Demeaning the Donald

The Imperial Haystack, who has compared a free-trade area that lets in refugees to a Nazi super-state, and who has squealed about punishment beatings "in the manner of some World War Two movie" because not everyone agrees that somebody who leaves a club should receive the benefits of full membership, has gone all politically correct when it comes to comparing a racist demagogue with a racist demagogue. The Haystack finds it jolly distasteful that anyone should demean with references to the Hitler régime an administration which banned Muslims on Holocaust Memorial Day and then forgot to mention the Jews.

The Haystack is, of course, quite right to state that one should not make comparisons between Tin-pot Tessie's soul-mate and Churchill's great contemporary. Even Hitler's worst enemies (i.e. most people with a civilised bone in their body) admit that he had actual personal charm and served his country bravely in battle. Charm is in the eye of the beholder, so it would be futile to argue the Imperial Haystack's apparent sentimental regard for tribble-topped tangerine torture fans and climate change deniers with a penchant for pussy-grabbing and a coathanger salesman's attitude to abortion rights. Nevertheless, the non-alternative fact remains that when the Great War came Adolf Hitler did not have bad feet.

People in a Far-Away Country

Rah rah for our soul-mate, the Trump!
No charlatan, cheat, churl or chump!
We're well in - but what!
He's starting to squat
And doing a big orange dump!

We're almost quite certain that race
Should probably not have a place
In policy there -
But that's his affair,
And we'll tell him so to his face!

Rah rah for our little brown brothers,
Their wee piccaninnies and mothers!
No lives will be marred,
No Brits will be barred:
Our Muslims are not like those others!

Amber de Pfeffel Chamberpot

The Pedantry of the Unelected

Our national march to renewed greatness has once more been impeded by unelected experts. Tin-Pot Tessie has been trying to push through an Enabling Act to protect British values; mere lawyers are hindering this necessary and patriotic measure by requiring the Government to define what British values are. Similar quibbling has victimised the good old Anglo-Saxon term nonviolent extremism, since it has proven beyond the linguistic resources of the dead-eyed warden to come up with a definition that includes all the bad people (wogs, citizens of nowhere and Jeremy Corbyn, basically) while excluding such paragons as the Trumpster, the head-chopping House of Saud and the strutting meta-retired ex-Caudillo of the Farage Falange.

Supporting Our Boys Within the Limits of Budgetary Reasonability

Unlike many government departments and most ministries, the National Audit Office has little choice but to concern itself with the mundane workings of the reality-based planet; which can lead to unfortunate tidings if one happens to live in a world where all is rah-rah because the planet is still bestridden by the British Empire. The Ministry for Wog-Bombing has been told to make efficiency savings of another six billion, partly because the costs of its planned upgrades are being pushed up by Britain's liberation from its largest market and the resulting fall in the value of the pound. Savings are likely to come from that old favourite, pay restraint, rather than from - to take a random example - abandoning any weapons of mass destruction that can't find the right continent.

In Her Place

Doubtless the Trumpster has all the relevant details at his fat little fingertips, including her birthday and where she likes to be grabbed; but his staff have loyally stepped in to demonstrate to the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK her proper rank and title in the new world order. It is, as most inhabitants of the reality-based planet might guess, the same as in the old world order; but the staff of the Obama administration would probably have bothered to observe such diplomatic niceties as spelling the servants' names correctly. The Trumpster has no such scruples, and his subordinates are evidently learning by example; although there are suggestions that they simply confused Theresa May with Saint Teresa of Calcutta, a barmy old bigot from a small, weak country who thought that poverty, pain and badly-run hospitals were good for the soul of anyone who couldn't afford private care at an American clinic. There is, of course, no reason whatever for anybody to confuse the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK with any such person.

More Dreadful From Each Foreign Stroke

Say what you like (while you still can) about small-minded, authoritarian, curtain-twitching vicars' daughters - when the right con man comes along, they do make superb sycophants. The dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK has foresworn the British dignity shown by Germany and the British defiance shown by Mexico, and has signalled that the relationship between the Trumpster and herself might be one to rival the magical British Imperial romance between the chimpanzee and the poodle. "Haven’t you ever noticed, sometimes opposites attract?" Tin-Pot Tessie simpered, without making entirely clear which of their respective régimes she considers free of paranoid xenophobia, equitable in its income distribution, rational in its infrastructure and a non-hostile environment for immigrants.

