Devolution Debased

In a telling indication of how far England's first colony has fallen behind the mainland, politicians in Wales may soon be invited to legislate against saying the thing that is not in public office. A law against deliberate lying has been ruled out as too complex; it's true that Britain's leading liberal newspaper regularly proclaims what politicians "believe" and "hope," but apparently the necessary psychic powers have yet to manifest themselves in Cardiff. Nevertheless, the parliamentary standards committee has drawn up recommendations to tighten up the code of conduct and sanction the kind of people who claim Cabinet-level expenses at Westminster. With an access of insular complacency worthy of the proportionally-represented Euro-wogs, one commentator has even called on Westminster to emulate the Welsh example; and this despite the changes being at least partially driven by the possibility of electoral gains for Team Starmer's own favourite policy advisors at Farage Falange Incorporated.

Orange Letter Day

Mere weeks into the second reign of the Trumpster and his head-tribble, the sycophancy of the courtiers is already a credit to Republicanism. A congressbeing from the gesturally-named Finger Lakes region of New York has used the occasion of George Washington's birthday to propose that the occasion of the Trumpster's first policy statements should be conscecrated in similar fashion. "His impact on the nation is undeniable," she proclaimed; which is undeniably true, and it is to be hoped that proposals for national holidays memorialising George III, John Wilkes Booth and Osama bin Laden will soon be forthcoming on the same grounds. In the meantime, the prospects for a Statutory Trumpster Day, or STD for short, appear less than promising, despite likely enthusiastic support from the Farage Falange, Ambassador Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, and the more bipartisan reaches of the Democratic Party. Not least among the difficulties will be that the Imperial Doge and Supreme Car Salesman of the Nation is unlikely to approve of the little people being given more time off work. Whether the head-tribble has been approached for comment remains as yet unclear.

Vive la Différence

An encouraging new trend in intra-Semitic racism may have emerged in Miami Beach, where a Jewish man apparently saw a couple of what he believed to be Palestinians and proceeded to impose an Israeli ceasefire with the aid of the Second Amendment. In fact the victims were Israeli tourists who promptly denounced their attacker as one of the Arab Untermenschen, thereby further demonstrating the perils of insufficient diversity. We can only sigh for what might have happened if Europe's Jews, instead of colonising the Levant, had simply consented to let the Nazis carry out their early plan of deporting them to Madagascar. In an African setting their God-given superiority to the natives would have been self-evident on sight, and they would have been able to evolve a form of racism considerably better adapted for shootings in the United States.

Move Over, Talleyrand

During the halcyon days of the nineteen-fifties, when everyone knew who won the war and everyone knew their place, the Conservative government of Harold Macmillan proposed that post-imperial Britain's role in the world might be that of an "honest broker," the first word presumably sans the knowing snigger that would now be de rigueur. During the halcyon days of the nineteen-eighties, when all was gumption and get-go, the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher rehashed the idea under the rubric of a "special relationship" between Washington and London, as opposed to the common thug-and-sidekick bond that actually existed. In keeping with its programme of Change™, Team Starmer has now trotted out the same old fantasy, with the business secretary expressing hopes that Britain can act as a "bridge" between an EU that has no reason to trust it and a US that openly disdains it. Whether the Trumpster and his head-tribble or the recalcitrant Euro-wogs will be receptive to such hard-headed realism remains as yet unclear.

Set a Fraud to Catch a Fraud

The Church of Rome, whose own eye is noted for its scarcity of beams, has set itself to perform an ocular motility cleansing upon a woman who claimed that a statue of the Virgin wept tears of blood. She also claimed that the statue was talking to her, which may have been what prompted the Church to anathematise her as a fraud, and to proclaim a clear and scientific distinction between real and fake supernatural phenomena; viz. that the Pope approves of the one and not of the other. A DNA test on the blood in question has determined that it was the woman's own; which may, as her lawyer pointed out, indicate merely a miraculous mingling of earthly sanguination with the heavenly sort. Even if the Virgin's DNA profile should prove troublesome to access by prayer alone, a copy is presumably stored somewhere in the Vatican archives; and even if no match is found, that might mean only that God is making a point after His usual whimsical fashion. Alas, the lady herself, who has a prior record of Vatican-style financial probity, seems disinclined to rejoice and be exceeding glad at her persecution, and has absented herself from the vicinity of the miraculous presence.

