Possibly Ahead of its Time

Remarkably enough, it seems there are instruments so blunt that even the British Home Office won't use them against immigrants; at least, not for very long. The Powellite Pantechnicon Programme, which involved driving vans with a wogs-go-home message and some duncansmithian figures around racially mixed areas of London, has been scrapped; either because it is not subtle enough for Theresa May, or because Tim Farron and Norman Baker persuaded her against it by sheer force of personality, depending on whom one believes. The Conservatives claim that, contrary to the faith-based habits of her Cabinet colleagues, May took the decision on the strength of an "evaluation", which showed that the programme had not been effective in persuading illegal immigrants or their cats to depart our shores. One of May's flunkeys had earlier justified the campaign on the grounds that it was cheap financially as well as morally: if a single wog left the country as a result, the flunkey said, then the cost of the advertising would be recouped. Apparently one single wog did in fact come forward; not because he saw the vans, but because he read about them in the Guardian, whose national security credentials have doubtless been well and truly restored by a grateful government. In any case, the Home Office has now begun sending threatening text messages to people who appear to have been chosen more or less at random, in the hope that this will provide an even more glorious bulwark against the foreign tide.