Crisis, What Crisis?

In spite of Jeremy C Hunt's aspiration for Chinese working conditions, and even in spite of bursaries being withdrawn in order to pay Google's back taxes, the NHS is having difficulties recruiting doctors and nurses. Two-thirds of trusts are recruiting from the swarming migrant hordes: a development which the Conservatives are viewing with apparent equanimity. Foreigners, NHS staff: really, when you come down to it, they're all just coolies, aren't they? "Overseas nurses have always made a contribution to our NHS," said the chief executive of Health Education England, neatly summarising a good part of the reasoning, if reasoning is the word I want, behind both the Government's anti-public-health policy and its wog disposal régime. A spokesbeing was extruded by the Department of Forcible Contracts to proclaim that the Bullingdon Club and its minions remain intensely relaxed about the whole business, but may get around to providing training places to make up rather less than half the shortfall in time for a bit of trumpeting at the next general election.

Shop A Scrounger and Win A Skoda

Although Britain has no shortage of have-a-go heroes prepared to fight benefits fraud wherever they find it, the payback has been a little less salutary; at least if one happens to number oneself among those boorish and backsliding types who concern themselves with mere facts. Between 2010 and 2015, eighty-five per cent of benefits fraud cases resulting from tales tattled by members of the public were abandoned on the grounds of insufficient evidence or no evidence at all; abandoned, that is, not by some wishy-washy legal-aid lawyer, but by the Department of Workfare and Privation's very own Idleness Police. Great was the Murrovian indignation of the Liberal Democrats, who unfortunately were not part of the government between 2010 and 2015 and thus had no opportunity to bring their moral superiority to bear upon the burgeoning McCarthyite atmosphere. In general, the DWP manages to recoup its losses from false claims by underpaying claimants who are genuinely entitled; unfortunately, although the department is run by the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith, who can probably count all the fingers of one finger if given sufficient time to cogitate, it remains unclear whether the money spent on investigating false claims of false claims outweighs the unfortunate lapse into solvency.

Clean for the Queen

The Ministry for Wog Control is recruiting gap-year students and giving them five whole weeks' training before employing them to interview asylum seekers and make real decisions about whether to pander to potential economic migrancy or kick them out in a manner befitting Queen, country and Mad Tessie May. In this brisk and economical fashion the usual red tape of degrees and four years' training for immigration lawyers has been dispensed with in favour of belt-tightening efficientisation and fast-tracking of the marauding swarms to their deserved despair and suicide. Only forty-three per cent of initial refusals are overturned on appeal, and the Ministry regards students as "quite an effective demographic; they are not looking for a long-term career with the Home Office or even a permanent contract" so that all the important jobs can be left to important people. The students' remuneration is described as "appropriate", although it is unclear whether it is quite so appropriate as the payments for those efficient G4S people, with whom the Home Secretary has almost no marital connection whatsoever.

Frankenstein

Bernard Rose 2015

The interesting British director Bernard Rose emerged a quarter of a century ago with two excellent supernatural horror films, Paperhouse and Candyman; and has recently teamed up with actor Danny Huston for updated adaptations of various works by Leo Tolstoy, including two fine psychological horrors, IvansXTC and The Kreutzer Sonata. Rose's version of Frankenstein also features Huston, but in a supporting role; the sole point-of-view character is the creature (Xavier Samuel), whose major parental figure is not Huston's bluff and ruthlessly bungling father, but the ambivalent mother embodied in Victor's wife and colleague Elizabeth (Carrie-Anne Moss).

Besides having the creature describe his emotional state in a voice-over drawn from Mary Shelley's original, the screenplay borrows from various filmic sources. (In the same spirit, but rather less aptly, the British DVD packaging is a disingenuous ripoff from that of the recent critically-mauled comic-book fantasy I, Frankenstein.) The action is removed from eighteenth-century Europe to twenty-first-century Los Angeles, and Rose works inventive variations on the drowned moppet and blind benefactor from James Whale's films with Boris Karloff; while the creature's physical nature recalls that of Michael Sarrazin's incarnation in Jack Smight's misbegotten 1973 miniseries Frankenstein: The True Story. In the novel, Frankenstein aims to create a man of consummate physical beauty, but lacks the necessary finesse and rejects his creation almost as soon as it's completed; in the Smight and Rose films, the creature is beautiful on initial assembly, but gradually becomes hideous owing to a cancer-like flaw in his organism.

