A Place Calling Itself Jerusalem

An extract

The archbishop undid the chain at the back of his neck and took off the ornament, bowing his head slightly as he did so. Grasping it only by the chain, he leaned forward and held out the cross to the governor. "Would your Excellency care to take a closer look?"

The governor held out his hand, and the archbishop dropped the nasty thing into it. The governor wound the chain around his fingers and dangled the cross before his eyes. Now he could see that the figure was nailed in place through its feet and the palms of its hands, and that there was a wound in its side just under the straining ribs. He saw also that the spiky, irregular protrusions were not confined to the brow but grew all across the top of the head; they did not so much resemble horns as a sort of insane crown. Running a finger across them, the governor found the spikes authentically sharp.

"The sins of the world," said the archbishop, watching closely, "which He took, is taking and will take upon His head for ever, until the end of time. Every offence against the law of our god increases His agony; in some families there are small reproductions, either painted or made of plastic, to which the children have to add a thorn every time they sin in word, thought or deed. His blood is on us and on our children, and on our fathers and mothers too."
"But who was he?” The governor was wearily certain that he had heard all this before; perhaps even several times. There were always so many more important things to do than keep track of native superstitions.
"Who was He? Your Excellency, I assure you He still exists. We are not discussing a mere historical event. He was, is and will be a man begotten by our god, to suffer and die for the remittance of those debts which we can never hope to pay without His intercession. Each year He suffers and dies, and then rises from the tomb to suffer and die again the following year. So long as the world exists in sin, His pain can have no end. Hence the blank face, as your Excellency will understand: to suffer beneath such a burden is so profound an agony that any depiction would be presumptuous."

It was the clean shiny surface that seemed presumptuous to the governor. Delivered three at a time outside the city walls, prisoners condemned to be crucified were dragged up the hill by the legionaries, often accompanied by sullen elders and wailing families. When the procession drew near the summit, the presiding centurion would emit a signal and the three crucifixtures would each grab a prisoner, hooking him through the wrists and then reeling him, screaming and bleeding, up against the cross-beam. As soon as the prisoner was in place, further hooks would emerge, like a spider’s jaws, and clamp his feet, while details of the charge and sentence were displayed on a luminous screen above his head. At a predetermined time, if a recommendation for mercy had been entered and approved, the crucifixture would automatically break the prisoner’s knees to facilitate a faster death from suffocation; otherwise, they hung there until they died from thirst, or from shock as the birds pecked away their soft parts. Their agony was most perceptible.

The archbishop held out his hand for the ornament and the governor gave it back, repressing an urge to wipe his hands afterwards.

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Undue Credit

Irresponsible and un-Christian left-wing firebrands at the Court of Appeal have once again put forth the long-discredited and irrational idea that the Government has some sort of obligation to keep within the law, even when engaged in its sacred vocation of poor-bashing. Scroungers, shirkers, migrants, anti-semites and other undesirables will no doubt recall the case of Cait Reilly, who was ordered to quit her voluntary work at a museum and go shelf-stacking at Poundland instead, in return for a similar lack of wage and an additional lack of prospects for proper employment. Reilly took the Government to court, was duly defamed as a graduate snob who thought humble labour was beneath her, and won her case because the Department for Workfare and Privation had thought it beneath themselves to provide appropriate information to people who were, after all, scroungers. The brilliant Iain Duncan Smith retaliated by shunting an emergency law through the Commons saying that he had been right all along, and was abetted by the Liberal Democrats and the glorious, election-winning pre-Corbyn Labour Party. Being the brilliant Duncan Smith, he also decided that his legislative patch-and-bodge applied retroactively, to those scroungers and shirkers whom the Idleness Police had sanctioned before the new law came in. The High Court and Court of Appeal have now both ruled that this was unlawful under the Human Rights Act, thereby emphasising once again that the beastly Euro-wogs have been sneakily giving human rights to the work-shy. The new Christian philanthropist at the Department for Workfare and Privation, who has sued his own constituents over the bedroom tax, is "considering the judgement"; though whether he can rival his predecessor's moral and intellectual incandescence remains to be seen.

