An Absolute, Fundamental Human Right

Britain's Head Boy has brought the moral weight of his personal disapproval to bear upon the case of Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman sentenced to death for adultery and apostasy because she married a Christian. "The way she is being treated is barbaric and has no place in today's world," fulminated Britain's Head Boy, who has apparently just heard that his chums at G4S have no financial stake in the lady's corrective environment. "Religious freedom is an absolute, fundamental human right," fulminated Britain's Head Boy; which doubtless helps to explain why his government is deporting little girls to have their genitals butchered by the upholders of traditional values in Nigeria. Of course, Nigeria is slightly richer than Sudan; and Meriam Ibrahim had the good sense to marry an American, so that, unlike Afusat Saliu and her daughters, she is not an asylum seeker in the United Kingdom.

In Sure and Certain Hope

A woman who posed as a spiritual con artist has been jailed for ten years after being found to be merely a financial con artist. She took money from her dupes on the pretext that people would dance around it in the Amazon rain forest and then send the money back, thereby solving all worldly difficulties. Instead of contenting herself with a reasonable commission, the enterprising lady appropriated the entire financial sacrifice for herself, thereby opening herself to the charge of fraud. The judge who sentenced her said she had cast a spell over her victims and threatened them with terrifying consequences, and called it "the worst case of confidence fraud I have ever had to deal with or indeed that I have ever heard of" because the victims' lives had been wrecked out of pure greed rather than from any genuine spiritual motivation. Had the putative healer only thought to dress in sackcloth and throw her ill-gotten gains at an established church, all might have been forgiven.

Virtues of Omission

Mercifully for the Chilcot-reading public, records of over a hundred and fifty trysts and love-notes between George W Bush and the Reverend Poodle will not be disclosed in all their verbatim ickitude. Despite Tony's own efforts towards biometric ID cards and the database state, first in the name of national security and later on the pretext of immigrant-bashing, the Reverend's own privacy remains sacrosanct. Only "quotes and gists of the content" will be used, so that anything incriminating can be dismissed in the time-honoured fashion as having been taken out of context, or misread because George's crayon was down to a stub. The principal cast of the Chilcot report will also be given a right of reply before anything is disclosed to their employers, the taxpayers; and if by some remote chance anything untoward is found to have occurred, it is to be hoped that the Reverend Blair will have sufficient time to spare from spreading enlightenment and accumulating cash to be consulted on the validity of the arrest warrant.

Yet More Exceptions

Less than a week after being elected, a councillor for the Farage Falange has been sacked. Dave Small objected to equal marriage (family values), complained about not being allowed to say "Paki" (freedom of speech) and predicted that the embarrassing lack of Romanian and Bulgarian scroungers would soon be forgotten when thousands of other scroungers arrived from Mali. Despite all this, Small has been expelled for endangering the Falange's universal reputation for tolerance and enlightenment, as exemplified by its branch chair in Harrow. Jeremy Zeid, one of the few members of the Farage Falange who failed to join the expenses-claiming community last week, has been complaining that Ilford has too few white people; but given the Falange's famously impeccable non-racist credentials, it would clearly be quite wrong to suggest that he might be annoyed at the wogs for not voting him in.

Blessed Are the Pure in Bomb

The Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair has resentfully denied suggestions by certain uncharitable and backsliding persons that he is delaying publication of the Chilcot report on the Iraq crusade. In fact, his reverence, who displayed such manly certainty about the weapons of mass ethereality and the moral imperative to turn Iraq from a Stalinist dictatorship into a recruiting station for al-Qaida, does not even know why the report is being held up. His reverence is positively eager for the report to be published, so that the gleaming lily-whiteness of the Blair conscience may be displayed once again, to the incalculable ethical improvement of those who may have missed it. The actual cause of the delay is the Americans, who seem to have some objection to the idea of someone publishing George W Bush's pillow-talk with his poodle; heaven alone knows why. If the Reverend Blair could hurry things up, whether by bombing a few more wogs or taking a very large fee, then undoubtedly the Reverend Blair would do so. But such power, pouts the Reverend Blair, is no longer his to wield; and the delay, like so much else, is not his fault. Tony says it, so it must be true.

