Brexit and other offensive words starting with the letter B

theguardian.com:

I would love to have been a fly on the wall when the subject of the EU came up during the meetings between Boris Johnson and Ukraine’s President Zelenskiy. How could Johnson, master of bullshit, have possibly handled the irony of the situation? He, the principal culprit in what is being increasingly recognised as the self-harm of Brexit; and Zelenskiy, desperate to join the EU that the UK, in its unforgivable folly, has left.

Now, I use the word bullshit – not normally one that appears in this column – advisedly. I have read a short book by a renowned American moral philosopher, Harry G Frankfurt, entitled On Bullshit. Frankfurt examines the distinction between humbug – “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying” – and outright lying; he sees his third category, bullshit, as “a lack of connection to a concern with truth”. It is “this indifference to how things really are” that he regards as “the essence of bullshit”.

This seems to capture Johnson – bullshitter extraordinaire – and the entire Brexit tribe. They displayed a distinct lack of connection to a concern with the truth during the referendum; and they very definitely affect indifference to how things really are as the Brexit chickens come home to roost.

The deleterious impact of Brexit on the UK’s output, investment, trade and standard of living is becoming more and more obvious. The Resolution Foundation finds that real incomes per head are some £470 lower than they would have been if we had remained.

But that is not all: Lord Heseltine put the frustrations directly attributable to Brexit neatly in a recent article in the Financial Times: “Queues are back. During the last war they reflected the dire threat we faced, but at least there was a common enemy … This