HERE'S HOW FEARS OF A BORIS JOHNSON 'NO DEAL' BREXIT HAVE KICKED OUR SMALL AFRICAN CHARITY IN THE TEETH.

I figure it is fair enough to say the whole No Deal Brexit thing has kicked off big time. When people start singing 'Keep the Red Flag flying high' at one o;clock in the morning in the House of Commons it's a pretty good indication that things are starting to get a bit wild. I've got say, it was great to hear a resoundingly Scottish voice say 'No' when the bouncers called last orders on democracy as usual.

What a bloody shower.

We are told time and again to tune out from all the Remainer scaremongering. Project Fear, right? Blatant propaganda. Lies, lies and more lies. Who are all these senior doctors and haulage bosses and customs agents and shipping companies anyway? What do they know? And they even have the gall to call themselves experts in their field. When will they get it into their thick liberal heads that even if they do their so called jobs for a hundred years they will never know 10% of what Nadine Dorris knows. Because Nadine Dorris knows best. Of course she does.

Hard Brexit will mean milk and honey and anyone who says otherwise is a traitorous surrender monkey. Normal people from Wakefield aren't about to fall this kind of spineless defeatist talk.

The party line is rammed down our throats day after day after day. Britain great, foreigners bad. Everything is great and everything is about to get even better.

End of.

Well it doesn't feel that way for our little African charity, The Kupata Project.

I'll assume you don't know what we're all about, so here's a potted summary. School girls in Uganda miss 25% of their education because their families cannot afford to buy sanitary pads. It's a massive problem with a really easy solution – provide sanitary pads.

So we raise funds in Scotland and we use all the cash to buy sanitary pads. The Kupata Project has no office, no paid staff and when Carol and I visit Uganda next month, we will be paying all of the expenses for the trip out of our own pockets.

Basically, every penny we raise is spent on buying sanitary pads.

We are now buying re-usable pads. SoSure. They are manufactured by a not for profit company called AfriPads. The factory is in Uganda and all of the workers are Ugandans. 

If you want to check them out you can follow the link below.

'SO SURE' RE-USABLE SANITARY PADS

We will be giving the girls four re-usable pads each which is enough for a year.

OK. Hopefully you get the picture. And of course you are thinking what on earth has any of this got to do with the looming prospect of a Boris Johnson 'No Deal' Brexit.

Well, quite a lot actually.

It's all in the maths.

When we first visited Uganda in November 2017, one of our British Pounds was worth 5500 Ugandan Shillings.

When we arrive in Kabale Province in October, we have £3000 to spend on SoSure pads.

If the value of the pound had held up, the cost of four re-usable pads would have been £2.40 per girl per year.

If the pound had retained its value, we would be able to help out 1250 girls.

But our British pound hasn't retained its value. Instead it has crashed and burned as the rest of the world has watched the antics of our pathetic excuse of a Government with a mixture of contempt and horror.

As I write this, one of our devalued British pounds is now only capable of being converted into 4500 Ugandan Shillings.

Which means the cost doing what we do is now £2.90 per girl per year.

Which means the £3000 we have raised from the good people of Scotland will now only run to helping 1000 girls.

Which means 250 girls will spend the next year missing a quarter of their time in school. I suppose this falls under the banner of Globalisation. An overblown Etonian tells a bunch of fairytales and the dominos fall all the way to Kabale Province in the heart of Africa.

And 250 school girls miss a quarter of their education.

So thanks, Mr Johnson. Thanks a bunch. The maths puts me in mind of a joke from the 1970's when Westminster looked at all the maxed out credit cards and called in the IMF for a bailout. The joke described an imagined front page headline.

“Britain's application to join the Third World turned down!”

And these same people have the front to suggest a Scottish Pound wouldn't be viable. Aye right.

When your currency is falling against the currency of a struggling country where most people get by on a dollar a day .... well ..... the message seems pretty clear! For Christ's sake.

Anyway. It is what it is. We land at Entebbe International airport on October 14 so I guess there is still time to try and raise the money we have lost thanks to the chaos south of the border.

Maybe you might be minded to help out? Yeah, yeah. Of course you knew it was coming. The proffered hat. The shaken tin. The abject pleading. Well at least I'm not pretending to need a quid to get a bus ticket to Cumbernauld.

A fiver is enough for a full year's worth of school for two girls. It isn't a sticking plaster. It's an investment. And we make sure every one of the girls knows the pads are a gift from the people of a country called Scotland. And in a few years, we will be joining Uganda in the 'Independent from London Rule' club. It's a club worth joining. And fair enough, right now London doesn't allow us to do any diplomacy of our own. Right now it's one of those grown up things we aren't allowed to touch. But this doesn't mean we can't forge a few links. A few bonds.

And as the years roll by, we hope there will be thousands of better educated girls in Uganda who have a warm feeling towards a far away country called Scotland.

Can't hurt, right?

If you are minded to help us to help a few more girls, you can find the Kupata Project online fundraising page by following the link below. We can absolutely promise every last penny will be spent on buying sanitary pads. 

THE KUPATA PROJECT ONLINE FUNDRAISING PAGE