Shun Him, Ye Proles, For He Lacks the Common Touch

Britain's Head Boy, whose desperately spontaneous poses with darts and pints of Guinness brought such joy to the 2010 general election campaign, has had a bit of a squeal at an unruly tick for not being ordinary enough. The Caudillo of the Farage Falange, proclaimed the Bullingdon Club's representative of the white working class, is really a "consummate politician" who merely pretends to be a "normal bloke down the pub", as may be seen from "his expenses and his wife on the payroll and everything else". The Falange's strategy, blathered Daveybloke the Bloke, is "about trying to grow votes in clusters or something in different parts of the country", like champagne grapes, rather than gaining votes in the normal democratic way, through fake pledges and rotten boroughs. Britain's Head Boy proclaimed that the minority of a minority who voted for the Falange did so because they were deeply disillusioned with the European Union, and that only Britain's Head Boy could whip the Euro-wogs into shape.

Meanwhile, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, whose Sadiq Khan published an excruciating grovel in the Daily Express yesterday, remain as determined as the Conservatives to massage the buboes and ignore the bacillus. In some democracies, a sixty per cent vote for the Stay at Home Party might be cause for concern, and might even prompt some politicians to think about trying to increase turnout. In our own nominal democracy, Labour shuns the non-voting majority on the grounds that it might contain leftists. The two main wings of the British Neoliberal Party are interested only in wooing back the kind of thoughtful, informed proles who think the Caudillo of the Farage Falange is one of themselves, and whose Daily Express concerns thereby qualify as worth bothering about.

In the Long Run, the Black Death Was a Good Thing

Medical scientists - persons of the grubby, ill-informed sort who thought that Twizzler Lansley's anti-NHS law would harm public health - are once more risking the remnants of their tattered credibility by promulgating yet further heresies against the faith-based community in Westminster. Despite the dictates of present orthodoxy that profit always provides, it appears that various badger-influenced pathogens have been shifting the goalposts and becoming immune to antibiotics. Meanwhile, research into new antibiotics has declined because there is more money to be made out of bankers' diseases like high blood pressure than out of preventing future pandemics which may do little more than winnow out a few million of the weaker proles. To deal with the problem, the malcontents are suggesting hospitals with "greater distances between beds, lower bed occupancy rates, improved staff-patient ratios and large, openable windows"; in short, the polar opposite of modern public health policy, which calls for fewer hospitals treating more patients using a smaller staff with cheaper qualifications. Window dimensions might perhaps be negotiable, should the Minister for Health and News Corporation or any of his chums suddenly find their true professional level as double-glazing salesmen.

Not Their Fathers' Keeper

Ideological, atheistic fanatics at the United Nations Committee Against Torture have rejected the Vatican's use of Cain's argument in relation to sexual abuse by priests. The Vatican had declared that, as a tiny, helpless city-state with a population composed entirely of celibate or furtive males, it bore no responsibility for the conduct of priestly resources anywhere else in the world, despite the latter's purely coincidental membership of the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, the Committee called on the Holy See to "stop and sanction" any actions that would give rise to credible allegations that its employees were violating the UN Convention against Torture. Fortunately, the Vatican had declared itself innocent of any wrongdoing before the Committee's report came out; but it has condescended to agree to give "serious consideration" to the recommendations. Just because an institution has been found worthy by Mussolini, that does not mean it should refuse to adapt to the present day.

Those Local Election Results In Full

Fury at henhouse earthquake horror

UKIP have set off the tremors of a political earthquake which has shot the fox among the turkeys in the henhouse of British journalistic cliché, according to the latest results of the results of the local elections, sources said.

The Caudillo of UKIP, Nigel Falange, said that the UKIP natural disaster had triumphed, despite the minor setbacks of gaining control of no local authorities and failing to raise its share of the vote.

"The British people have spoken, and now at last perhaps we can dare to talk about the issues of immigration and Europe, which have scarcely been mentioned for the past fifty years except in one or two very small Daily Mail headlines," said Mr Falange.