Like the creature's narrative in Shelley's book, Rose's film focuses on the inner ugliness of mainstream humanity, whereby unthinking parents, callous scientists, brutal officials and vengeful mobs drive the physically adult and superhuman but mentally childish creature to manslaughter and murder. Shelley's creature undergoes a rapid intellectual development and eventually becomes capable of reading Paradise Lost and of disputing in articulate and sophisticated fashion with his arbitrary and hysterical maker; but, except in the voice-over, the creature in the film remains largely monosyllabic to the end: a hoodie-clad ragamuffin whose rotting face and unthinking violence differentiate him barely, but just enough, from the dregs of society among whom he temporarily finds a place.

The archaic cadences of Shelley's prose in the voice-over may jar for some, especially as the creature barely speaks a coherent sentence on-screen; but for me it worked considerably better than most voice-overs, contrasting the horror of the creature's appearance and actions with the innate strength and honesty of his spirit. The borrowings from the Whale films are sufficiently re-invented to avoid the sin of hommage, and fit much more convincingly into the present-day setting than would Shelley's family of outcast nobles. Although episodes with policemen and dogs verge, respectively, on caricature and the maudlin, the film is well-acted, commendably concise and no shot or scene outstays its welcome. Rose has attempted the same tricky balancing act as in his Tolstoy films - convincingly updating the story while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original - and, on the whole, has brought it off very well.

Everyone Deserves A Second Chance

The Ministry for Profitable Incarceration has abandoned yet another of Chris Graybeing's innovations, which involved limiting the movements of offenders by attaching a white elephant to each miscreant's ankle. Instead of the proposed custom-built devices, tracking tags will now be off-the-peg, as befits Corbynite proledom, and will be rolled out "before the end of the parliament" or, in Oldspeak, whenever. Additionally, the Ministry will be allowing bids from those exceptionally honest people at G4S, who stiffed the taxpayer for nearly two hundred million over the monitoring of fictitious tags. This efficiency saving pleased the Conservatives so much that they were still throwing public money at the company a year later, despite the Home Secretary having almost no marital connection with G4S whatsoever.

Much to Learn

Some investors in canine assets who redistributed a blind man's guide dog outside Beijing have returned the animal with a letter of apology. It is as yet unclear what impact this deplorably unenterprising behaviour may have upon the troubled Heathen Chinee economy. There is, of course, every possibility that an unintended pull factor will be created, whereby every disabled scrounger will expect special treatment from the criminal classes; a culture of entitlement which is even now being gradually cripple-kicked out of Britain by the gang in Whitehall and their ATOS bully-boys. It appears that entrepreneurial gumption among the Heathen Chinee has some way to go before it approaches the pinnacle manifest on our own blessed isles.

A Fitting Tribute

Other than wog-bombing and cripple-kicking, there are few things more guaranteed to unite the British Conservative Party than a spot of Royalist toadying. Accordingly, now that Daveybloke has taken such effective action to prevent a split over Europe, the London Haystack has announced that the latest addition to the city's prole conveyancing system is to be named the Elizabeth line, in honour of the country's longest-serving monarch (in Oldspeak, longest-reigning monarch). Most lines on the London Underground have dull unimaginative names derived from their shape or geography, reflecting the grim, Stalinist utilitarianism behind the concept of public transport. However, there is a Victoria line, named after the previous longest-reigning monarch, who presided over a period of unprecedented scientific advance and social reform; so it seems only fair and fitting that we should have another line called after the monarch who has been presiding for the past thirty years over the gradual emergence of the North Korea of the Atlantic.