Ulster Uteruses

Thanks no doubt to the machinations of the evil Euro-wogs, Westminster has given up its sovereignty to the extent that Northern Ireland has exempted itself from the Abortion Act 1967. Elections for the Stormont assembly will take place next Thursday, and a few superstitious old ladies are all of a flutter at the prospect of such a defiantly British part of the United Kingdom finally deciding to fall in with British law. Echoing a pro-coathanger agitator in Rhode Island, Catholic bishops have been urging their sheep not to vote for candidates who believe that women should have the right to exercise a modicum of choice when it comes to serving as incubators for little Papists. Although Northern Ireland has failed to catch up with the 1960s, it continues to keep alive the spirit of the 1860s, whereby the Offences Against the Person Act recognises various mindless agglomerations of cells as having the same rights as a Catholic bishop or the Right Heterosexual Peter Robinson.

They Have Their Little Foreign Ways

Deeply concerned as to whether British armaments are being utilised with appropriate care, the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has today ordered some flunkey called Toby to have a bit of a wheedle at the Saudi ambassador. Britain's Head Boy's favourite fundamentalist head-choppers are carrying out an inquiry as to whether their rampage in Yemen has been as morally pure a crusade as is commercially necessary under the terms of Britain's export licenses. Unfortunately, the Saudis have limited experience of sustained wog-bombing and are not used to shrugging off international scrutiny in the manner of more developed democracies; hence, they are proving frustratingly slow to acquit themselves. Indeed, such is the Saudi inexperience of scrutiny that the British military officers who are given access to every bombing run have been too modest to reach any conclusions of their own, thereby forcing Her Majesty's Government to keep up the flow of armaments. It would certainly be unjust to refuse the House of Saud the wherewithal to wog-bomb before the House of Saud has even decided whether or not it has done anything wrong.

The Scumbag Press Editor

Once upon a time there was a Scumbag Press Editor, whose sense of tact and honour was exceeded only by his good manners at the luncheon-trough. When a disaster occurred in which ninety-six people were killed through official incompetence, the Scumbag Press Editor published pictures of the dying, and accused those who had been present of a variety of unsavoury and criminal acts. He did not accuse them of tapping telephones, but that was only because the march of technology had not yet caught up with the Scumbag Press Editor's powers of moral indignation.

Quite soon afterwards, it transpired that the Scumbag Press Editor had not been telling "THE TRUTH", as advertised in 96-point Witchfinder Sans-serif above his screed - his original choice, "YOU SCUM", having been vetoed on the grounds that his stupider readers, viz. his readers, might feel personally and non-profitably affronted. In fact, the Scumbag Press Editor had been perpetrating a lurid smear campaign. Fortunately, the Scumbag Press Editor's sense of tact and honour ensured that he continued squealing vociferously and to his own considerable profit for the next twenty-seven years, during which the wheels of British justice ground on with their accustomed celerity.

When at last it all came out, and the victims were found to have been unlawfully killed, the Scumbag Press Editor declined to comment, even for his accustomed purposes of libelling the dead and/or blaming someone else. Concerned that the Scumbag Press Editor's sense of tact and honour might finally have got out of hand, a Fellow Journalist hastened to phone him.

After many attempts the Fellow Journalist succeeded in getting through, and gurgles of rage and horror splattered his innocent eardrums. "Well, if that's your attitude," said the angel of mercy, and rang righteously off; much to the despair of the Scumbag Press Editor, who lay pinned to the floor of his second-best pigsty while ninety-six dark and terrible shapes took turns hosing copious quantities of ectoplasmic urine down his morally indignant throat.