Our Moral Progress

Apparently there was a time when profit-making companies, even British profit-making companies, made profitable use of legal technicalities to circumvent the law. After Britain abolished slavery and British values paid compensation to the owners, the Empire's biggest shipping company continued using slave labour in the Caribbean, where the woke mind virus had yet to take hold. Even so, the private sector's characteristic efficiency ensured that the company failed to survive the financial crisis of the early nineteen-thirties, and despite some creative accounting by its noble chair it was taken over by the government. Such was the Communistic and un-British tenor of Ramsay MacDonald's Labour administration that the shareholders were not even compensated at the taxpayer's expense.

Lowe Quality

As with the National Johnson (remember him?), the appeal of the Farage Falange for the great British public is presumably that they offer simple solutions in words of one syllable, with open season on wogs thrown in as a bonus. Strangely enough, their straight words are sometimes accompanied by clean and direct actions on the order of a left-handed corkscrew at a Thames Water board meeting. In a move eerily reminiscent of all those wealthy Brexiters who celebrated British independence by shunting their assets into the EU, one of the Falange's parliamentary nano-rabble has installed solar panels on his farm, even as the First Subfarage goebbeled that renewable energy was a "massive con" and one of the two or three things in the country that would be taxed under a Falange thousand-year plan. Given that the Falange has only five expenses claimants in the Commons, a policy split is quite an achievement; especially a policy split that can elicit accusations of hypocrisy from the Deputy Conservatives and of incoherence from Team Starmer. Nevertheless, despite its paltry parliamentary presence the Falange must still be given its due as a political bellwether: it belongs to the hallowed private sector, so His Majesty's Government and His Majesty's Loyal Opposition are straining to out-ugly one another in pandering to its base.

If Muroids be the Food of Love

Conservationists in British Columbia have come up with a novel campaign for Valentine's Day: for the price of a few dollars, a dead rat named after an ex can be fed to a northern spotted owl, and photos and videos provided as a souvenir. The scheme is called No regRATS, a lapse into tabloidese which is perhaps the least tasteful thing about it; but that aside, the combination of Gallic sentimentality over animals with Anglo-Saxon erotic proficiency should ensure its appeal across the whole nation. Whether the programme will be sustainable beyond Valentine's Day remains as yet unclear; although few would deny its potential should its popularity extend to Canada's noisy and extremist southern neighbour. If indignant northern rodent-lovers were to set up a few ratlines into the homes of some meaty Republicans, the resulting food chain would arguably border on the paradisal.

Evils Necessary and Unnecessary

Appropriately enough for a stalwart of the Great Orange Party, the chairbeing of the doubtless optimistically named Senate intelligence committee is stirring up simultaneous red and yellow scares. Attempting to drive a wedge between the Trumpster and his best boy for now, the senator accuses the squillionaire manbaby of dealing too civilly with the Communistic Heathen Chinee. Self-evidently, the Trumpster's favourite is undermining the very basis of capitalism by taking his business where the money is. The senator, who is surnamed Cotton and represents the state of Arkansas, has referred to the use of slaves by nice people as a "necessary evil" on which the master race built its manifest destiny; this doubtless explains how he also came to notice the complicity of numerous US companies with Heathen Chinee slave labour and genocide, which are notoriously inferior to those varieties sponsored by the American taxpayer.

Realism At Last

In a refreshing departure from the world-beating rah-and-blah which the CEO of Team Starmer has been squeaking forth on the subject of AI, a Government minister has modestly recused the master race from leadership. Given the prospects for depriving great swathes of the population of their living and using up resources which might otherwise be wasted powering and watering millions of homes, the advantages of AI technology for moderate and sensible governance are self-evident even to lesser breeds such as the Heathen Chinee. Nevertheless, the secretary for Musk and related matters celebrated the opening of a summit in Paris by proclaiming that the race to AI supremacy must be led by "western, liberal, democratic countries," thereby eliminating the UK from the running on two counts out of three.