Boiler Trouble

Another triumph by the greenest government ever has emerged in the form of the Renewable Heat Incentive, a government subsidy for installing low-carbon heating systems. Chris Huhne, when he was the Deputy Conservative doormat at the Department for Energising Climate Catastrophe, described the scheme as "not marginal" and "a big, big scheme"; as might be expected, the scheme has turned out to be not altogether unmarginal, with a small, small take-up. Of course there are good reasons for this. Heating is "the single most important cause of global warming in the UK" apart from scroungers, unauthorised badger activity and the last Labour administration; and under the present religious orthodoxy such important issues are best left to market forces, with government providing occasional minor tweaks to help the middle classes. For example, the Renewable Heat Incentive was touted as an incentivisation for any non-scroungers whom the Osborne economic miracle might have happened to plunge into fuel poverty; so in order to keep the scroungers away, the Government has ensured that no-one who is fuel-poor can afford to be incentivised. In the first two months of the scheme's operation, after a three-year delay in launching, two hundred households applied for the subsidy and seventy-nine were accredited. Out of another eighteen thousand households which already have low-carbon heating systems, one-ninth applied for the subsidy and one-eighteenth received accreditation. It is a triumph of almost Duncan Smith proportions.

We Didn't Join the Army to Kill People

Some of the more penetrable crania in the coalition are beginning to absorb the unfortunate fact that not everything which goes wrong in the NHS can be blamed on the NHS. A couple of Conservatives, Sarah Wollaston (a former GP who evidently prefers cutting budgets to managing them) and Stephen Dorrell (a bland ministerial flunkey from the interregnum which followed the martyrdom of the sainted Thatcher), have issued a rather mystifying statement that the NHS cannot continue to function under present policies. They have been joined by Paul Burstow, a Deputy Conservative who helped them vote through Twizzler Lansley's anti-NHS bill. Somehow or other, despite Lansley's assault and various kicks in the groin from Jeremy C Hunt, the three of them reckon that the NHS is on course to collapse during the course of the next parliament; Dorrell has even expressed qualms at the idea that the sick and vulnerable should pay for the rich and greedy except during a recession. The substance of all this is of course unexceptionable; but it does raise the question of who these people think they are working for. If they don't want the NHS to be destroyed or the sick and vulnerable to suffer then, like the PFI Party's Andy Burnham, they are in the wrong organisation.

Small Change

For the past few months, the Church of England's Ethical Investment Advisory Group has apparently been combing the Gospels in search of a Biblical justification for investing in corporate loan sharks. By golly, they have discovered one: "It is no more realistic to desire that they invest only in morally perfect companies than it is to desire that any of us should relate only to morally perfect individuals," proclaimed the group's chair. "In any event, such an objective would rather miss the point of the Gospel. It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick." This, of course, is a convenient adaptation of the Saviour's justification for keeping company with harlots and publicans, although the Gospels are, to my imperfect knowledge, a little vague on what financial returns He pocketed as a result. Financially speaking, the EIAG usually recommends the withdrawal method where there is "no genuine desire for change" on the part of the patient; and any corporate wish to tighten regulations or sack a few rotten apples is of course devoutly to be encouraged. But if investment in unethical companies can be justified on such grounds, it is difficult to see what the Church needs with an advisory group. If loan sharks can improve their moral health by selling the Church a few shares, then surely it is the Church's spiritual duty to spread its healing lucre into everything from weapons manufacture to child trafficking.

Daveybloke the Diplomat

Another diplomatic triumph by Britain's Head Boy has ended up more or less as expected, with the appointment of a ghastly foreigner as president delegate of the European Commission. Jean-Claude Juncker is the favoured candidate of the European People's Party, the mainstream right-wing bloc from which Britain's Head Boy defected because it wasn't UKIP-friendly enough. Instead, the Conservatives joined a far-right rabble of chancers and Holocaust deniers, and UKIP were duly annihilated, to an extent which this spring became moderately clear even to Britain's Head Boy.

Daveybloke dislikes Juncker because he is "the ultimate Brussels insider," which must inevitably be anathema to anyone with the populist instincts and democratic credentials of the millionaire junior salesman from the Bullingdon Club. Daveybloke would presumably have preferred the honour to fall upon someone genuinely trustworthy, like Fred Goodwin or Rebekah Brooks. In order to stop Juncker, Daveybloke has mostly resorted to squealing that the mainland will stop speaking to the Continent unless the Euro-wogs fall into line; if nothing else, this has at least enabled him to forge a grand alliance with Hungary, which will no doubt come in handy the next time he decides to squabble with Germany, France and suchlike insubordinate pipsqueaks. Certainly the Euro-wogs still have much to learn from the nation that won the First World War and has also held Costa Rica to a goalless draw.