Giving Them the Business

Well, here's a thing and no mistake: the Department for Profiteering, Privateering and Pocket-lining has less concern for human rights than Amnesty International might wish. The ministry has taken a leaf out of the Gove manual for training infantine resources, and has appointed non-qualified personnel to deal with claims of human rights violations while simultaneously depriving them of the necessary resources to make proper investigations. The system, according to Amnesty, is a genuine paragon of British fair play and respect for the law: "inconsistent, unreliable, biased towards businesses and out of kilter with the standards it is supposed to uphold". It rejects most complaints out of hand, takes an average of six months or more to make an initial assessment, and the allegedly responsible ministerial body has no power to exact compensation or otherwise enforce the moral or behavioural improvement of wealth creators who, naturally through no fault of their own, may inadvertently have caused a regrettable degree of unintended if entirely legal offence to some uppity wog or other. Among those few companies which are crude or stupid enough to have gained a slap on the wrist under these rigorous conditions are those charming people at G4S, with whom the present deeply subtle Home Secretary has almost no marital connection whatsoever, and who were found to be "technically in breach" of human rights guidelines for supplying the Righteous State with child incentivisation material.

Prometheus Penitent

Spare me not, Zeus; let nobody deliver
My offal from your eagle's lawful hook.
Give me what pity should have chilled my look
At dim humanity. I watched it quiver
And tried to kindle thought, and kindled fever.
The beast shone ardent with the flame I took,
In heat to hunt a witch or burn a book:
I should have left the wretched ape to shiver.

Their world now warm enough with light that blinds,
The titan fire in distant darkness lost,
Olympus' peak falls to the petty pest.
I yield and pay as cooler judgement finds:
Rip from my flesh the creature's awful cost,
And let the monster-maker never rest.

Fitz-Victor Genevese

Not a Person of Credit

Never let it be said that the minions of Mad Tessie May are entirely lacking in compassion: a half-blind nonagenarian widow with heart trouble has been magnanimously granted the opportunity to prove beyond reasonable doubt that she is unfit for deportation. The Home Office had planned to throw her out of the country as part of the continuing war on health tourism, which the Secretary for Health and News Corporation has done so much to abet by undermining the fifth column that is the National Health Service's junior doctors. However, the swarming migrant in question is white and her native country is not officially a war zone, so the Home Office evidently felt that the 3am courtesy call by Kevlar-clad transfer incentivisation personnel might for once be considered a little tactless. Nevertheless, it remains clear that the lady is not a "person of credit" like Lord Crosby of Deadcat or the divine Rupert, and also that her application for continuing residence contained a blatant untruth: she is in fact a whole year younger than was claimed. Presumably the Home Office plan, if plan is the word for mentation among the minions of Mad Tessie May, is to kick her out quietly once the fuss has died down.

One Does Not Bomb A Wog Only To Help His Children

Given the Bullingdon Club's well-known addiction to the finer things in life, from poor-kicking to pig-sticking, no doubt a petition by a hundred and forty-five cultural eminences will prove just what is needed to stir the Head Boy's conscience about the swarming hordes in Calais and Dunkirk. Maintaining the polite fiction that the British and French governments might care about a crisis which is merely humanitarian, the letter urges the Head Boy to exert his purple-visaged charisma upon his French counterparts and persuade them to postpone demolition of parts of the Calais camp until the junior wogs therein can be turned into fully-fledged threats to the deprived children of Albion. Michael Morpurgo has visited the camps, emerging puzzled and indignant that "our prime minister and the French president cannot get together and contrive a way of at least looking after these people in a humane way". The French government has even set up an aggressive police presence at the camps, worthy of those charming people at G4S and Serco, although presumably a little more competent since the camps are still there. One might almost think, pace the harsh realist who perpetrated War Horse, that profiteers and wog-bombers have at best a minimal interest in improving the lives of their victims.