Between Us and You There is a Great Gulf Fixed

In the great tradition of its former leader, Dame Shirley Porter, Westminster council has no room for a possible victim of Middle Eastern torture who claims he has no place to lay his head. The man, whom the Sun has already nicknamed Jes the Res, is known to be a religious extremist with dangerously heretical views on property, worldly goods and other fundamentals of modern religious orthodoxy. However, despite much intemperate language and a habit of keeping female company that may have been soiled by contact with the Culture Secretary, there is no reliable evidence that he ever personally harmed anyone or shared a platform with Jeremy Corbyn. A council spokesbeing said that the borough had reached "saturation point" but that the man was welcome to whatever stable accommodation he could find, adding: "But if he causes any trouble, we'll nail him."

Freebies on the Force

Although the more elderly among us may recall a time when the Conservatives pretended to some sort of interest in maintaining law and order, the requirements of the Osbornomic miracle have long put paid to such relatively trivial considerations. Accordingly, with the decade-long decline in violent crime now terminated as efficiently as the economic recovery in 2010, the Government has decreed that cases of child abuse, terrorism and other things the Chancellor doesn't much care about may henceforth be dealt with by unpaid staff. The Home Secretary, whose marital connection with those efficient folk at G4S is virtually nonexistent, has already announced the creation of unpaid militias with police powers, including the right to hand out penalty notices or detain a scary Muslim for the half-hour it takes for the 999 call to go through. Naturally, the Chancellor has claimed to be providing "real-terms protection" for the plebs in the police, while cutting their budget by the equivalent of 3200 salaried officers; for this dereliction he was rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority, which in Whitehall circles is apparently considered both a reasonable deterrent and a proportionate penalty.

Ballooning Britishness

Local authorities have been forced to intervene in the restaurant business because the British are too embarrassed to ask for a glass of water. Eighty per cent of people drink tap water at home, but being a customer at a restaurant routinely involves interacting with staff who are offering a commercial service. In such circumstances, most British people have trouble enough calculating the minimum acceptable tip and showing just enough disapproval at the service staff's ethnic fetishes, without being drawn into the intricate and distasteful business of asking for things as well. Hence they tend to plump, if that is the verb I want, for letting their spawn guzzle nominally fruit-flavoured hypersugar juice instead. Where avoidance of parental discomfort is involved, years of playground persecution followed by an early heart attack is evidently a reasonable price for the children to pay.

President Piccaninny

As Zac Goldsmith's mayoral campaign has demonstrated, a good working definition of racist is a Tory with no economy to stand on; and the London Haystack has now demonstrated it further with a characteristic display of statesmanship. President Obama has had the temerity to vent an opinion which is not that of the London Haystack, and which diverges even from the opinions of Michael Gove, Chris Graybeing, the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith and the Farage Falange - all the brainy ones in British politics. The London Haystack therefore considered it his duty to put the uppity wog in his place, and duly batted out a blather for the scumbag press calling attention to the president's Kenyan ancestry and resulting "ancestral dislike of the British empire". The British empire was of course a far more efficient, compact and democratic entity than the EU, and Obama's dislike of the empire is of course entirely unshared by most Americans, whose nation has been Britain's greatest-ever ally since 1776. The London Haystack has been regrettably unforthcoming on what his own Ottoman Turkish ancestry has done for his attitude to democracy, human rights, ethnic and religious minorities or a free and responsible Press.

A Certain Potential

As might be expected given that one of its chief spokestwits doesn't know what an average is, the Vote Leave campaign has got into a bit of bother with its figures. The minions of Gove have been jabbering to the effect that turning the EU from our biggest economic partner into our biggest economic rival could result in a windfall of £350 million each and every week for a newly-independent Westminster and its surrounding provinces. This claim roused the suspicions of Norman Lamb, who served as Deputy Conservative doormat in Jeremy Hunt's Department for Health and News Corporation during the Conservative administration of 2010-15, and therefore has some experience of numbers whose perfume seems redolent of a Cameron family tax return. Sure enough, the chair of the UK Statistics Authority confirmed that the £350-million figure was "potentially misleading"; and if there is one thing that Gove, the London Haystack and the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange simply cannot abide, it is wasted potential.