By Their Fruits

Injecting drugs into his hide,
He lived a score of years, then died;
And left, as warrant of his worth,
No progeny to taint the earth.

Another preached the moral way,
Perished to rise another day,
And caused two thousand years of strife.
Which, then, was the more wasted life?

Rev. Sorbus Malbarb

Taxpayer Urged to Fix Scroungers' Roofing

Some people from the construction, housing and environmental sectors appear to have failed rather badly in comprehending the Government's reform agenda. A coalition of twenty organisations has written to Lord Deighton, the commercial secretary to the Treasury, calling on the greenest government ever to provide a million homes with proper insulation. The organisations admit that this would cut energy bills, thereby causing undue hardship to executives in the Big Six cartel; they admit that it would reduce fuel poverty, thereby removing one of the most important incentives for poverty-stricken proles; they even admit that it would reduce dependence on fossil fuels and help to tackle climate change, as though the greenest government ever had ever shown the slightest inclination to take action on either issue. On the positive side, thousands of jobs might be created; but even these could potentially be the kind of unproductive, scrounger-friendly jobs that require investment and training and regulation and suchlike nasty and blasphemous things. We are fortunate that Lord Deighton, formerly a humble cog in the taxpaying machine that was Goldman Sachs, is likely to treat such peculiar ideas with the attention they deserve.

What May Be Achieved With Rupert's Legal Aid

Britain's Head Boy has issued a full and frank apology for allowing Andy Coulson to impose upon his good nature. Thanks to Daveybloke's excessive generosity, with which so many of Britain's poor and vulnerable are all too familiar, a criminal has been allowed into Downing Street for almost the very first time. Coulson, as we know, was originally oozed into the Head Boy's tea-room primarily to keep Daveybloke and his chums on the path of Murdoch virtue; this was before Murdoch's attempted ingestion of BSkyB, when Jeremy C Hunt's qualifications as a member of the News Corporation goon squad had the chance to obtrude themselves. So manifest were Coulson's abilities, as a Murdoch minion and former scumbag press editor, that he was never even properly vetted, and he duly became one of the few genuine crooks of ignoble birth whom Britain's Head Boy considered worthy of both the vote and a second chance. Clearly, Daveybloke in his exceeding innocence has been cruelly exploited; doubtless Leveson is to blame.

Nevertheless, it does appear that Coulson was a more competent scumbag press editor than Rebekah Brooks, who has been found innocent of just about everything that was going on at the tabloid she nominally ran. Her solicitor said that she could not comment because the trial was still going on. There's a first time for everything.

Why Don't You Ask Him If He's Going to Stay?

It appears that Daveybloke's ever more subtle attempts to whip the Continent into line with the mainland are starting to grate a little even with fellow Bullingdons. Various Polish politicians, one of whom used to trash restaurants with the London Haystack, have been recorded expressing their irritation in rather forthright language. Remarkably enough, the coalition's double-pronged charm offensive of ill-tempered sulks and wogs-out grandstanding has failed to win friends and influence people; and this despite the fact that, as a spokesbeing for Britain's Head Boy pointed out, "there are a lot of member states that have strong relations with Britain, where Britain has played an important role in their history." Fortunately, as with the Polish pilots who did so much to help the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, they have played next to no role in ours.

Summer Solstice

Again the long day's sun has soaked the place;
The city and its citizens are lapped
By yellow heat, as though the heavens clapped
A bag of lukewarm urine to their face.

The fragrant lard rejoiceth; and the more
It crisps and sizzles in the golden glow,
The greater joy in cooler hearts to know
That now the tactful nights will start to draw.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Washed Out

When it comes to protecting Britain's seas, the greenest government ever has been about as rigorous and pro-active as one would expect. On the basis of a recommendation in 2011 that it should establish a hundred and twenty-seven marine conservation zones, the coalition twiddled its thumbs for two years and then established twenty-seven, mostly on paper which has the virtue of being cheaper and simpler than establishing things in the reality-based community. The Government has expressed some vague hopes that the whole business will be up and running, or at least wobbling to its feet, in a couple of years' time; much as the Osborne economic miracle has gone from being a single-parliament dose of salts to an indefinitely protracted course of snake-oil and mercury. It is true that a Marine Management Organisation has been set up; but since the MMO is a public body and not a profit-making conglomerate like ATOS or G4S, there is some uncertainty as to whether the Government will bother funding it, particularly when scarce resources are needed for dredging rivers and gassing badgers.

