The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Sick Wogs Cough Up

Now that the Health and Social Care Act has had time to bed in and efficientise the NHS, the Minister for Health and News Corporation is naturally looking for new ways to ensure that the working conditions are appropriately Chinese. Since the Government is far more interested in wog-bashing than in public health, it was only a matter of time before medical professionals were conscripted into the border police; and the Department for Profitable Healthcare is now considering whether non-whites and people with funny names should be required to produce either a certificate of insurance or a credit card before being given treatment. A spokesbeing for the ministry gave due assurance that no-one would be denied urgent treatment and that "vulnerable groups" would be exempt from charging until they could be duly demonised. Then again, the spokesbeing also proclaimed that the NHS was paid for by "families living in the UK" rather than by taxpayers generally: a rather significant accounting error which, along with the thirty-year drive to privatise, may possibly help to explain the present financial shortfall.

Friday, October 30, 2015

Backward Nations

Despite the example set by Britain, it appears there are parts of the world which still have not learned the lessons of modernity. One such is Tanzania, where the government has appropriated public money that could be spent on bankers and strangely-shaped buildings, and is throwing it at an initiative to condemn the population to solar energy. Of course, Tanzania has rather an abundance of sunshine, which presumably helped to suggest this rather simple-minded solution to the climate and energy crises. It is unfortunate that we on the mainland have no sunlight at all, or even any corresponding advantage in wind or waves, and thus have to go cap in hand to China and beg for initiation into the mysteries of sustainable uranium.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Marketed Forces

Ostentatious wealth, lack of social mobility, institutionalised sexism and a robust belief in the moral value of punishment are not the only things Arab states have in common with the British Conservative Party, according to a report by Transparency International. All seventeen of the governments surveyed are characterised by secrecy and nepotism, with networks based on family ties and the use of powerful agencies as personal fiefdoms. "Corruption contributes to instability and creates insecurity," lectured the director of Transparency International's Defence and Security Programme sternly. Indeed, from the way some people carry on it might almost be thought that there were profits to be made from war. In the gloriously-democratised Iraq, you can buy a divisional command for £1.3 million, which is just about the way things worked in the British army during the pre-Crimean Golden Age to which the Bullingdon Club seeks to return us. In the case of Britain's biggest weapons market, Saudi Arabia, the government does not even bother to report the amounts it spends, which represents a distinct civilisational advance over the traditional and cumbersome Whitehall method of lying and then being found out.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Charity Shouldn't Be Free

Contributors to food banks will no doubt be delighted to learn that the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith has plans to conscript their charity into the Department of Workfare and Privation. It is of course vital that food banks become accepted as a necessary, permanent and tax-free feature of the incentivisation landscape, thus freeing up more public money for the Government to spend on hospitals, schools and infrastructure, as the Bullingdon Club has been simply itching to do all these years. Accordingly, agents of the Idleness Police are to be posted at food banks in order to provide motivation, mark down proles who seem to be gaining weight without permission, and generally ensure that there is no escape for skivers attempting to dodge the shrapnel from the Duncan Smith benevolence bomb.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Fracking Democracy

In light of the recent defeat in the Lords, which has wantonly delayed the tax credit cuts that would have brought joyous Christmas incentivisation to millions of hard-working families, the Bullingdon Club is taking no chances with regard to other measures designed to comfort and protect the vulnerable, the disenfranchised, the poor and the persecuted. I refer of course to fracking companies, whose interests are being delicately nurtured through the cruel whims of Westminster by the Clegg-pledging Amber Rudd, token filly at the Department of Energy. Given the clear and present dangers inherent in debate, the plotted new measures to allow frackers to drill under protected areas will not be discussed in the Commons but will be rubber-stamped by a committee of eighteen MPs. In the interests of democracy, a majority of the members are Conservatives; and in the interests of disinterested judgement, none of the members are from the constituencies whose voters will be placed at risk of environmental vandalism, poisoned water supplies or occasional earthquakes. One member's local association received £5000 from a company which hopes to benefit from fracking; fortunately, the donation from a would-be fracking profiteer to a pro-fracking MP had absolutely nothing to do with anything at all, and was intended purely as a tribute to the said member's honesty, integrity and personal charm.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Securing the Future