However, as results flooded in the resulting results resulted in consternation in the two mainstream branches of the British Neoliberal Party as a result, however.

A split emerged in the Labour party over the question of whether Labour had been too soft on immigration, or too soft on UKIP for being too soft on immigration. Several people also said that Ed Milibeing was weird.

A split emerged in the Conservative party over the question of whether to keep on kicking poor people and foreigners, or to make an electoral pact with UKIP in order to keep on kicking poor people and foreigners.

A spokesbeing for the Liberal Democrats, whose local authority representation now consists mostly of Cheltenham and a flooded Portaloo on the South Downs, said that such results were "only to be expected at this stage in a parliament".

The Liberal Democrat leader, David Cameron, has ruled out any possibility of a coalition with UKIP, unless in "exceptional circumstances" when it would serve the good of the nation and enable Nick Clegg to retain his little red box.

On the basis of today's results, the results of next year's general election have been recalibrated and may turn out to be almost as accurate as predicted in some cases.

Among the comparatively trivial matters buried under the rubble from the political earthquake were the opinions of the seventy to eighty per cent of the electorate who voted for none of the above.

We Were So Concerned That We Left Them There

Cometh the poll, cometh the token pretence to be human. In today's case, since the polls are merely for local authorities and Europe, it has fallen to Sarah Vine, the wife of Michael Gove, to trot out the Love Us For We Are Victims Too schtick. Apparently the next generation of Goves are suffering playground persecution; not because of any normal and legitimate reason such as their size, skin colour, appearance, physical or mental disabilities, idiosyncrasies of speech or personality, or their parents' income, but because of the all-too-well-advertised fact that their father is a malignant nincompoop. Vine, who is a paid driveller for the London Evening Bozza, also claimed (or "revealed", as the journalese hath it) that hate-crazed socialists had been swamping her mailbox, and that she had considered dispatching her children to Italy so that they could see what a well-run democracy really looks like. Since the persecution of her children is so very newsworthy, Vine decided against it; a good professional decision, as it enabled her to imply that her husband's eternal enemies, the dreaded qualified teachers, were behind the bullying: "If it is a toss-up between the teaching unions and my mum, I think the unions are less scary." In the fragrant league table of political posturing with children as human shields, this may not quite rank with Daveybloke's co-opting of his dead and disabled son as an unpaid intern in the propaganda department; but anyone who cares about education will certainly hope that Vine is correct in her prediction: "at some point there is going to be payback."

Twisted Tabloid Transgender Terror Tryst

Senior executives from the scumbag press are to meet with a transgender campaign group. After a scientist was gored by a stag, the Sun, the Daily Mail and even a couple of newspapers made much of her transgender status; partly no doubt because of the alliterative qualities in sex swap scientist and the penetrating symbolism of the incident, but mainly no doubt because they genuinely believed they were acting in the public interest by splattering aspects of the lady's private life across the national media. The Press Complaints Commission held a polite meeting, after which it was agreed that the coverage had been inappropriate; and the Sun is sending a deputation to meet with All About Trans, a project dedicated to communication between transgender people and the infotainment industry. Presumably both sides are expecting a freak-show of some kind, although it seems likely that only the transgender people will get one.

Just When We Were Progressing So Well

A vote for Scottish independence would be a vote against the progressive ideals represented by the Reverend Blair's New Labour and his Glorious Successor's New New Labour, according to Douglas Alexander, who served in various progressive capacities from before the progressive liberation of Iraq through progressive control orders and the progressive detention of children to the promise of progressive biometric ID cards and progressive cradle-to-grave surveillance. New Labour and New New Labour were, of course, both notable for their progressive vision of a multi-ethnic, multicultural, multinational state, in which the Government struggled endlessly but progressively to balance the interests of various multinational corporations against those of Rupert Murdoch, and in which Jack Straw was not afraid to express his progressive gibbering fright at the sight of a woman in Muslim headgear. "When my children and grandchildren ask me what I did in the referendum," blathered Alexander, "I will say that I worked to make real an ethic of neighbourliness in every community, in every street, in every home in our nation." Clearly the fiend Salmond and his minions can have no truck with so progressive an ideal, given their apparent wish to throw it all away and pander to the whims of a few million poll-tax test animals.