The Heart of the Approach

Another triumph of the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith and the Idleness Police has been meanly criticised by a parliamentary committee and, as one might expect, perfunctorily defended by an anonymous spokesbeing. The committee's report on Personal Independence Payments says that the DWP's henchmen at ATOS misled the Government when bidding for the relevant scrounger elimination contract; ATOS is a private company and not a social security claimant, so the Government apparently decided that its self-certification was good enough. On the positive side, claims were delayed for more than six months; claimants were hospitalised from stress or because they could not afford medically prescribed diets; and by last October the Department of Workfare and Privation had achieved a full sixteen per cent of its expected quota for claims processed and decided.

Rather uncharitably, the public accounts committee calls this a "fiasco", but Britain's Head Boy extruded a spokesbeing to set the record straight. "I think what you are seeing is the transition from a scheme of self-certification to one where I think the right and proper checks are being made," the spokesbeing said. Apparently everything is on course, always when the brilliant Duncan Smith is involved, and the heart of the Government's approach is that people are only being forced into hospital because resources are being more efficiently targeted. If eighty-four per cent of claims have not been dealt with on time, that is just one more indication of the number of shirkers and scroungers who remain to have their crutches heartfully kicked away.

From Gazprom With Love

At last someone has discovered a plausible explanation for the widespread opposition to shale fracking. Foggy Rasmussen, the secretary-general of the North Atlantic Wog-Bombing Organisation, has been interpreting various allies and has detected the cunning hand of Russia behind it all. The evil empire has "engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas". Self-evidently, the recent arrest by the Russian authorities of Greenpeace protesters in the Arctic was nothing more than a fiendishly clever bluff; while the protests of various American citizens are merely the sad result of living under the notorious Kenyan Muslim Marxist who has cheated his way into the White House. Who, after all, could possibly have the slightest objection to their home's foundations being undermined, the occasional earthquake or hot and cold running methane from the bathroom taps, unless they had fallen for the evil promptings of SMERSH and Moscow Central?

Hunt Speaks Out

The Royal College of Nursing has voted down a proposal for a flat fee to be charged for GP consultations. Ninety per cent of delegates voted against the motion, though presumably the London Haystack will have something or other to say about the turnout. The issue has come up because, in spite of Twizzler Lansley's reforms, the Osborne economic miracle and the consistent benign interest of all the British Neoliberal Party's various right wings, the National Health Service is facing a financial crisis. Since protecting the world's best healthcare system by cancelling Trident, chasing corporate tax dodgers and raising National Insurance would be an unthinkable hate-crime against the prevailing theology, the Minister for Health and News Corporation has settled for a headline-grubbing lunch-blather about cosmetic surgery patients coming over here and stealing our beds. Hunt made it very clear that he is against "purely cosmetic work being done" at the taxpayer's expense; which is jolly sensible of him, and makes him look just about as brave, alert and statesmanlike as any Murdoch flunkey slapping a straw man in the face with a red herring possibly could look. No doubt he is also against such equally significant threats as illegal immigrants in the Lords, North Korean hegemony in Scotland or leftists in the Labour Party.

The Innocent Have Almost Nothing to Fear

The Minister for Justice and Heterosexual Hostelry, who famously knows as much about the law as Jeremy C Hunt knows about medicine or Theresa May about the Passport Office, has refused compensation to a man who was wrongfully imprisoned. Mere judges have decided that Victor Nealon's conviction for attempted rape was unsafe, and Nealon was denied parole because he refused to admit to the crime; so naturally Chris Graybeing has decreed that no miscarriage of justice has taken place. Nealon's lawyers are hoping to get a judicial review before the coalition abolishes them; but as the differently-guilty one himself observed, "I'm still picking up the pieces of my life. My fight isn't over. It's going to take years." Even if the Government loses its case in the end, of course, it will do so on the taxpayer's money; which will no doubt be jolly fortunate for the life of Chris Graybeing.