Free From Non-Financial Fripperies

A liberalising devolution of democracy has always been an intrinsic thingummy in the Government's war on red tape, and the freedomisation of local councils has now been progressed with a diktat from on high about the perils of trying to be the greenest government ever. Councils will face "severe penalties" if they attempt anything so seventies-Stalinist as refusing to throw money at an apartheid state; and any hint of interfering with the profits of fossil fuel corporations would not only be morally anti-semitic but could risk actual compliance with the country's obligations under international law. Additionally, the Bullingdons have decided that, for the purposes of local government pension funds, such trivialities as "the environment, social issues or corporate governance" should be considered "non-financial factors", since there is clearly no monetary value in regulation of the private sector, keeping the population healthy or indulging in planetary habitability. Nevertheless, the bad old ways still persist, not least in the matter of good old-fashioned democratic forelock-tugging. Despite the new, happy life which their lords and masters have granted them, it appears that local authorities are showing considerable reticence in expressing their natural gratitude.

In Memoriam: Andrzej Żuławski

Farewell, Żuławski; take thy demon wing
And back into the darkness draw thy fire.
Thy shamans and thy devils of desire
Remain, and make thy crazy praises ring;
The shadow, shern and louse lustily sing
And dance in double time around thy pyre;
Ensuring that the world, though thou retire,
Shall not forget the most important thing.

Who, having shared thy vision, could go back,
Escape thy creatures barking in the brain?
What mind or eye resist such bold attack,
Retreating to mere sanity again?
So sprawl among the silver globes above,
And laugh amid demented shrieks of love.

Not Just a Piece of Paper

As trivial fripperies like the NHS and the social safety net are sliced away and the core of true Britishness is laid bare in all its Duncan Smith greatness of spirit and intellect, respecters of tradition and pageantry will no doubt rejoice that the practice of recording laws on bits of dead animal may yet be retained. The House of Donors decided seventeen years ago to start using paper instead of vellum for the printing of acts of parliament; and now that the House of Expenses Claimants has decided to put the decision into practice the traditional squeals of rage are echoing around Whitehall. No doubt there are comparatively few MPs who would rather kill a tree for writing materials than slaughter a calf, particularly when the latter option lightens the public purse by eighty thousand a year. Meanwhile the rest of us may count ourselves fortunate that the skins of flayed proles would be too coarse and colourful for our lords and masters to use instead.

Blood Parasites

Haemophiliacs who were accidentally infected with HIV or hepatitis thirty years ago could be the next group of scroungers to get a kicking from the Department of Workfare and Privation. The British Government has never accepted responsibility for the disaster, which occurred when the NHS was forced to buy blood on the free market; but successive administrations have paid the victims discretionary compensation which the Conservatives have now decided would be better off helping with Google's unpaid tax bill. Indeed, it seems unlikely that many of our present lords and masters even know what haemophilia is: doubtless Michael Gove connects it vaguely with the Russian Revolution of 1789, but the word is far too long for the likes of Jeremy C Hunt and the brilliant Duncan Smith, who most likely regard HIV and hepatitis as the well-earned wages of such victimless sinners as drug addicts and homosexuals. The Bullingdons all know, at any rate, that serious illnesses left to the free market tend to be a self-solving problem; after all, Britain's Head Boy has already said he's sorry, which is a far more economically sustainable way of dealing with the matter than paying out good money to keep people alive and sponging; and a minister for NHS privatisation has proclaimed, apparently with a straight face, that no amount of money could make up for the pain and distress of not having been deprived of compensation for thirty years. Nevertheless, the pretexts for the cuts make the usual brave effort to convince despite their terminal tiredness: a more accessible and equitable system of support, better value for the taxpayer, a less confusing system; just like all those other roaring successes from rail privatisation to the Health and Social Care Act. Whatever the new rules turn out to be, the Department of Doctor-dumping has proclaimed that the DWP will not be administering them; which presumably means the bleeder-bashing will be outsourced to the boot-boys at ATOS, who can incentivise the victims to sell their blood on the free market instead of sitting at home dripping all over the alarm clock.

