Innocence Abroad

Those currently bleating that cuts in international aid and support for the Netanyahoo's ethnic cleansing have lost Britain some sort of moral status would do well to look into our glamorous history of fair play with the Chagossians. Arbitrarily evicted from their homeland for the convenience of Britain's favourite ally, some were granted the right to British citizenship mere decades later. Others were deported to Mauritius and the Seychelles, and Mauritius is now claiming the Chagos Ialands as its own and issuing identity documents defining Chagossians as Mauritians. Having acted unlawfully in decolonising Mauritius without decolonising the Chagos Islands, Britain is negotiating with Mauritius on the issue of sovereignty, and has chivalrously refused to permit the Chagossians so much as observer status: doubtless Britain's glistening pink Secretary of State for Lesser Breeds shares the Mauritian government's inability to tell Mauritians and Chagossians apart. Lord Dave, whose noble countenance would indubitably blotch puce should the Strasbrussels dictatorship seek to re-define Britons as Europeans, has also reversed the policy of his predecessor and ruled out any resettlement of the islands; presumably because his predecessor was James Cleverly and resettlement has three syllables too many. Despite its moral status, Britain's Ministry for Wog Disposal apparently declined to comment on the matter.

No Head for Business

Eighteen human skulls from ancient Egypt have been withdrawn from legal sale, apparently because things that once belonged to colonialists and fascists should never be sold and because human remains, like six-week embryo Americans, have the dignity and rights of human beings. The inanimate objects in question date from the second millennium BCE, and were originally housed in citizens of an aggressively militarist and expansionist nation whose culture and religion have been defunct slightly longer than those of the British Empire. Having presumably been judged by Osiris and passed on to their reward some little time ago, the rightful owners of the skulls are unlikely to be much concerned about how some far-removed heathens treat the bits they left behind. It is true that the skulls were acquired by a Victorian colonialist who subscribed to the then-fashionable theory of phrenology, and subsequently by his fascist grandson; and the claim that selling the property of dead persons endorses the values held by those persons is very nearly as sensible as the idea that the psychological features of a human being can be read in the lumps on their cranium.

Eye-Catching Solutions

As the Conservatives' economic miracle continues to bite and foam, Britain's largest trainer of guide dogs plans to make almost a tenth of its workforce redundant. Rising veterinary bills and inflated dog food prices mean that Guide Dogs UK is threatened with a funding deficit of some twenty million pounds; fortunately, the number of people suffering sight loss is scheduled to double within the next fifteen years. With twice as many blind people, it should be a simple matter to pair them up and thereby extend the foundational principle of democratic Britishness - the blind leading the blind - into the disability convenience industry. Besides, there are still plenty of people who misuse what eyes they have and see what is in front of them instead of what the Government wants them to see; so once we regain our sovereignty from the hated foreign courts the Government may even be able to make up any guidance shortfall with a quick Exoculation Act.

A Very Strange Country

A healthy pink portion of best parliamentary gammon has gone squealing to the Maily Toryguff because some Africans and their subtle Oriental paymasters had the gall to treat him like a wog. The banker, Brexiteer, equal marriage opponent and high-maintenance expenses claimant for East Worthing and Shoreham was detained for several hours in Djibouti and then thrown out, allegedly on direct orders from the Heathen Chinee, who have very cunningly invested in the country for the sole purpose of inconveniencing forthright members of the master race. Despite Djibouti's relative nearness to Rwanda, such manifestations of British fair play as overcrowding, indefinite detention and conditions unfit for human habitation do not appear to have been bestowed; and the champion of democracy and human rights for the right sort of people also does not seem to have been tasered, cavity-searched or interrogated about his sex life, perhaps because he might have enjoyed it too much.

