The London Prat

Keir Starmer Announces Yet Another "Reset" With Europe, Britain Begins Looking For Original Factory Settings LONDON -- The Prime Minister this week unveiled his latest "reset" with Europe, the seventh in roughly eighteen months, prompting a weary nation to start hunting through its drawers for the little laminated card that explains how to restore the country to its original condition. Nobody can quite remember what that condition was. But everyone agrees it had fewer dialogue boxes. Have You Tried Turning Brexit Off And On Again? The reset, officials explained, is not a U-turn, a rejoin, or a reversal. It is more of a gentle reinstall. The country keeps all its files but loses all its settings, and a small spinning wheel appears over Whitehall while everyone waits to see whether it'll boot. One Treasury source described the mood as "cautiously buffering." Another said the relationship with Brussels was now "fully patched, pending one final restart we'd rather not talk about." A third simply stared at the wall and whispered the word "cache" until security escorted him to a quieter committee. The comedian Stewart Lee, asked for comment in a pub he did not wish to be in, observed that Britain had achieved the rare feat of being both updated and out of date at the same time, like a phone that won't stop reminding you to update it while refusing to update. The Default Position Keir Starmer Announces Yet Another Reset With Europe () Downing Street insists the reset will deliver "frictionless cooperation," which is the political equivalent of promising your laptop will run cooler if you simply believe in it harder. Brussels, for its part, responded with the diplomatic shrug of a tech support line that has heard this exact problem before and knows precisely how the call ends. Veteran reset-watchers, a profession that did not exist three years ago and now staffs an entire wing of think-tankery, note a familiar pattern. As Latest Story Magazine reported earlier this spring, each reset begins with handshakes, proceeds to communiqués, and concludes with both sides agreeing to schedule a future reset of the present reset, which is itself a reset of the last one. The official government position, available in dense PDF form at gov.uk, runs to forty pages and uses the word "ambition" so many times it has filed for its own constituency. Meanwhile the broadcasters at BBC News have quietly installed a permanent graphic reading "EUROPE: TALKS ABOUT TALKS" to save on production costs. Restore To An Earlier Point Here's the unfashionable truth underneath the jokes. People aren't really asking Brussels for anything dramatic. They'd settle for a government that picks a direction and walks in it for longer than a news cycle. The endless resetting isn't strategy. It's the look of a country that's afraid to commit because committing means somebody, eventually, has to be wrong out loud. And there's something almost touching about a nation that keeps reaching for the factory settings. It means we still believe, somewhere, that there's a cleaner version of ourselves waiting under all the clutter. We just can't find the card. Britain formally left the European Union in January 2020, since which time successive governments have pursued varying degrees of closeness and distance with the bloc. The current administration has framed its European policy around the language of "reset" and "renewed partnership." No factory settings have yet been located. Satire disclaimer: This article is a work of satire from The London Prat, written as a human collaboration between the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer. Quotes are invented, resets are real, and no actual operating system was harmed in the making of this reboot. For more cheerful nonsense from across the pond, visit our American cousins at Bohiney.com. Auf Wiedersehen, amigo! Reset #7. Spinning wheel. Factory settings not found. Please wait. "Cautiously buffering," says Treasury. Reset number seven. Coffee cold. BBC installs permanent graphic: "TALKS ABOUT TALKS." Efficiency. Original factory settings: lost. Fewer dialogue boxes, probably. Reset-watchers: new profession. Ambition (x47). Kettle on.

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Keir Starmer Announces Yet Another “Reset” With Europe