Fear Not Oblivion

Fear not oblivion; your life and all it felt,
Consumed, and threw away, the planet owns:
Eternal landfill now, a plastic welt.
As to your death, the echo of your groans
Will stay in rocks your squabbles failed to melt:
The faint and fading imprint of your bones.
And if too few of you should drown in mud
To fossilise and let the future know
That you were here, when finally the blood
And flesh of earth excretes you? Even so,
Though you be gone, your poisons shall not die.
Fear not oblivion, for they will wait,
And with their glowing glories testify
To mutant insects curious of your fate.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Correction

While Germany redeems the Holocaust by arming Israel and hunting down nonagenarian camp functionaries, the Austrian government has taken an altogether more robust approach. Many families whose property was stolen by the Nazis have never had it returned, and a Jewish author who wrote an exposé has been imprisoned in the charmingly-named Simmering jail for the past four months. In a case that the former court reporter Thomas Bernhard might have treasured, Stephan Templ applied on his mother's behalf for the return of a property seized in 1938, and was sentenced to a year's imprisonment for fraudulently concealing the existence of an aunt whom he had in fact mentioned half a dozen times. The relevant documents have now surfaced, and Templ has been allowed to comment by telephone; which shows that, for all its sterling efforts, the Austrian justice system still cannot compare with the British one.

Daveymandering Democracy

The Bullingdon Club's obsessive pursuit of fairness and equality is to continue with a cull of one-thirteenth of the expenses claimants in Parliament's lower house. This measure was originally suggested under the Conservative administration of 2010-2015, but was vetoed by the Deputy Conservatives when they found themselves on the wrong side of a broken pledge. Coincidentally, the cut is expected to result in the Conservatives winning an extra twenty seats; which means that all redundancies will either be voluntary or take place among people who don't matter very much in any case, and no doubt if MPs suggest amendments beyond what is fair and reasonable the contract will be duly imposed. Any plans the Bullingdon Club may have concocted to equalise and fairnessate the House of Donors, Bishops and Hairdressers have not, as yet, been placed before the public.

Details of the prior history and present nature of our Mother of Parliaments are available here, at a very reasonable price.

Breeding Always Tells

Our sebaciously smirking, coke-snorting chancellor has a sebaciously glistening, pouting younger brother whose respect for the medical niceties approaches that of George's colleague Jeremy Hunt. As one of the four scions of the mucilaginous wallpaper barony that is the hard-working family Osborne, Adam Osborne evidently shares his brother's famous commitment to playing hard and working the rules. Five years ago he was suspended from practice because he falsified a prescription for a drug-addicted escort girl; now he has been struck off the register for having sex with a woman he was treating for anxiety and depression. Doubtless it was just a bit of harmless fun, like George screwing the taxpayers; but a potential embarrassment arose when the unfortunate lady tried to kill herself just after Osborne dumped her. Naturally, Osborne deeply regrets any offence he has caused and realises now, with hindsight, that his behaviour was inappropriate and wrong; evidently they forgot to tell him about boundaries when he was studying for the profession. Perhaps he attended a free school, or a Catholic one. Anyway, since it was never his intention to hurt anyone, Osborne gave the temptress fair warning that he would make her pay; so given his family connections we may presumably expect to see her name and picture unflatteringly spattered across the scumbag press in the near future.

Wave Goodbye

Since the British Isles, like many islands worthy of the name, are more or less surrounded by water, the Government is naturally dragging its feet over whether it should bother keeping a manifesto pledge to support a tidal energy project at Swansea. Britain's Head Boy was frightfully bung-ho for it before the election; but as with so much of the other guff one throws out during our Mother of Parliaments' quinquennial ratification and rah-rah from the proles, the ardour tends to cool once the electorate has again delivered up the goods. The tidal project has not actually been cancelled; but negotiations have been going on for a year, the company in charge requires a decision within a few weeks, and a further six months will be required before the relevant minister can understand why it wouldn't be more efficient just to frack the Gower Peninsula and buy more oil while it's going cheap.

