Forcing for Good

Although Kabul is safe enough for natives and other expendables, the same does not apply to Government staff, who are kept under armed guard until such time as the Ministry for Wogs and the Colonies may choose to make efficiency savings by sacking them. Nevertheless, as our mission in Afghanistan grows ever more accomplished, Her Majesty's Government has registered some annoyance at the property damage caused by the latest bit of native unrest. The Imperial Haystack is so appalled by the violence that he and his trough-mates have no intention at all of granting asylum to anyone who can be swiftly and sneakily deported back to the war zone. Still, let nobody say that the lessons of the past have not been learned. Rather than simply lie, as they did over the Dubs amendment, the Conservatives have recycled the standard evasive manoeuvre which they use when someone dies after being found fit for work by the Department for Workfare and Privation; namely that they cannot comment on "the operational side" because it has nothing to do with them, especially now that we control our own borders.

Good Christian Folks

In a strange alien country, ruled by a fanatical oligarchy and riven with religious zealotry, a woman has claimed that she was raped as a child, became pregnant and was forced into marriage. In fifty-four per cent of the strange alien country's federal states, there is no lower limit on the age at which people can be married. About nine and a half million women in the strange alien country were married before the age of sixteen and, doubtless owing to the resulting spiritual exaltation, tend to suffer a higher incidence of psychiatric disorder. "You can’t get a job, you can’t get a car, you can’t get a license, you can’t sign a lease," the alleged rape victim said, "so why allow someone to marry when they’re still so young?" Of course, this misses the point: there is no question of allowing children to marry, but only of allowing their parents to marry them off. That's what freedom of conscience is all about, as a recent presidential hopeful observed after vetoing a bill that would have outlawed child marriage. In this regard, the strange and alien country remains closer to the good old ways than the head-chopping House of Saud, which imposed a legal minimum age of eighteen as long ago as 2013. All things considered, it seems fortunate that this particular strange and alien country is one with which we share only a few of our values. I certainly wouldn't approve of its much-married mullah holding hands with any dead-eyed warden of mine.

Helping the Little Chaps Keep Up

Now that our new-found independence has given us yet greater freedom to be a force for global virtue, Her Majesty's Government has wasted no time in working to ditch the green crap that is the Paris climate change agreement. Once more defending corporate citizens against the bondage of regulation, the Conservatives have been nagging the Euro-wogs to make their energy efficiency standards voluntary rather than mandatory: a purely altruistic enterprise, since the Conservatives intend dumping all those standards once they've passed their Henry VIII memorial Great Retard Bill. Her Majesty's Government has also argued that, given that targets for renewable use are so far away, there is no reason why member states should bother making any progress towards them now. Muddling through at the last minute: it's the way Boris Johnson and David Davis do their homework, it's how the Conservatives wrote their manifesto; so it stands to reason, and common sense dictates, that it's the best approach for the benighted Euro-wogs, especially as it would mean giving everyone more time to come around to the Trumpster's way of doing things as regards dealing with that wacky, irresponsible Heathen Chinee sense of humour.

Amicable Arabs, Moderate Muslims

Our chums, customers and fellow-defenders of British values, the head-chopping House of Saud, are making ready to demonstrate once again their dedication to law and order. A man with impaired sight and hearing has been sentenced to decapitation for violent acts during a protest, the court making clear its disdain for delay and red tape by admitting no evidence other than a signed confession by the accused. He is also accused of sending texts, despite lacking the money for a phone; an anomaly which the pious minions of the head-chopping House of Saud presumably ascribe to sorcery. Surprisingly enough, despite his privileged status as the strong and stable vicar-spawn's other best chum, the Trumpster had better things to do during his recent visit than discuss human rights.

No-Nonsense, Straight-Talking, Getting Things Done

I am in receipt of a leaflet on behalf of my incumbent MP, Mike Freer, the gist of which is that I ought to vote for him because some other people will be voting for him. Various local people are pictured and quoted upon the merits of Mike Freer, while Mike Freer himself spends a paragraph listing his local achievements and the "no-nonsense, straight-talking 'getting things done' style" on which he prides himself. Nevertheless, he retains his inexplicable reluctance to express pride in the local food bank, which appeared on his watch thanks to policies which he helped to vote through. Doubtless future missives will be equally forthcoming about Mike Freer's pride in the NHS crisis, the need for the army to stand in for the police, the wrecking of the justice system, the continuing degradation of the environment, and all the other results of policies Mike Freer helped to vote through.