Swift Justice

Even an acolyte of the Blessed Tony may occasionally make a mistake, and one such has graciously owned up barely twenty years after the fact. It appears, mirabile dictu, that the imposition of indefinite sentencing for petty crimes has occasionally led to people serving indefinite sentences for petty crimes, while promised courses for rehabilitation were found unsustainably non-productive of favourable headlines in the right-wing Press. The statute was eventually declared unlawful by the hated Euro-wog Convention on Human Rights and revoked under the coalition, but those who had already received indefinite sentences did not have their cases re-examined. Doubtless the Conservatives took a dim view of British justice being diluted by a foreign court, while their Liberal Democrat accomplices took a dim view of diverging from the Conservatives in the face of moderate and acceptable quantities of suicide and self-harm. Although the original policy was as flawless as any other conceived in the divine light of the Reverend Blair, it was let down by the human fallibility of lesser specimens, whose toughness on crime prevented their anticipating that making an option available to the judiciary might cause members of the judiciary to take up the option. Fortunately, lessons have been learned and any compensation made to the surviving victims will be at the expense of the taxpayer rather than the culprit.

Sacred Second Amendment Hideously Misapplied

One of those fighting for the coveted position of post-Pence vice-Trumpster has run into trouble over, of all things, the legal use of firearms. Kristi Noem, the interplanetary-pornstar-monickered governor of South Dakota, has published the customary personal manifesto about her relationships with God, Murca, motherhood and rabid tangerine head-tribbles, and has recounted of her own free will how she applied Tennessee educational values to a training-resistant dog and on the same day rather effortfully shotgunned a recalcitrant billy-goat, finally finishing off the uncastrated, unruly and presumably unarmed animal with the third shell. Noem and/or her ghost-writer seem to have believed that these decisive actions would be viewed in the same kindly light as personally blowing away gooks, chinks, commies, beaners, ragheads, uppity ethnics and abortion-seekers; but for obvious reasons of self-preservation no patriotic American is going to be very comfortable with arbitrarily killing off bleating and barking dumb animals. Rivals were quick to condemn the shootings, pointing out that the same infinitely loving God who created earthquakes, tornadoes, intestinal parasites, Yersinia pestis and Democrats also created dogs, whose fawning nature and predliction for drooling, defecation and making loud noises about very little indicates both their inherently Christian nature and their birthright as honorary members of the Republican Party.

Nightmare Free

An extract

Someone was pounding at the door of the man who never had nightmares. The pounding was blunt and low, and was paced for the most part with comparative deliberation; every so often the impacts rose in rapidity and timbre as the furious flat of the palm stood in for the bruised yet persistent fist. Nagged from oblivion, the man who never had nightmares opened his eyes to the daylight. Through the yellowed window he could hear the chanting of children, to which the pounding on his door provided an eccentric bass-line. He listened through a cycle of punches and slaps, wondering vaguely who the percussionist might be and why they did not use the doorbell, which played brief tunes that changed automatically at random intervals to prevent the hearer becoming inured. The man who never had nightmares had missed no rental payments, had asked for no repairs, was not expecting a package and was in no trouble with the law. That seemed to exhaust most of the possibilities, except for a sudden emergency; but the man lived and slept on the top floor of a tall, elderly building with minimal amenities and no lifts, so his door would hardly be the first choice of anyone seeking immediate aid, and if the emergency concerned himself he would surely have noticed by this time.

In any case, it was becoming apparent that whoever was pounding on the door had no intention of giving up and going away. In fact, a further element had now been introduced into the morning's music, namely a muffled, incomprehensible, but imperious baritone. The man pushed back the bedclothes and sat for a few moments with his feet on the floor. One foot started tapping in time to the children's chant outside, but the next bout of beating on his door disrupted the rhythm.

"All right," called the man who never had nightmares. His throat was dry and his voice cracked into a cough; but his activity must have registered on the other side of the door, because the pounding stopped in the middle of a volley and the muffled baritone took on a querying note.

"All right," the man called again. His dressing-gown was draped over the back of the chair, and seemed to have adapted itself during the night for a different anatomy to his own. The sleeves were in the wrong places, and the collar and hemline had apparently undergone some sort of unnatural coupling. The noise from the door started again, more loudly than ever, but stopped when he ordered it to wait. The dressing-gown was fitted with a hood; once he found this and ascertained that it wasn't inside-out, the rest was relatively simple. He pushed his arms through the sleeves, tied the cord around his waist and pulled the hood up over his dishevelment.