One Thing or an Otter

Further evidence has emerged of the Deity's eternal forethought in anticipating and testing the doubts of His followers; either that, or the Heathen Chinee have contrived a hoax which, while not quite on the same scale as returning the planet's climate to prehistoric levels of warmth, does demonstrate a certain tell-tale lack of subtlety. Mere palaeontologists claim to have discovered fossils of a two-metre-long, fifty-kilogram otter, and some are already trying to claim it as a sign of diversity and unanswered questions, rather than as a clear proof that all biology has stayed more or less the same since that whimsical week in 4004 BCE. Like many climate change deniers and most creationists, the humungotter was most at home amid swampy shallows, and may have been too thick-headed to use tools without assistance.

A Social Disease

Never let it be said that the Government has no use for the National Health Service. Just like landlords, teachers and your friendly neighbourhood curtain-twitcher, the NHS has at last been permitted to find its true métier as an instrument of wog detection. Some obscure bits and pieces of the Health and Social Care Act, which seem to have bothered the liberty-loving Liberal Democrats not at all when they waved it through Parliament, allow the Government to demand and receive the address, date of birth and GP details of anyone whose medical confidentiality it deems against the public interest. One anticipated side benefit of such biological policing is that unauthorised wogs will be deterred from seeking medical attention in the first place, thereby transforming themselves (and, in the case of infectious diseases, any native shirkers among whom they lurk) into a self-solving problem.

England Expects

When your Bristol City Bobby is out Beating (is out beating)
And Searching for the Terroristic Tyke (ristic tyke),
There is a Darkling Truth that Bears Repeating (bears repeating):
The Fact that Many Buggers Look Alike (look alike).
If a Wanted Suspect Makes a Vile Proposal (vile proposal)
Or Utilises Insult Most Unclean (most unclean),
You've Fifty Thousand Volts at your Disposal (your disposal)
With Which to Serve your Country and your Queen (and your Queen).
By Neutralising Muscles' Capitation (capitation)
Through Power of your Electronic Toy (tronic toy)
You thus Fulfil the Public Expectation (expectation)
And Show your Blue Coat Wraps a Worthy Boy (worthy boy).
With Constabulary Duties to be done (to be done),
A Policeman's Lot is Quite a Zappy One (zappy one).

T R Bilge

New Directions

Doubts have emerged about the ability of the Westminster rogue state to inflict nuclear genocide only on those who deserve it. Last June a Trident test missile was launched from a British submarine off the coast of Florida; it was intended to hit a target off western Africa, presumably in commemoration of the long history of prosperitious freedomisation between the two regions. Instead, the missile flew towards the USA which, had it been armed with a nuclear warhead or several, might have constituted something of a diplomatic indiscretion. Tin-Pot Tessie has refused to say whether she knew about the malfunction when the House of Expenses Claimants debated the renewal of Britain's genitalia of mass destruction the following month. Debates on matters of potential wog-bombing being famously fact-proof, it would probably have made little difference to the outcome; but the apparent disinclination to inform Parliament does shed an interesting light on the Government's attitude to restoring our democratic sovereignty once we have seen off the hateful Euro-wogs. The secrecy is all the more surprising given that the Ministry for Wog-Bombing claimed the test as a success. After all, the submarine did manage not to blow itself up, which arguably gives it the advantage over the rest of the country.

Of Busts and Boobs

Champions of the whining and wheedling party to the Special Relationship (viz. the party that believes a "special relationship" actually exists) will be comforted to know that the Trumpster's first act of international diplomacy has been to restore to the Oval Office the notorious bust of Sir Winston Boris de Pfeffel Churchill. This idol was the subject of much patriotic indignation when Obama supposedly demoted it in order to make room for a bust of a coloured person, with the then London Haystack blathering about the president's "ancestral dislike of the British Empire", although it is not altogether clear whether the implication was supposed to be that Obama was a Kenyan Muslim communist or simply that he was a piccaninny. Since Churchill was thoroughly moneyed, obscenely entitled, a blustering incompetent, a verbose self-promoter and an enthusiastic wog-bomber and substance abuser (though Winston favoured the snifter while Donald favours the snort), there are any number of reasons why the Trumpster might identify with him aside from the fact that his image now adorns Britain's least valuable and most plastic banknote. Given the likely extent of his grasp of British history, to say nothing of the specialness of the relationship, it seems probable that the Trumpster simply wished to restore the Oval Office décor to the way it was during the tenure of the Bush chimpanzee.

