Freedom from Information

Aside from its obvious benefits as regards leaving the country poorer, meaner and stupider, it is arguable that the full advantages of the mainland's forthcoming independence from the Euro-wog yoke have not yet been clearly set out. Her Majesty's Government has consistently refused to release its own assessments of the likely consequences, apparently on the grounds that money isn't everything and that the sunlit uplands will be so transcendentally rah-rah that public rejoicing might fatally exceed the brief period which Mr Churchill deemed fitting for the undisciplined lower classes. Nevertheless, the Government did spaff a few dozens of millions on a Get Ready campaign, and has even thought up a new slogan for the day after withdrawal; the obvious one, Protect and Survive, is presumably being saved for next year. Almost every plucky little yeoman in Britain was exposed to the Get Ready campaign, and some visited the relevant fag-end of the government's website, which informed your correspondent that no preparations were necessary and which was regrettably taciturn about the schedule and quantity of forthcoming financial improvements. Now the pedants at the National Audit Office are complaining that there is little evidence of the public being any better informed, for all the world as if there were still some sort of place in British national policy for evidence and information. A more mature understanding was demonstrated by an expenses claimant for the former Deputy Conservative Party, who praised the campaign as "an expensive propaganda stunt designed ahead of the election to help no one but Boris Johnson stay in Number 10" and thus a soul-mate to all moderates, centrists, decents and sensibles who call Westminster their spiritual homeland.

Sanitary Inaction

Although Her Majesty's Government has made clear on numerous occasions that it considers British expatriates to be little better than immigrants, there are some who still haven't got the message. The beastly French, and others who share their Stalinistic interest in public health, are officiously making arrangements to evacuate their citizens from the midst of the disease-ridden Heathen Chinee; but the new, globally-minded independent Britain has correspondingly larger worries. It is all very well to bring a new virus into the country when the hated NHS has been suitably crippled and any deaths will most likely be among the financially undeserving; but what of the cultural damage to our thousand-year kingdom from those who have lived among the Heathen Chinee and very possibly gone native?

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Carnassials cxliii-clxvii

As the epidemic continued, however, the work of transporting the dead was bestowed upon inferior citizens, whose sensibilities were insufficiently refined to be offended by close contact with bloated and soulless flesh. Those who died in poverty were placed in the community lime-pits, and their surviving relatives were charged a special dissolution tax to ease the clergy's grief over the loss of revenue on mausoleum space.

The exequies of those who died wealthy were rather more elaborate, with specially scrubbed mourners marching behind the coffin and exuding the mingled odours of sanctity and carbolic soap. Behind them walked the relatives in order of precedence, all clad in funereal puce and urging the Creator of the universe to admit the deceased into paradise while continuing to withhold that privilege from the bereaved. Behind the bereaved, at an appropriately spiritual distance, walked a member of the clergy, his face hidden behind the ritual mask from which, thanks to the rites of purification, the odour of carbolic wafted even more strongly than from the specially scrubbed.

In this instance the mausoleum was a tastefully bladed cupcake of bashed basalt, with battlements frogged and filigreed in reverent magenta. Here the procession halted and the coffin was carried inside, to be placed within the grave hastily dug beneath the luminous pink floorboards. The more illustrious dead were usually shelved until they had rotted sufficiently to be sealed in sacred urns and kept on the mantelpiece and occasionally waved about for curative purposes; but the epidemic had proven itself resistant to traditional medicine and sacrifices were required even from the deceased.

But before the propitiations had been proclaimed or the mysteries mumbled, the inferior citizens fled shrieking from the tomb. The specially scrubbed shook their heads in disapproval, and the clergyman gave vent to a carbolic-scented anathema upon the follies of the ignorant and superstitious. Entering the mausoleum in a state of exalted moral indignation, they found the floorboards taken up and the grave almost neatly dug, with the Father of Teeth sitting on the edge. He was picking his third-yellowest dentures with a splinter of bone and whimsically dangling his unspeakable feet.

"What is the meaning of this outrage?" demanded the clergyman.
"I'm not outraged," said the Father of Teeth.
"You have outraged our culture and community," said the clergyman. "by interfering in the necessary and rightful interment of a respectable citizen."
"I have spared the community a health risk," said the Father of Teeth, "by removing from its midst some highly infectious matter. It's arguably more pious to get rid of such stuff as rapidly as possible, before the fatal miasma it exudes has time to penetrate the holy carbolic."
"I trust the service was to your satisfaction," said the clergyman, after a sudden intake of breath caused no doubt by some unforeseen importunity of the spirit.
"What matters most in such cases," said the Father of Teeth, with a belch that ricocheted around the tomb most sonorously, "is the quality of the dish, not the quality of the waiters."

No Darkies on the Climate Front

If there's one thing infotainment consumers absolutely cannot stand, it's an ill-balanced composition in a press photograph. More than mere omission or falsehood in the text, more even than the legalistic intricacies of ensuring that both casual and ideological racists get a fair crack of the whip, an off-centre picture can result in complaints, cancelled subscriptions and, in the worst cases, legal actions and social media trigger warnings. Hence the commendable caution exercised by Associated Press in removing from a picture of climate activists at Davos a dazzling white building, which distracted the eye and gave undue weight to the left. The fact that an African activist was also removed, leaving four Caucasians in harmonious balance with the pictorial ecology, constituted no more than a benign coincidence. While Africa has so far contributed little to the causes of the climate emergency, it is highly vulnerable to the effects; which means that African climate activists can hardly be in business from the most lily-white motives anyway.

Doing Well By Doing Good

We are all aware, because that Churchillian historiographer Boris Johnson has proclaimed it, that the real "tragedy of Africa" was the white man being forced to lay down his burden too soon. Fortunately for the piccaninny powers, the Johnson administration is ready to make due restitution for the world-historical error of decolonisation, which was forced upon the civilising nations by noisy welfare-state lefties and the Nazi-Soviet appeasers in the Brusso-Strasbourgian Politbunker. This very week the People's Haystack opened an investment summit with a rah-and-blah about sending electro-convulsive lightning bolts through the renewables industry, which he evidently considers ripe for lobotomy. Meanwhile, the Dark Continent is to be taught the rudiments of extracting oil and gas, to be used of course in the cleanest and greenest way possible given current economic realities and the requirements of market forces. Token funding of a few clean energy projects can safely be left to that perennial mark, the British taxpayer, who will soon be righteously demanding why that rather pitiful fifty million couldn't have been spent on preventing floods in Brexitannia or deporting more wogs.

Crowning Triumph

The Heathen Chinese
Have got a disease;
All over the globe it is moving,
While ministers bless
Our great NHS
With terminal bouts of improving.

Now doomed British proles
Can die in their holes,
With valour and honour unswerving
According to station
And leave this great nation
Exclusively for the deserving.

Mickey Bedpan

Beastly Barrister Snubs Sterner Sentencing

One of the main problems with mere experts, aside from their tendency to let the weight of mere facts warp their loyalty to the Government, is their habit of treating simple headline-grabbing proposals as though they were meant to solve actual problems. The People's Haystack has pledged to win War on Terror II by Christmas with his Churchillian scheme for subjecting terrorists to lie detector tests and forcing them to spend more time in the penal warehousing system, where they can learn the rudiments of a useful tax-free trade in the recreational substances industry. Nevertheless, rather than doing his duty for Queen and Cummings by providing appropriate rah-rah, the Government's adviser has maintained a laser-like focus on the mere facts that the polygraph is unreliable and that most terrorism offenders have been stopped short of committing actual terrorism. He even seems to think that Britain's security forces should engage in research, rather than fulfilling their proper function as messenger boys for the Trumpster administration; so it will come as no surprise that he also seems to believe that sentencing should be carried out by unelected enemies of the people just because they happen to know a bit about the law. It would of course be uncharitable in the extreme to infer that Boris Johnson, of all people, might have his own reasons for preferring lie detectors that don't work.

Miracle on Route 93

Vulnerable to the blandishments of Satan thanks to centuries of atheistic Muslim propaganda under the recent Kenyan occupation, Pennsylvania state police have arrested a woman for asking until it was given, seeking until it was found and knocking until it was opened. Specifically, it appears that upon the day after Epiphany she travelled the highway for some hours until God was persuaded to take a moment from running the Universe and indulge in a bit of back-seat driving; whereupon He guided her into the opposite lane and crashed her into an oncoming car. The petitioner and two of the other car's three occupants were injured; yet instead of giving thanks for God's mercy in not turning the incident into an apocalyptic pile-up, the earthly powers of Pennsylvania are acting for all the world as if the woman had done something irresponsible. Even in a country where trust in God is sacred enough to be flaunted on the currency, it seems the secular arm can sometimes get ideas above its station.

Outrage Upon Outrage

We are used to the lesser breeds' inability to remember who won the World Wars; but who could have imagined anyone forgetting the War of the Spanish Succession? Britain's victory in that noble conflict, without even American help, would have placed a Habsburg prince on the Spanish throne had not the British betrayed his candidacy at the last minute, possibly on the grounds that his anti-Gypsy policies were as yet insufficiently genocidal. In the confusion Britain filched a big stone with monkeys on it, some of whose descendants are now embroiled in a bizarre conspiracy to make themselves slightly foreign. Gibraltar, which voted against the British people in 2016, is exacerbating its guilt with crypto-Iberian noises about joining the Schengen area. Should the treacherous plot succeed, visiting Britons would have to defile themselves applying for visas and paying fees, for all the world as if they were immigrants trying to stay in their own British homes. It is to be hoped that Her Majesty's Government's fellow far-rightists in Vienna will remember their nation's historic debt of honour, should Britain now be minded to seek back-up from the Austrian navy.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Daniel 6 xxiv-xxviii

Having attained high rank under the kings of Babylon, Daniel falls victim to the malice of other officials who manipulate his patron King Darius into throwing him into a lions' den. God protects Daniel through the night, and Darius has the accusers cast into the den along with their wives and children, whose bones are broken in pieces. The king praises God and Daniel prospers.

God's addiction to collective punishment of the most violent sort is once again demonstrated in His evident contentment with the execution of the wives and children. As theologians concerned with moral and spiritual rather than historical truths, we cannot permit ourselves the relativist evasion that such punishments were customary in the ancient world; nor can we rationalise away the problem by denying the literal meaning of the text. Women and children are placed among lions and all the bones in their bodies are broken, while the desire for mercy over sacrifice occurs neither to God nor to his prophet; and as a result God is praised and His prophet prospers.

Nor may we truthfully state that the New Testament overrules or contradicts the morals of the Old; God's enthusiasm for mass murder is as consistent and unalterable as the law of the Medes and Persians. The only notable difference is that Jesus proclaimed even harsher measures as the penalty for somewhat smaller derelictions than attempting the felid-facilitated demotion of a rival courtier.