Brexit: The Squeezed Upper Classes

At Christmas one is positively inundated with post from "charities" attempting, often through flattery, to encourage one to part with one's savings in order to help preserve "tiger cubs" or "orangutans" from "deforestation" or men with guns. Putting aside the necessity of hard wood furniture for one moment, one has long held that the decline of "Big Game" hunting was a wholly adverse thing. In the past Uncle Bertie and his chums would shuffle off to Africa in the winter months and return in the spring, bearing agreeable animal skins - all wholly organic - that their relatives could dot about their homes and which were very effective at keeping out the draft from under library doors. Nowadays, one is obliged to employ a "carpet man" to come to one's house, make a lot of unnecessary measurements and "fit" something ghastly that leaves one's hall looking like a "sitting room" in a semi-detached bungalow in Basildon.

The long term consequence of this, inevitably perhaps, is that one is increasingly hard pushed to find a decent "animal skin beater" and one's treasured leopard and lion skins are left to fester. Worse still, the once thriving industry of "rug beating" like street-portering and chimney-sweeping is now in long, possibly terminal decline and young people are more minded to study "nail technology" "nursing" or "computer science" than a useful trade that will provide them with a lifetime of work.

The declining calibre of "service" in general has long been a source of concern to ordinary families across Britain and in recent years many have been obliged to hire sub-standard butlers, valets and even scullery maids from "Eastern Europe." Despite their best efforts, these inadequate "migrants" have often struggled to provide the discretion, genuflection or comprehensible English that one might take for granted in a good British servant. Nannying in particular has suffered a shocking degeneration, as cheaper "au-pairs" often lacking the basic skills of nurse-maidery, pram-husbandry and cheek-pinching have flooded the market - leading to an inexorable deterioration in standards. 

One has heard heart-rending stories of mothers having to bring up their own children, infants uttering unspeakable things in Latvian and young boys in green velvet meeting terrible ends as they peddle their tricycles - down the wrong side of the road. All of this is quite clearly the fault of open borders, mass unskilled migration and the tiresome and meddlesome EU that has sought to ban "big game hunting" and destroy the British nanny.

Here, as everywhere else, Brexit offers us an enormous opportunity. Turning off the tap of "Bulgarian servants" will create vacancies that can be filled once again by good British equerries, pages and footmen. Furthermore, the inevitable post Article 50 removal of the much hated, EU imposed "minimum wage" will drive down salaries and re-energise a healthy retainer sector once more, breathing new life into a long neglected and much treasured industry. 

The squeezed upper classes will be squeezed no more and the working men and women of Britain will once again be able to take up the mop, the poker and the silver cloth and go on with life as it was before. A win win for all.