For an Inauguration

My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of Trumpery,
Of thee I sing:
Land where the natives died
For pilgrims' humble pride;
With economic slide,
Let freedom ring!

My native country, thee,
Land of the white and free
Sharp-elbow shove.
My heart with rapture thrills
At thy great butcher bills
From yearly nigger-kills
With freedom's love.

Let poison bloat the breeze
As we chop down the trees
To freedom's song;
While we are bold and brash
With our corporate dash,
And rich men take the cash -
What can go wrong?

Our fathers' God, to Thee,
Author of butchery,
To Thee we sing.
Fount of our bravery,
Genocide, slavery,
Greed, guns and knavery,
Republic's King.

Our joyful hearts today
Their grateful tribute pay,
Happy and free,
For all the toils and fears
And all the blood and tears,
Filling the next few years,
Donald, to thee.

Our nation's better men
Will feel so great again
With each new stunt.
Let the flags be unfurled,
Big mouths with pride be curled,
Little folk of the world
Grabbed by the cunt.

Samuel F Grimsnipe

Varieties of Vergangenheitsbewältigung

Mere hours after a German patriot of the Gove History persuasion had a bit of a whinge about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, a mischievous migrant has launched an art project to demonstrate that memorials are what you make them. The memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe (those victims who did not have the foresight to be proto-Israelis are rarely mentioned, and Britain's leading liberal newspaper elides them into the Six Million as "other minorities") has been the scene for various cheery activities, which the Israeli-born artist Shahak Shapira has juxtaposed with archive footage from the camps. The plangent patriot had complained, with the usual alt-snowflake self-pity, that "Germans are the only people in the world that have planted a monument of shame in the heart of their capital." That assertion, of course, can be convincingly rebutted by an hour's walk around London, with its memorials to Francis Drake, William Augustus, Herbert Kitchener, Douglas Haig, Arthur Harris, Winston Churchill and doubtless one or two barnstorming strivers from the East India Company. What makes them monuments to pride rather than shame is that Britons have been conditioned to see robbery, slaving and mass murder as regrettable indulgences of the uncouth lesser breeds, rather than as an intrinsic part of our thousand-year island rah-rah.

Britishness Unbound

The legitimate and understandable concerns of the white working class are likely to be assertively reiterated once Tin-Pot Tessie begins the formal process of isolating Europe from the British mainland, according to the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The Commission has not yet been abolished by the Conservatives, most of whom probably think that EHRC stands for European Human Rights Court, and that it has something or other to do with unelected banana-straightening bureaucrats in Brussels. A spokesbeing for Tin-Pot Tessie stated that, whatever the citizens of nowhere may proclaim, the dead-eyed warden would "certainly not want" a surge in hate crimes, and that "the outcome of the referendum was not a vote to become inward-looking and to stop being an open and tolerant nation", despite its evidently blazing credentials as a wogs-out mandate. Meanwhile Yvette Cooper contributed her own brand of Blue Labour fatuity to the issue by describing hate crime as "un-British". Xenophobia, in other words, is nasty because it's foreign.

The Shills of God Grind Slow

With the chances of a West European return to mediaeval levels of poverty, ignorance and social stratification looking better by the day, the leaders of the Anglican Communion have called upon the faithful to repent the unfortunate misunderstandings of the Reformation, the legacy of which has been largely to keep Christians from "unity in love". In Standard English, this means that Christians have spent the last five hundred years failing to hate non-Christians properly because they have been too preoccupied with hating each other. The Reformation sprang from Luther's rebellion against the corruption of Rome, and resulted in much persecution of Christians by other Christians, which obviously had never happened before; and there is, of course, no talk of anything so merely moral as repenting the fourth-century devil's pact with the Roman Empire. Still, if the priests of Christendom are to take due advantage of the present turbulence and bring back the good old days of loving their enemies onto a bonfire, some agreement over such burning issues as whether and under what biological endowments they can marry one another might make for a promising start.

