Just the Man

Britain's Head Boy has once more demonstrated that, whatever the ravages of his various holidays, that purple-jowled imitation of an imitation statesman still contains a full-blooded Bullingdon sense of humour. He has nominated Twizzler Lansley for nothing less than the role of undersecretary for humanitarian affairs at the United Nations. Lansley is the former health secretary who shovelled aside the public, the British Medical Association and the Ghost of Little Ivan™ in order to re-organise the NHS along lines suggested by private health companies and the fast food industry, and handled the public-relations aspect so charmingly that his reward was to be fired at the first opportunity and replaced with the spad-busting Murdoch drone Jeremy C Hunt.

The UN, of course, is nearly as big a thorn in the average Conservative love-handle as the EU. It is an unruly collection of foreigners which has, on occasion, had the temerity to meddle in sovereign British affairs like poor-bashing and wog disposal; so Lansley, the health minister who wanted to legislate away his office's responsibility for health, is a near-perfect choice. Whatever humanitarian projects he cannot wreck by incompetence, design or dishonesty will be more than made up for by the election-year prestige which Britain's Head Boy will gain among his back-bench baboons by this blithe trashing of the UN's restaurant. One can virtually hear the flick of the finger as the crumpled five-pound note is projected with unerring accuracy into the darkie-looking waiter's eye-socket.

The Winning Formula

The sainted Thatcher's faith in her independent nuclear deterrent did not extend to a belief in its ability to ward off a chemical attack by the evil Soviets, according to newly declassified documents. The old bag was all of a tizzy in the early 1980s when the Ministry for War and the Colonies warned her that there was no possible military response to a chemical attack other than nuclear war; the practice of issuing soldiers and useful civilians with gas masks and other protective equipment had apparently not been invented at the time. Thatcher, an industrial chemist by training, employed several varieties of slimy toxic waste in her various cabinets; and it is just possible that she was also inspired by the doings of her government's good chum and business associate, Saddam Hussein, who was deploying chemical weapons against the Great Satan of Iran and who within a few years would use them to deliver a short, sharp shock to his own enemies within. However, despite the imminent threat of Communist biochemical apocalypse, it was decided that the degree of public indoctrination required for an independent chemical deterrent would be excessive, and eventually the British government settled back into default mode and resolved to punch above its weight on the world stage by doing whatever the Americans thought best.

Organic Opportunification

That noted paragon of Conservative entrepreneurship, Michael Green, is apparently trying to break into the organ harvesting business. He is annoyed because there are "three needless deaths a day" through organ shortages, and he has decided that the more expendable among us ought to do something about it. Hence, websites used by state pension and universal credit claimants will soon be upgraded so that, even in the event of a needful death from hypothermia, malnutrition or despair, the deceased scrounger can be of some practical use, though of course only to the deserving. Perhaps some of the party's chums in the private health industry are running short of merchandise; or perhaps some of the party's more discerning donors have ordered a few sweetbreads for the trough.

Don't Lame Your Ducks Before They've Hatched

Britain's Head Boy may be in for a bit of a ticking off from his Ministry of Wogs, Frogs and Huns, where somebody has just noticed that the promised 2017 referendum on EU membership coincides with Britain's next schedued stint as EU president. Should the Deputy Conservatives retain enough seats in May to prop up the Real Conservatives through a second term, the British government could find itself chairing meetings, forging agreements and leading from the front while simultaneously planning to pick up its marbles and go home or, more likely still, running around in circles and squeaking with panic. The position is made all the more difficult by the fact that the referendum is a promise specifically designed to appease the back-bench baboons on the UKIP wing, and therefore can hardly be subject to the same convenient flexibility as promises about looking after vulnerable citizens or keeping the NHS.

Letting the Side Down Like It's 1915

More than two thousand job-stealers and cultural impurities were rescued from drowning by the Italian navy on 24-25 December. Naval personnel may have been distracted from their duty to protect Europe from invasion when a Nigerian migrant subjected them to emotional blackmail by blasphemously giving birth on the very day when the Christ-sprog dropped. Another migrant pressed his claim for sympathy so far as to be found dead, and as a result the British Home Office is expected to announce tough new rules to prevent migrants benefiting from lack of life functions. Meanwhile, during this season when the Christian tradition enjoins us to thank God it's them instead of us, we may all be proud that Britain played no part in these unhealthy shenanigans. The Italian armed forces are of course hardly famous for their moral fortitude; among next year's glorious anniversaries will be the centenary of Italy's declaration of war on its former ally, Austria-Hungary, which will doubtless be celebrated across the entire continent by gazillions of illicit wogs.