We Don't Stick to Facts; Why Should Facts Stick to Us?

Britain's Head Boy is having a bit of a dither about the "right to be forgotten" on the internet. Since the principle has been backed by the European court, it is only natural that Daveybloke should wish to avoid coming out in its favour, at least pending some diminution of the threat from the Farage Falange and its fellow-travellers in his own back-bench rabble. Only the most uncharitable observer would imagine that Daveybloke's doubts arise from concerns about the Conservative Party's right to relegate future election pledges to electronic oblivion; not least because the judgement was concerned only with factual information and not with fantasy fiction. Among the hundreds of people applying to have information about themselves erased from Google's memory is a politician who does not wish their behaviour while in office to be a matter of public record; doubtless Britain's Head Boy, in making his decision on the matter, will be mainly concerned with such principled matters as whether the expenses claimant in question belongs to his own party or another.

That Explains the Food Banks

Britain now has more billionaires per head of population than any other country, even democratic ones like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. This is according to a list compiled by the Sunday Murdoch, which is based only on "identifiable wealth"; presumably the figures would be even better than stated had the Sunday Murdoch been able to include the sort of confidential wealth that results from the more ethically permissible forms of tax avoidance. The Sunday Murdoch list also excludes bank accounts, to which News Corporation has no access now that so many of its hackers are occupied at the Old Bailey. "The richest people in Britain have had an astonishing year," gushed the list's compiler. "While some may criticise them, many of these people are at the heart of the economy and their success brings more jobs and more wealth for the country", much more so than all those nasty, common immigrants who come over here merely to work, and who are feckless enough to pay their taxes instead of dodging them.

On the Fringes

I have received an election leaflet from the UK EPP, alias the Four Freedoms Party. The EPP is the mainstream centre-right bloc in the European parliament, and claims to support the "freedoms of speech and faith, freedom from want and fear" espoused by Franklin Roosevelt; which doubtless explains why the British Conservative Party abandoned it to join a rabble of Nazi nostalgists, gay-bashers and climate-change deniers. The leaflet notes that "British politicians not 'Brussels' are responsible for problems like housing shortages, educational and training shortfalls, archaic transport, aircraft carriers without planes, and substandard cancer care", and points out that "although this is not a general election, others dwell in their manifestos on issues for the British parliament to decide".

This point is proved by Labour's effort, which reiterates the various minor adjustments that the party claims it will make in order to help the precariat teeter a bit more comfortably: freezing energy prices, supplying more childcare, doing something or other with the NHS and imposing a "compulsory jobs guarantee" on the young, the feckless and the battered remains of the English language. Europe gets a single brief paragraph of forty words or so, aimed sensibly enough at "young Londoners" who must be simply itching to be compulsorily guaranteed, and pointing out the EU's economic importance; which self-evidently is far less important than striking One Nation poses over matters barely relevant to the present elections.

Lessons Learned, Lines Drawn

A major member of the energy cartel has been ordered to pay its customers back the equivalent of several executive bonuses. E.ON mis-sold to recipients of the Warm Home Discount Scheme, presumably because the scheme is aimed at older people and those on low incomes and therefore was thought to merit the kind of economical staff training which we have come to expect of public-utility profiteers. The chief executive had a bit of a grovel and the regulator said it was time to draw another line and wait for the next egregious theft, and Ed Davey (not to be confused with Ed or Davey), the Deputy Conservative doormat at the Department for Energising Climate Catastrophe, said that victims of the energy cartel should thank their lucky stars for Ed Davey and his coalition chums. E.ON will have to pay out up to £20 million, which can doubtless be recouped when the energy cartel arranges its next price hike.

Who is my Mother, and Who are my Brothers?

