Green and Pleasant Land

So it's not just the courgettes - apparently the UK is facing a shortage of all vegetables thanks to poor weather in Spain, where most of them are imported from.  They are going to have to ration them.  Just like the war.  Everyone will be issued with a ration book, specifying how many of each type of vegetable they can have a month.  Perhaps they'll produce powdered cabbages, like the powdered egg they had in the war - just add water and you get a green mush which is nothing like the real thing.  I should imagine that there will soon be spivs hanging around on street corners, sporting trilby hats, sidling up to housewives and asking if they want to buy some black market root vegetables, before opening their rain coat to reveal that it is lined with carrots and radishes.  They'll be the only ones to profit from the situation.  Them and the allotment owners who supply the black marketeers with illicitly grown vegetables.  There will undoubtedly be police crackdowns on allotments, green houses and back gardens, with them all being seized by the state to prevent the illegal growing of vegetables for private profit.

But don't worry.  Jeremy Corbyn is already on the job.  As we've noted before, the Labour 'leader' has been devoting so much of his time to the problem that he just hasn't had time to formulate any coherent policy on Brexit.  To be fair, though, his vegetable supply strategy does address one of the major potential post-Brexit problems: the UK's over-reliance on EU imports for its vegetables.  This current shortage and its accompanying price increases is just a taster of the dire times ahead once we've left the EU.  But not to fear, Corbyn has a plan.  Ironically taking inspiration from wartime austerity, he's proposing that every available piece of open land should be cultivated for the production of vegetables.  Back gardens, allotments and market gardens would be nationalised and public parks, school playing fields and even the central reservations of motorways and dual carriageways would be put under cultivation.  Traffic roundabouts would no longer be blooming with flowers, instead sporting runner beans, peas and cabbages.  Never again would Britain be dependent upon foreign vegetables for its five a day.  Of course, this would nean the destruction of the habitats of many wild animals, but some sacrifices always have to be made in times of emergency.  On the positive side, we would, once again, be a truly green and pleasant land.