Pushing Back the Tide

Yet more hundreds of British jobs have been saved in the Mediterranean. Although the swarming hordes continue to be attracted by Jeremy C Hunt's NHS, by the pampering attentions of the Department for Workfare and Privation and by the prospect of the mad mullah Sadiq Khan taking over as mayor of London, the barnstorming small-business gumption of northern Africa's transportation entrepreneurs continues to ensure that one local amenity which isn't in short supply is the salutary object lesson of seeing one's fellow marauders turned into fish food. Nevertheless, the whole business is still very inconvenient for Europe, where rich white people and their dupes are becoming quite annoyed at the persistent refusal of war-torn and peckish wogs to recognise our humanitarian push-back against their pull factors. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has called for "increased regular pathways for admission of refugees and asylum seekers" and for "additional possibilities for resettlement and humanitarian admission, family reunification, private sponsorship, and humanitarian and refugee student and work visas" - for everything, in fact, except the obvious solutions of concentration camps and wog-bombing.

Bum Note

A massive, hairy arse looks set to disintegrate into warring red buttocks with only the orangey-brown perineum that is Donald Trump holding them together.

The Trump campaign had appeared to rise above its rivals during the race to the bottom, uniting lunatic-fringers across the country with a populist base who are mad as hell and don't much care who with.

However, the arrival of a veteran delegate-clincher has germinated in a turf war between a snake in the grass and Trump's own long-time elephant-humper.

There has been basic conflict over whether "letting Trump be Trump" should be replaced by more conventional arsing now that the purple-faced toupée-denier has built up a commanding lead, and even over whether the thing on his head should be referred to as "the thing on his head" or, more informally, "it".

The need for delicate delegate-wrangling may yet result in an override of the populist haystacking that has caused the results of so many resulting caucuses.

The Gluteal Old Party is already split between Trumps and non-Trumps, between old-style conservatives and sharp-suited Klansmen, and between quasi-sane Christians and dead-eyed holy rollers.

Meanwhile the global community is split between that minority of the US population who think Trump isn't a terrifyingly bad joke, and everybody else.

The Jowls of Soft Power Wobbling With Righteousness

With another four hundred or so British jobs gloriously saved in the Mediterranean, an empty suit has toddled along to Tripoli in order to teach the natives a thing or two about running a proper country. Britain's Head Boy's Minister for Wogs, Frogs and Huns arrived just in time to undermine parliamentary rule, on the very sensible grounds that the Libyan parliament has so far failed to govern in a fashion to which Whitehall can in good conscience accommodate itself. In support of law and order and the stability of the oil market, the empty suit offered the Libyan government ten million pounds, which is almost one-thirtieth of the amount the British government spent wog-bombing the country into its present state of freedom from centralist interference, human rights and other red tape.

Meanwhile, in Britain's mother of parliaments, the Minister for Wog-bombing himself had a bit of a blather about giving the fuzzy-wuzzies what-for with the prior approval of the Commons, unless it should become necessary to give the fuzzy-wuzzies what-for without the prior approval of the Commons. Having helped to precipitate the worst refugee crisis since Churchill saved the Jews, and considerately added numerous square miles of territory to the Daesh Caliphate, Her Majesty's Government is certainly not going to let itself be artificially constrained from keeping the country safe.

