A Modest Post Brexit Proposal

Dear <Redacted>

With respect to your request for ideas to deal with possible post Brexit and pandemic economic decline and shortages of food we recommend revival of Jonathan Swift’s modest proposal adapted to modern circumstances.

As you know Swift proposed that the answer to famine in Ireland was that the Irish should sell their babies to the rich. Given the recency of this proposal we consider it a viable solution to the problem of food poverty if applied to the poor.

The solution that emerged in China during a major famine, where women swopped babies in order that they did not eat their own child will probably not be widely adopted here.

Our proposal would doubtless prove popular in constituencies that voted for this government and, properly marketed, would ensure another electoral victory for our people.

We would of course have to restrict this to the poor, who may be assumed not to vote for us and breed like rabbits, unlike the superior upper and upper middle classes.

We rejected the idea that the government should pay for the babies of poor mothers and propose, as did Plato, that all babies be removed from their mothers at birth nominally to be raised by the state in order to ensure a higher standard of education for the children. The children of the genetically superior upper classes can rapidly be returned to the mothers blaming either clerical errors or some form of exemption. We would of course need to place a gagging order on the parents involved.

Another option is simply to order removal of all babies born to families with an income below a threshold to be determined, though we think a threshold of £50,000 seems appropriate. We would market this as applying to benefit scroungers or better to immigrant benefit scroungers.

A third option would be to tell the women affected that their child died at or soon after birth implying the mother’s lifestyle caused the death. Since we have control of the figures we can easily mask the fictitious rise in neonatal deaths.

There may be a problem with finding enough workers sufficiently psychopathic and greedy to process the stock we obtained from the working class mothers thus before implementing this scheme we need to invest heavily in automation and robotics. This will let us reduce the number of humans involved. These humans will merely see a robot vehicle carrying healthy babies to a neonatal care ward for special treatment and would not expect to see the stock again. As a bonus it will make the National Health Service more attractive to our prospective US buyers.

The processed stock can be distributed to foodbanks after lacing the meat with viagra to ensure a more constant supply of meat. Alternatively, and with better implications for our budget, we could set up a company that sold this meat to supermarkets and takeaways. We expect no problems finding businesses that ask no questions especially in constituencies that voted for this government. It is our understanding that humans taste like pork so we suggest that the stock be marketed in this form as far as possible.

Our commitment to privatisation dictates that we outsource this process. Outsourcing will also give an arms length scapegoat in case this blows up in our face.

I am aware you have a list of potential party donors who would jump at this opportunity. If we could however outsource to a company run by someone with a brown skin we could turn this into anti immigrant propaganda if it becomes public. Obviously we need a greedy fool for this, but again that should present no problems.

We also recommend this be tried out first in Scotland in areas where we expect a high number of residents support independence.

We also note that this would create a potentially self financing way to dispose of the corpses of Coronavirus victims.

We will be producing a more detailed report once we hear your response to this document.

This document has been classified Top Secret only for eyes on the list above and we recommend you take great care in how you handle it.

Yours Etc

NB. It is possible this was a tasteless satire.