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Read them runes

25th Feb 2016
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So on 23 June we get to vote in or out (or was that Cameron or Johnson?). Let us read the runes (now an official substitute for opinion polls – they can’t do any worse).

For some it is midsummer’s eve, and it’s certainly the eve of St John, so a day for jumping over bonfires, feasting and merrymaking (though merrymaking must be strictly curtailed in the interests of austerity).

There is cricket at Lord’s that evening, with Middlesex playing Somerset in the T20 Blast (sorry, NatWest T20 Blast), but nowhere else. No spending a peaceful day watching county cricket, then.

Bruce Springsteen, having played the UK gigs for his latest tour, will be between Denmark and Sweden, maybe even on the Oresund Bridge on that very day. Noir or what? Dedicated Springsteen fans are given to popping over to Paris or Berlin to see him, so won’t want their travel plans complicated. Votes for staying in, then.

Cunningly, it is also a rest day in the European football championships, so either England will be on the brink of greatness (or a quarter-final elimination), or they will have been knocked out, falling in a group containing Russia, Slovakia and Wales.

Which way that will have gone is going to be crucial in the election, though it might have been far worse if England had been beaten by Romania or Poland. England’s last group game, on the 20th, is against Slovakia. The effects will be greater than when England’s defeat in the 1970 World Cup scuppered Harold Wilson’s hope of holding on to power.

If England are out, disgruntled fans may be coming back from France in large numbers, possibly wishing to be excluded from Europe forever. Young English footballers, too, may be hoping for exit, since it would stem the flood of Euro-journeymen (and many others who hold EU passports through mysterious ancestry).

In 1970 Harold Wilson was known to talk about football, but this was seen as something to do with his being northern and working class. Now we have two Etonians, one supporting Aston Villa (mostly) and the other – well, Boris’s original stance was that footballers were a lot of ghastly oiks drinking lager and getting paid too much. This is not now a vote winner (more the Margaret Thatcher line), but one can see why somebody looking for votes in London is not going to risk an affection for one team annoying the supporters of everybody else. Though he has been very kind to West Ham over the Olympic Stadium.

But, don’t forget, at Eton they play football (as in soccer) rather than rugby. When I were a lad we had just such a one in the Keele University team (where are you now, JACC Watson-Gandy?).

This is going to be a very odd campaign. The oddness of the “leave” team is odd indeed – Johnson, Galloway, Gove, Duncan-Smith, Farage. Weirdly (that word’s going to get used a lot) the Tory press – the Mail, the Express, The Telegraph, the Times – will all line up against a Tory Prime Minister, and they will all do it because their extremely rich proprietors, none of them residents of the UK, see it to their personal advantage.

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By JDBENJAMIN
26th Feb 2016 12:55

And this relates to accountancy, how exactly?

Simon's Sweetman's blog is as relevant to this website as a blog about keeping tropical fish.

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