Catholic leaders in Chile have admitted that they knew for at least ten years about a scheme to steal children from single mothers. Unmarried pregnant women were harassed by priests into giving up their children for adoption; those who refused were anaesthetised and told that their child had died, while healthy infants were kidnapped and placed with married couples. This occurred mainly under the régime of Augusto Pinochet, the nice old man who fostered such tender solicitude in both the Reverend Blair and his spiritual godmother and champion of family values, Margaret Thatcher; but there are allegations that priests and doctors were still playing their little games as recently as 2005. Similar schemes existed in Spain and Argentina, mainly as a precaution against left-wingers being allowed to breed; in Chile the motivation was apparently less plebeian, deriving mainly from a wish to protect the reputations of rich families. It is as yet unclear whether the Catholic Church received any consideration, material or otherwise, from those families which benefited either by the addition of an adopted child or the subtraction of an illegitimate one. In any case, although it has now condescended to co-operate with the police and the national child protection agency, the Church felt no particular need to confess, repent or atone until the activity was disclosed by an outside agency, in accordance with the usual pattern of such abuses.

Dam Fools

Five years ago ecologists in Scotland released four pairs of beavers into the wild, some four hundred years after the animal was hunted to extinction in Britain. There are now thirteen beavers living around various lochs and interfering with the local environment by building dams instead of golf courses. Beaver dams reduce erosion, and can help to prevent the occurrence of floods and improve the quality of water, much to the detriment of the United Kingdom's flourishing sandbag industry and privatised moistural distribution companies. Next year, the fiend Salmond and his demented pack of hooters and skirlers at Holyrood will decide whether the damage is to be permitted to continue; meanwhile, it is believed that a scientific team under the personal guidance of Owen Paterson is sacrificing numerous badgers at the full of the moon in an attempt to create a viable modern breed of Scottish Conservative.

Politically Incorrect

Although it remains, for the time being, more or less legal to discuss the policies of the Farage Falange, the venting of mere opinion is another matter entirely. One of the Falange's candidates for the expenses-claiming community in Europe has been squealing for the police to arrest anyone who refers to her cadres as fascists. A rally is scheduled at Brighton and Hove this evening, and the party has called on the local chief constable to ensure that the free speech does not get out of hand. The Caudillo himself has accused Hope Not Hate and Unite Against Fascism of being Labour party stooges and of waging a violent campaign against him; and we all know that the Caudillo of the Farage Falange is not a man given to overstatement, at least where non-Romanians are concerned.

Take That, Keep This

Britain's Head Boy has given a bit of a ticking off to a pop singer who engaged in a tax avoidance scheme. Britain's Head Boy is very much opposed to aggressive tax avoidance, as opposed to the cuddly tax avoidance that qualified him as the sort of hard-working restaurant-trasher who plays by the rules and wants to get on. Britain's Head Boy has also decreed that the pop singer should not have to return his OBE. Since the crooner in question is a Conservative supporter, and since the OBE is named after the British Empire, which was built on such enduring Conservative values as initiative, hard work, entrepreneurship, grand larceny and wog-bombing, this seems only reasonable.

We Cannot Let the Terrorists Keep Us from Shopping

Relatives of those killed in the 9/11 attacks are protesting arrangements at the official museum, which are about as near to being on schedule, on budget and sensitive towards the bereaved as one would expect from an enterprise begun under the George W Bush administration. The museum, a commercial venture which will charge twenty-four dollars per entry, has been built on a site which is vulnerable to flooding, and the authorities have chosen a superbly cack-handed inscription for the room where human remains are to be stored. Human remains which have not been identified are to be put in the basement. The families of the human remains find all this a bit undignified, even though they will be able to visit the museum for free and in private, and perhaps even get a discount on souvenir key-rings, as long as they make an appointment first.

Bottom Right

I have received an election leaflet from the political wing of UKIP, which has also bought up the front and back pages of the local free newspaper. Apparently the late depression was all Labour's fault, and nothing at all to do with anyone whose bonuses George Osborne might be fighting the Euro-wogs to keep inflated. Well, that settles that.