Balancing Necessity and Nastiness

Among the most devious and sinister threats to our Britishness, of course, are those components of the marauding swarms who deliberately and with premeditation get themselves pregnant in order to come over here and use our NHS to flood the economy with woglings who cannot be deported until they reach eighteen. The House of Lords has voted to end the practice of detaining these dangerous persons; but of course this would constitute an unacceptable threat to the country in general, and in particular against the profits of those nice people at G4S, with whom Mad Tessie May has almost no marital connection whatever. Accordingly, the Home Secretary has decreed that pregnant swarms will be detained for a maximum of seventy-two hours, or for up to a week longer should a minister feel like it. In addition, vulnerable adults (i.e. those who can prove they're not faking it, or committing suicide just to make the Home Office look bad) will not be detained "unless it is absolutely necessary and only when the immigration considerations outweigh the issues of vulnerability." Since the doings of those nice G4S people are always necessary and immigration concerns outweigh just about everything these days, the impact of this radical improvement may possibly take some time to make itself felt.

God's Will First

A migrant whose disposal the Australian government outsourced to Nauru has been fined and threatened with jail for the crime of self-harm. A refugee from Iran, which is run by religious extremists who believe in sorcery and witchcraft, the migrant was detained for two years on Nauru, an island whose penal code outlaws sorcery and witchcraft, along with fortune-telling and attempted suicide, before being "released into the community". Having moved to an area where his daughter would have more children for company, he was raided by the police and threatened with yet further regional processing, a prospect which appears to have depressed him despite Australia's famously British attitude to asylum seekers. The recommended sentence for self-harm is one year's imprisonment with hard labour, and the prosecutors argued for a custodial sentence in order to deter others, given the well-known propensity of suicidal people towards rational self-interest. However, the court contented itself with separating the man from his eight-year-old daughter and relieving him of £110, which the magistrate said she hoped would incentivise him to count his blessings and be a bit more considerate in future.

Punching Above Our Weight on the International Stage

Not only are Britain's favourite Islamic fundamentalist head-choppers buying our freedomisation hardware; they are also receiving training in "international targeting". Officers from the army and the Royal Air Force, with the swashbuckling designation of "weaponeers", have been dispatched with a rattle of jargon to Saudi Arabia, in order to ensure that the weapons sold by grace of Her Majesty's Government are not unduly misused. Doubtless this valuable input from the liberators of Iraq and the democratisers of Libya has helped prevent any unnecessary and undeserved civilian casualties in Yemen, beyond the odd 2800 or so collateral damagees.

Blather Together

In order that the Brexit campaign may sensibly pursue the devastating sanity of turning the EU into an economic rival, the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange has ordered everyone to be chums, at least until the next token filly needs a spanking for her disloyalty. The Caudillo, who next week intends to share a stage with the equally brilliant Chris Graybeing, clearly wishes nothing to interfere with his quest for Britain's independence from its biggest market. Even the Falange's most lucrative donor has rowed back on his squeals about a Westminster stitch-up and his pledge to extend the merriment into October by suing the Electoral Commission for the crime of having nominated the jabbering baboons of the Conservative Party over the jabbering baboons of the Farage Falange. It remains to be seen whether the Caudillo's new policy of appeasement will extend to his most hated political enemy, the seat-warming wing of the Falange in the House of Expenses Claimants.

Our Kind of Extremist

Britain's Head Boy's favourite Islamic fundamentalists are not doing anything wrong, regardless of any quibbles by mere experts in international law. The Saudi head-choppers' ongoing rampage in Yemen has been certified squeaky-clean, with an innocence factor of near-Israeli proportions, because the Saudis have conducted numerous investigations into their own conduct and have satisfied themselves that the Saudis aren't doing anything wrong. No-one in the British Government could possibly quarrel with that, since it's exactly the way Whitehall and the Bullingdon Club like to conduct their own little affairs. The Saudis are also buying British weapons, which as everyone knows are clearly labelled Not to be used for the purposes of gratuitous violence, and the mere expert in international law has a funny foreign name; so it hardly seems worth while to pursue the matter further.