The granny-bashing component of the Conservatives' long-term economic plan is more or less on schedule, according to an actuarial firm which has been investigating the machinations of the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith. The new universal state pension, which the Department of Workfare and Privation claims is so simple that even Duncan Smith can almost understand it, is expected to leave most workers worse off in the long term, with the most undeserving skivers set to lose as much as £20,000. Fortunately, the long term is also the period of time over which most of the Conservatives' present wrinkly vote will die off; hence the planned Great Daveymander to ensure the continued safety of British democracy in their absence.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Then Imitate the Action of the Vassal

Hard-working taxpayers awaiting their Yuletide notice of the cuts to their tax credits will be delighted to learn that Britain's Head Boy spent a hundred thousand of their money attending the funeral of a head-chopping, limb-lopping Islamic fundamentalist. The cost of Daveybloke's trip to Saudi Arabia was seven and a half times that of a trip to Australia two months before, doubtless because the aeroplane was weighed down by concerns over human rights. Fortunately, as we all know, the Bullingdons have saved the taxpayer far more than a hundred thousand by removing subsidies for clean energy, thus ensuring a gold-plated economic justification for grovelling to human rights abusers who can cook the climate and irradiate the countryside.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Constitutionally Incapable

Britain's Head Boy, who refused to attempt reform of the Lords and then crammed it with his own chums at the first opportunity, wants to re-jig the electoral system so that it's fairer to people like him. As a preliminary to this exercise in enfranchisement efficientisation, the Government wants to delete about two million unworthies and undeservings from the electoral register, and has now decided to do it a year early so that any elections which crop up next May will take place under a less iniquitous system than the one which has kept Britain's Head Boy in office. However, the Electoral Commission has flagrantly undermined British democracy by advising the House of Donors to block the Great Daveymander for now, apparently on the grounds that our thousand-year fudge is too fragile to withstand the whims of a few middle-aged schoolboys in a hurry. Of course, since the Electoral Commission has not yet been privatised, its conclusions are by definition flawed by red tape, human rights and Trotsko-Stakhanovite ideological bias.

Friday, October 23, 2015

English Poppies for English Heroes

With the usual superb timing, the powers that be have proclaimed an alteration to the Victory Day ceremonies on Opiate Sunday next month, and have chosen the day after the House of Claimants' vote on Chris Graybeing's fuck-you-Jocks amendment to the constitution to proclaim it. The change will mean that Britain's Head Boy gets to lay his wreath separately from all the other political leaders and Tim Farron, who will be relegated to their proper status as afterthoughts. Ever perspicacious, Downing Street is thought to be mulling the question of whether this may be seen as giving the appearance that Whitehall is "handing the Prime Minister an enhanced role", whereas of course, as the rich-born scion of a hard-working tax-dodging expert, Daveybloke will merely be assuming his proper place as the equal of Royalty.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Protocols of the Elders of Mecca

German politicians and pundits have been busy slapping down a noted war criminal for trying to re-write the history of the Holocaust. The prime minister of the Righteous State has preceded a trip to Berlin with a lecture about an alternate history in which Hitler had no thought of gassing the Jews before 1941, when a Palestinian put the idea into his head. It is certainly true that the Nazis considered exiling Europe's Jews, with Madagascar a possible candidate for the resulting influx of migrants; but in the history of the present planet the idea was abandoned on economic and pragmatic grounds, probably without assistance from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, with Victory Fortnight and its Poppy Day orgasm nearly upon us, there can be little doubt that, if he could only find a way of blaming the Palestinians for the Amritsar Massacre or one or two Bloody Sundays, the prime minister of the Righteous State would meet a far more hospitable reception here in the land of Mad Tessie May and the Rothermere Daily Stürmer.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Criminal Enterprise

Hard-working taxpayers will be happy to learn that the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration has been saving money in the usual Whitehall fashion, by splurging a million or so in benefits for those charming Serco people to run an empty children's prison. Hassockfield, a "training centre" where Serco's illegal use of force contributed to the suicide of a fourteen-year-old, was for most intents and purposes closed last November, when the last dysfunctional infantine resource was ejected. Nevertheless, the Government was compassionate enough to realise the hardship Serco has suffered since its payments for tracking the movements of dead people were withdrawn, and the company continued running the site for the noble intent and purpose of having money thrown at it.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Healthy Profits

