Introduction

In the documentary film Brexit, Health and Me, the drill rapper Drillminister reflects on accountability for political decisions affecting the health of the UK population and the NHS in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The Drillminister interview is replete with references to legal forms of accountability: criminal processes, including imprisonment, for stealing, fraud and ‘joint enterprise’, as well as investigatory processes designed to promote transparency, such as Royal Commissions.

Interviewer:  Your song ‘NI Backstop’ for me was a song about educating, but also that encapsulated the arguments so well. What made you want to do that?

Drillminister:  Because my main ops is government, my main ops is the people that's putting us down. What I’m saying, in certain lines like, um, ‘Before the referendum, did the average Joe know what Brexit was?’ – before the referendum, not after, where everybody's saying, ‘Brexit, Brexit, Brexit’, saying the buzzword – did they know what Brexit was? No, they didn’t. They had no clue, otherwise they wouldn't have been driving around with big buses saying, ‘Yeah, 150 million … [corrects self] 350 million … is going back to the NHS’, which is a lie. Which, right now, why is no one in jail for that? Because if I’m a fraud man, and if some Uncle is coming and saying, ‘Yo, I’m putting blah, blah, blah into your account’ … you’d be like, ‘Yo, Uncle, you’re putting that money in my account, yeah’. That man’d be in jail. …. But yet you were able to say 350 million, and got your vote through, and now we’re all effed ….

Interviewer:  What do you think should happen? Cos obviously the 350 million going back to the NHS, on the big red bus by Boris Johnson, it's been discredited, obviously, it's not true, what do you think should happen to MPs who abuse our trust, and the general public, like that?

Drillminister:  Um, to be fair, when you’re doing something so important, I know it sounds extreme, you have to do jail time. You have to. Guys are doing jail time for less, on the roads. Just, um, joint enterprise, if you know what that is – that's you was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, you never did anything, you never touched anything, you weren't a part of anything, you were there.