Suffer the Little Children to Drown Unto Me

Now that fans of Baby Jesus have had their fun celebrating the mewling, puking incarnation of the Almighty, perhaps we might spare a thought for one of Daddy's other little pranks, which occurred ten years ago today. The Boxing Day tsunami, which killed more than two hundred and thirty thousand people and displaced a million and a half more, was not noticeably a direct result of human error. It seems to have taken place because of a massive earthquake on the floor of the Indian Ocean, so any connection with the usual divinely-punishable forms of human sinfulness, viz. sexual freedom and refusal to recognise Baby Jesus' cultural cleansing of the Saturnalia, would appear to be tenuous at best. Knowing everything, of course, Baby Jesus' Daddy must have known from the beginning of time that the earthquake and tsunami would happen; the All-Merciful must have known about the million and a half spontaneous additions to the housing market and the two hundred and thirty thousand dead, one-third of whom were children. He must even have known about the film The Impossible, in which a family of Aryans comes through the devastation more or less intact; perhaps that above all was what persuaded him that the whole thing would be for the best.

White Christmas - Millions Panic

Fury at meteorological horror

Terror stalked the nation as the Met Office warned that parts of England could expect a white Christmas season.

In a hideous anomaly for the winter months, freezing temperatures, snow and cold weather are expected in late December.

Unusually for December in Northern Ireland, England and Wales, rain and sleet are also expected, interfering with shopping and prompting speculation that the End Times are upon us.

The Met Office also expects an 80% probability of increased efficiency savings among expendable patients and disruption to the tattered remnants of services.

A silver lining is expected to lighten the clouds of the prospective national emergency, however, as the results will likely contribute to official propaganda for the next round of cuts and privatisation.

Men of Goodwill

Britain's Head Boy has been preaching Christian values, presumably in another attempt to shore up his vote among the elderly who are more likely to be church-goers. Doubtless he also wishes to bestow spiritual reassurance upon his own back-bench baboons, who tend to favour such venerable Christian values as witch-hunting, Muslim-baiting, misogyny and slave-holding. Daveybloke burbled about the armed forces "protecting people and entire communities from the threat of terrorism and disease"; of course, the Saviour is well known for advocating the use of soldiers in all sorts of circumstances, especially when loving one's enemy. Daveybloke burbled about the volunteers and charity workers whom his administration has done so much to liberate from the ties of materialism. Daveybloke burbled about the churches opening their doors and welcoming one and all unto the spiritual supermarket; the Church of England, like Britain's Head Boy himself, has recently even gone so far as to appoint a token filly to a position of some authority.

Clegg and the Milibeing, by contrast, chose to base their seasonal platitudes around the Christmas truce, doubtless in the hope of connecting with those who vote Sainsbury's.

Panic Stations

Those of us who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 under the impression that the party had some vague interest in liberal democracy may take some bleak, vindictive consolation in the sight of the Deputy Conservative leader moving from sour sanctimony to full-fledged panic. (I almost wrote bowel-clenching panic, but of course he would need guts to suffer that.) Only twenty-three per cent of Clegg's constituents voted Conservative four and a half years ago, so Clegg's enthusiastic support for a hard-right, corporate-fundamentalist administration of sniggering schoolboys, gormless grotesques and beady-eyed psychopaths must have come as a bit of a shock for the fifty-three per cent who voted Liberal Democrat. The Labour candidate has been running an energetic campaign, and at present the two parties are neck and neck in the polls; so Clegg has been taking two days a week away from his poodling duties at Westminster in order to renew his vows with the electorate. Labour has neither confirmed nor denied that it is making a special effort to unseat him; indeed, one could argue that in the event of another hung parliament Labour would find it easier to use Clegg than anyone unduly afflicted with either principles or popularity.

Not Very Bright

Local authorities are turning off streetlights in order to save money. The shadow Minister for Being the Son of a Former Minister, Hilary Benn, has proclaimed that "significant areas of Britain have been plunged into darkness since May 2010", thanks to councils dimming lights or turning them off altogether. The culprits are mostly Conservative councils, who are presumably a bit less inclined to worry about little things like whether the streets are safe to walk after office hours, because for truly hard-working families there is no such bureaucratic limitation as office hours: one is working, or working from home, or in the car, or tucked up in bed and dreaming virtuous, entrepreneurial dreams.

