The defining point of the British sausage is not quite as Jim Hacker put it:
Hacker: By the end of next year we shall be waving goodbye to the good old British sausage and we’ll be forced to accept some foreign muck like salami or bratwurst or something in its place
Sir Bernard Woolley: They can’t stop us eating the British sausage, can they?
Hacker: They can stop us calling it the sausage though. Apparently it’s going to be called the emulsified, high-fat offal tube.
Sir Bernard: And you swallowed it?
The grand distinction of the British sausage is not what the meat is. All sausages are made from whatever scrag ends come to hand. It is that we, being the pragmatic folk we are, note that the yumminess goes to hide in the fat of said scrag ends. We thus add up to 10% rusk, or breadcrumbs, to retain that yumminess through the cooking process.
Which brings us to current events:
The UK is on the cusp of victory in the Sausage War with the EU, after Brussels finally waved the white flag over allowing British bangers to be sold in Northern Ireland at the end of the grace period.
We’re willing to agree that there is a scale to regulation and politics. Some things are better handled at a higher level, for more people at a time, some things at a lower and more locally.
The current situation has the rulers of the remnant-European Union’s 450 million people arguing with the UK’s rulers of 65 million over what type of sausage the 1.8 million in Northern Ireland may have for their breakfast. The 1.8 million not even being a part of the 450 million.
We can’t help but think that there’s something wrong with the scale at which government and regulation is attempting to work here. We do rather lean to the idea that the folks of Northern Ireland are capable of deciding which sausage, if any, they’d like to have for their breakfast. This doesn’t even need to be done collectively, that voluntary cooperation between butcher and consumer would seem to be all that is required.
They have been doing this for some time, after all, there is a reason that the full plate in all its emulsified, fatty, offaly tubular yumminess is called an Ulster Fry.