The leaflet is a good British sheet of A4, professionally folded with two good British folds, with much good British mention of fighting Britain's corner and the global race and hardworking people who want to work hard and play by the rules but, mirabile dictu, nothing about being all in it together. To compensate for this omission, there is a picture on the front of Britain's Head Boy with his mouth open. Presumably he is giving the recalcitrant ticks of Brussels a good telling-off, and perhaps even threatening to veto their place in Big School, because the leaflet informs me that the political wing of UKIP wants Real Change in Europe. The mainstream wing of UKIP, which is to say the gibbering likes of Amir Latif, "simply can't deliver on anything they promise". Also, Labour and the Deputy Conservatives "won't stand up for Britain". The Real Conservative leaflet says all this twice, so it must be true.

The Real Conservatives, for their own part, have a Long-Term Economic Plan, of which the first point is Reducing the Deficit. There was a time when the Real Conservatives' promise was to eliminate the deficit within the space of a single parliament; but the Real Conservatives, unlike the Farage Falange, simply almost deliver on some of their promises. Another point on the Long-Term Economic Plan is Creating More Jobs, and we all know what brilliant results have already been achieved through wage cuts, workfare and hanging the self-employed out to dry. A further point on the Long-Term Economic Plan is Delivering the Best Schools and Skills for Young People so that they can succeed well enough in the global race to stack shelves in Poundland, if not pay back their tuition fees. This point on the Long-Term Economic Plan is, of course, in the hands of Michael Gove, so charity forbids further comment.

The most important part of the leaflet, as far as seeing off the Farage Falange is concerned, is of course Capping Welfare and Reducing Immigration, "so that our economy delivers for people who want to work hard and play by the rules". People claim social security because they do not want to work hard; immigrants never play by the rules. The distinction between the Farage Falange and the Real Conservatives should here be self-evident; namely that UKIP, like the BNP, simply cannot deliver on its promises, while the Real Conservatives are always happy to witch-hunt a wog or kick a struggling prole. Unfortunately, I was myself claiming benefits for some time quite recently, and even did some voluntary work, which places me firmly in the skiver camp; sometimes I even fraternise with immigrants. Clearly I would make a most unworthy addition to the Real Conservatives' constituency, even if I were hard-working and rule-abiding enough to marry my money and lie on my CV, like the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith.

But what of the Euro-wogs? Well, children: "people feel that the EU is heading in a direction we never signed up to - that it's costing British taxpayers too much and we have lost control of our own affairs." I wonder why people might feel that, given the famous variety, honesty and independence of the British press. Anyway, despite having lost control of its own affairs, the Government has done all sorts of nice things in the interests of Putting You Back In Control: tax cuts for the rich, starvation for the unemployed, workfare to create jobs, immigrant-bashing within the arbitrary limits set by the Euro-wogs, and saving money that might have gone into Eurozone bailouts in order to throw it at G4S, Serco and Royal Mail profiteers. Strangely enough for the greenest government ever, the leaflet does not mention Britain's plucky defiance of the EU's laws on environmental pollution, which has done so much for our children's potential in the global race towards universal asthma.

Inside the leaflet (at the bottom right, appropriately enough) is a picture of eight Real Conservative candidates posing with Britain's Head Boy, with a number key so we can tell them all apart. The numbers are out of sequence on the picture and, bizarrely enough, on the key as well; apparently the Real Conservatives' well-known trouble with figures goes even deeper than previously thought. If elected to serve with the Latvian Waffen-SS fan club and the Real Conservatives' other charming friends in Europe, the candidates will Fight Britain's Corner and will "stand up for Britain's interests and not their own careers", because Real Conservative politicians are carefully screened in order to eliminate mere careerists.

Rewriting History

Vladimir Putin has taken time off from re-hanging the Iron Curtain to engage in a bit of historical revisionism about who won the Second World War. The annual Victory Day parade, commemorating such minor skirmishes as Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kursk, provided the Mussolini of Muscovy with an opportunity to portray the USSR as having made a greater contribution to victory than the United States, or even Winston Churchill. Putin mentioned "millions of victims and terrible hardships", although he was tactful enough to omit Stalin's Michael Gove-style military reforms of the thirties, which involved purging virtually anyone with any knowledge or experience in the name of political correctness, and which may have contributed in some small way to the Nazis getting as far as they did. Defending his Ukrainian adventure, Putin also mentioned the resurgence of fascism in Europe; which will doubtless annoy Britain's present Head Boy and Winston Churchill's rightful heir, one of whose first actions as Conservative leader was to abandon the European centre-right bloc in favour of an alliance with the Latvian Waffen-SS fan club and the Holocaust-denying chancer Michal Kaminski. Next year, of course, the seventieth anniversary of Churchill's triumph will fall upon the very day after the general election; it is to be hoped that between then and now Britain's Head Boy and his chums will be forthright in reminding everyone who really got the job done.

