Better in the Long Run

Among the small mercies of the Great War must now be counted the Royal Navy's lack of spectacular success in the Battle of Jutland, which means that its centenary has passed in a somewhat less rah-rah fashion than one or two others we might mention. In terms of tonnage sunk the Germans had the best of it, whether because of superior seamanship, better ships or Churchill's mismanagement of the Admiralty; but the British fleet was larger and could better afford its losses. The Germans failed to achieve their strategic goals and the High Command was driven to adopt the propaganda disaster that was unrestricted U-boat warfare. None of this is exactly the sort of stuff one can summarise on a commemorative coin or sloganise with a bit of poppy-porn. Possibly the comparative lack of rah-rah simply reflects the fact that historical analysts of the Gove-Johnson calibre have other things to jabber about at the moment. Then again, perhaps it reflects the diminished status of the Royal Navy, which nowadays has trouble finding aircraft carriers with matching aircraft or U-boats that can find a target smaller than Scotland; and which, far from thrashing terrorists like the RAF or teaching Saudi head-choppers the art of war like the army, was recently employed in the inglorious pursuit of fishing a bunch of migrants out of the Mediterranean.

Our Civilising Influence

As the Chilcot report crawls towards publication, and the Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair crawls to remind us that the judgements of man are as nought to the justice of his chums George and Jesus, it seems the democratic legacy is getting all freedomised up again. The Iraqi army is about to storm Fallujah, where about fifty thousand people are being held hostage, amid acute shortages of food and medicine, by the Fighting Islamic Sons of Tony. It is reported that execution squads are roaming the streets ready to evangelise with extreme prejudice anyone who leaves their house or shows a white flag.

During the crusade against Saddam Hussein, the city of Fallujah was the scene of at least one massacre by US troops before being taken over by insurgents and then liberated with extreme prejudice by the forces of righteousness. Fortunately, its history for the purposes of journalism begins ten years after those regrettable events; and it is arguable that Saddam Hussein would have done much worse to the city had his weapons of mass ethereality possessed the awesome destructive power which almost everybody except the global population at large believed they did at the time.

Cancer is Good For You

Scientists as a class can, as we know, be unpleasantly immune to British values whenever mere facts enter the equation; and scientists with a public health agenda can often be the worst of the lot. Hence, no doubt, the unreasoning prejudice of some who are funded by Cancer Research UK, and have discovered that their pension funds are being invested in British American Tobacco. The investment is the fifth largest by the Universities Superannuation Scheme; the largest being its holdings in the equally clean and responsible Royal Dutch Shell. The USS has declared itself a "responsible and engaged investor", and has had a bit of a chat with the tobacco companies about marketing approaches and regulations; which certainly ought to settle any reasonable doubts.

This Madness Must Be Monetised

Despite record announcements of new investment and the endless life opportunities opened up by the Osbornomic miracle, it seems young people in England are still refusing to buck up their ideas. The Conservatives have promised to give mental health services "parity of esteem" with the various non-comedic services they've been slashing and selling; and it does indeed appear that children and adolescents on the verge of suicide are being treated to much the same lottery as those with physical problems. The Conservative head of the all-party group on mental health has called for a "fundamental transformation" of services, by which he presumably means flogging them off to those famously bucked-up people at Serco and G4S; and Britain's Head Boy has already taken decisive action of his own. He appointed a token filly as "mental health champion for schools", whose intended function was presumably to argue for the utter sanity of whatever the Bride of Gove happened to be doing at the time. Instead, the appointee claimed that being poor, being forced into debt or being made to take the Eleven-Plus at five and a half might be contributing to mental health problems. As the father and primary user of Little Ivan™, Britain's Head Boy has no time or sympathy for those who use problem children to make cheap political points; so he sacked her.

Mere Context

Britain's leading liberal newspaper has reported with its customary impartiality upon President Obama's visit to Hiroshima. The well-known drone-master and nuclear non-disarmer made some unctuous noises about moral rearmament and learning the lessons; the Chinese foreign ministry called attention to Japanese war crimes and parroted the line that the use of nuclear weapons on human beings was necessary to shorten the war. Some Japanese consider the bombings a war crime, and Britain's leading liberal newspaper faithfully reported this, while dutifully noting that "the consensus in the US" contradicts and thereby invalidates this proposition. The evidence of mere facts, as set forth in papers declassified thirty years ago and extensively written about since, is that the Truman administration deliberately prolonged the war, refusing Japanese offers of surrender until it had used its new toys. The purpose was to remind the USSR not to get any funny ideas about peaceful co-existence now that the Axis was gone. But this is mere context; and, since neither Barack Obama nor the Chinese foreign ministry had anything to say about it, any mention by Britain's leading liberal newspaper would doubtless have been inappropriate.

