Blame it all on Brussels and immigrants and treacherous bastards guilty of the crime of being young and smart. Across great swathes of England, the Brexit lemmings are starting jump and jive on the top of the cliff. When in doubt, scream 'Fuck you' at the top of your voice. All of sudden we seem to be hearing a lot about the good old days when we came out on the winning side of world wars. Who gives a shit if things get bad? Bring it on. Eating whale meat is a price worth paying so long as it wipes the smiles of the faces of all those young people with their fancy coffees and their Nig Nog friends.

And Germany is the bad guy again. Retro, or what!

The polls are telling a story which is impossible to ignore. The English are losing the plot and starting to yearn for a return to Spitfires in the sky and white faces in the corner shop. And if that means burning everything down, then fuck it, let it burn......

The English are starting to look a lot like the mate who always gets into a scrap once they get pissed. You know the type. We all know someone like that. And eventually you have to start ignoring their Friday night calls. Not worth the hassle. Oh, they are right as rain where they're sober... But once they get a few pints down their neck..... Nah. Not worth it. Best avoided.

Thankfully the rest of the world can see the difference. They can see clearly enough we Scots are not going down the road of Spitfires and hating Germans and brown people. We have their sympathy. And they wonder why on earth we don't just cut the cord and get ourselves as far from the demented cliff edge lemmings as we can.

And you know what? They're absolutely right.