Not Our Sort of People Just Yet

Five Syrian terror organisations, including the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, are to be proscribed in Britain for the crime of doing slightly less damage to Iraq than George W Bush and the Reverend Poodle. Although it is thought that ISIS, like his reverence, benefits from a special relationship with Saudi Arabia, the organisation does not yet have sufficient funds to qualify for official residence in the United Kingdom. The Government is also eager to send a message of disapprobation to those terrorist organisations which commit mayhem and murder while failing to take British interests properly into account. "Proscription is a useful weapon in the armoury at the disposal of the government, police and security services to disrupt terrorist activity and protect the UK," babbled a Home Office flunkey who must be rather glad to be talking about something other than passports. Given the other important demands on their arsenal, it is to be hoped that the Government, police and security services will find time to take all due advantage.

Muscular Britishness

Britain's Head Boy, whose government has been such a paragon of moderation in so many respects, has had a bit of a burble about fighting the forces of extremism with the glories of muscular Britishness. More precisely, he's ordered one of his more literate fags to write an essay for the Stürmer on Sunday about the urgent need to place the moderate values of the Minister for NewsCorp and Faith Schools, Michael Gove, at the heart of the national curriculum. It appears that Britain's Head Boy read a book about History once, and thinks it would be rather jolly if every junior educational consumer could share his learning. Accordingly, his intention is to use next year's anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta as a handy distraction from, among other things, Chris Graybeing's abolition of equality under the law. Although Britain's Head Boy is a bit vague on what Magna Carta means, he does recognise the document as the foundation of the liberties traditionally enjoyed by the aristocratic thug class of which the Bullingdon Club is one degenerate remnant and the British Neoliberal Party another. Britain's Head Boy believes that freedom for the right people is not optional, that tolerance of others is fine when they're not immigrants, and that accepting personal and social responsibility and upholding the rule of law should be obligatory for the proles if not for the Cabinet.

A Better Class of Foreigner

The Heathen Chinee have issued a series of rebukes to the coalition, both over its echt-UKIP approach to border controls and its bungled wrecking tactics in Europe. Particularly humiliating must be the idea that the Heathen Chinee used to regard Britain as merely the equal of France and Germany, and are now wondering whether even that lowly status is too good for us. The Government has tried to repair the situation by giving Heathen Chinee business executives the status of honorary whites, and is now being forced to extend the classification to all Chinese visitors. Shipping refugees back to Bongo Bongo Land is one thing, but even immigration controls can be taken too far; especially if a special relationship has gone all distant and one is looking for a new, non-Euro-wog best chum.

To A Romantic

Those chemical rushes
on which you are tripping,
those hormonal gushes
with which you are dripping,

have moved other dust
towards murder and rape,
same hunger and lust
from amoeba to ape:

vestigial limbs over which you insist
on tripping - because it's so nice to be kissed.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Tackling the Naughty Bankers, Helping the Nice Bankers

As we are all aware by now, because the coalition has told us often enough, the late financial disaster was caused primarily by the last Labour administration, with significant contributions from immigrants, the NHS and the fact that poor people have too much disposable income. Having taken swift and decisive action to remedy these problems with a three-year economic depression, the Government has now turned its attention to the City of London which, mirabile dictu, appears to contain a few rotten apples of its own. The Euro-wogs have set out a directive making certain forms of cheating a criminal offence, but the Chancellor has opted out of those particular measures; not in order to protect his chums from prison sentences (O perish the thought) but in order to leave himself the freedom of movement to bring in more quickly and efficiently the measures he has opted out of. The Chancellor has also told the deputy governor of the Bank of England to implement a review of City practices; this will begin in the autumn with a consultation to ensure that the City is treated with appropriate understanding and compassion, and will finish some time after the next election. At about that point, presumably, the anticipated bursting of the Bullingdon Bubble will require a few token tweaks of the financial sector, in addition to the renewed kicking of those who are really to blame.

And After All That Hard Crusading

The peace, freedom and democracy which have characterised Iraq since 2003 suffered a bit of a blip this week, causing the White House to break out in sporting jargon. A spokesbeing called on the Iraqi government to "step up to the plate" lest it drop the ball now that the baton has been passed in front of an open goal in the final straight towards full democrato-pacificatory liberalisation. The trouble seems to be a set of Islamic extremists who, by some small oversight or other, were not expunged from the new, free Iraq when the forces of Shock and Awe went in to make the country safe for peace, democracy and Halliburton. The Islamic State of Iraq, said the White House, "is not only a threat to the stability of Iraq, but a threat to the entire region", and may even be trying to undo all the good work that George W Bush and the Reverend Poodle managed to achieve with all that white phosphorous and depleted uranium. The White House spokesbeing went so far as to condemn as "despicable" the extremists' practice of targeting innocent Iraqis, rather than collaterally detrimenting them in a civilised, Christian fashion.