Then again, perhaps this one missive is enough. One of Mike Freer's fans notes that he is "not obsessed with Westminster" which, translated from the tactful, means that Mike Freer is a dutiful little backbench flunkey who almost always votes for what's put in front of him. When the Bullingdon Club were campaigning against cutting the country off from our single biggest international market, Mike Freer was a passionate pro-Remainer, as were most of his constituents. Now that Tin-Pot Tessie wants to tank the economy by leaving the single market and putting Liam Fox, David Davis and Boris Johnson in charge of international relations, Mike Freer is meekly pro-Brexit. Mike Freer may not be obsessed with Westminster, but given a choice between those he supposedly represents and those in charge of the feeding-trough, it seems clear enough who receives the greater share of his disinterest.

The no-nonsense straight talk of Mike Freer and the Conservative Party is equally evident in the flyer accompanying the leaflet, which squeals that Jeremy Corbyn is going to increase inheritance tax on homes worth more than £425,000 - "half the homes in the Capital". The source for this number is the London Evening Osborne, whose new Head Boy is not exactly known for being frightfully good with figures. It is a little unclear why metropolitan élitists such as myself, who are faced with frozen salaries and rising prices and perforce choose the luxury of rental, should vote for Mike Freer on those grounds. In any case, why should a hard-working family worry about inheritance tax? Will home-owners' children not be capable of earning their own mortgages in turn, by the sheer, Churchillian gumption of their Britishness? Given a free ride by the taxpayer, will they not suffer a certain lack of entrepreneurial motivation?

The flyer nowhere mentions the Conservative Party, except in the very small print where a certain Alan Mabbutt lets slip, with pardonable lack of fanfare, that he is working for them; but it does implicitly equate the supposed calamity of a Corbyn win with Trump's presidency and the Brexit referendum, which demonstrates a healthy perspective on both of those undoubted catastrophes. In a particularly no-nonsense, straight-talking and pride-worthy touch, the names of Mike Freer and Theresa May do not appear at all.

Sometimes the Old Ways are Best

Owing in large part to our staunch allies and customers in the head-chopping House of Saud, an old Victorian chum has returned to give the scroungers and shirkers in Yemen another firm yet fair lesson in the robustness of traditional British values. Thanks to the Saudi intervention and its British hardware, Yemen has all the advantages that make for a buccaneering, have-a-go economy: an infrastructure free of government interference; a water system unshackled by regulatory red tape; medical staff whose workloads and salaries are balanced to benefit everyone, provided one takes into account those necessary and appropriate adjustments which must be made according to how much a particular customer really matters. As a result, there is a cholera epidemic: just the thing to weed out the weakling metropolitan élites and leave a cleaner, stronger and more stable nation in its wake.

Entrepreneurial Buccaneering

An encouraging degree of progress appears to have taken place in our still nominally unaccomplished mission of redeeming Libya through British values. Despite the blind persistence of the swarming hordes, jobs continue to be saved for British workers in the Mediterranean; not least by armed Libyan coastguards who have been trained in human rights by the Royal Navy and who have taken up the suggestion by elements of our free and cantankerous press that refugees should be subject to discouragement of the projectile variety. A rescue ship run by the non-British SOS Méditerranée and Médecins Sans Frontières recorded armed coastguards pointing guns and opening fire to intimidate migrants on their continental invasion craft, and boarding one vessel with the apparent objective of taking the occupants' phones and cash into more legitimate ownership. Certain self-styled humanitarian organisations seem to think the coastguards can live solely on these inevitably slender pickings, and have suggested that Britain and the EU should withdraw their support. A spokesbeing for the Ministry of Wog-Bombing expressed awareness of the incident, adding: "We take all allegations of human rights abuses very seriously, and take them into consideration for any support we provide overseas," as the people of Yemen, among others, have recently had occasion to find out.

The Better Part of Vassalage

Perfidious Euro-wogs are attempting to undermine the special relationship between Global Britain and its bestest global ally by contradicting the Trumpster's declared opinion that climate change is a hoax by the Heathen Chinee. Faced with an embarrassing situation, Tin-Pot Tessie appears to have taken the British way out and said nothing at all, thereby showing up the New-Risen Empire of England, Wales and the Falkland Islands as slightly less assertive in its own self-interest than the head oligarch in Mussolini's city-state of theocratic sex pests. It's possible that the dead-eyed warden's discretion was an attempt to appease the Trumpster into some sort of reciprocal discretion on matters of national security and ongoing criminal investigations; or it may be that the woman who abolished the Department for Energy and Climate Change, and made the gormless Andrea Leadsom minister for the environment, was simply acting in the spirit of the new, independent, sovereign, buccaneering Britain, and falling meekly into line with her CEO.