Naughty New Hampshire Bookworms

Some lunatic in the Christian state of New Hampshire has got himself arrested for interrupting a school board meeting in protest at teenagers being made to read about sex. The novel in question, Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes, also incorporates healthier, more all-American subjects like bullying and shooting people; but it does have a one-page sex scene which, according to the horrified parent, reads "like a transcript for a triple-X porno movie". I have never read Picoult's book, but the explicit extracts quoted in the press hardly seem to measure up to the child-corrupting likes of Kurt Vonnegut, or even Anne Frank; one can only conclude that triple-X porno movies in the Christian state of New Hampshire must be rather tame affairs. In any case, the school has issued a grovelling apology affirming the Constitutional primacy of family values over freedom of thought, and has promised to revise its policies so that parents can make a positive contribution to the process of censorship rather than merely complaining from the sidelines.

Glazing Over

Clay poppies plant, for those who died
At fighting for the winning side,
Not boys, nor dupes. We much prefer
To think what sporting chaps they were;
For nations always like to play
With flower of youth, and make it clay.

Marlin Flanders

Purple in Thought, Purple in Word

Following on from the recent Batten bumph, I have now received a leaflet from the Farage Falange candidate for the local elections. It features twenty bullet points about what jolly things the Farage Falange would do in local government. Apparently there will be more NHS for all, more prioritisation of local people, tougher action against offenders and lots of parking. The other side of the leaflet features a largely comma-free rant about the European Union, in which most of the sentences seem to have been undeservedly thwarted in their urge to end with an exclamation mark or several: "As long as the EU Parliament is able to pass legislation imposing restrictions on international trade agreements between the UK and non-EU countries the UK remains powerless to prevent restrictions which limit our ability to trade with the world." A mere full stop seems hardly in keeping with the spirit of the thing. Perusing further: "The only way out of this is to leave the EU and we are the only party that will guarantee that without diminishing our influence on trade with the EU and the rest of the world, a world which we historically used to trade proportionally much more with." It is jolly decent of the Farage Falange's local candidate to specify the particular world to which he is referring, although regrettably he does not make clear whether the world in which leaving the EU will have no consequences for our European trade is the same planet as our own. The candidate's name is Amir Latif and his leaflet says nothing at all about immigration; which is rather odd, considering the eminently non-racist nature of UKIP's concerns about immigration, at least among those candidates who haven't been expelled yet.

Bread of Heaven

In Gateshead once an Angel rose
To celebrate and to remind
Of greatness as achieved by those
Who weren't the profiteering kind.

A wealth creator who had seen
The spread of its majestic wing
Felt that its message should have been
A more constructive sort of thing.

"A focus for our hope and fear?
Your thinking is a bit confused.
There is no Art, nor Public here -
Just billboards that are not yet used."

W. Morrison Gormless

All the Difference

A Conservative council candidate who used Twitter for Islamophobic and homophobic comments rather than for insulting poor people and immigrants has resigned from the party. This candidate is not to be confused with the various UKIP candidates who have resigned after making Islamophobic, homophobic, sexist and racist comments. Whereas UKIP is a non-racist, non-lunatic party which just happens to be led by a rich white man and to include a wide and diverse variety of racists and lunatics, the Conservative Party is a non-racist, non-lunatic party which just happens to be led by a rich white man and to include a wide and diverse variety of token types, provided they are sufficiently thick-headed, unpleasant, crooked and greedy. The differences between the Conservative Party and the Labour Party are, of course, very nearly as significant.