Overworked junior doctors and foodbank-frequenting student nurses will be gladdened at the news that Twizzler Lansley is unlikely to become destitute in the near future. The appointed salesman for the 2012 anti-NHS act has been out of a real job (viz. has been Leader of the House of Commons) since Britain's Head Boy, in a hilarious Bullingdon yah-boo towards the BMA, replaced him with Jeremy C Hunt. Daveybloke did try to fob the Twizzler off on the United Nations earlier this year, but for some inexplicable foreign reason the UN secretary general preferred an under-secretary for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief who had some vague inklings of experience in the field of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief. Despite his well-known affinities for the fast-food industry and obvious intellectual capacity for flipping burgers, the Twizzler will be advising private healthcare companies and working for his wife's public-relations firm. Naturally Lansley, whose love for the Britain he helped create is so profound that he intends moving to New York at the first opportunity, is bound by his honour as a politician not to make use of any privileged information which he may inadvertently have overheard during his escapade at the Department of Health. After all, Britain's Head Boy has pledged to close the revolving door between Westminster and the private-sector gravy train, and we wouldn't want that pledge to go the same way as his pledges on the deficit, the NHS, Leveson and tax credits; at least not until the electoral process has been properly gerrymandered.

Monday, October 19, 2015

A Cleaner Mañana

A mere half-century after making a radioactive mess in south-easten Spain, the World Cop has finally condescended to clean up the damage. A B-52 carrying four weapons of mass destruction crashed after a mid-air collision in 1966, forcing Franco's minister of tourism into a horrifying, moob-waggling photo-opportunity with the US ambassador in order to show that the radiation was harmless. The minister of tourism died at the age of seventy-nine, having conveniently mutated into a democrat once the Caudillo went to his reward. Since President Obama has recently ordered the Spaniards to keep on electing radioactive waste as their government, it seems only fair to balance things up a bit; especially as the US plans to increase its military presence at both Rota near Cádiz, and at the charmingly-named Morón.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Origin of Britishness

Fury at grunting ignorance deficit

A tough but fair policy on migrant issues by the Neanderthals may have delayed the emergence of Britishness by up to 35,000 years, according to anthropologists.

Teeth found in a Chinese cave indicate that specimens of Homo sapiens ipsedixit spread across Asia without apparent difficulty, which may have fostered the evolutionary complacency that eventually led to their development into the Heathen Chinee.

Far greater difficulty was encountered by those heading north, who were met by Neanderthals who "were not grunting, ignorant cavemen" but nevertheless apparently considered themselves the indigenous population.

It is possible that violence was not used and that, like many primitive and unsophisticated races, the Neanderthals relied on a hostile environment to keep the intruders at bay.

However, climate change resulted in a decline in population and Europe was taken over by hard-working families who worked hard and got on with the struggle to become British.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Doctoring Evidence

Like every other trade union, with the possible exception of the official City of London trade union known as the Parliamentary Conservative Party, the British Medical Association has an unfortunate tendency to mislead the poor thick-headed proles who are its members. The BMA opposed Twizzler Lansley's Health and Social Care Act, on the grounds that it would lead to chaos in the NHS and wouldn't help patient care; the BMA opposed the coalition's cuts to nursing places, on the grounds that they would lead to a shortage of nurses. Thanks to these very reforms, as we all know, the NHS is every day and in every way getting better and better, while living within its means and being propped up only slightly by migrant labour. Yet despite all this, and despite the awesome benignity of the Government's intentions, the BMA has got its junior doctors all riled up and protesting about the latest attempt to help them towards a new and improved life of Sino-American working conditions. What can be the problem?

Friday, October 16, 2015

Insidious

A corrupt, archaic and bureaucratic oligarchy, with a long record of repression towards its citizens and international dirty dealing, has been warned against tactlessness by the Heathen Chinee. It has been argued that the recent economic boom among the Heathen Chinee was based on disregard for social and environmental problems and the imposition of working conditions which the Minister for Health and News Corporation would like to bestow upon Britain's junior doctors. The Osbornomic miracle, by contrast, has been based on everybody being in the green crap together. Accordingly, the Bullingdons have been busily sucking up to Beijing and trying to keep a lid on the Dalai Lama and the slant-eye jokes, because Britain desperately needs Chinese investment in nuclear power in order to compensate for the shortage of wind and waves which is characteristic of an archipelago in the North Atlantic. To help pave the way for a mutually gracious and profitable relationship, the Great Britain China Centre announced the appointment to its presidency of the veteran crook, Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, who replaces a dead sheep.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Trussing Up the Trees

Britain's Head Boy's token filly at the Department of the Environment has bidden fair to prove herself an even more dazzling excuse for a minister than Owen Paterson. Liz Truss, whose previous achievements include anticipating Jeremy C Hunt's diagnosis of the great British prole's need for Chinese working conditions, has used her first major speech to show that, while Paterson may habitually have talked out of his rectum, Truss can pull numbers from hers. Not just any old numbers either, but big ones with lots of noughts.