The Secretary for Community Atomisation and Social Cleansing, Eric Pickles, had a blather earlier this year about the wonders of keeping everything dark at night. Aside from the supreme advantage of giving Eric Pickles a good night's sleep, the measure also cut crime because burglars enjoy being lit up at work. Unfortunately, the burglars did not agree, and some weeks later the police demanded that the lights be switched back on.

Thank You For Dialling 999

click
prrrrrrrrrrrrrr
beep beep beep beep beep beep
click
(Twenty seconds of electronically-enhanced non-copyright music)
click

"Good morning, customer. Thank you for dialling 999. You have been transferred to NHS England Rapid Dispatch brought to you by NHS England in partnership with Serco, BAE and Macdonald's. If you or a member of your family has a life-threatening condition, our aim is to help with prompt and appropriately targeted ambulance responsivity solutions. Please help us to personalise our response to your needs in accordance with the appropriate response to your needs. If you are calling about a life-threatening condition which will probably not be fatal for twenty minutes or more, please press 1. If you are calling about a life-threatening condition which will probably not be fatal for between ten and nineteen minutes, please press 2. If you are calling about a life-threatening condition which will most likely be fatal in the next nine minutes, please press 3. For shareholder information, including how to invest in Britain's health, please press 4. To hear about our exciting range of ambulance responsivity related products, please press 5. Please answer correctly and be prepared to back up your choice with the appropriate documentation, otherwise you may be liable to withdrawal of services and a fine of up to £400 in addition to any prescription charges. To hear these options again, please press the hash key. Thank you for telling us about your life-threatening condition and thank you for calling NHS England Rapid Dispatch."

click

Sheep Among Wolves

Francis of Assisi, from whom the present pope derives his paponym, was naïve enough to take literally the Saviour's words about wandering around without money or a change of clothes, preaching the gospel and taking meek comfort in the belief that anyone who didn't listen would bring down upon their city a fate worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah. The present-day Franciscan Order is a rather different proposition, like most mainstream Christians who for many centuries have recognised the Saviour's recommendations on poverty as the heretical interpolations they are. Hence the slight embarrassment of an open letter by the Order's minister general, which discloses “grave, and I underscore ‘grave’ financial difficulty” as a result of weak or compromised systems of fiscal oversight. The responsibility, as always, lies outside the Church, with questionable activities by people who are not Franciscan; doubtless this explains the apparent lack of joy at the Order's imminent return to its original values.

Motor Mouths

The Caudillo of the Farage Falange has expressed concern that the robust British sense of humour is being eaten away by battalions of laughter-challenged wogs, chinks, ting-tongs, gippos, pakis and poofters. The Caudillo was having a bit of a blather on LBC radio, about one of the latest candidates to resign from the party after using racist language. The Farage Falange is a non-racist party where racists are not allowed, and the Caudillo pointed out that this particular candidate was raised on a council estate: the kind of place where, in the Caudilo's experience, most people talk like that, though entirely without the sort of malice that invariably characterises the politically-correct brigade.

The Caudillo also claimed that he was joking when he blamed immigrants for the motorway congestion that supposedly prevented his attending a recent rally. "No one's got a sense of humour any more," lamented the Caudillo, whose standard mode of discourse is, of course, a perpetual model of well-considered sobriety. Regrettably, the Caudillo does not appear to have offered similar clarification for any of his other public statements, many of which are almost as sensible as the motorway joke or the Falange's 2010 manifesto.

Court Case Threat to Reckless Rat

If further proof were needed of the perils of unrestricted immigration, one of the recent migrants to the Farage Falange is being sued by his former compatriots in the Real Conservative Party. Mark Reckless, the Falange's Sub-caudillo for the white-van constituency of Rochester and Strood, defected along with his chief salesbeing without troubling to save his ex-colleagues the expense of printing propaganda with his name on it. This must be all the more galling since the pledges and policies would have been almost entirely indistinguishable; the major difference between a Real Conservative election leaflet and a screed from the Farage Falange is that the former uses more cyan and the latter more magenta. It's the toner, not the tone.

Anyway, the parlous financial position of the Real Conservative Party, with all those bankers and arms dealers still begging in the street and quite unable to help, means that indigenous Rochester and Strooders have been delving into their pockets to print propaganda for what turned out to be the wrong Mark Reckless. Accordingly, and in keeping with the principles of Osbornomic fiscal probity, the local party plans to spend more money on a lawsuit unless Reckless hands back £3000, or about one-fifth of the going price for sharing a trough with a cabinet minister. No doubt the Ministry of Justice will be more than happy to help: why, if not for such deserving cases as this, was Legal Aid ever invented?