Slightly Excess Wastage Among the Juvenile Resources

No-one knows better than Britain's Head Boy that dead children have their uses; but a cabal of mere experts in Seattle is trying to undermine Britain's juvenile resources by comparing them with foreigners. Britain's infant mortality rates exceed those of every country in western Europe except Malta, even among children who will probably grow up into unemployed hoodies; and no doubt the perpetrators of the Health and Social Care Act live in hope that we shall catch up to American rates in due course. The figures have been linked to inequalities in health care, lack of red tape and the removal of playgrounds from poor areas in order to instil appropriate values into the children of hard-working families. Nevertheless, since the research was carried out in the United States and not by female South American UN rapporteurs, the response from Westminster fell short of the usual megadecibel squeals of righteous indignation. The Ministry for Profitable Healthcare extruded a flunkey to rattle off statistics showing that every day and in every way Britain is getting better and better, and Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition said that it more or less agreed with what the Government is doing, except that it was a tragedy not befitting a civilised country that should be made fairer with a few minor adjustments.

Batten Down the Letterbox

I am in receipt of an election communication from the Farage Falange. The Falange's candidate for a place in the expenses-claiming community in Europe is one Gerard Batten, a fleshy-faced chap in a suit who looks remarkably well-fed considering his refugee status. "Help us to help you get our country back by joining the fastest growing political movement in Britain," urges Gerard Batten; apparently I am to understand that the fastest-growing movement in Britain is the Farage Falange and not Political Islam after all. Those eighteen words are the only words permitted Gerard Batten on the entire leaflet; it would of course be uncharitable in the extreme to wonder if this might be because Gerard Batten holds the kind of opinions on wogs and women that have recently brought the Farage Falange so much amusing publicity.

"4,000 people a week come to live in Britain from the EU," squeals the leaflet. Of course none of them pay taxes, employ natives or ever go back home again, so "Enough's enough". The leaflet further asserts that "In the EU, we can't control our own borders", while of course the pesky French and the rest of them can all control theirs; which doubtless is what prevents the likes of Gerard Batten from finding a comfortable home in a society whose openness and tolerance approaches their own. "Unlimited immigration costs British jobs", which would certainly be alarming if we had unlimited immigration. "Cheap labour pushes down British wages" and "Schools, health and welfare are under pressure" - not because of anything bankers like Nigel Farage may have done, but because of the Euro-wogs and their puppets in Westminster.

The reverse of the leaflet is occupied by a message from the Caudillo himself, which is several times longer than the echt-BNP soundbite granted to his minion on the front. Not only have we lost control of our borders, but we also "have no control over who we trade with, how much we pay to heat our homes and feed our families or how we just get on with our lives." Regrettably, the Caudillo does not indicate whether he believes that the profits made by the Big Six energy cartel are determined in Brussels or in Strasbourg. Nor is there any indication as to what the Farage Falange has to offer in order to boost British wages, relieve the pressure on schools, health and welfare, or control energy prices. The idea seems to be that more patriotism and fewer Euro-wogs would do the trick; but, assuming he ever gets control of his own party, I am sure even the Caudillo of the Farage Falange has more in mind than that.

You Get the More or Less Scientific Conclusions You Pay For

Daveybloke's badger-busting environment secretary, Owen Paterson, has at last emerged from the discreet silence which surrounded him in the wake of the recent sandbag shortage in southern England. Unfortunately, he has not emerged because of some glamorous action like giving a pensioner his last sandbag or protecting Royalty from a badger onslaught or anything like that. Instead, he has been caught trying to sell off the Food and Environment Research Agency, which investigates things like pesticides, GM crops, bees and other matters of no great concern. Hitherto the agency has been part of the hated public sector, with all the gold-plated pensions and uncommercial values one would expect; but twenty-nine organisations have expressed an interest in taking it over and bringing its ethos into line with that of the faith-based community to which Paterson and his intellectual peers belong. Paterson also plans, if that is the verb I want, to merge the Animal Health and Veterinary Laboratories Agency with the inspectorates for bees, plant health, seeds and genetically-modified parliamentarians. The new agency will be part of the hated public sector, but no doubt it will be prevailed upon to outsource its duties to a more doctrinally correct provider.