Healthy Profits

I'm sure we are all relieved to know that Jeremy C Hunt is unlikely to need the aid of a food bank in the near future, unless he starts managing his own little affairs the way he manages the NHS. Apparently Hunt's failed business ventures include exporting marmalade to Japan, a boondoggle currently undergoing resurrection thanks to the vole-brained Minister for International Werritty. He also tried building children's playgrounds, but presumably couldn't get them quite unsafe enough to satisfy his conscience.

Nevertheless, he is now in line for a fourteen-and-a-half-million-pound windfall from the sale of a company which he co-founded, though not, as many less scrupulous businesspersons might have done, from motives of mere profit. "A lot of people who start their own business do so because they think it’s a good way to make a lot of money, but when you start it becomes simply a matter of survival," Hunt's website sermonised. "It’s a daily struggle, which is why small business people tend to be very down to earth and practical", just like Spadsacker Hunt, who viewed the London Olympics as little more than a chance for an eminently down-to-earth knee-trembler with Rupert Murdoch.

Hunt has proclaimed that he will use his money to campaign for causes he believes in once he finally decides that, like his fellow striver Tristram Hunt, he has little more to gain from pretending to be a mere public servant.

Spreading Civilised Values

Britain's continuing noble efforts to improve human rights in Bahrain have culminated, expectably enough, in the first executions since the year the Bullingdon Club took office. Three men convicted of killing police officers have been shot by firing squad; there are the usual claims of torture and coercion, but authorities have found "no evidence of coercion in the case documents", which certainly ought to settle the matter as far as Her Majesty's Government is concerned. The government in Bahrain is owned by a minority faction and has recently been cracking down on the majority, which will unquestionably evoke what passes for human sympathy in Westminster. Even more importantly, ever since the Arab spring Britain has spent millions training the Bahraini police in the hope of getting democracy to flower in an appropriate and constructive manner; and it also wants to build a naval base there. Accordingly, the Imperial Haystack has reiterated Britain's opposition to capital punishment and "raised the issue" with the Bahraini government, who are doubtless as chastened as can be.

Putting Off Our Finest Hour

Historiographic indignation levels are set to rise as the Heathen Chinee attempt to rewrite the history of the Battle of Britain by relocating the war's beginning to when the fighting started. A British historian, whose book The Second World War begins with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, said that the Heathen Chinee were trying to "reverse the recent tide of historiography" by claiming that the Second World War began with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. A Beijing historian commented that the revision was justified in terms of mere accuracy, but that the Communist Party is likely to be trying for a propaganda effect. This is, of course, all quite alien to the far more objective and sensible British method of history, where stout chaps do sterling deeds, where the odd famine or genocide is barely worth mentioning and is in any case compensated by some dashed fine railways, and where the role of the Heathen Chinee in the Second World War is even more minor and obscure than that of the USSR.

Those Who Share Our Values

A Hungarian TV camerawoman who was filmed giving assertive attention to her legitimate concerns has been found guilty of breaching the peace. She was working for a station associated with the Christian fascist party Jobbik, and demonstrated her respect for their values and beliefs by tripping up a swarming horde who was carrying a child, and by putting the boot into a fleeing juvenile cockroach. Although the maximum penalty is a large fine, her sentence is arguably even harsher: she has to refrain from kicking any more refugees for three whole years. In addition, her life has been derailed by the intolerant public reaction to the deeply regrettable fact that she was filmed, and she claims to be planning a move to Russia, where freedom of the boot is apparently still sacrosanct. Presumably it was only the continuing dictatorship of the muesli-munching metropolitan élite that prevented her coming to Britain.