Targeting Resources

The Bullingdon Club has managed the remarkable achievement of being too callous for Eric Pickles. A squabble has apparently broken out between the Treasury and Pickles' Ministry for Atomisation and Social Cleansing, over the former's proposed removal of local welfare assistance. Not only is this fund designed to provide emergency help for people on low incomes; it has the additional character flaw of being administered by local authorities. Evidently even Eric Pickles is not too thick-headed to be concerned for his place at the trough after the next general election; and Osborne's little orange fag Danny Alexander has been squeaking a bit as well. Both of them want to keep the fund going with £70 million of ringfenced money; but the chancellor has other ideas of how best to court the white working class. Along with the bingo and beer, he has pledged fifty million in an effort to make the England football team slightly less hopeless.

Quintet

Robert Altman 1979

Quintet is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film in which futuristic style and advanced technology are distinguished by their absence; in fact, the beards, long clothes and large hats worn by many of the characters suggest the denizens of a corrupt and muddy mediaeval city-state. Appearing at the end of the decade in which Altman made his name with crowded, expansive satirical comedies like M*A*S*H and A Wedding, Quintet is slow, grim, taciturn and, for the most part, closed in not only by the walls of its crumbling citadel, but by misty-edged framing which makes the interior scenes appear as if through goggles imperfectly cleared of condensation. It is a film about a game, in which the wife of a losing player calmly and deliberately fries her own hand on a stove, and in which the only playful character becomes collateral damage thirty minutes in.

Essex (Paul Newman) and his young, pregnant wife Vivia (Brigitte Fossey) struggle across a frozen desert to the dying city, where a bullet train stands half buried in snow and where the dead are disposed of by leaving their bodies for packs of rottweilers. Society is dominated by the game of quintet, which seems to be popular everywhere since even Vivia, a seal-hunter's daughter who has never seen the city, knows how to play it. The game involves five players who sit around a pentagonal board, and a "sixth man" who sits out and manipulates the game before playing against the winner of the five. The board includes a region known as "limbo", and players who are knocked out are said to be "killed". It quickly becomes apparent that the city's elite quintet players, under the guidance of the affable adjudicator Grigor (Fernando Rey), have taken matters to an unpleasantly literal level.

One of the players, St Christopher (Vittorio Gassman) runs a charity mission where he delivers a sermon on the five ages of man, from the pain of birth to the finality of death, bounded by a sixth space which comprises the horror of nothingness. Humanity is dying out: Vivia is the youngest person and the only pregnant woman to appear in the city for as long as Essex' brother Francha and his friends can remember. She is promptly killed in a cowardly, indiscriminate bomb attack aimed at Francha, who has been selected for the regular quintet tournament in which the city is the game board and the killing is real. Although the film almost entirely avoids non-devious displays of emotion, Altman makes a poignant scene of Vivia's brief, wordless funeral in an icy, rushing river.

Taking on the identity of Redstone, another early loser in the tournament, Essex moves among the players and gradually comprehends the nature of what is possibly the last human society in the world. Confronting Grigor with the corpse of the runner-up, Essex discovers that, as St Christopher preached, the game is a reflection of the universe, in which the only possible prize is living to play again tomorrow. Like every other optimist before him, Grigor smiles and invites further play, while delicately shielding his nose from the stink of burning flesh.

Quintet was not a success either commercially or critically, and apparently remains largely unloved. I first saw it on television when I was far too young to understand it, and found it genuinely haunting. Between that first viewing and the next, many years later, I had few concrete recollections except for the opening sequence of Essex and Vivia tramping through the wilderness of the new ice age; but the chilly, murky atmosphere and the enigmatic game full of hidden, deadly meanings (although all the characters can play quintet, its rules are never fully explained to the viewer) have clung to me for decades.

Seventh Smackdown for Serial Offender

Chris Graybeing, the Lord Chancellor and Minister for Justice and Heterosexual Hostelry, has suffered a seventh defeat by the hotbed of wishy-washy leftism that is the British legal system. Graybeing's latest glory concerns legal aid funding for people fighting deportation; as we know, deportation is always justified because it is usually done to immigrants. Nevertheless, Graybeing's guidance on the matter has been ruled unlawful under the hated European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees fair trials, family life and other privileges of Britishness to billions upon billions of wogs, woggettes, woglings and wog-marriers. The palpable insanity of the situation would be enough to break a lesser man, granting the purely logical possibility that a lesser man than Graybeing exists; and Graybeing himself, of course, has also been victimised by a conspiracy of lawyers, charities, NGOs, the Labour Party and, by no means least, his own formidable depths of competence. Fortunately, it appears that his general intelligence is fully the equal of his legal expertise, so presumably he remains blissfully unaware of his abjection.

