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How the Euros are going to f**k up your month if you don't give a shit about football

IF you don’t care about football, your life is about to become a waking nightmare. Despair as you’re subjected to these things, you non-football-loving weirdo.

TV is f**ked

The games are all on BBC and ITV so if you’re an avid viewer of Dickinson’s Real Deal, or the far superior Bargain Hunt, you are shit out of luck. It will also mean missing out on whatever cheap reality show about knitting or something the BBC puts on at eight o’clock, when they know everyone under 50 is streaming something better.

Pubs and bars become no-go zones

Forget having a quiet drink at your local this month, because for some reason footie fans have to watch all the football, not just their team, which means going the pub for every game and getting blackout pissed by the second half because none of them really give a shit about the score of Turkey vs Czechia. Try reading The Silmarillion in a corner to really feel like a social reject.

The office pool/fantasy football league

If you haven’t mastered the art of knowing just enough about football to fake your way through a conversation, you are out of time to learn. Hiding at your desk or the simple act of nodding while someone talked about goal aggregates was enough last week, now you have to download a bloody app as well as piss five quid away betting on Slovenia because no other sod would take them.

Nationalism everywhere

Until last week all you knew about your neighbour was that they drove an Audi and would listen to Crowded House a bit too loud on weekends. Now you’re finding out that they are loonily patriotic as their windows are suddenly covered in England flags they got from JD Sports. 

Failure

If there’s one positive thing about the Euros it’s that it will bring the country together like the bunch of hopeless losers we are when England inevitably get knocked out. Sure, we make a song and dance of pretending we can win, but that’s just our secret masochism making eventual defeat all the sweeter. And what, at the end of the day, is more English than celebrating being crap at something?

What is capital gains tax and have you ever met anyone who has paid it?

LABOUR will not promise that capital gains tax will rise, but have you, or has anyone you know, ever paid it? This FAQ explains what it is and why the answer is no: 

What is capital gains tax? 

Capital gains tax is paid on money from selling an asset for more than you paid for it. 

What, like the successful teams on Bargain Hunt?

Yes, exactly like that, except for those doing a little better than to be thrilled they’ve made £60 on a nasty teapot. 

How much do you have to make? Because one time I sold a SNES game on eBay for £250. 

How endearingly pathetic. Try £6,000, or 245 times that amount. Perhaps if you sold shares, a Picasso, a business or a spare house. 

I haven’t got any of those things. 

No. Only nine per cent of people pay capital gains tax. But those people, as you can imagine, are involved in some pretty high-value transactions. 

So it wouldn’t be anyone I know? 

It could. For example your mates who bought in Hackney Wick for £285,000, sold for £1.4 million and have a huge house in Hastings now. Your colleague who inherited his uncle’s coin collection and sold it for 75k. Your annoying nephew who made 100 grand on Bitcoin. 

But I hate all those people and wish they had less money. 

That’s why rises in capital gains tax are ‘the politics of envy’ and Labour should not even consider them. Those people earned that money fair and square by doing nothing. 

Is that why neither I nor anyone I know gives a bugger about Labour raising capital gains tax to soak the rich, improve public services and get the country working again? 

See? It’s like making private schools pay VAT all over again.

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