You May Be Brown, But You Can Still Back Zac

Lord Crosby of Deadcat has once more opened Zac Goldsmith's mouth and vomited forth his wisdom upon the world. Goldsmith, whose personal touch in the campaign thus far has been to burble that he rather thinks he ought to be mayor because he rather thinks it might be rather rah-rah and he's dodged enough tax to have earned it and BEWARE THE WRATH OF KHAN and um ah um ah, has proclaimed his rival guilty of associating with extremists, sort of. Goldsmith has been helped, if that is the word I want, by a bit of additional Sadiq-smearing from the present incumbent and Mad Tessie May. The London Haystack had a bit of a blather about links with a London imam whose views are so obnoxious that Khan obviously shares them to the letter; while Mad Tessie May "said she was worried about whether" Khan knew another Muslim who wrote some words on a website - a crime against humanity of such magnitude that even the trendy lefties in charge of Guantánamo Bay decided to release him.

It is all frightfully tolerant and democratic, of course; and doubtless Lord Crosby of Deadcat is saving up something special to disgorge as the frenzy builds to peak Britishness. Having recently taught Londoners that everyone named Patel is an Indian and therefore a jewel-clutching Narendra Modi fan, it can only be a matter of time before Lord Crosby decides to edify us with the idea that everyone named Khan is a stripey undesirable from the Jungle Book. In preparation for the great day Goldsmith, the stooge, must stand outside mosques handing out targeted leaflets ("The Prophet would back Zac! Vote for Sadiq Khan and your 72 virgins will be cut to 16 in a crazed public transport lab-rat experiment!") and burbling about reaching out to everybody.

Seriously Silly

A colonial subcaudillo of the Farage Falange has apparently gone soft on the question of whether Britain's notorious excess of qualified physicians should be cured by recourse to a crackdown on parking offences. A defector from the eminently sane and sensible Ulster Unionists, David McNarry recited for Radio Ulster's lucky listeners the standard Rothermere-Mosley rant about getting our country back. Asked what he would do if a Polish surgeon was fined for overstaying in a car park, McNarry proclaimed that the Farage Falange would deport any and every wog who was found guilty of anything and everything. However, he later retracted the comment, stating that he had been faced with a silly line of questioning and had decided to give a silly answer in order, Zen-master-like, to force upon the radio presenter a satori regarding the Farage Falange's deportation policy. Apparently, what the Farage Falange really wants to do is deport people only for "a serious offence followed by due process and conviction in the courts", which makes the Farage Falange somewhat more weedily liberal than the student-purging Mad Tessie May; for this week, at least.

Wholly Unforeseeable

In their perpetual crusade to protect British values from the marauding swarms, the minions of Mad Tessie May have for the past three years been permitted to give refugees and asylum seekers the News Corporation treatment. An amendment to the Police Act 1997 allows wog disposal operatives to bug homes, cars and migrant warehousing centres, and to hack telephones and computers. The Liberal Democrats are predictably shocked and outraged: "No parliamentarian would have ever foreseen immigration officers having the powers to hack into our smartphones and computers of potentially quite vulnerable people," squealed the spokesbeing for home affairs. The amendment was passed in 2013, so heaven only knows what greasy, unprincipled bunch of mendacious right-wing enablers can have been in coalition with the Conservatives at the time.

Sajid Sucks Up

Britain's Minister for Holidays is preparing to sack up to four thousand of his own staff, according to a leaked strategy paper. This would amount to about forty per cent of the department's core staff, and would constitute a greater amputation than is deemed necessary even by the most blinkered, immature and vindictive acolytes of the Osbornomic miracle, such as George Osborne.

Sajid Javid, who was so concerned about the state of Britain's steel industry that he toddled off to Australia with his daughter, recently demonstrated his fiscal efficiency by throwing some taxpayers' money at a firm of management consultants. They seem to have come up with the goods, advising Javid to do exactly the sort of thing Javid likes to do. Javid is a Thatcherite, and he likes sacking people. Javid is also the token minority of an ethnic persuasion in a cabinet full of people who want to abolish the Human Rights Act and restore to employers the right to hire and fire on whatever grounds they dashed well please; so it's only natural that he would wish to ingratiate himself with the prefects by taking the Osbornomic miracle in his own department that little bit further than strictly necessary.

Hardly Front-Page Stuff

Despite the efforts of Britain's Head Boy and his chums to do nothing whatever about it, global warming may attain far worse levels than have hitherto been predicted. New research indicates that the ice content of clouds, and hence their ability to deflect excess heat from the sun, has been overestimated. Fortunately, the results are uncertain, and quite probably fail to achieve even the pitiful 95% certainty among mere experts that anthropogenic global warming exists at all. No doubt this partly explains why the likelihood of yet more disastrous climate effects has been relegated to the Just the Environment section of Britain's leading liberal newspaper.

I Am Not A Crook

Tax avoidance is morally wrong. I have consistently talked about having a meeting about talking about doing something about it. I have never profited by tax avoidance. My family has never profited by tax avoidance. Neither I nor any member of my hard-working family has any plans at the present time to profit by tax avoidance. As a public figure to whom the plebs look for moral guidance, my tax affairs are a private matter. Those who wish to know more should put up or shut up. I have never tried to pretend to be anything I am not. I have never profited by tax avoidance, although I have profited by tax avoidance. But that was a long time ago when I was leader of the opposition. That was the time when I burbled about solar panels, simpered about Little Ivan™ and the NHS, and took my European party into cahoots with the Latvian Waffen-SS fan club. I obviously can't point to the source of every bit of money when I come from such a hard-working family with so many dead people in it. To say that my father's tax-avoiding activities were meant to avoid taxes is a tragic misconception. It was all because of the mess Labour made. It was because of the scroungers and migrants. Badgers probably had something to do with it. My admiration for the innocent beauty of decapitated pigs has never been other than clean and pure. I have almost never profited by tax avoidance, and I have even more never done so by very much. Tax avoidance is sometimes morally wrong, but usually perfectly legal, especially when real people do it, which hardly ever happens, and then only to avoid tragic misconceptions such as the idea that I have made excessive profits by tax avoidance. Jeremy Corbyn is planning to experiment on commuters, so can we get back to genuine issues now?

A Deserving Sort of Chap

Hard-working families, bursary-free nurses and other beneficiaries of the Osbornomic miracle will rejoice in the news that there is at least one man in the country who has been historically underpaid and still deserves a rise. Nic Budden, the chief executive of an estate agent company, has graciously allowed his basic wage to be inflated past the half-million mark, with an increased maximum bonus of £825,000 - a small but significant improvement on the beggarly £576,562.50 which was previously on offer. The company has recorded a fall in profits, and its shares fell by a third between last June and the end of the year; but this is purely because Londoners are very inconsiderately squatting on their ever more affordable equity, and has nothing at all to do with any reluctance on the part of corporate fat cats to get on their bikes and look for transactions. Naturally, like most CEOs most of the time, Budden deserves credit for adapting and growing into an enlarged role, rather than whining about being spread too thin, after the manner of certain shirkers in the hated public sector who deal in mere lives instead of actual property.

The Tears of a Clown When There's Someone Around

Among the perils of sainthood is an excess of sympathy, even for enemies of the race such as young people and single mothers. A few months ago, the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith had a bit of an on-camera snivel about a nineteen-year-old single mother who had somehow failed to be incentivised into work by the Government's programme of motivational impoverishment. This was in December, before the Chancellor's vicious attacks on vulnerable members of society had obtruded themselves upon Duncan Smith's devoutly Christian conscience. The brilliant Duncan Smith has turned on the public waterworks before, on a visit to a Glasgow tenement whose residents he commenced kicking as soon as Baby Jesus, with a little help from Britain's Head Boy, exalted him unto the Department of Workfare and Privation. As on that moving occasion (it's a matter for the individual worshipper whether motion occurs in the heart or the bile duct), it would of course be uncharitable in the extreme to suggest that the man who was too thick-headed to lead the Stupid Party might have been indulging in a bit of lacrimatory crocodilism.

Decent Marauders

As one would expect given that the swarming hordes are to blame for everything that isn't the fault of militant teachers, money-grubbing medics and mansion-dwelling poor people, the minions of Mad Tessie May take migrant welfare very seriously. Doubtless this explains why the number of suicide attempts in wog disposal emporia has reached an all-time record, with eleven per cent more recorded in 2015 than in 2014. It is, of course, a credit to those charming people at Serco and G4S, with whom the Home Secretary has almost no marital connection whatever, that so many among the marauding swarms have been moved to try and ease, in their own small way, Britain's famous crisis of full-upness. Eleven minor marauders were on suicide watch last year, so it seems that even the little woglings are stepping up to the plate and pitching in for the great baseball game that is the saving of our British identity.

Stepping Up to the Plate

I am sure we all remember the glorious wog-bombing of Libya, which has done so much for regional stability and the spread of British values. As often happens in these matters, the natives have thus far proved unworthy of their freedomisation, and have responded to their newly-bestowed liberty in the most unconstructive ways. Ever mindful of the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving, Her Majesty's Government has decided that its entire humanitarian contribution to Libya's 2.4 million scroungers for the present financial year will be £50,000: the equivalent of the price for attendance at one business community belch-in with the Bullingdon Club. This commendable parsimony has prompted the usual outcry from ghastly foreigners at the UN, who seem to think Her Majesty's Government has some sort of moral obligation to bribe people not to turn into migrants, health tourists, terrorists or other marauding swarms. So secure is the Head Boy in his Blairite rectitude that he has not even deigned to respond to a summons from the foreign affairs select committee, which is holding an inquiry into the whole glorious affair and is at least mildly concerned that ground troops may be deployed on something other than a sneaky basis and spoil all the fun.

Soft Power

As we all know, because various spokesbeings have informed us, the Government is opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances (except possibly for the work-shy) and thus takes every opportunity to make civilising overtures to the less enlightened. In the case of Saudi Arabia, for example, the Government has robustly continued selling weapons so that the fundamentalist Islamic state can continue its murderous attacks on Yemen; while the Head Boy himself has staunchly bowed and scraped before the kleptocrats of Allah, whose government extracts confessions by torture, and executes people who were children at the time of their supposed offences. As one might expect, such forthright interventions have resulted in spectacular success: Saudi Arabia continues to extract confessions by torture, and to execute people who were children at the time of their supposed offences. Indeed, under the democratising influence of the Head Boy and his squealing, purple Secretary for War and the Colonies, the number of executions is set to double this year, having risen by more than forty per cent last year; and they still buy our weapons, too. What more could one possibly hope for?

Keep Calm and Save Money

Those with robust faith in basic British values will find themselves vindicated yet again by the revelation that, even in the face of the Nazi menace, the British government remained staunch in its determination not to give hand-outs to unauthorised wogs. Some time after Churchill had personally won the war and liberated Auschwitz, the German government agreed to contribute a million pounds in compensation to those British nationals who had been undeservedly treated like Jews, Roma, moral degenerates or other lesser breeds. In their zeal for fair play, the British spent two years investigating the family background of a tortured and executed Allied agent in order to ensure that her daughter, who had a suspicious foreign-sounding name, was not an undeserving case. One Dutch Jew, who apparently thought that being a British subject meant he didn't need to show his papers, rejected a princely offer of £500 for the gassing of his family; the Foreign Office told him they would "make certain enquiries which may take a considerable time", which is Whitehall English for "your application has been put in the rubbish bin because you have hurt our itsy-bitsy feelings."

Oddly enough, the whole business has been kept secret for fifty years, despite the copious amounts of British buccaneering entrepreneurialism on display. Possibly it was thought that the story should not be told until a new generation required appropriate role models for keeping compensation out of the wrong hands. Then again, perhaps it was simply that not enough of the money found its way to the tax-dodging community for Her Majesty's Government to take real pride in its work.