Traditional Values

As Daveybloke's Minister for Wog-Bombing dips another few toes into the Iraq quagmire, the Government's fellow warriors for democracy in the Middle East are having a bit of female trouble. A woman has been detained for car-driving, face-showing and generally undermining the social cohesion of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; normally these acts of justice last for a few days, but Loujain al-Halthloul's detention has been arbitrarily extended by nearly a month. She was participating in a campaign against some of the country's more ridiculous laws, and the spectacle of females driving automobiles has caused much the same sort of panic among Daveybloke's Saudi chums as the spectre of equal rights tends to cause in the British Conservative Party. No doubt the British Government will be having forthright words with the Saudi theocracy on how the UK's weapons exports might best be used in defence of those inclusive, tolerant and peaceful values which Britain's Head Boy learned at Auschwitz the other day.

Filaments

A Fairy-Tale

There was once a boy whose hair grew so fast that by the time he learned to walk his head seemed twice the width of his shoulders. His parents did their best to control it, with scissors and shears and eventually a lawn-mower; but the hair always grew back, forming a near-perfect sphere marred only by the boy's face beneath it, like a lump of grey meat thrown under a well-clipped hedge.

The boy's hair continued to grow, at a uniform if prodigious rate, and with every month that went by less and less of his face could be seen, until finally it disappeared completely. One day, when his father was chopping away at the undergrowth so that the boy could be fed, he discovered that the face seemed a bit smaller than before. At first the father thought that the face appeared smaller because of the massive shock of hair surrounding it; but further application of the lawn-mower left no doubt. The boy's face, which had once been normally proportioned, was now barely wider than the top of his neck. The boy's parents marvelled at this, but the hair soon grew back and covered the face again, and they quickly forgot about it.

A few months later, the boy began to have strange seizures, when he would suddenly fall to the floor and thrash about uncontrollably, flailing his limbs and emitting terrible cries. His parents took him to a doctor, who had to cut away half a mattress-full before he could examine the surface of the boy's head. What he discovered was rather interesting: as well as growing out, the hair was also growing inward. The inward growth had so far been inhibited by the hardness of the skull, but over the years a few strands had penetrated the cranium and were now tickling the surface of the boy's brain. Whenever the brain convulsed from the tickling, the boy would suffer a seizure, and the doctor warned that the seizures would happen more and more frequently now that the skull had been breached. He advised the parents to keep the boy confined until the head and brain had been entirely consumed, whereupon hopefully there would be no more trouble.

So the father pounded an iron stake into the middle of the lawn, and built a rockery around it so that the neighbours wouldn't complain. Then he locked an iron fetter around the boy's ankle, since his neck could not be found, and attached an iron chain to the fetter, and fastened the other end of the chain to the stake. Whenever the boy had a seizure, the chain would rattle and chips would fly from the rockery, but the neighbours never complained because their own children found it all very edifying.

Gradually the seizures became less severe and the noises less disturbing, but something new and strange began to happen instead. The boy became gradually thinner and less substantial, until sometimes the parents could have sworn he was so light as to float above the ground. Of course they had long since given up feeding him, since neither jaws nor teeth could be found within the great globe of hair; but they had not expected him to become airborne as a result. Nevertheless, that is exactly what happened. Within a few weeks the boy would float above the house at the first sign of a moderately strong wind, and after three months the father could not haul him down for the night. The chain stretched and strained, creaking and nagging, and the boy floated in the sky like a mutant dandelion, whose seeds had somehow dragged their withered stem into the air with them.

One night the parents were woken by the sound of the chain falling onto the rockery. The boy was not on the end of it. The father said the links must have rusted, or the boy's leg must have become too thin for the fetter. The mother said the boy must have grown so light that the chain could not hold him; and through all her remaining years, every time a cloud paused above the house, she would swear it was shot through with fine filaments that grew ever longer, ever thinner, ever darker.