Truss has decided that the way to save the environment is to slap a price tag on it, much as a previous token filly tried to do with the forests before being laughed out of office. The ambitions of Truss go a bit further than that: she has had all Britain's soil and rivers valued as well, and has come up with an asking price of "at least £1.6 trillion". The arithmetic involved in this calculation may defeat a lesser mind than that of Liz Truss, a former commercial manager for environmental enthusiasts Royal Dutch Shell plc. For example, it seems that while a tree is alive it is worth fifteen times more than if it is chopped down for timber, apparently on the grounds that all living trees are equally useful and all timber is worth the same, whether it goes to build someting useful or is wasted on roof-rafters for prole-homes. It is as yet unclear what market value would be placed on Liz Truss if she could be used as an umbrella stand or a novelty support for goldfish bowls; but she would certainly be a better bargain than she is at the moment.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Tentative Diagnosis

Dr Sarah Wollaston, the Conservative chair of the parliamentary select committee on health, appears to have lost sight of her party's ideals. She appears to believe that the Secretary of State for Health and News Corporation should have some sort of interest in public health; an obligation legislated away during the last parliament by Twizzler Lansley and his Liberal Democrat enablers. She appears to believe that the Conservative Party is vandalising and privatising the NHS in order to improve the nation's health, when the very appointment of creatures like Lansley and Hunt to the relevant ministry indicates rather clearly that her Bullingdon bosses' priorities lie somewhat in the region of elsewhere. She appears to believe that a Murdoch drone and Bullingdon appointee should treat the instruments of public accountability with something other than casual contempt. She even seems to think that a public health service should be concerned with improving the nation's diet, rather than fattening up the gullible for profit. As always, it pains me to be uncharitable; but I wonder if Dr Sarah Wollaston is in the wrong party, or the wrong profession; or if, alternatively, she is simply the thickest GP in the House of Expenses Claimants after Liam Fox?

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Little White Lies

Diplomacy has never been the Bullingdons' strong point, and it appears that Britain's Head Boy was so shocked at some uppity wogs' misreading of the regrettability of the slave trade that he was somehow induced to burble the thing that was not about some other uppity wogs. The wogs of the first part are the government and people of Jamaica, who seem to think that historical crimes deserve something more in the way of reparations than a bit of moral simpering by an over-promoted public-relations office boy. The wogs of the second part are three hundred Jamaican inmates in British prisons, who Daveybloke proclaimed could now be cleaned out to make more room for the natives, thanks to a £25 million bribe from Britain's hard-working families to the Jamaican government. Unfortunately the Jamaican government, which some years ago refused to ratify a voluntary agreement with Gordon Brown's administration to keep British jails for British workers, has now said that no prisoner transfer bargain was made, and that the two countries have agreed only to "explore the possibility." Translated from the diplomatese, this probably means a few suits from both sides have undertaken to do lunch and draft a memorandum or two the next time the mad old cat lady in the Home Office blows a gasket. It is as yet unclear whether the Bullingdons plan to repay the slight by vetoing the Caribbean.

Monday, October 12, 2015

A Labour Moderate

I am sure we all remember the snooper's charter, which will keep us even safer than MI5, MI6, Saudi Arabia's UK-enhanced interrogators and the Bullingdon Club's extrajudicial assassination programme have already made us. A previous version of the bill was blocked during the last parliament by the Liberal Democrats, who only spent five years in office and thus had insufficient time to sell out on that issue along with all the others. Now, of course, the mad old cat lady in the Home Office has at her disposal an absolute parliamentary majority, with the only potential rebels being a few "populist" clowns like the David Davis publicist David Davis. Hence the only real problem for the new, testosterone-pumped version of the bill is how to manage Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition; accordingly, the mad old cat lady has organised a neat little cross-bench stitch-up. The chair of the committee charged with scrutinising the bill, appointed by the mad old cat lady herself in order to prevent any conflict of interest, is a former security minister for that noted friend of civil liberties, Gordon Brown; a former chair of the intelligence and security committee when dossiers were being sexed-up under the Reverend Blair; and a board member at Thales, which manufactures surveillance equipment and can doubtless provide the same quality of disinterested advice on security as the private healthcare companies did on the NHS. In short, a Labour moderate.

