The Cause

Because in our great game they were the pawns with which we scored,
We'll wait around a while and try to keep from looking bored;
If volunteer, if conscript, when they joined us in our fight,
They truly earned their pittance if they died for what is Right.
In their remembrance we'll invest a minute - make it two -
Because they gave it all for us, not for themselves or you.
We'll stand here looking sombre in our poppy-pimping suits
And tolerate the breaking-off from filling of our boots,
In memory of those who served their Government and Crown
By helping keep the profits up and hold the rabble down.

Gloria Stead

Political Football

It may safely be assumed that Team Starmer is preparing to purge the Football Association of Ireland from the international sporting community, given that organisation's passing of a resolution against the Righteous State. The resolution approves submitting a formal motion to ban Israel from European club and international competitions, on the grounds of failure to implement a proper anti-racism policy and of usurping the footballing prerogatives of the Palestinian Untermenschen. Such self-evidently absurd and antisemitic objections cannot help but inflame the indignation of the Trumpster and his head-tribble, whose kingdom will be co-hosting next year's World Cup and who have doubtless already supplied the Israeli team with the weapons and body armour necessary to sweep aside all opposition until the final against the team from Trumpsterland.

Pragmatic Peacekeeping, Affordable Atrocity

British decency is always most touching when most inexpensive; and His Majesty's Government seems to have come through splendidly when faced with the prospect of a non-profitable genocide in Sudan, where paramilitary groups generally lack the US-bankrolled weapons-purchasing wherewithal of the Righteous State. Given four possible options for protecting civilians and preventing war crimes, the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets plumped for the least ambitious; though its parsimony was no doubt more than adequately compensated for in the volume of tutting noises that emerged once the ethnic cleansing was properly under way.

Prevention Creep

British extremists are very selfishly becoming less Islamic and more like the political mainstream. Initially set up by the Blairites as a convenient vehicle for official Islamophobia, the Prevent programme now risks subversion through referrals of people barely distinguishable from Team Starmer's policy-makers in the Farage Falange. More than a third of beneficiaries in the past year also had at least one mental health or neurodiversity condition, which presumably is not quite what Wideboy Wesley Streeting meant when he implied that disabled people are just in it for the free BMWs and luxury accommodation. It is to be hoped that the programme can somehow be restored to its original sensible and moderate remit, perhaps by encouraging more referrals of those displaying insufficient enthusiasm for virtuous genocide or profitable ecocide.

We Won't Remember Them

Even now that Remembrance Sunday has been more or less officially re-branded as a rah-rah for the troops, the poppy-wearing patriotic consciousness remains in need of protection from certain British soldiers. During the Spanish civil war about 2500 British and Irish citizens joined up to fight against Franco's coup, and the current Spanish government is commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Franco's death by bestowing citizenship on some of the volunteers' descendants. Among them is the son of a Latvian immigrant who had the temerity to study medicine at Edinburgh and then try to infiltrate the territorial army; whereupon, with unimpeachable British decency, the authorities responded first by threatening him with deportation and later by conscripting him. Along with that of the other International Brigades volunteers, his memory is unlikely to be welcome behind any of the well-fed would-be-solemn faces at the Cenotaph next week.

Ideologically Confined

Democracy among the lesser breeds is often still a primitive affair, and the Chilean government has strayed so far from the path of virtue as to impose inferior housing conditions upon some friends of the sainted Thatcher. In order to relieve overcrowding elsewhere, the authorities plan to re-purpose the luxury retirement home where the doddering accomplices of the delightful Augusto Pinochet have been housed at the public's expense. It's bad enough to believe that prisons can ever be too overcrowded; but attempting to remedy the situation by inconveniencing moderate and sensible patriots demonstrates just how far from British values the Latin American consciousness remains.