Common Sense

A confederacy of common sense has formed in opposition to a massive, big-government social experiment by the Obama administration to "run roughshod" over the democratic process (common sense, pace the uppity Ms Parks, says niggers don't ride) by giving transgender students equal rights. Now that reform (vandalism and fire-sales, in Standard English) is the prerogative of the neoliberal orthodoxy, a new name has had to be found for those less responsible social changes advocated by anyone to the left of Donald Trump. Experiment seems to fit the bill, and was used quite recently by the more extreme candidate for the London mayoralty when referring to Sadiq Scary Muslim Khan's declared intentions to favour the city's infrastructure over the more moderate and acceptable goals of ever-bigger oligarchical follies and ever-noisier blanched pachyderms. Such right-wing delights as wog-bombing, cripple-kicking, poor-bashing and open season on melanin addicts can never be classified as experiments, because their virtues are well known, thoroughly established, and tirelessly touted by the preachers of the True Faith. They are just common sense, just like the difference between boys and girls or the way that a cold day now and then proves there's no such thing as global warming.

Going Off Message

While Britain's brave boys in blue continue courageously to implement Her Majesty's Government's compassionate yet pragmatic let-'em-drown policy, those cowardly Italians continue to undermine their efforts and taint their sacrifice. Although five British jobs were saved when another boat capsized in the Mediterranean today, the UK's achievement was somewhat undercut by the migrant-abetting mafiosi of the Italian navy rescuing a swarming horde some five hundred and fifty strong. This means, of course, that less than one per cent of the entire boat-load will have internalised the correct lessons about pull factors, the legitimate concerns of the white working class, and the advisability of staying in one's native war zone; particularly if it happens to be among those select wealth-creating and entrepreneurial war zones which, like Libya and one or two others, have resulted from the glorious wog-bombing activities of Britain's Head Boy and his chums.

Fire Sale Soon

Possibly in order to distract attention from the Tessie in Wonderland trip that is the Psychoactive Substances Act, or perhaps because she has some slightly eccentric ideas about the best way to appear less silly than Michael Gove, the Home Secretary has gone off on one about the fire and rescue services. Though held in great affection by the communities they serve, it appears that parts of the fire and rescue services allow a toxic and corrosive culture of bullying and harassment combined with a lack of accountability. They are, in other words, quite unlike either the Conservative Party or those upstanding people at G4S, with whom the Home Secretary has virtually no marital connection whatever; and the solution, as might be expected, is to implement a radical and ambitious programme of reform (demolition and privatisation, in Standard English). The general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union expressed cautious agreement about the need for fairness and accountability, but was impolite enough to point out that it was the Conservative administration of 2010 which, with its little yellow enablers, removed the diversity targets that were then in place. He also showed mild surprise at the Home Secretary's claim that the size of the workforce had been unchanged for ten years, given the hobnailed efficientisation measures in which her own government has been indulging over the past six. It is as yet far from clear how far this pedantic attitude will help when it comes to constructive collaboration with the legal genius behind the migrant cat story and the Psychoactive Substances Act.

Not Quite Managerial Material

It seems that even the humblest employees at the fine and law-abiding firm of G4S are not immune to the management's work ethic. G4S, it will be remembered, is the firm which provided such brilliant security at the London Olympics that the army had to be called in to plug the gaps; and which then, having been duly rewarded with various lucrative contracts for tagging offenders, demonstrated its gratitude by charging the taxpayer for keeping track of people who were confined, deceased or otherwise reasonably slow-moving. Thanks to this glowing record, and hardly at all because Mad Tessie May's husband is a major shareholder, the company remains the Home Office's first choice whenever the former party of law and order decides to outsource more law and order; and some call-handling staff at Lincolnshire police have allegedly taken a rather enterprising approach to the 999 industry. Since G4S do not yet have control of the courts, the five employees are innocent until proven guilty; but they are under investigation by both G4S and its business rivals in the police for making bogus calls in order to massage their performance figures. It is suspected that they did so without even ensuring that they were on a performance-related bonus scheme; which has very naturally resulted in their suspension for fiscal ineptitude.