A Few Hedgehogs Short of a Motorway

With all that's going on and standing still in the country's transport system, beleaguered travellers will rejoice to see that the brilliant Chris Graybeing has been having a bit of a philosophical interlude. During the recent trouble on the trains, the brilliant Graybeing responded by trotting out the arcane distinction between honest British taxpayers and mere users of public transport, who apparently have similar tax arrangements to certain members of the Conservative Party. Only yesterday the brilliant Graybeing approved a road tunnel through one of the country's oldest and richest archaeological sites; and today the brilliant Graybeing has denied that cyclists use roads. Presumably this minority religious belief explains the brilliant Graybeing's recent clobbering of a heretically-placed cyclist with the door of his car. Despite his hit-and-run attitude to the various political briefs which successive prime ministers have inexplicably given him to play with, the brilliant Graybeing did apparently acknowledge the cyclist's existence although, as a genuine road user, he did not feel obliged to give his details to the fleshly outrage against Nature, morality and the Highway Code. Meanwhile, the Government has pledged to double cycling levels, but it seems likely that this commitment will go the same way as the green crap and the harmless little jokes about protecting the NHS and safeguarding our interests in the European single market. The Government is spending less than £1 per person on the issue, because the brilliant Graybeing can count up to less than one; but doubling would require him to count up to two, and possibly even higher.

Time to Grow Up and Be a Proper Bank

Wishy-washy metropolitan elites have been pestering the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK and her flunkey Nick Hurd, the Minister for Being the Son of a Former Minister, over the likely sell-off of the Green Investment Bank to an Australian asset-stripper. It remains as yet unclear whether the dead-eyed warden is in favour of the sale primarily because of instructions from Rupert Murdoch or because of her own refined personal preferences. Even Vince Cable, who was happy to stiff the taxpayer for a goodly sum when flogging off the Post Office, apparently has qualms about the theft and demolition of public assets now that he is out of government. The bank was set up under the Conservative government of 2010-15, in which Cable was the nominal business secretary; but among the first decisions of the Bullingdon Club government of 2015-16 was the cleansing of even the most token whiff of green crap. Besides, the architect of the Osbornomic miracle thought that the money might well come in handy for helping to pay down the deficit incurred by the first five years of the Osbornomic miracle, provided that nobody in the City needed a bit of a pick-me-up. In response to cross-party concerns about the sale, the Minister for Being the Son of a Former Minister said that the bank would be able to accomplish much bigger things when freed from the suffocating hand of the state. Indeed, one need only look at the Arctic, the Niger delta and the Gulf of Mexico to see just how big the results of unrestrained private enterprise can be.

Britishness Skittishness

So great has been the moral progress of our education system that the University of Winchester now has a Centre for English Identity and Politics, which apparently was set up in order to keep the drivelling New Labour flunkey John Denham from toddling about and getting himself into trouble. Denham has been blathering for years about Englishness, Britishness and the need to bribe the white working class away from their natural racist bigotry, and he is now blathering about some YouGov data which shows what most of us have known for a long time; viz. that after years of writhing theological debate on the meaning of Britishness, very few people have much idea what it means, and almost certainly care less. It also appears that people who feel more English are more likely to have voted to leave the EU, which shows that if you ask two stupid questions you are likely to get two stupid answers. Again, in order to need telling this by a YouGov survey one would really have to belong to the Gove-Denham brand of intellectual firebucket or to the Tristram Hunt faction of the Farage Falange, rather than to those metropolitan elites which constitute the reality-based portion of the human species.

White Tiger

Karyen Shakhnazarov 2012

At the height of the Great Patriotic War, a gutted Soviet tank is discovered with its driver burned up and fused to the steering wheel. In spite of injuries that would normally be fatal, the man is still alive, and over the next few weeks makes a seemingly miraculous recovery, although he cannot remember his own identity and is renamed Ivan Ivanovich Naidyonov (Ivan the Found) by his comrades. Quiet and unflappably calm, Naidyonov (Alexei Vertkov) retains all his tank-driver's skills and seems to have developed a psychic bond with the machinery; so when ominous rumours begin to circulate about a German Tiger tank with apparently supernatural capabilities, he is naturally assigned to destroy it, under the watchful eye of counter-intelligence officer Fedotov (Vitaliy Kishchenko).

Splendidly shot amid white-misted Russian forests, White Tiger is for most of its length more of a war film than a ghost story, before mutating into something more peculiar than either. Still, the supernatural element is nicely integrated thanks to the atmospheric visuals and some unpretentious but telling touches, as when Fedotov gets his first sight of the White Tiger and tries to take its picture. The battle scenes - two duels and a spectacularly disastrous mass assault - are in deadly earnest, the vulnerability of Naidyonov and his all-too-human crewmen never in doubt; and although Naidyonov develops a personal mythology of a T-34-riding "tank god" who speaks in thunder and lightning, no deus ex machina descends to destroy the White Tiger.