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Derangement in Brown and White

While the Home Office may be giving reluctant asylum to Syrian refugees, instead of leaving them in concentration camps or letting them drown, that doesn't mean the wog-bashing has to stop; oh, good heavens no. A few days before the mad old cat lady raved out her party piece at the Conservative belch-and-burble in Manchester, her minions sent out orders forbidding local authorities to provide refugees with "white goods and brown goods which could be considered luxury items", such as radios, televisions and computers. Refugees are to be permitted, grudgingly enough, the tools of bare survival; but providing them with the means to communicate with the outside world, or to inform or, heaven forfend, entertain themselves would be a stab in the back to hard-working families all over the scumbag press.

Saturday, October 10, 2015

Edit Cavell

Monday will mark the occasion for a bit more First World War rah-rah, being the centenary of Edith Cavell's execution. Cavell used her position as a nursing matron in Brussels to smuggle Allied soldiers into the Netherlands so that they could continue fighting Germany and killing Germans. The Germans took exception to this, and court-martialled and shot her in accordance with the usual wartime treatment of spies and traitors; thereby handing the British a propaganda coup which rivalled the sinking of the Lusitania five months earlier. Since she was quoted as saying, "Patriotism is not enough; I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone", Cavell's death was naturally used to fuel a metastasis of the patriotism (viz. hatred and bitterness towards Germany) which was already running rampant in Britain; and after the war her remains were brought back to Britain and given the sort of treatment later reserved for such saintly, peaceable figures as Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.

Friday, October 09, 2015

Minimum Necessary Response

Alas for your daughters and sons!
Our thoughts and prayers with you in tons!
For peace and the law,
We all must do more -
If only they'd had a few guns!

Let's make it priority top!
These horrors must come to a stop!
Our students can't face
What happens most days
Between some black kid and a cop!

There must be some mental disease
That causes these madmen to seize
For nefarious use
Their toys, and abuse
The Second Amendment. Next, please.

George Washington Columbine CMXCV

Thursday, October 08, 2015

Poor Law

Another left-wing firebrand has spoken out against the Government's new system of fines for pleading not guilty. This time the troublemaker is the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Thomas of Place-the-Welsh-Secretary-Probably-Cannot-Pronounce, who attacked the scale of the fees in a speech ostensibly about the supposed legacy of Magna Carta. He made the speech to an audience of legal workers in New Zealand last month, but it was apparently not thought safe to release the contents here on the mainland until after Michael Gove got safely through his turn at the Conservative Party's belch-and-burble in Manchester.

Wednesday, October 07, 2015

Hot Air

Onshore windfarms have very sneakily taken advantage of Government subsidies to become the cheapest way of generating electricity, according to a report by the hard-left pressure group Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The price of wind in Britain has almost halved in the past twelve months, to £55 per megawatt-hour, and is expected to plummet even further when the eructations and flatulations of the Conservative Party conference are taken into account. The price of nuclear, by contrast, has risen; which is doubtless why the Government has removed investment in renewable energy in order to hand over our generating capacity to the Chinese. Fortunately, a spokesbeing was extruded to blather about hard-working bill payers, who are approximately as hard-working as hard-working taxpayers but less familial than hard-working families, and are not nearly as important to our security, stability and opportunity as hard-driving tax dodgers.

Tuesday, October 06, 2015

On Point

At last the Government has solved the conundrum of how to save the NHS while sacking nurses: Britain must import more ballet dancers. Helped by their little orange chums in the coalition, the Conservatives started their hob-nailed re-jig of the health service by cutting several thousand nursing posts; and in the interests of hard-working families there are no plans to repair the damage in anything less than a couple of years from now. Accordingly, the Government intends to deport nurses from outside the EU should their work ethic prove insufficiently Chinese to earn them £35,000 after six years in the country. Ballet dancers, by contrast, will be immune from the attentions of those charming G4S boot-boys because ballet dancers are defined as a shortage occupation; doubtless because the present Minister for Health and News Corporation was once Minister for Cultchah and News Corporation, and did not fail to leave his mark.