Once outside his bedroom, the front door was along a short passage and round a bend. However long the pounding had been going on before he woke, there was no sign of any damage. Evidently the emergency was not, in the opinion of his guest, sufficiently severe to justify kicking the door down, at least for the moment.

The door was solid, with no window and no spy-hole. "Who's there?" called the man who never had nightmares.
"Logue, it's me, it's me." The voice was indistinct and excited. "Open up now. Open up this minute."
"But what's going on? Who are you?"
"It's me, I told you. Don't you recognise my voice? Open this door."
"What do you mean, me? What do you want, what's your name?"

There was a pause, as if the voice's owner were attempting to gather his patience, or perhaps to gather the strength for another assault. Then the voice spoke again, very slowly; far more slowly than necessary in fact, with a suppressed and trapdoor-rattling undertone of haste that made it sound almost inebriated: "Slee," said the voice. "Slee. Practitioner Slee. Do you understand? Slee. Now open this door. Open up. Open up."

Although the sounds of Logue taking off the chain and turning the key must certainly have been audible outside, the litany continued all the while. As soon as the door began to move Slee gave it a violent shove; perhaps he had even taken a few steps back and charged. He stumbled heavily inside, knocking Logue sideways against the wall. Slee turned too fast, stumbled again and pushed clumsily to close the door. His fat hands scrabbled at the lock and chain, and he tugged a couple of times at the latch to make certain. He and Logue stared at each other.

"What's going on?" demanded Logue, and Slee gestured frantically for silence. Under his light raincoat, the practitioner was dressed as Logue always saw him during their weekly appointments, in the casual-professorial style designed to exude whatever combination of authority and friendliness might be necessary to place the average patient at ease: the jacket smart and discreet like a diplomatic spy, the shirt-collar loose and open to avoid unsightly bulging of the neck. Logue's next appointment was two days away, and was supposed to take place at Slee's office. Logue had not even been aware that Slee knew where he lived, although of course his address and various other details had been required of him when they began his therapy. He had assumed that the information was needed purely for administrative purposes, or for occasional written correspondence, rather than for the practitioner to drop in on the patient whenever the fancy took him.

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Voices of Virtue

Eighteen countries, including the world's moral leader and its favourite ally, have given Hamas a bit of a nudge about freeing the remaining hostages in the Gaza ghetto. The families of those kidnapped on 7 October have long accused the Netanyahoo of making too little effort to secure their release; and after only half a year of cheering him on the international paragons seem to be coming around to the families' point of view. There is even a chance that some of the less intellectually British governments may eventually tumble to the possibility that a happy ending to a hostage situation is rarely made more likely by dropping American quantities of high explosive on the area where the hostages are held. Meanwhile, the statement by the ethical eighteen may have allowed honesty to trump diplomacy by a slightly excessive degree in noting that the fate of the hostages is causing about as much genuine international concern as that of the civilian terrorist population.

Classroom Ventilation

Legislators in the God-fearing state of Tennessee have responded to last year's school shooting at Nashville in the most Murcan way imaginable: namely by licensing teachers to carry concealed handguns in school. According to a survey by the wishy-washy liberals at the Rand Corporation, a fairly large majority of American teachers believe that pedagogues who pack would not make schools safer, and more than half believe they would make schools more dangerous; and this in a country which has boasted a school shooting resulting in injury or death once every nine and a half days this year. Nevertheless, parents and teachers protesting against the law were removed by armed men on the orders of the state's house speaker; which demonstrates, if nothing else, that unconcealed weapons also have their advantages when it comes to imparting appropriate social values.

Compassion Actually

Five migrants, including a child have got thoroughly into the spirit of St George's Day by saving British jobs in the Channel, thereby proving the necessity for a fate worse than death as a deterrent to future invaders. Having finally pushed the Rwanda Transportation Bill past the House of Donors, Fishy Rishi has toddled off to Poland to brag about Britain's future wog-bombing capabilities, but took the opportunity to inform reporters that deporting refugees to central Africa is an act of tough love in pursuit of a better business model. Poland, where so many people were rescued from the pain of being Untermenschen while Mr Churchill was busy winning the Second World War, evidently seemed an appropriate venue for a joke along those lines, even though the parents of the deterred child were not present to appreciate it.