Our Boys, Our Values, Our Chums

It may surprise some that the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns, now in the charge of a suitful of stale air, still makes any pretence of being concerned over human rights abuses. In fact, last year the department designated thirty countries as sources of humanitarian concern; fortunately for British values, the concern runs about as deep as a speech by Philip Hammond. British armed forces are involved in training personnel in sixteen of the thirty countries, including some which are recent beneficiaries of democratisation by wog-bombing, such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya; and a few, such as Bahrain, China and Saudi Arabia, where enlightened and benevolent rulers have ensured that the process of democratisation is advancing at a pace congenial to the Bullingdon Club. For example, British commandos are training Bahraini soldiers in the use of sniper rifles despite (or, in Oldspeak, because of) the alleged use of such specialist troops to pacify some uppity proles who made a bit of noise five years ago.

Her Majesty's Government has also announced that it will be working more closely with Oman, whose qualifications for the privilege, as listed by Amnesty International, include the use of "mock execution, beating, hooding, solitary confinement, subjection to extremes of temperature and to constant noise, abuse and humiliation" and "a culture of arbitrary arrest and detention in secret institutions". Doubtless thanks to the British values on display, the blustering blimp at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing has personally proclaimed Oman our pal.

Push Her Out

Purveyors of family values, such as a Conservative member of the Commons select committee on health, are calling for the head of Cathy Warwick, the chief executive of the Royal College of Midwives. Warwick has proclaimed that, far from concerning themselves solely with the breeding of little Britons, midwives should also aid and abet those perverse females who fail to see their uterus as public property. The RCM is supporting a campaign to change the 24-week limit on abortion, and Warwick is chair of the board of trustees for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, which is the country's biggest provider of pregnancy terminations. The Conservative member Andrew Percy has claimed that there is a conflict of interest, presumably in the same sense as with builders who take down walls, doctors who prevent disease, and members of anti-NHS parties who sit on health committees.

Punching Above Our Weight on the International Stage

Just because the Government has grudgingly agreed to resettle twenty thousand Syrians over four years or until an appropriate lynch mob can be whipped up, that doesn't mean the party of Zac Goldsmith has gone soft on foreigners; oh, dear me no. Once their claims are granted, refugees unlucky enough to be here already are given four weeks to find accommodation and an income before being made homeless. In order to protect the taxpayer further, the Government also withdraws its munificent handout of £5 a day; loans are available, but the Government takes longer to process the applications than it does to kick people onto the streets. Naturally, the Conservatives are deeply concerned that refugees should integrate themselves into civilised society until a pretext can be found for returning them to the wog-bombing zone; doubtless this explains why a government-funded service to aid integration was abolished by the Conservatives and their little yellow enablers - aptly enough, during the very same year as the glorious and freedomising wog-bombing of Libya.

Pouring Oil on Ruffled Feathers

Britain's Head Boy is preparing himself for a diplomatic encounter which might prove a trifle awkward, not least because it will involve a larger, louder, fatter and stupider version of Boris Johnson. There are rumours that Donald Trump intends dropping in on his golf course in Scotland, which would naturally be a matter of concern for the Conservatives as golf courses are among the few parts of Scotland they care about. The Head Boy has described Trump's anti-Muslim blather as "divisive, stupid and wrong", and indeed it stands in ignoble contrast to the Head Boy's own recent backing of Zac Goldsmith's mayoral campaign right down the sewer; to say nothing of his Middle East policy of wog-bombing and concentration camps, his dismissal of the resulting Calais refugees as "a bunch of migrants" and his let-'em-drown policy in the Mediterranean.

Still, despite such displays of bleeding-heart metropolitan liberalism, the Head Boy probably has little to fear from an encounter with the blustering purple thing that dangles from Trump's hairdo. After all, Britain's Head Boy is the chap who used his dead child to lend credence to all the sweet nothings he was burbling about the NHS, and then turned the NHS over to Twizzler Lansley and Jeremy C Hunt. Britain's Head Boy is the chap who hugged huskies and then signed over half the country to shale frackers while letting illegal polluters poison forty thousand people a year. Britain's Head Boy is the chap who claims to lead the Conservative Party and to believe in Europe, while risking a British exit in order to humour some baboons on his back-benches. Britain's Head Boy is, in short, not the sort of chap to balk when it looks as if his immediate interests might be served by a bit of the old fast and slimy. Whether Trump's hairdo or its dangler will have the subtlety to appreciate the manoeuvre is another question.