It is after the second duel, in which the monster is defeated but not finished off, that the film becomes truly unexpected. Having argued with his superior over whether something supernatural really is taking place, Fedotov is given a few days' leave and informed that the fall of Berlin is imminent. Rather than staging a final showdown amid the Reich's Götterdämmmerung, as almost any other film-maker would feel morally obliged to do, Shakhnazarov takes the tanks off-screen entirely. Instead we are shown, at some length, the ceremony around the signing of the surrender documents by Field Marshal Keitel (a superbly prissy Christian Redl), following which the defeated Nazi leaders are treated to a luxurious meal while they chat quietly among themselves and don't mention the war.

A lingering scene shows the results of their handiwork: a seemingly endless line of prisoners marches through the ruins of Berlin, witnessed by tank crews and stunned civilians, and also by Fedotov who drives grimly out of the city to find Naidyonov still ready for battle. The White Tiger has retreated for now, but in fifty or a hundred years, or perhaps seventy-two, it will be back.

The epilogue, set amid decadent splendour in an unknown place, shows only a man seated comfortably by a fire and talking to a close colleague or mentor. The film's main musical score is derived from Wagner's Tannhäuser, and the speaker is a demonic artist engaged, as he believes, in a deadly but redemptive struggle. A grim little masterpiece of restrained horror and cinematic chutzpah, this scene drives White Tiger across the borders of the interestingly odd, and a small but significant distance into the realm of demented genius.

This is Not a Crisis, But We Have a Cunning Plan Anyway

There is no crisis in the NHS. The dead-eyed warden herself has decreed it; and she is the one who told us that filthy migrants were avoiding deportation because they had cats. If any other plausibility enhancement solution were needed, the dead-eyed warden is also the one who prefers appeasing the Farage Falange to letting mere expert opinion pollute the patriotic purity of her inactions.

Additionally, the minister for profitable prole-training has overruled the Red Cross on the definition of a humanitarian crisis, on the grounds that she saw much worse when she was toddling about the globe funnelling humanitarian aid to her corporate masters. She also asserted that the need for the Red Cross to help provide public health services in the world's sixth-richest country is nothing particularly unusual. Whether or not it is anything particularly disgraceful was not a question the minister chose to explore, because a Five-Year Plan is in hand to blame everything on local authorities, so obviously Everything's All Right.

Rapid Response

Even in the Not Awfully Bright Party, where cerebral gravity is so light that a penny can take several decades to descend when it drops at all, a few vague misgivings are starting to surface about the wisdom of turning our biggest trading partner into an economic rival purely for the sake of keeping out the wogs. The chair of the manufacturing company William Cook, who apparently prefers employing people to sacking them despite being a major Conservative Party donor, has said he will withdraw his support if Britain is taken out of the single market. He also admitted to employing immigrants, presumably in order to avoid being named and shamed by the Clegg-pledging race-baiter Amber Rudd; and obliquely noted the fact that the Leave campaign in the referendum was essentially a pack of lies: "the amount of money that we contribute to the European Union was always portrayed by the leavers as a gross sum without anything in return." And all it took was six months of patriotic drift and the resignation of a major civil servant. Never let it be said that the captains of British industry are slow to command events.

Gas the Poor

The punter-parboiling Routebozza bus may be on its way out, and the pleb-free garden bridge may yet be abandoned; but at least one aspect of the London Haystack's legacy persists in the city's barnstorming pollution levels, which have breached the annual legal limit in less than a week. Thanks to the greenest government ever, when it comes to air quality much of the country takes a relaxed and liberal attitude to the rule of law; and the London Haystack's winning combination of rah-rah populism and Churchillian orotundity has done wonders for the capital, with almost six thousand early deaths a year from nitrogen dioxide poisoning. A few window-dressing measures were proposed during the last parliament, but were rejected by the Bullingdon Club and their little orange fag at the Treasury, who did not wish to sacrifice Britain's second-to-leading place among Europe's top prole-gassers. Nevertheless, the Government remains committed to improving air quality and cutting harmful emissions insofar as this can be achieved without undue inconvenience to ministerial kickbacks, party donors, Nissan, etc.