More Disappointments From the Muslims

Like many little jollifications of the same sort, the recent wog-bombing in Libya has achieved all kinds of worthwhile goals and has been kept from roaring success only by the backwardness and recalcitrance of the natives. Sir Peter Ricketts, Britain's Head Boy's national security monitor at the time, has been having a bit of a blather about it, and has proclaimed the 2011 adventure such a success that military intervention may now be required to mitigate the consequences of our previous military intervention. As soon as the Reverend Blair's convert and erstwhile chum Colonel Gaddafi was out of the way, it was assumed that the natives' urge towards freedom would naturally come into its own and that market forces or, at a pinch, an appropriately co-operative dictatorship, would prevail in no time. Matters have not turned out quite so favourably because the Libyans failed to seize their chance to "get together to form a coherent government with a coherent security structure and basically reinvent their country", which is a great disappointment to the security adviser who advised bombing their country into all that glorious potential for coherence. It now appears that Islamic State fighters are attempting to move into the Libyan oil-fields, doubtless with nefarious purposes in mind; which could yet make the whole business even more disappointing than it already is.

Keep Our Cliffs White

So effective are Mad Tessie May's wog disposal methods that our exit from the EU would result in refugee apocalypse, according to Downing Street. A spokesbeing for Britain's Head Boy was extruded to squeal that we must remain in Europe because if we don't Britain's borders will move back to Britain, the Frogs will send us their wogs, and a bunch of migrants will swarm across the Channel overnight, colonise Kent and radicalise everybody and their granny before you can say Dunkirkistan. Rather than foaming about boat people (we do, after all, have a submarine or two), the Head Boy himself was careful to confine himself to sniggering at the mugs in France who have agreed to be the custodians of Britain's borders and ensure that the wogs stop at Calais. However, he did strongly imply that in the event of Britain voting to turn the EU into a competitor the Euro-wogs, in their envy of our low-tax, low-welfare, low-down economy, could very well turn nasty; and that the minions of Mad Tessie May would almost certainly have trouble coping, particularly those efficient G4S people who seem to have trouble coping with almost everything.

The Dust Settles

The blackened bag gapes out a toothless grin;
Soft groceries protrude, strain out dark ends.
The carrier, though little mirth attends,
Widens its smile and cannot hold them in,
And waits for finer fissions to begin.
Through spattered light the modest dust descends;
The dry, white drizzle still serenely wends,
Pale droplets of disintegrated skin.

You would not know, to hear their peace resound,
How noisily the offal pieces played:
How they complained, and dragged themselves around,
And shopped, and shed so much of what has made
This quiet epitaph which moves and lies
Amid the mumbled elegies of flies.

Gleetie Moocher

They're Everywhere

Is nobody safe? The youth wing of the Farage Falange, comprising mainly those angry, loud white men whose hair has been shaved off rather than fallen out, has been infiltrated by the forces of foreign fascism. Beyond the demonisation of Muslims by those elements of the mainstream media which are owned by an Australian-American economic migrant, and even beyond Daveybloke's cosying up to Latvian Waffen-SS fan club in Europe, British fascist groups are being forcibly reinvigorated by persons of Polish, Ukrainian and Italian heritage.

Tragically enough, in light of the obvious danger to our common Britishness, the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange was apparently not asked to comment, or else was busy with his crusade against the infidel Turks, or was stuck in a wog-generated traffic jam.

Bridge Between Nations

Police in Thailand may have misapplied British values by arresting a number of migrants in what sources said was a gambling den. Thirty-two people, mainly British but including lesser ranks, were taken into custody in Pattaya after a special unit from the interior ministry raided their bridge club. Like Westminster with warmer rain, the resort town is much valued by foreign mafias and is famous for its sex tourism; and, like the United Kingdom, Thailand is run by some not very elected people who have promised to mend what they claim is a broken society, and to that end have given the police unprecedented public accountability by abolishing the distinction between worthwhile tip-offs, malicious denunciation and crank calls. Fortunately, Thailand's wog disposal methods are less enthusiastic than Britain's, especially when the gambling migrants in question turn out to be bridge-playing expats instead.