Their Cross to Bear

We live in a complicated world, and occasionally a moral problem will arise which even a bit of wog-bashing cannot readily resolve. One such is causing a dilemma for the clean-limbed cadres of the Kent Farage Falange, whose county council is being forced to choose between that great Englishman, Saint George, and that other great Englishman, Baby Jesus. Local patriots have put up flags along the road through one of the villages, and now that Christmas has been with us for a week or two the county council has come over all Health and Safety about the prospect of putting up the festive lights. There seems to be some disagreement as to who is or is not legally permitted to remove the flags but, doubtless mindful of the moral risks involved in offending the stormtroopers' delicate sensibilities, the parish council has meekly requested that they carry out the act themselves. It is to be hoped that Baby Jesus will remember His English heritage sufficiently to show an appropriate degree of gratitude.

That's an American Holiday, Walt

Bob Newhart has caused me much cultural confusion. When the TV show bearing his name appeared in the schedules, it occupied the slot formerly filled by 9 to 5, which featured a villain named Hart; so I naturally assumed that Newhart must be a spinoff. On first seeing it, I was further discombobulated by the American habit of naming some shows after their stars even when the stars play fictitious characters: Newhart was not a Newhart sketch show but a sitcom about a travel writer living among some comical country cousins.

A little later I encountered his monologue "Introducing Tobacco to Civilisation", in which he plays a business associate of Sir Walter "Nutty Walt" Raleigh, reacting sceptically to various novelties from the New World. It's an ingenious piece in which the performer can elicit considerable hilarity just from stating bare facts and then cackling at their manifest absurdity; but even so, one early line puzzled me. Walt has sent over a boatload of turkeys, which have not been used according to instructions: "as a matter of fact they're still here, Walt ... they're flapping all over London as a matter of fact. See, uh, that's an American holiday, Walt." Cue one of the largest laughs on the recording and a round of applause.

It's probable that even at my then-tender age I was aware of the Pavlovian reaction that afflicts many US citizens upon mention of the divine demonym; but I was still surprised that even these poor insular creatures should imagine Christmas as their own exclusive burden. Fortunately it was explained to me that Americans have some holidays of their own and don't associate turkey with Christmas in the way we do here on the mainland, and my horizons were duly broadened.

However, as with so many aspects of globalisation and multiculturalism, it appears that the process has now gone too far. Strange foods and alien practices are encroaching upon our native calendar; and to add insult to injury, they are doing so right in the middle of the Christmas season and blatantly clashing with the Remembrance Day rah-rah. Britain is a tolerant and inclusive nation which has effortlessly assimilated Indian caste-consciousness, Chinese authoritarianism and Nigerian corruption; but it can hardly be expected to yield to the values of a country with a written constitution, an official separation of church and state, and a fully elected parliament. Surely a decisive intervention by the protectors of our cultural coherence can only be a matter of time.

Prisoners of Efficiency

In the wake of the accidental release of a child sex offender and (yet worse) brown asylum seeker, trade union officials and other criminals have very treacherously, ungratefully, antisemitically and un-Britishly presumed to warn prison authorities and His Majesty's Government about the state of the national punishment system. At least one convict due for release made an official complaint about the lack of any information as to where he was meant to live or how to contact his probation officer, while the prison officers' union even seems to think that individual staff members should not be blamed for systemic problems; and this despite someone conveniently low in the pecking order having already been suspended, quite possibly by those responsible for the paperwork in which the suspendee's error originated. Meanwhile, the Minister for Profitable Incarceration has put the blame on human error, rather than on the general running down of public services which the Conservatives and their little yellow chums accelerated past breaking point and which Team Starmer has no particular interest in reversing. The advantage of blaming human error is, of course, that it is soon to be eliminated along with immigrants and all other Bad Things by the introduction of the BlairCard™ digital panopticon and by the replacement of everyone on a fallible salary grade by AI bots powered from a Musk plagiarism hub.

Fair Warning

Britain's telecoms watchdog has fastened its soft, sloppy gums around the ankles of a company for adhering to the letter and not the spirit of the rules. Ofcom recently ordered companies to inform customers about price increases in pounds, pence and advance; O2 has done just that, hiking monthly bills by an extra forty per cent from next April and tactfully refraining from any overt sniggering when breaking the news to the victims. Ofcom expressed disappointment that a profit-oriented company should do everything it can get away with in the name of profit; the extent to which other profit-oriented companies will be chastened by this uncompromising whine of rebuke remains as yet unclear.