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Public information films. Like all folk of a certain age, I loved them and still spend a fair bit of time tracking them down on YouTube today.

Whether it was the young lads accidentally sticking the unfeasibly tall mast of their sailboat into the power lines, the man sticking his power drill into the wall with a couple of matchsticks before promptly electrocuting himself, the carpet turning into a bear trap to illustrate the dangers of putting rugs on polished floors or Donald Pleasance voicing the faceless Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, the more terrifying the better.

The golden age of the public information film was the 60s to the late 70s, back when governments felt it was worth spending money to inform their citizens of dangers to their health and lives. They probably peaked in the early 80s with the (never shown) Protect and Survive series at the height of the Cold War, telling us all how to get through a nuclear war. (The answer? Hide under your desk.)

These wonderful, horrific short films finally started to disappear the further we got into the 80s, as successive Thatcher governments probably decided something like, ‘Ah what the hell, it’s cheaper to just let ’em all die.’

(Image: UGC)

And now they’re back! That’s right, Boris Johnson’s Government (yep, it’s still painful to type that) is planning the biggest public information films campaign since World War II in order to prepare us for No Deal Brexit.

The cost of this campaign? An estimated £130million. Now the first thing that crosses your mind is that this can’t be good. Governments rarely spend money on stuff like this when everything is going great.

The second thing that crosses your mind is – if this is just for the TV campaign, how much in total is now going on No Deal preparations? £2.1BILLION. I know that, like me, you’ll be thinking this seems like an awful lot of money to be spending because of the actions of a bunch of your simpler countrymen.

You’re also probably wondering what else we could have used that cash for. Wonder no longer, dear reader. I spent a bit of time reading up on the subject and can furnish you with a non-exhaustive list of what 2.1billion quid could have got us if we’d spent it, say, on the NHS.

Ready? Here’s what we could have had…

124,000 healthcare assistants

84,000 midwives

84,000 nurses

84,000 physios

70,000 doctors

20,000 hip operations

2100 CT scanners

Or probably a few hospitals. But no, we’re going to get… what exactly? Blue passports. A bit of ‘sovereignty’. And, well, that’s it.

And your mind goes back to 2017, to Theresa May facing down a nurse on Question Time who asked her why her wages hadn’t grown since 2009, eight years previously. May’s infamous answer? There just isn’t “a magic money tree” that we can shake to get the cash to pay nurses properly.

(Image: PA)

But it turns out that there is a magic money tree. It’s just very delicate and can only flourish under very specific conditions – like the Pennantia baylisiana, a tree so rare that just a single specimen exists, on one of the Three Kings Islands off the coast of New Zealand, where it has sat, all alone, since 1945.

Yes, it turns out that you need very specific conditions indeed in order to make the Magic Money Tree bloom. Wages for nurses won’t do it. And it won’t appear anywhere near hospitals or schools or anything like that.

It turns out that what you need to get the tree spraying money as far as the eye can see are the following:

1) A madman who will risk the whole country to appease a few racists in his own political party.

2) An absolutely crazy, unworkable idea, voted for by a combination of simple, lied-to people and racists.

3) A second madman who is more concerned with power than the wellbeing of his own people and who is willing to thrust the crazy idea down everyone’s throats as viciously as possible.

Until now, it was thought that the chances of all three of these magical factors coming together at the same time were so remote that we’d never see the Magic Money Tree blossom in our lifetime.

How wrong we were. The tree has just produced a couple of billion to get us through No Deal.

It still won’t be enough. Maybe we can all just hide under our desks.