Brain Cells

Among the jolly legislative treats lined up for the Head Boy's home stretch is the biggest overhaul of prisons since the nineteenth century; although it remains an open question whether the system is to be dragged into the twenty-first century or allowed to slide back to the eighteenth. The bill is the work of Michael Gove, the jabbering homunculus who thought that the best way to reform the education system was to antagonise everyone in it except Michael Gove and to put out a special edition of the Bible signed by himself. Among Gove's proposals for prison reform is a programme whereby our massively overcrowded prisons will stand more or less empty for most of the week and then become massively overcrowded at the weekends, to the ineffable moral improvement of the inmates. Presumably Gove (who, as we know, has trouble with figures), thinks that this is the way to ensure that the average number of inmates becomes better than average.

Meanwhile Gove's predecessor, the well-known public intellectual Chris Graybeing, has denied that overcrowding is at record levels, and blames everything on "legal highs", a category which in the Graybeing pharmacopoeia includes such moral hazards as books, telephone calls and exercise. Graybeing expressed his hearty approval of the bill, which seems a reasonable indication of just how far the Gove approach will go in ameliorating the problems Graybeing himself exacerbated with such hobnail-brained enthusiasm. Fortunately, Gove also intends to give "greater autonomy" to governors, so that they can take more of the blame when things go wrong.

An Offended Nose

One of the nice things about being a racist is how inoffensive it makes you. No matter how racist the racist yap of a particular racist may be, that particular racist is always the injured party and almost never means to cause offence. The strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange, for example, does not formulate his own racist yap (perish the thought), but gets it directly from Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, or possibly from some underling circa 2009 and/or 1998; or perhaps he makes it up as he goes along. The Caudillo accused Labour of rubbing his nose in diversity; and, being the straight-talking populist that he is, did not allow himself to be diverted from his nasofrottal victimhood by the fact that he was sitting next to a black woman. Better yet, the lady was one of that presumably dwindling band who still think the Farage Falange's anti-EU case amounts to anything more than purple-visaged, gaiter-thwhacking, cummerbund-busting, nigger-nobbling wogs-outery. Just to underline the point, Andrea Leadsom, a token filly from the Bullingdon Club's Ministry for Frackers and Chinese Uranium, started babbling about immigrants coming over here and overwhelming those precious public services which the Conservatives and their Farage Falange frères et semblables are so dedicated to preserving. Leadsom later "clarified" (claimed, in Standard English) that she did not intend to cause offence, and cited the bones of her body to prove it; which certainly ought to settle the matter.

Gas the Plebs

Hitler was, of course, a socialist who, along with his well-known proto-Brusselous loathing of healthily assertive nationalism, was also fanatically opposed to proper control of public information. Certainly no sensible, straight-talking populist could object to the non-publication of a report on air pollution; particularly a report which found that the most dangerous pollution is being concentrated in exactly those districts which contain the most expendable citizens. Only the most depraved levels of ultra-Islamazoid fanaticism, stratospherically boosted with Stalinist fervour and poisonously pumped with patricianophobic polpottery, can explain Sadiq Khan's Mussolinian fervour in dragging the unfortunate document into the glare of unwelcome publicity. Has he no sense of responsibility?

The Night Manager

Susanne Bier 2015

There was once a time when John le Carré and the BBC were a potent combination. The two George Smiley serials featuring Alec Guinness are masterpieces of acting, exposition and moral seediness, pulling no punches either with the Nineteen Eighty-Four beetle-man who is their ostensible hero, or with the pain and peril of those relative innocents who are ground up in his machinations. Susanne Bier's The Night Manager dispenses with such outmoded complexities, serving up a simple-minded melodrama in which an evil arms dealer, operating with the connivance of the British government, is brought down by a rainbow alliance of plucky little underdogs.

The acting is unimpeachable. Hugh Laurie is very good as Richard Onslow Roper, who comes across as Edward Fox's Jackal self-promoted from the death-factory floor; Tom Hollander amuses playing Leonard to Roper's Vandamm; and Olivia Colman is excellent as the spymaster Angela Burr, despite a script which feels the need to establish her as a breeder so we can be properly certain of her moral compass. It is amusing to see (however briefly) Burr's husband given the unloved, dutiful, long-suffering but conveniently unseen character more usually reserved for the action hero's wife.

Otherwise, we're back in the fifties. Colman delivers (very well) a monologue about the consequences of chemical warfare, thus establishing the conventional one-to-one relationship of personal trauma and present motivation. A female expendable commits suicide after a single scene, thus motivating a useful pawn without any unnecessary unpleasantness. An Arab whore serves as the Night Manager's motivation by getting her head bashed in; an Aryan-American whore, by contrast, makes due sacrifice on the hero's behalf and gains appropriate redemption complete with family values.

Also on the debit side are an intrusive musical score, which seems determined to hand-hold our mood through every single non-dialogue moment on the soundtrack; and the patronising use of captions to tell us where we are, even when the photography, action and dialogue make it perfectly clear. In these as in other respects, The Night Manager as a whole better befits the smug crudities of mainstream Hollywood than the man who once wrote The Looking-Glass War and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

Drinking From the Same Labour Mug

While the master race clutches its pearls over the migrant crisis in Europe, the vast majority of refugees continue to be accommodated in poorer countries; and the Upper Milibeing has proclaimed that this desirable situation should now be formalised. The most vulnerable cases, which he estimates at a reassuring ten per cent or less, may strive for the privilege of relocation; the remainder will just have to stay where they are and "become productive residents of the countries that they’ve fled to." In order to facilitate this integration (the Upper Milibeing does apparently concede that not all wogs are exactly the same), the civilised world must ensure that the receiving countries "get international financial support", which in Standard English presumably means that any safeguards their people have against corporate exploitation should be demolished all the faster. It is, of course, axiomatic that no refugee could become a productive resident of a proper country like Britain; and once they recover or reach the age of majority, the orphans and cripples can always be sent back to the war zone, as under the present régime.

Without the Law

Various representatives of Western civilisation have walked out of the Ugandan president's inauguration ceremony. The European and North American delegates were protesting against some offensive remarks about the International Criminal Court, which Museveni criticised in his inaugural address. He referred to the court as "a bunch of useless people", despite all the good work it has done investigating and indicting numerous non-Caucasian war criminals. The United States, being World Cop by the grace of God, is not a member of the court but has called on lesser breeds to live up to their commitments insofar as this would not adversely affect US interests. The Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair, we may assume, agrees with the United States.

Farmer Charlie

Waiting around for one's parent to die is perhaps not a bad job if you can get it, but the problem does remain of what to do with all that spare time. Along with pretending to be an architect and sending unsolicited advice to Government ministers, the Prince of Wales likes to play at farming, and has donated his expert opinion on the subject of what ought to be done about the over-use of antibiotics. Apparently his royal highness' cattle and sheep have been treated with homeopathic remedies alongside more conventional medicines; and of course the homeopathic remedies have worked remarkably well. Homeopathic remedies tend to be most effective when taken with real medicine, even when used on animals which have not yet evolved the placebo effect. An additional benefit is that the active ingredient for homeopathic remedies happens to be a liquid hydrogen-oxygen mix which is, for the moment, quite readily available and fairly cheap; so the prince and several of our more brilliant politicians are keen to promote it as a handy replacement for mere treatment on the hated NHS. After all, what is good enough for the prince's hard-working farm animals should certainly be good enough for Britain's malingering proles.

Guilty, Yet Deserving

Some serial offenders from one of London's more disreputable districts have received more than £100,000 in legal aid from the taxpayer, despite being repeatedly found guilty of mass poisoning, negligence and sloth. The recidivists are, of course, minor gang members of the greenest government ever, which has persistently broken the law on air pollution and therefore stands complicit in up to forty thousand premature deaths every year, according to its own figures. The supreme court ordered the miscreants to buck up their ideas, to which Elizabeth Truss' Department for Fracking and Whatever responded, eventually, with a sneering declaration that it might get around to cutting pollution in a decade or so. Four years ago Truss co-authored (or perhaps had co-authored for her) a pamphlet which described British workers as being among the world's worst idlers; so we must all applaud her obvious desire to lead by example. Meanwhile, annual funding for improving air quality has been cut by eighty-four per cent, thanks largely to Owen Paterson and his little yellow enablers during the Conservative administration of 2010-15; but at least we can rest assured that £105,000 of the money saved has been spent in a good cause.

Trading Motes For Beams

Britain's Head Boy has been caught in his usual statesmanlike mode, pestering a bored nonagenarian like a prefect yapping at Granny on Founders' Day. As the tax-dodgers' friend who tried to remove the right to strike and cut off the funding for opposition parties; as the Beloved Leader whose Home Secretary is operated by G4S and whose Culture Secretary is run by Rupert Murdoch; as the liberal reformer who put his hairdresser in Parliament and who has just had his advertising man knighted, it goes without saying that Britain's Head Boy must have a certain concern about corruption. It is only natural, therefore, that he has invited some experts along so that he can make sure he's doing it properly and not under-using his tuck box.

Since the Head Boy was in the presence of the hated John Bercow, the intermittently troublesome Archbishop of Canterbury and the IDS-witted Chris Graybeing, he decided to have a bit of a trumpet about what a rah-rah cabinet meeting he had chaired this morning. "We talked about our anti-corruption summit," he burbled. "We’ve got ... some leaders of some fantastically corrupt countries coming to Britain." The Head Boy was referring to Nigeria and Afghanistan: "Nigeria and Afghanistan are possibly two of the most corrupt countries in the world," he recited, a junior tick having guided him to the appropriate Wikipedia page; but Granny was unimpressed and turned her head away. Welby argued that the present leader of Nigeria is not corrupt, but nobody sought to deny the Head Boy's mission-accomplished in Afghanistan.

Please Relax, You Are Perfectly Safe

Britain's new, dynamic energy policy (viz. ditching the green crap and relying on sustainable uranium to keep the City's lights on) has been subject to yet more outrageous interference by the bureau-wogs at the United Nations. A committee has found that the UK has been treating its European partners in much the same way as it likes to treat the indigenous proles, by building a potential nuclear disaster site without putting itself to the trouble of pretending to consult those who might be affected. In this case, the fallout includes Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway and Austria, besides the financial health of that great British company, EDF of France. "Compliance with international obligations is something we take very seriously," sniggered a spokesbeing who was doubtless unaware of (to take a random example) the London Haystack's heroic efforts at keeping the capital's air quality sufficiently buccaneering and barnstorming and generally outside the law.

Eternal Vigilance is the Privilege of Stupidity

Even after so many years of the War Against the Abstract Noun, there remain a few ivory-tower academics who have not fully grasped the extent of its liberatising pacificality. An American Airlines passenger found herself seated next to a man engaged in suspicious behaviour amounting to possession of dark curly hair and scribbling cryptic alien squiggles on a pad; naturally, she passed the stewardess a note, got the flight delayed and denounced the suspect to the FBI. The man, a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, had been doing a differential equation, and has declared himself perturbed by the workings of a security system that "relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless". He has obviously been spending too much time with his differential equations and not enough observing the world as it has become since the régime of Dick Cheney and his pet chimpanzee.

We Hope to Work Constructively With This Vile, Treacherous Fanatic

During an election campaign, as is well known, stuff gets said, questions get posed and excrement occurs, and if happens to be a bit racist, well, that's just the rough and tumble of politics. One of the more cloacal doings in the London mayoral election was dropped by the Minister for Wog-Bombing, Michael Fallon, who blathered that Sadiq Khan could not be trusted with the city because Scary Muslim. During the last general election campaign, Fallon blathered that the Milibeing could not be trusted with the country and would hand it over to Vladimir Putin at the first opportunity; and Fallon, whose defence policy consists largely in continuing to fight the Cold War, is evidently not the chap to change something that works, even if it doesn't. Now that Khan has been elected, Fallon has blathered that London is almost safe because a Conservative government will be working to undermine him at every turn, but nevertheless Scary Muslim. Given that the Tooting imam in question has shared platforms with Conservatives, the new blather of Scary Muslim is a particularly brilliant excretion.

Browned Off

That Khan is a dangerous cuss:
For sure one of Them, not of Us.
You plebs must beware
Of making him mayor,
In case he should blow up a bus.

Your name is Patel; you must be
A jolly old Hindoo, I see!
What ho and pip-pip,
For I'm the sahib
Protecting your baksheesh, savee?

The chap who expected to coast
Right into the mayoral post
Began as white trash
With plenty of cash
And finished as nicely-browned toast.

Goldie Dodger

Trained to Within an Inch of Their Lives

Flagellation fans in the party of John Whittingdale will rejoice to learn that the Government's hired thugs at secure training centres (child prisons, in Standard English) continue to adopt a thoroughly no-nonsense attitude while beating British values into our more recalcitrant junior resources. One institution where a fifteen-year-old was restrained to a vomit-assisted quietus more than a decade ago was still scoring highest for child abuse in 2014-15; and as one would expect, the three institutions which were most productive in such old-fashioned discipline were all run by those delightful people at G4S, with whom the Home Secretary has almost no marital connection whatever. The Ministry for Profitable Incarceration is so concerned at the abuses that it has introduced a new system of restraint which requires increased reporting; it is as yet unclear whether decreased suffocation was considered a possible pull factor for potential criminals. As for the sixty-five incidences of suffocation and/or serious injury inflicted in the cause of justice in half a dozen institutions over a single year, the Ministry has so little to hide that it has heavily redacted the relevant report.

Full Spectrum Dingbat

As the chap who allied his MEPs with the cranks, crooks and Jew-baiters of the European Conservatives and Reformists, and as gun-runner in ordinary to the head-chopping House of Saud, self-evidently there is nothing Britain's Head Boy hates more than extremism. The flagship of his "legacy package" of legislation, before he toddles off to spend more time with the wages of his dear old dad's tax-dodging, is an anti-extremism law which will enable the Home Secretary to ban extremist groups, issue extremism disruption orders to prevent extremist behaviour by extremist individuals, and close down extremist communication media and premises from which extremists are supporting extremist activities. It is all frightfully full-spectrum and forthright and robust, except for the minor problem that nobody knows what extremism is.

To the Not Terribly Bright Party, of course, extremism is like human rights or modern art or foreigners: something nasty and evil and fundamentally un-British, but not something that any self-respecting expenses claimant should even think about trying to define. Unfortunately, the business of applying the law will not be in the hands of those sensible people at Serco and G4S, who can be relied on to understand such nuances, but in the hands of the courts, which are themselves riddled with the kind of extremist who believes that laws should be consistently applied and that governments should stay within them. Accordingly, the anti-extremism bill has been going through much the same contortions as the Psychoactive Substances Bill, by which the Government tried to make illegal anything that brought about alterations in the brain, such as LSD, caffeine or the condition of being awake. The Conservatives have learned from that rather chastening experience, and have so far kept more or less clandestine their efforts to find a definition of extremism that includes terrorists but excludes wog-bombers; that includes peaceful protesters but excludes the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers Club; that includes Hacked Off but excludes the Rothermere Stürmer; and that includes Sadiq Khan and the Green Party but excludes the Farage Falange and Mad Tessie May.

A Touch of Unctad

Greasy foreigners with silly names are once more attempting to insinuate their totalitarian red tape into the private financial orifices of Britain's wealth creators. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (the acronym for which sounds like something the Bullingdon Club might use to oil up their porcine penetration packages) has blatantly invoked the politics of envy by urging governments to interfere in the running of their own jurisdictions. Even the sacred borders of the British Empire are not exempt from the sordid law-mongering: should the urgings of Unctad ever be heeded, the very vaults of Britain's Head Boy's dear old dad might one day be prey to the vulture tax-man, purveyor to the hated public sector. One would think that the United Nations, which owes its existence entirely to the deified Churchill and his American chums, would have a bit more sense of what is fair and right for the right sort of people.

Saved Again

We have, of course, been stabilising the hell out of Libya ever since someone or other launched an ill-conceived wog-bombing campaign there a few years ago. The humanitarian activities of Britain's Head Boy and the empty suit at the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns continue to spread freedom and entrepreneurial zeal among the local hard-working families, while consigning numerous less worthy inhabitants to the peace of Daoud Jones' locker. Ninety-eight British jobs have been saved from the swarming hordes this weekend alone; besides a potential maternity hospital which was rescued from almost certain bankruptcy when a likely birth tourist was foiled in its nefarious doings.

Moral Medicine

Besides efficientising the NHS into brand-name status, the Osbornomic miracle has accomplished a moral transformation of GP surgeries. A report by Doctors of the World has found that surgeries are refusing registration to sex workers, homeless people, migrant swarms and people who have allowed the minor discomforts of domestic violence to override their sense of family values. Although all residents of the UK are theoretically entitled to free primary healthcare, the guidelines on registering new customers are sufficiently Jeremy Hunt to leave a good deal of leeway for prioritisation of the more meritorious cases; which is particularly fortunate given the present administration's commitment to providing a seven-day service for the deserving.