Other Incidental Costs

Three members of the energy cartel have been fined the equivalent of a week's power lunches for failing to meet their obligations in cutting household bills. The fines, totalling £4.6 million across three companies, will be paid to various worthy causes which the Government cannot be bothered to fund directly. The regulator's senior enforcer said that the fines send "a clear message to the energy industry that late delivery of obligations is unacceptable"; in fact, they send a clear message that late delivery of obligations can be paid off by dropping a few crumbs to charity. It is as yet unclear whether the energy cartel will recoup its costs by slashing salaries or sacking staff; but the power lunches are undoubtedly safe.

It Must Never Happen Again, Except to the Scroungers

Evidently Lynton Crosby has informed Britain's Head Boy that Little Ivan's corpse is looking a bit mouldy these days. In search of an alternative source of dead children to climb over, Daveybloke toddled off for a quick ninety minutes in Auschwitz yesterday, and no doubt learned some important lessons. Foremost among them, of course, will be the little matter of who won the war; but Daveybloke will certainly have drawn moral instruction on the need for tighter immigration controls and the deplorable excess of disposable income among the poor and disabled, because that is the sort of moral instruction which Daveybloke draws in most contexts. It is to be hoped that Daveybloke was tactful enough not to make an offer on behalf of Serco or G4S, and that somebody was on hand to translate the slogan Arbeit Macht Frei into a proper language and give him the chance of a quick snigger at the gates.

His conclusion, once he had lit a candle and had a bit of a simper in the book of remembrance, was that "the UK must fight against prejudice, persecution, anti-Semitism and tyranny wherever we find it and stand up for inclusiveness, tolerance and peace", presumably by cuddling up to the Latvian Waffen-SS fan club, helping dictators with their domestic problems and arming Israel to the teeth. A commission has already been set up to decide how Britain should remember the Holocaust and whether it is worth bothering to recall those who ended up in the camps simply because they were not wealthy enough to become legal immigrants elsewhere. The commission will announce its proposals to coincide with the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Winston Churchill and Lord Rothermere; it is unclear how much mention will be given to the minor contribution made by the Red Army.

Fury at Muslim Horror

British taxpayer subsidises Nobel giveaway

All three of Britain's major political parties were incandescent with fury today as a female Muslim refugee deprived ordinary hard-working Britons of their share in the Nobel Peace Prize.

"I am incandescent with fury today," said Aubrey Whinge, prospective UKIP candidate for the Tory seat of Gusset and Fudgetunnel.

"Modern Britain is full of ordinary working people who work hard and want to get on, and yet nobody is allowed to say anything about it."

The Prime Minister was having a working brunch at Auschwitz with representatives of G4S and US intelligence, but a spokesbeing for 10 Downing Street said that he shared the incandescent fury of ordinary hard-working Britons.

Ed Milibeing was incandescent with fury, and said that his heart fibrillated with adoration whenever an ordinary hard-working Briton waved a flag.

Despite claiming to be fond of mathematical formulas, workfare-age Malala Yousafzai was unable to give any coherent explanation of why she is not yet putting something back into the British economy by working in a shop.

Yousafzai's attitude towards traditional educational values provoked use of enhanced chastisement methods by the Taliban in 2012.

Her hospital treatment at the expense of the British taxpayer provoked controversy, but in its own defence the Government has pointed out that she was taken to a Birmingham hospital rather than a real one in London.

Forgive, O Lord, Our Excess of Virtuous Contrition

Our nation, born of genocide,
In slaves and conquest takes its pride;
From then till now, warfare's the thing,
With due "enhancéd questioning" -
Unless the thought perchance occur
That it's American to err.

But now, thank God! we're done with such,
And swear henceforth, however much
Of baring tortured soul it takes,
We shall be kind to our mistakes.
Forgiveness now must be our text
When next we err, and next, and next.

Trapper Clapper

Then They Came for the Judicial Review, and There Was Nobody Left to Pander To

The Deputy Conservatives would not follow the Conservatives' ideological path of shrinking the state even when there is nothing to be shrunk, according to George Osborne's little orange fag. Having spent much of the present Parliament pandering to the Conservatives before the advent of Nick Clegg's pre-election panic, Osborne's little orange fag accused the Conservatives of pandering to UKIP in a pre-election panic. The Conservatives would like to go on cutting and privatising even after the structural deficit is no longer there to serve as an excuse, however paltry; the Deputy Conservatives, by contrast, believe that some of the vandalism should probably be slowed down to some extent within at least a year or two of there being nothing left. Osborne's little orange fag, whose party voted through the benefits cuts, the sanctions regime, the bedroom tax, the Health and Social Care Act and the abolition of legal aid, is worried that the Conservatives may inflict "unnecessary pain" on the country if they continue doing exactly what they've been doing all this time with the Deputy Conservatives' enthusiastic connivance. Both the Conservatives and the Deputy Conservatives agree that the deficit should be eliminated by 2017-18, although it is not as yet known whether this estimate is as reliable as their previous estimate that the deficit would be eliminated by 2014-15.

