Wholesale Fools' Paradise by Nicholas Hagger

[Collective Ink Books] In Fools' Paradise, a mock-heroic poem on Brexit which complements his masque King Charles the Wise, Nicholas Hagger presents the most important British event since the Second World War: the Brexiteers' struggle to wrest control of the UK's laws, borders, money and trade from the EU and turn the UK into a more prosperous paradise. In 16 cantos and an epilogue of heroic couplets with an epic tone, he narrates the 2018 Chequers compromise and its aftermath: the EU's opposition, lack of internal support, looming ‘no deal' and requests for extensions that keep the UK in the EU. He shows the UK Ship of State as manned by a squabbling crew sailing for an illusory paradise and too riven by division to reach agreement. The dream all were promised seems undeliverable. In the tradition of the social satire of Dryden and Pope, the elevated style is undermined by a recurring image of the Ship of Fools in Sebastian Brant's 1494 Swiss poem Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff