Good Old Days

As the Church of England continues chewing its coccyx over the permissible manifestations of human love, researchers at Salisbury Cathedral have been compiling a history of the numerous nefarious activities which have taken place within the close of their venerable pile. It appears that God's chosen were just as much inclinded towards lying, stealing, brawling and not keeping off the grass even when the sodomy laws were in full force and Church propaganda was all-pervasive. "All this is a great disturber of the suggestion that things used to be so much better," observed the dean, singling out his fellow Anglicans for their "dewy-eyed" moral nostalgia; of which the Saviour, who considered Bronze Age morals too lax and liberal for the Iron Age, would certainly be unlikely to approve.

Farmed Out

Given the preponderance among British patriots of bleating sheep, silly cows, grunters, squealers and guzzlers at the trough, it should hardly come as a surprise that the great British farmyard has become less disposed towards trading with the beastly Euro-wogs. Nevertheless, certain woke and backsliding elements among the nation's agribusiness expendables have responded with less than total enthusiasm to their liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke. Rather than taking the path of entrepreneurial pragmatitude and making due preparation for the deregulated glories of hormones and chlorine, the breeders of élite animals destined for the metropolitan petting zoos of decadent Continentals have gone so far as to club together and pay for the red tape necessary to continue their treacherous trade. One farm manager even implied that Her Majesty's Government had some sort of responsibility towards commercial fifth columnists who barter and fraternise with the Euro-wog enemy, prompting a Government spokesbeing to proclaim that it was the foreigners' responsibility to take back control.

Treated Like Foreigners

Following Britain's liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke, the Portuguese government has failed to issue British expatriates with updated residency cards. As a result, authentic specimens of the master race have been detained at airports like immigrants, suffered job insecurity like workers, and been forced to pay for medical care like Americans. According to the Portuguese border force (or service as the Latins foppishly call it), an online portal has been set up through which Britons are expected to endure the kind of bureaucratic indignity that, in the civilised world, is considered fit mostly for Ukrainians. Indeed, expatriate life in Portugal so much resembles a vision of the future for native life in England that Her Majesty's most Britannic Government has felt obliged to intervene at ministerial level. The Portuguese have been righteously reminded of their duty to implement the withdrawal agreement which Her Majesty's most Britannic Government has spent the last few geological eras foghorning as an imposition and an outrage. It is to be hoped that this display of straight talk from the moral and legal high ground will leave Britain's oldest ally sufficiently chastened, since British nationals of all people can hardly be expected simply to go back where they belong.

Some of Britain Basks

Despite its obsessive nostalgia for such traditional blessings of Britishness as stagflation, the workhouse and the National Front, Her Majesty's Government remains intensely relaxed about the uncomfortably rapid transition away from temperate of the greatest climate in the world. The River Thames has shrunk by five miles, further drought is forecast (though only by people who meteorologise professionally, as opposed to genuine patriots), and local moisture provision facilitators have implemented no restrictions on use. Instead, Thames Water has compensated for its profitably decayed infrastructure, and for the fact that a £250-million desalination plant has just been exposed as another of the National Johnson's little jokes, by ordering the little people to be more judicious with their taps. A spokesbeing has also ordered Her Majesty's Government to impose rationing, though the threat of a special luxury tax for imbibing raw sewage appears to be in abeyance for the moment. Her Majesty's Government has expressed frustration at Thames Water, which seems to be taking unfair advantage of the religious doctrine that forbids democratic governments to override the will of those who can afford private pools.

Crabby Pedants

A mere scientist who also happens to be the wrong kind of Lord has had the temerity to cast doubt upon Britain's ability to become a science superpower, even now that the master race has freed itself from the shackles of international collaboration, legal obligation and other insufficiently patriotic aspects of reality. Lord Krebs, whose name seems to exude a certain whiff of migrancy, co-authored a report whose very title dared to query whether the Government's rah-rah was anything more than sloganeering. Krebs criticised the proliferation of red tape which in the Brexit universe passes for removal of red tape, and raised the possibility that many trumpeted initiatives may soon be abandoned in favour of the ever-necessary tax cuts. Nevertheless, parliamentary politeness appears to have kept the authors from pointing out Her Majesty's Government's well-documented lack of acquaintance with the physical universe, where many borders have more than one side and where swingeing cuts to a particular thing tend to result in less of that thing being available. It remains as yet unclear what malign twist of Civil Service malice placed the authorship of a report on the National Johnson's administration in the hands of a zoologist whose doctoral thesis concerned territorial behaviour in one of the world's great tits.

Cleanliness is Next to Britishness

Since a true Englishman hates few things more than a hypocrite, Her Majesty's Government has wagged an admonitory finger at a global management consultancy over its involvement in state corruption. Besides being a mis-spelling of a large Batman villain, the consultancy consulted with a former president of South Africa (not, alas, that nice Mr Botha) to re-shape the country's economy, in a flagrantly disreputable manner not at all reminiscent of certain right-wing British politicians and their chums among the press and profiteers. While casually knocking eight months off a three-year ban, the National Johnson's sometime stick insect in charge of shortages and lorry parks scolded the consultancy for its questionable integrity and for not taking its own culpability seriously enough. By a fortunate coincidence the consultancy is not one of Her Majesty's Government's strategic suppliers, which will come as a surprise to those enemies of the people who have thus far failed to credit Her Majesty's Government with a strategy.

Moral Leadership

God still hates gays, but the Archbishop of Canterbury is nevertheless disinclined to punish churches which condone same-sex marriage. While affirming the validity of the commandment in Leviticus - appropriately, a screed foaming with priestly indignation at the inadequacy of the tithes - and the Saviour's endorsement at Matthew 5 xviii, the Archbishop observed that there are places where affirming equal rights can cause trouble for the Church, and other places where denying those same rights can cause trouble for the Church. Since his primary consideration as a Christian is not the dignity of human beings, much less the opportunities for holy martyrdom or loving one's enemies, but the survival of the institution that pays his stipend, the Archbishop could clearly do no other than to take both sides at once.

Picton Unpictured

As if the woke pogrom against the nation's statuary were not enough, the beastly Welsh have dared to censor a portrait of the highest-ranking officer to be killed at Waterloo. The image of Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton, Member of Parliament and sometime governor of Trinidad, is now partially obscured by a strut in front of the great man's equipment, and has been surrounded with material providing, of all things, context. Picton's régime in Trinidad was so British that he was prosecuted for excessive cruelty, immoderate severity towards slaves, carrying out summary executions without due process, and imposing the military penalty of picketing (stringing up by the wrist) upon a fourteen-year-old free mulatto girl. Picton argued that such measures were forced upon him by European red tape, and the Privy Council duly dismissed almost all the charges. After a jury was impudent enough to pronounce him guilty of torturing the girl, Picton gained a retrial in which he was set at liberty while the court was adjourned for deliberations so thorough that no verdict was ever reached. It remains as yet unclear whether the Minister for Cultchah, Murdoch and Rah-rah intends to intervene on the portrait's behalf; presumably because Picton sat in Parliament as a Whig (a Liberal Democrat, in modern currency) rather than for the natural party of corporal punishment and wog control.

Plunder

In days of old
They sank their gold
To rise in wondrous hauls;
Our wreck will be
An acid sea
Awash with plastic balls.

Coral Dunn

High Society

We have been aware for some time that the National Johnson isn't much of a details man, preferring to confine his attentions to the big picture and let his servants deal with the fiddly bits. This insouciance appears to have reaped unfortunate dividends, thanks to the great man's failure to install his favourite as head of the National Crime Agency. Lacking appropriate managerial guidance, agents of the NCA have apparently impounded a significant portion of the entertainment for the forthcoming party celebrating the holy matrimony between the National Johnson and the bearer of his most recently acknowledged offspring. With taxpayer-funded venues now out of bounds, the rah-and-regurgitate has been relocated to the humbler abode of Lord Bamford, a Party donor and chair of the Muslim disposal vehicle manufacturing firm JCB. Rather than allowing the revels to take place inside his eighteenth-century mansion, Bamford has set up a large white-powder-coloured tent in the grounds; which, given the quality of Johnson's friends and the likelihood of breakage, spillage, pilferage and digestive misadventure, seems a most foresighted precaution.