We Three Kings

A report into food poverty has been shrugged off in expectable fashion by the Conservatives, and leapt on with predictable desperation by the bandwagon-hopping leader of the Deputy Conservatives.

The report suggests that ministers, the voluntary sector, the Church and other commercial concerns might be able to do a bit more to relieve food poverty. Damian Green, formerly a minion of the mad old cat lady in the Ministry for Snoopery and Prole Control, squealed that the whole thing was a Socialist plot to nationalise food banks and compel the taxpayer to spend more on welfare. When faced with the possibility of less malnutrition in the world's seventh-largest economy, Green said, "I'm not quite sure what the additional value is."

Matthew Hancock recited Lord Freud's theory that food banks are only being used because people know about them and enjoy a free lunch. The only solution to poverty, proclaimed Hancock (formerly of Oxford, the family business and the Bank of England), is good honest labour, whether or not it pays a living wage; and since there are more people than ever now on workfare and zero-hours contracts, it stands to reason that poverty must be coming down whether or not people are getting less poor.

Nick Clegg, attempting to distance himself from the measures his party has supported with remarkable unanimity all through the present Parliament, said that some of the problem might be alleviated by cutting benefits after one or two warnings. I smell something there, but I'm not sure it's votes.

Boats for Bankers

Thanks to the ongoing Osbornomic miracle, Britain is booming so loudly that it can afford to recommence empire-building in the Middle East. The authorities in Bahrain, whose record on democracy and human rights has much of the flexibility and force which Whitehall is denied by the nitpickings of meddlesome Euro-woggery, have agreed to subsidise the construction of a Royal Navy base, the permanent costs of which will be borne by the ever-obliging wartime British taxpayer. A suitful of stale air at the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has been babbling about expanding thirty-year footprints, and the Minister for Wog-Bombing has been trumpeting that Britain is now in the Gulf for the long term, where it can keep an eye on the mad mullahs while stomping Johnny Isis into line. All in all, this policy seems a healthy contrast to our previous long-term presence in the Middle East, which resulted in the rise of Johnny Isis and helped to get the mad mullahs thinking that they might require a nuclear deterrent.

Party Animals

Three years ago the coalition pledged to outlaw the use of wild animals in circuses, and as recently as April Britain's Head Boy told Animal Defenders International, "Yes, we are going to do it." Naturally, they haven't done it: the relevant bill has been repeatedly held up by three of Daveybloke's back-bench baboons: Andrew Rosindell, Philip Davies and Christopher Chope, whose respect for democratic process has been noted by your correspondent before. Rosindell argued that it would be wrong and cruel to remove the animals from the servitude to which they are accustomed; much as Rosindell's political ancestors no doubt argued against universal suffrage and the ending of the slave trade. A spokesbeing for the Department of Fracking (DeFra) said that the law would be passed "when parliamentary time allows"; the present parliament has a six-month general election campaign to run, so there is very little time left over for fripperies like legislation, particularly on animal welfare. Of course, from fox-hunting to pheasant-shooting and from badger-gassing to migrant-bashing, cruelty to the lower forms is as Tory a pastime as one could wish to imagine; and rare indeed is the Conservative MP which did not spend some idyllic portion of its youth pulling the wings off flies or granting unsolicited sexual favours at the queue for the local abattoir.

A Lucky Escape

This year sees the centenary of the notorious Christmas truce, when soldiers on opposite sides of the developing Great War climbed out of their trenches and started fraternising; and the bemused reaction of one general has been preserved in a letter written to his wife. Sir Walter Congreve was a fighting officer who won the VC in the Boer War and lost his left hand in battle in 1915, but faced with a temporary peace among the commoners his courage apparently failed: he declined to show himself during the truce in case the Germans took a pot-shot at him. The brass, of course, learned the necessary lessons and resolved Never Again, even though the participants dutifully started killing each other again on Boxing Day; and the final transformation of the incident into advertising kitsch has recently been accomplished through the good offices of J Sainsbury plc.

