On Wednesday, I watched Jeremy Hunt unveil the budget live on TV, though a carefully coordinated campaign of leaks to client media outlets meant it held little of the excitement it did in the 1970s. Where’s the fun in that? If Hunt’s 2024 budget was a 19th-century Parisienne burlesque artist, she would have walked on stage already naked and then gradually put her clothes back on, to the increasing uninterestedness of the disappointed perverts in attendance.
What an event budget day was when I was a boy! The annual release of the budget was as thrilling to me as waiting for each week’s new No 1 in the Radio 1 chart rundown. To this day still, I have a battered C60 audio cassette on which I used to tape both direct from the radio. Side one is my favourite No 1 singles from the period 1974 to 1977 – the Rubettes’ Sugar Baby Love, Windsor Davies and Don Estelle’s Whispering Grass, the Wurzels’ The Combine Harvester and the Sex Pistols’ gamechanging God Save the Queen. Side two is highlights of the then chancellor Denis Healey’s budgetary announcements from the same years. Who can forget 1974’s 10% on crisps, 1975’s ½p on a loaf of bread, 1976’s beer up one penny and 1977’s unprecedented withdrawal of the 2% national insurance surcharge on charities, a decision so radical it was essentially Healey’s own punk rock moment.
But there seemed to have been a mistake in Hunt’s budget speech. In his opening remarks, he explained how the UK economy has suffered the financial crisis, the pandemic and war in Europe. But there’s one major fiscal disaster Hunt somehow overlooked. What was that massive thing that happened in between the financial crisis and the pandemic? Oh yes, Brexit, which Boris Johnson backed and which Goldman Sachs says has taken 5% off our gross domestic product and which the Centre for European Reform says is responsible for an annual £40bn shortfall in tax revenue. And which means I can no longer buy old jazz vinyl cheap from France. Happy now, “red wall” voters?
It seems all roads lead to Brexit, even the A30, which last week took me to Truro and back, to perform at the comfortably appointed and acoustically unsurpassed Hall for Cornwall. The day after the show, a highlight of the run, I was fortunate enough to find myself in the town square of Bodmin on the national day of Cornwall’s Saint Piran, who was from Ireland in Europe. On the stone steps of the town hall, ceremonially clad dignitaries kept getting their microphone in front of the amplifier, prompting squalls of feedback, giving the event the air of a mid-80s Jesus and Mary Chain set performed by the cast of Trumpton. It was something I hadn’t realised I needed until I saw it.
It was a lovely day. Children danced in a massive circle to some bagpipes and everyone shouted: “Oggy, oggy, oggy! Oi, oi oi!” as they paraded past the Oggy Oggy pasty bakery. Earlier that morning, I watched in tears as a trio of veiled women launched a huge floating effigy of the Cornish comedian Jethro Tull – who died in 2021 after inventing the seed drill – into the River Camel and set it on fire, while monks from the abbey of St Mary and St Petroc intoned in Latin the words of his most famous routine: “This train don’t stop Camborne Wednesdays.”
Later, in the square, I shared my hymn sheet with a Cornishman who didn’t know the words either and sang the Cornish national anthem, The Song of the Western Men, which was written in 1825 by the antiquarian parson Robert Hawker. He famously invented the harvest festival, dressed up as a mermaid and once excommunicated his cat for catching a mouse on a Sunday. Perhaps if Justin Welby had dressed as a mermaid and excommunicated a cat, he would have been able to keep the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches within the wider body of the church. But, as usual, he was too busy speaking French and interfering with things.
Ten years ago, I sat in Parson Hawker’s jerry-built writing hut on the north Cornish cliff path and ate a corned beef roll in the rain. The hut is the National Trust’s smallest property, and as such I am surprised the woke heritage organisation hasn’t put up a plaque saying Hawker identified as a mermaid, as I understand from the Daily Telegraph that this is exactly the sort of thing it normally does and that is why the board should be filled up with right-leaning academics with links to Tufton Street lobbying groups. Mermaids indeed!
A few miles farther north along the path, I had visited the writing hut of the poet and librettist Ronald Duncan, who is oddly best known as the writer of Jack Cardiff’s 1968 Marianne Faithfull bikesploitation flick Naked Under Leather. If there was but one more writer’s hut in the immediate area, Cornwall could be exploiting a Writers’ Huts Trail tourist boom, instead of just sending coachloads of flushed women to the various places where Aidan Turner, in Poldark, unreasonably raised the levels to which men are expected to maintain their abdomens.
But the county has still got loads going for it. Hall for Cornwall’s luxurious 2018 refurbishment is now completed, with £2.1m of EU European Regional Development Fund money, which the people of Cornwall, still wreckers at heart, sneakily snaffled before voting leave. The county’s EU funding was then replaced by a Westminster bung of less than 50% of what Brussels used to give it.
When the people of Cornwall, and of Britain generally, wonder why they are even worse off than before, they should acknowledge the financial crisis, the pandemic and Putin’s war. But above all, they also need to acknowledge Brexit. Strange that the chancellor neglected to mention it.
Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee is on tour in March at Darlington Hippodrome (16) and Kings Theatre Portsmouth (21)
