The London Prat

£23 million facility awaits a threat that never arrived PORTSMOUTH, England — Britain has achieved a breakthrough in international diplomacy after spending years and millions of pounds on border inspection facilities, only to discover that European sausages have never actually attempted to overthrow the government. The revelation follows renewed efforts to simplify UK-EU food trade, which could make the expensive post-Brexit inspection infrastructure unnecessary. Portsmouth Border Control Post: What £23 Million Bought According to reporting on Portsmouth's £23 million border control post, the facility opened a few years ago to inspect animal and plant products. New trade arrangements could substantially reduce the need for those inspections. Of the total, Portsmouth City Council put in £6 million of its own budget and is now seeking compensation. For British taxpayers, this raises an obvious question. Why spend £23 million teaching a sausage to identify itself when nobody intends to check its passport? Government officials insist the investment was worthwhile because Britain now possesses one of Europe's finest facilities for inspecting things it might no longer need to inspect. The building reportedly remains capable of identifying suspicious cheese, potentially hostile yoghurt and French butter attempting to enter the country without demonstrating sufficient appreciation for British sovereignty. Sausage Checks and Post-Brexit Border Rules Explained Under the previous arrangements, a continental sausage required documentation explaining its origin, ingredients and potentially its political opinions. A traditional Cumberland sausage, meanwhile, could travel freely throughout Britain without once being asked whether it supported European integration. Brexit campaigners celebrated the freedom to make Britain's own food inspection rules. Government departments responded by producing an entirely new collection of rules, buildings and administrative costs, all of them administered under the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The great achievement of Brexit, one taxpayer observed, was replacing European bureaucracy with British bureaucracy, which could now charge in pounds instead of euros. What Happens to a Border Post With Nothing to Inspect Port officials have been brainstorming alternative uses for the enormous facility. Suggestions circulating in Whitehall include a luxury retirement home for civil servants, a museum dedicated to unfinished government projects, or Britain's first national sausage interrogation centre. One proposal involves renting inspection rooms to suspicious married couples. For £75, customers could discover whether their spouse had concealed foreign cheese during a weekend in Paris. Colin Aldous, a retired Border Force officer who worked the Channel ports for thirty-one years, said the building's real problem is its size. "We trained for lorries," he said. "Nobody trained us for a quiet afternoon. I once watched a man guard an empty bay for six hours because the rota said bay four needed guarding." Inside the Memo: Staff Told to Stay Ready for Sausages An internal staff notice circulated at the port, a copy of which was seen by this publication, instructs employees to "maintain a constant state of readiness for incoming sausages." A follow-up line asks that readiness be maintained "irrespective of sausage volume, which we acknowledge to be low." A third paragraph reminds staff that the canteen kettle is not a government asset. A separate section of the notice, headed Frequently Asked Questions, lists only one question. It reads: "What is the sausage going to do?" No answer is given. Public Opinion on Sausage Sovereignty A survey of 1,000 British shoppers found that 71 percent had never been asked to present a passport by a sausage. Another 18 percent said they would be flattered if one asked. The remaining 11 percent said they had not understood the question but were fairly sure it was about cheese. The margin of error was described by the polling company as "mostly pork." The Cost of Reversing Course The government's greatest challenge is explaining how a building designed to protect Britain from uninspected food might become redundant without anyone admitting that the original panic was excessive. Officials could simply announce that the building succeeded so brilliantly at deterring dangerous sausages that the sausages stopped being dangerous. Economists have offered a simpler explanation. Political decisions frequently cost money, but political reversals cost money twice. British farmers, who must balance actual expenses against actual income, have expressed interest in receiving the same financial arrangement. If a farmer purchases a tractor that becomes unnecessary, perhaps the Treasury could congratulate him on his foresight and buy him another one. For now, the Portsmouth facility stands as a monument to British independence. The nation has taken back control of its borders, including the sovereign right to spend £23 million deciding whether to use them. Five Observations on Britain's Sausage Border Twenty-three million quid. You know what I could do with twenty-three million quid? Neither do the people who built this, but at least I'd have a hobby out of it. They built a place to catch dangerous sausages. Have you ever met a dangerous sausage? The worst one I ever knew was a Wednesday breakfast in a motorway services. That's a health problem, not a border problem. Somewhere there's a guy in a hi-vis jacket whose whole job is to look at a sausage and go, "Hmm." And the sausage is going, "Yeah, I know." And that's the whole conversation. That's a marriage. The council wants its six million back. Good luck. Ask the government for a refund and they'll hand you a form. The form costs six million. Britain took back control of its borders. Fantastic. Now we control them so well that nobody's allowed to be in them. That's not a border, that's a very expensive hallway.

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Portsmouth Border Post Finds Sausages Innocent

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