A Grievous Prospect

Dominic Grieve, whom Britain's Head Boy recently booted out of the prefects' common room for not being right-wing enough, has apparently just realised which party he has been living in for all these years, and it seems to have come as a bit of a shock. In a speech at my own alma mater, University College London, the former attorney general accused the Government of operating a faith-based policy with regard to putting the Euro-wogs in their place. Grieve pointed out that withdrawal from the European convention on human rights would call into question the devolution settlements for Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland; although the obvious unionist solution to the dilemma (abolishing devolution and re-uniting the Kingdom, while incidentally giving all those unemployed soldiers something useful to do) does not seem to have occurred to him. Grieve is pained "as a Conservative" because the coalition's excuses for its own human rights violations are being appropriated by a lot of greasy foreigners; and he even claimed that a document drawn up by the notoriously reality-based Chris Graybeing may be somewhat to the right of the facts. Well, of all the cheek.

Interview in a Small Room

"Why did you do it, Mary? Can you tell me that?"
"It seemed the most humane way. Sleeping pills and gas. They just dropped off. I carried them up to the bedroom and they never knew a thing."
"We did everything we could to resuscitate them. Your daughter responded briefly, but unfortunately - "
"You should have left her alone. You should have left all of us alone."
"Why did you do it, though?"
"To spare them worse. And me, too. It seemed just as well to get it over with while things are still more or less civilised."
"You mean your ex-husband, the divorce?"
"Don't be bloody ridiculous. I mean our civilisation. The climate's changing, or hadn't you heard? In a few decades, perhaps a few years, life won't be worth living."
"There are still some scientists who don't believe the climate really is changing, you know. Even if it is changing, there are plenty of people who don't think it'll be all that harmful."
"Well then, let's just say I made a judgement call."
"Do you really think that judgement was yours to make, Mary? We can't dictate the value of other people's lives."
"Remember that man who poured petrol over himself and struck a match outside the Employment Emporium the other week? Burned himself so badly that his insurance barely covered the costs. Do you know what happend to him?"
"They managed to identify him by his dental work. Once his record came up and it was clear he was insured for life-saving measures, he was taken to hospital and treated."
"And died anyway, after three days of agony."
"I'm sure they tried their best. What's your point, Mary?"
"My point is just that, Doctor: they tried their best. He was a hopeless case, not only financially but medically too; but still they tried to save him, and in doing so they inflicted on him seventy hours of excruciating pain. Weren't they setting a value on his life - a quite different value, incidentally, to the value he set on it himself?"
"You can't equate the actions of the medical profession with what you've done. It just isn't the same."
"You're damn right it isn't the same. I prevented pain; they prolonged pain, just as you and your people have prolonged my pain by resuscitating me."
"We can't value life by how much fun or pain there is in it, Mary."
"You can and you do. The question is simply whose pain and whose fun - yours or someone else's? Dragging a suicide back from the brink to face an infanticide trial - don't tell me that isn't fun of a sort. If you didn't enjoy it on your own account, just think of the bigger picture - the media, the public interest, the miniseries next year - "
"So you do think we'll be around next year? And watching TV?"
"Still here, and still getting worse. A little narrower, a little nastier, a little poorer, a little more brutish. Then eventually the collapse - war, starvation, slavery, rape and all the usual - and after that probably extinction. The climate will keep changing, you know; even if we were to stop all pollution tomorrow, we'd still have the worst ahead."
"And you killed your children to spare them that."
"I did."
"And nothing can bring them back."
"...Nothing. Yes."
"And now that you have done this terrible, irreversible thing, Mary - what will you do if civilisation doesn't end?"
"Do you have children, Doctor?"
"Yes."
"Do you love them?"
"Yes."
"What will you do when it does?"

Foreigners, Look Out

Britain's most senior female police officer, Cressida Dick, has had her CV printed in Britain's leading liberal newspaper under the rubric of journalism. Cressida Dick will be giving up her membership of the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club in order to join the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns. The spawn of two Oxford academics, Dick went to both Oxford and Cambridge and subsequently rose rapidly through the ranks of the police force on merit alone. She was the officer in charge of the operation which ended in the killing and systematic defamation of Jean Charles de Menezes; a jury was denied the option of returning a verdict of unlawful killing and so returned an open verdict and thereby, in the opinion of Britain's leading liberal newspaper, cleared Dick of any blame in the matter. As a mark of respect to de Menezes' loved ones, Dick was quickly promoted to counter-terrorism chief; a job she did so well that, in the opinion of Britain's leading liberal newspaper and the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club, the country now faces its most serious terror threat in years.