Population Control for Deserving Species

For some people, it appears, even the Anthropogene Extinction Event is not enough. While living through the modest beginnings of one of the most appalling catastrophes to befall our unfortunate biosphere, some brilliant folk at Imperial College London are trying to add one more to the toll of species lost. In this case, however, the consequences will be purely positive, since the species in question is the mosquito, an unpleasant little bloodsucker which kills almost as many African children each year as religion and profiteering combined. It is now possible to alter the insects genetically so that females become increasingly rare, leading to a dramatic decline in population of the sort that Homo sapiens ipsedixit would never wish to contemplate for itself. Eventually the mosquito might even die out altogether, which would be an entirely wonderful thing because the mosquito is an apex predator that interacts with no other species apart from human beings.

Affordable Justice

Yet again, a mere professional has gone out of his way to muddy the crystal waters of the Government's cleansing agenda. In the teeth of the facts on the ground at Planet Graybeing, a mere judge has declared that legal aid might be necessary "in order to ensure a just and fair hearing". Quite aside from the judge's wilful defiance of the coalition's idea of justice, which has nothing whatever to do with fairness to anyone in the legal-aid income bracket, the unrepresented party in the case is doubly a pariah, being both a sex offender and a foreigner who has the temerity to require an interpreter. Doubtless Graybeing, as the possessor of Britain's finest legal mind after the staff of the Daily Mail, will take all necessary steps towards providing an appropriately constituted lynch mob.

We're All On Them Together

Thanks to the Big Society thingy, some of Britain's most vulnerable citizens are at last receiving due protection against their persecutors. A block of flats in central London has been fitted with inch-long metal spikes in the doorway to prevent the accumulation of non-productive human resources, whose presence might cause the price of the residence to decline and thereby contribute to a premature puncturing of the Bullingdon Bubble. Although comparatively few members of the British Neoliberal Party (even the London Haystack itself) have leapt forth to extol the virtues of this defensive decoration, surely few would deny that it epitomises the equality of opportunity which has become so rampant in modern Britain. Anyone, of whatever colour, creed or income bracket, is entitled to find the spikes as uncomfortable as they wish, should they choose to try and sleep on them.

Update It is only fair to note that the London Haystack (or, depending on the response, one of his understrappers) has now criticised the spikes as "ugly, self-defeating and stupid", thus injecting a much-needed aesthetic note into a debate which has hitherto been overly clogged with arguments merely social and humanitarian. Besides lowering property values as much, if not more, than a homeless person or a nearby windfarm, the spikes are self-defeating and stupid because the Haystack and his chums have already spent tens of millions making it difficult for the equity-disadvantaged to rest very long in one place. Doubtless all of London's hard-working home-owners will thank the Haystack for his interest in their plight.

Noble Purple

It appears that the Farage Falange is no longer content with stealing votes only from the Conservatives and the British National Party. A former leader and expenses claimant of considerable standing has written to Francis Maude at the Cabinet Office, demanding extra seats in the Lords on the grounds that the upper chamber's present composition does not reflect the Falange's share of the national vote. It is as yet unclear what the Farage Falange's former leader and expenses claimant of long standing thinks ought to happen to the bishops, given the number of votes cast for the Church of England. Anyway, the coalition agreement does in fact specify that appointments to the House of Donors "will be made with the objective of creating a second chamber that is reflective of the share of the vote secured by the political parties in the last general election." One of Francis Maude's underlings has told the Farage Falange's former leader and expenses claimant of long standing that his demands are "under consideration", which is presumably Whitehall English for go fuck a pig; and no doubt the Conservatives' coalition underlings have given their full approval to this approach. Of course there was once a time when the Deputy Conservatives claimed some vague interest in parliamentary reform; but any decision whether to leap into bed with the Farage Falange will naturally have to wait until after the next general election.

When Cynicism Strikes Again

When cynicism strikes again,
Just think upon those brave young men.

Think not of youth which fought and died
With equal zeal for the wrong side.

Nor of the older men who use
Old conflicts as today's excuse.