Monday, October 05, 2015

Cultural Revelation

I'm Jerry C Hunt, and methinks
The British state still has some kinks!
To straighten them out,
I'll bustle about
And take a few tips from the Chinks!

As brightest of Dave's little toolies
I say kicking proles in the goolies
Is lovely, it's true,
But more is to do -
We do not need workers, but coolies!

We'll work them all hours, like the Yanks,
And give all their pay to the banks!
If ever they dare
Protest in a square,
Why, then we'll just send in the tanks!

Fitzrupert Spadsacker

Sunday, October 04, 2015

Wheels Within Wheels

For those whose hobby is keeping the planet habitable for human civilisation, there is encouraging news: the agency responsible for certifying that vehicles meet standards on emissions receives just under seventy per cent of its funding from car manufacturers. Of course, there is no conflict of interest: a spokesbeing for the Ministry of Motoring has already been extruded to proclaim that it is only natural for those under investigation to pay for the service they receive; just as the police and the scumbag press always investigate their own derelictions in order to protect hard-working families and ensure that no funny business occurs. In any case, the governance framework for the Vehicle Certification Agency is determined by the Government, which consistently breaks the law on air pollution and has been trying to block EU legislation that would strengthen checks on car emissions; so that's all right.

Saturday, October 03, 2015

Stuff Happens

The forces of freedomisation have managed to collaterally detriment the only functioning hospital in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, to the immeasurable benefit of stability and world peace. Afghan security forces were able to close it down for a while a couple of months ago, when they went in to search for bad men and ended up assaulting three members of the staff; but this intervention is in a somewhat different league. The airstrike was conducted "against individuals threatening the force", according to the Jedi spokesbeing; Médecins Sans Frontières, which runs the facility, says that the hospital's location was known to all participants in the nation-building process and that the bombing continued for half an hour after the alarm was raised with the country's official protectors. It is to be hoped that the Russians, whose presence in Syria has caused actual civilian deaths and complicated a situation so simple that even Philip Hammond could understand it, will take due note and learn the appropriate lessons.

Friday, October 02, 2015

Humanitarian Intervention

The perils of failing to heed the Reverend Blair were demonstrated once more today, as it emerged that the holy man tried to save his chum Colonel Gaddafi from the consequences of excess democratisation. His reverence is thought to have held a special affection for Gaddafi, whom he personally redeemed from officially-designated mad dog status and whose attitudes to everything from national security to personal ostentation so closely paralleled his own. During the Arab Spring the Reverend Blair exerted his famous humanitarian influence, urging Gaddafi to flee to a safe place so that western governments could come up with a suitably humane retirement package, with the Reverend Blair acting as an honest broker in return for suitable remuneration. Although the Reverend Blair invoked his most powerful dialectical weapon - "I'm saying this because I believe it" - the Libyan dictator somehow contrived to remain unmoved, with notorious and deplorable consequences. The Reverend Blair, of course, having made his restraining influence felt on the Bush administration in Afghanistan and Iraq, went on to influence the peace process in Palestine and the liberalisation process in Kazakhstan, with similar spectacular success.

Thursday, October 01, 2015

No Fraternising With the Gooks

So resoundingly successful has been the Osbornomic miracle, and so equitably distributed the profits thereof, that Conservative Party bosses have been forced to warn their minions about venturing without disguise among the northern powerhouse's restless natives. In a magnificent gesture of Bullingdon tact, the Conservatives have decided to hold their annual belch and rah-rah in Manchester, which was not particularly rich in 2010 and has therefore been subject to the usual Osbornomic stimulus of budget restrictions on top of efficiency savings on top of austerity cuts on top of routine neoliberal nastiness. None of this has been in vain, since the money saved has gone to stimulate entrepreneurship and hard-working families in richer boroughs; but it appears that not all Mancunians have fallen in with the doubtless prevailing mood of forelock-tugging gratitude. Accordingly, the party chairman has ordered activists to remove their identification badges when out absorbing the local colour beyond the "ring of steel" which, in tribute to the party's popular mandate, the Home Office will be deploying around the proceedings. It is to be hoped that the glorious victors of May 2015 can also remember to put their badges back on before venturing back into the security zone; what a loss to the country should the next Sayeeda Warsi or Sajid Javid be drone-bombed into oblivion in mistake for a flat-cap militant.