Infant Rehabilitation

Given that the Government's prioritisation of mental health appears to consist in slinging the vulnerable into prison and leaving the problem to solve itself, it should come as no surprise that the Home Office is now plotting to put police commissioners in charge of "troubled children". Since the last parliament's attacks on schools and the law have worked out so jolly well, Mad Tessie May has decided to ram the two together Mandingo-style and see what comes of it. Possibly Mad Tessie May has been absorbing Foucault's Discipline and Punish, which draws some facile francophone comparisons between prisons and schools; more likely she is thinking of the commercial welfare of those charming people at G4S, with whom she has almost no marital connection whatever. She has also been inspired by a Conservative police and crime commissioner who, having all the requisite qualifications (viz. an MSc in Politics and Government), plans to open a "free school" with a "crime-specific curriculum" for "troubled children" of four years and older. The school will also aspire to mould "young people on the cusp of crime or interested in joining the police" - that or having, of course, not the slightest tinge of Boolean over-inclusionism. The borstal is already oversubscribed, and it remains to be seen how many of those cherry-picked for attendance will be "troubled" and how many will instead be the kind to keep a policeman's lot a fairly happy one.

Prevent and Contest

Well, here's a thing: the Government's Home Front strategy in the war on uppity Muslims appears to be inclining towards the counter-productive, though fortunately only if one is concerned with such fripperies as evidence and expert testimony, which the likes of Mad Tessie May have long since shouted down. The programme consists largely of one-word imperatives like Prevent! and Contest!, presumably because shouting is cheap; on the practical side, schools have been ordered to spy on their pupils for signs of "radicalisation", but the Government has not deigned to provide the sort of training which might enable its press-ganged surveillance operatives to make reasonably sensible judgements. Prevent! is apparently short for Prevent, Wogs, Or Else!, and is part of an overall strategy, if strategy is the word I want, called Contest!, which enables citizens to compete in identifying persons at risk of radicalisation from "all groups, such as Islamist extremists or the far right", or anyone else whose values run counter to British ones.

I'm Feeling Lucky

Doubtless motivated by nothing better than sour Gallic grapes over Britain's Head Boy's recent triumph against the migrant hordes, a Euro-wog finance minister has had the temerity to cast aspersions at Google's recent triumph over the taxpayers. Google and Osborne have reached a nice, cosy agreement whereby Google, like the Queen, agrees to pay whatever tax it finds convenient while dodging as much as it can get away with and graciously permitting Her Majesty's Government to lobby in Google's favour over Bermuda, where a further thirty thousand million is believed to be basking. The French finance minister has grumbled that the arrangement "seems more the product of a negotiation than the application of the law"; and indeed French tax officers have been known to treat Google in a manner which British enforcers tend to reserve for whistle-blowing journalists and uppity migrants. It remains to be seen whether Michel Sapin's retirement will be more cosy or less cosy than that of the smirking sebacity which gave us the Osbornomic miracle.

Worlds in Collision

Earth knocked off course in drunk-driving migrant horror

The British Government has reacted strongly to scientists' claims that the planet Earth was created by a collision between the real Earth and an alien world called Theia, in which fortunately no Britons were hurt.

The Prime Minister said he was "concerned" at the news, which could undermine house prices for buildings constructed on non-genuine terrestrial resources, thus rendering certain accommodation too affordable for Britain's fragile economic recovery.

The Foreign Office immediately demanded repayments from Brussels and ordered the United Nations to fund an inquest into which parts of the planet have been masquerading as Earth for the past four and a half billion years.

Conservative back-benchers urged the Prime Minister to give assurances that the mind of the Conservative Party would continue to remain off-planet "until our geological heritage is secured, until 2020 and beyond."

In an impromptu speech widely acclaimed as "Churchillian", shadow foreign secretary Hilary Benn urged the Government to hurry up and do exactly what it was already doing, only more so.

Some ministers took a more sanguine view. "Science does get things wrong sometimes," said the secretary for faith schools. "How do we even know the aliens were called Theia? The scientists weren't around at the time, were they?"