Victor Beach

Virtue Triumphant

Tomorrow's date looms large in Gove History™, as the seventieth anniversary of the day when Winston Churchill invaded Normandy and, with the assistance of a few Americans, commenced the liberation of Europe from some friends of Lord Rothermere. Strangely enough, not everybody sees it that way. The Germans, for example, are far more interested in the eastern front; a perverse if post-communistically excusable perspective which they share with the Russians and, in all probability, the Poles, Ukrainians and the modern Conservative Party's chums in the Latvian Waffen-SS fan club. For their own part, German chancellors have only recently started attending the D-Day celebrations ("commemorations" to lesser breeds), and have been careful to avoid any gesture which might be interpreted as honouring SS troops. Germany is a major provider of arms to Israel, the Righteous State in whose existence, as the noted historian Steven Spielberg informs us, the Holocaust is redeemed; it would be embarrassing if so ethical a connection were to be compromised by association with military aggression and racial murder.

Perhaps We Can Sell You Some Bullets?

The British Government, as we know, is more or less opposed to the death penalty. Where it cannot get a lawful detrimentation by the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club, it prefers to deport people to war-zones or have them restrained by boot-boys in the employ of G4S, rather than stringing them up on its own account. Certainly the British Government has no particular liking for countries full of dusky foreigners, more than one of them Muslim, who go around executing people without even having the courtesy to be the United States. Nevertheless, there are principles which the Government holds even more dear than the right to life of white British drug smugglers; and one of these is the contributory principle which dictates that British citizens are entitled to as much legal aid as they can pay for out of their own pockets. The co-defendants of the drug smuggler in question had access to funds and competent legal counsel, and received custodial sentences of no more than seven years; the smuggler herself, courtesy of the British Government, had no funds and received a sentence of death by firing squad. According to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's own legal counsel, "that does not mean that the appellant's individual circumstances have been ignored"; as one would expect, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office has taken the appellant's individual circumstances into account so far as making a conscious decision to do nothing about them. Doubtless the British Government deplores the death sentence for its lack of humane profitability to the likes of G4S and Serco; but given the appellant's financial state, any pretence of real disagreement would simply be a waste of resources.

Parties of God

Immigrants are partly responsible for slowing the decline in church attendance, according to the latest UK Church Statistics. Doubtless this has nothing at all to do with the purely moral decision by the Church of England to forbid its clergy membership in the British National Party, on the grounds that church doctrine on race equality contravenes the teachings of the BNP, not to mention the teachings of the Palestinian fundamentalist who called the Canaanites dogs. The Church of England has not banned its clergy from membership of the English Defence League, because the EDL lacks a formal structure, and the Church of England does not believe in discriminating against racists who lack a formal structure. Presumably on similar grounds, the Church of England has also not banned its clergy from membership of the Farage Falange. Labour and the Liberal Democrats, being nowadays largely composed of soggy Tories and unctuous hypocrites, are of course the Anglican clergy's natural political homes; membership of the brutal, greedy, corrupt and vicious Conservative Party also remains permissible, doubtless on the purely spiritual grounds that, like the Farage Falange, the Conservative Party appeals disproportionately to the same sclerotic gay-baiting blue-rinsers who are helping the immigrants clutter up the pews.

False Banners

The Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair has issued a lengthy sermon upon the subject of how the European Union needs to reform itself in order to become worthy of him. In part, of course, his reverence is simply taking advantage of Daveybloke's most recent blundering attempt to bring the Continent into step with mainland Westminster. Britain's Head Boy has been grandstanding to his UKIP wing and the good people of Newark by threatening yet another hissy-fit should the European commission end up with the wrong president. Compared with the parochial squeals of a purple-faced pipsqueak who can't even get some wogs bombed in four years of trying, even the Reverend Blair has a chance of appearing partially sane. Unfortunately, however, his reverence failed to maintain the appearance very long, and quickly reverted to his normal standard of low comedy by accusing the Farage Falange of deceiving the British public.

Cop Out

The Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club has forcibly reinstated one of its ex-members, who resigned prematurely in the face of his forthcoming exoneration by the IPCC. The officer was involved in a 2008 case in which, having responded to repeated 999 calls with near-G4S levels of efficiency, various Club members contributed to the demise-by-restraint of a black man with paranoid schizophrenia. After the traditional fashion, the IPCC's initial investigation cleared the Club of all wrongdoing; but in 2012 a coroner's court ruled that unsuitable and unnecessary force had been used, and the IPCC has been forced to try and cobble together another acquittal. Accordingly, after various hints including a threat of court action by the victim's family, the officer's resignation has been rescinded in order that he may feel the full effect of whatever line is eventually drawn under the case.