Fracked, Flooded and Feeble

Although the Tin-pot Tessie régime has abandoned various policies of its Bullingdon Club predecessors - notably the Osbornomic policy of running the economy largely on boasts and smirks, and the rather cheap and transparent pretence of having any significant areas of disagreement with the UKIP baboons - a certain reassuring consistency has emerged when it comes to facilitating climate-related disaster. Having appointed the drivelling Andrea Leadsom as next in line after the blithering Elizabeth Truss, the crackpot Owen Paterson and the failed forest-flogger Caroline Spelman, the Government plainly intends to continue rolling back the green crap. Investment in renewable energy has already been cut to bits by the Bullingdons, and will be progressed to virtual non-existence over the next three years. Investment in high-carbon energy is also slowing down, but far more reluctantly, and apparently for no other reason than that the prevailing religious orthodoxy specifies that maintaining the country's infrastructure is no part of the legitimate business of government.

Unforeseen Outcomes

Ministers have been warned that the process of independentising the nation from the Euro-wogs could lead to weakening of environmental protections and possible ruin for any farmers who may somehow fail to cash in on the burgeoning cheese and marmalade export markets. Although EU rules will be carried over into the Government's repeal bill, about a third will be difficult to transpose; probably because Andrea Leadsom doesn't know what they are and everyone who might have been able to tell her has been downsized out of the department. Ministers have also been warned that, even with the repeal bill in effect, many EU rules will end up with no-one to enforce or update them, and will be easily abolished without parliamentary scrutiny at the behest of whichever corporations a given minister intends approaching for the furtherance of their post-parliamentary well-being. In the face of such dire possibilities, ministers are doubtless taking every appropriate action to ensure that nothing untoward can occur.

A Warning From On High

Irritation with the Government's rabbit-in-the-headlights attitude towards Europe has been building in various quarters for some time (viz. since approximately the early hours of 24 June 2016, when "Plan? What plan?" was confirmed as official policy); but it seems that matters are now becoming serious. The City of London Corporation, of which the British Conservative Party is the political wing, has ordered its Westminster flunkeys to pull their collective finger out, otherwise the banks may be forced to move their operations away from London. Since the banks are Britain's only more or less functioning industry apart from selling weapons to the Islamic fundamentalists and terrorist underwriters at the head-chopping House of Saud, it is just possible that the economy might not benefit greatly from such an outcome, despite all those years of structural strengthening through the disciplined austerities of the Bullingdon Club and its little orange enablers. It remains as yet unclear whether another taxpayer-funded Nissan Plan is in readiness to forestall any precipitate evacuations. Doubtless the answer will depend largely upon whether the floundering prima donna and David Davis publicist David Davis can be made to understand why London-based banks might wish to uproot themselves purely for the sake of continuing to do business with a lot of Euro-wogs.

Going Ballistic

A spoiled, deranged man-child with silly hair has been blustering insanely and may soon have his chubby finger on a nuclear trigger. Accordingly, the United States of America, where a spoiled, deranged man-child with silly hair has been blustering insanely and may soon have his chubby finger on a nuclear trigger, has issued a solemn warning about provocative actions and inflammatory rhetoric which threaten international peace and stability; or at least those pockets of international peace and stability whose disruption would not serve the financial interests of the US kleptocracy. While threatening full spectrum annihilation for anyone who looks at the Pentagon wrong, the US statement cited "multiple UN Security Council resolutions" which it has pleased the World Cop by the Grace of God not to veto, and which therefore possess unimpeachable moral status. The World Cop is believed to have one or two nuclear weapons of its own; although it is not entirely clear why it retains them, since their deterrent value against existential threats from the likes of North Korea and (until recently) Cuba is so clearly minimal.

Ever Onward

Farewell to the year that is past:
Consign it to memory fast,
And step up to view
The next in the queue,
And trust it will not be the last!

Hello to the year that's to come:
Our annual temporal slum,
To take us right through
Till time to renew:
More deadly, more dirty, more dumb!

Samuel Grimsnipe