Helping the Terrorists Win

Liberal metropolitan élitists have once more resorted to bullying and intimidation in the face of genuine patriotism. The English Defence League, despite being only recently recovered from the trauma of being smiled at by a nice young lady in Birmingham, assembled a small rabble in Manchester to show that today's atrocity was All About Them, but were outnumbered and even sharply addressed by indignant locals tainted with the virus of multiculturalism. Instead of calling for concentration camps like Allison Pearson of the Barclaygraph, or demanding a Final Solution like Katie Hopkins, or even blaming Jeremy Corbyn like the Hillsborough Truth-Teller, Mancunians seem to be pulling together and trying to help each other through the catastrophe while leaving the burden of witch-hunting and scapegoating to less trivial-minded citizens. Even the medical personnel, despite all the fragrant little hints which have been dropped on them from a great height over the past few years, were reported to be working overtime, without sparing a single thought as to whether or not any particular injury-treatment consumer might constitute good business.

We Did Not Fight In Vain

The United Nations high commissioner for refugees has professed himself shocked at the British values on display in Libya's arrangements for wog warehousing. No squeals of outrage have yet been forthcoming from the British Conservative Party at this blatant breach of sovereignty; possibly because they're all too busy trying to find out which manifesto pledges are looking a bit Nick Clegg, or possibly because the UN high commissioner for refugees does not happen to be a foreigner of dusky female persuasion. Anyway, it appears that harsh conditions are being gratuitously imposed upon the swarming hordes which have materialised in order to take advantage of the flexible passport situation and the buccaneering boat-hire. These entrepreneurial conditions have apparently come about thanks to a civil war which somehow broke out in Libya during 2011, coincidentally preceded by a wog-bombing campaign in which the British Conservative Party joined with such enthusiasm that the diplomatic editor of Britain's leading liberal newspaper has nothing whatever to say about it.

Cleaning Cycles

Given the undisputed and inalienable status of Global Britain as global leader in the fight against climate change (a status perhaps best epitomised by the image of the late Head Boy having himself photographed cycling to the day job with a limousine in tow), to say nothing of the toxic levels of urban pollution achieved by the greenest government ever, it will come as no surprise to find that the most radical and innovative strategies for cleaning up the air are being considered by the Heathen Chinee. As mayor of London, our own Imperial Haystack pioneered a bicycle rental programme which served mainly as an advertisement for Barclays Bank; a Euro-wog designer has now perverted the concept into a scheme to make innocent bicycle users clean up the air as they ride. This stands in stark contrast to the sane and sensible measures employed by Her Majesty's Government and soon to be subject to approval by Donald Trump.

Humanitarian Intervention

Aside from the usual suspects - saboteurs, citizens of nowhere, wog-marrying race traitors and the like - nobody could accuse Her Majesty's Government of an unbalanced approach to legislation. No new attack on the poor takes place without a corresponding kick at the crippled; every cut to public services or environmental protection has its compensatory subsidy for polluters and tax-dodgers. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Government has taken equal care with its new vaping regulations, which make it harder for smokers to switch and thereby ensure that the cigarette industry will not be unduly inconvenienced by the plain-packaging law. The vaping industry is less than ten years old, but has already begun intruding upon the markets of its elders and betters in the carcinogenic profitability club; self-evidently, like the solar industry at a similar stage of development, the young bounder needs taking down a peg or two. Equally self-evidently, it would be imprudent to rely on the free market to administer the rebuke; no strong or stable government can afford to stand by and allow some Stalinist purge of the business community to take place in the name of mere public health.

It Isn't Racism, It's Common Sense

Traitors and saboteurs continue to muddy the pristine waters of British electoral politics. The parliamentary wing of UKIP has committed itself once again to Tin-Pot Tessie's much-failed target of reducing immigration to a few tens of thousands of wealthy people, and getting rid of all the nasty bureaucracy associated with fee-paying students, tax-paying spouses and the like; to say noting of all the medically-inclined wogs who have been causing so much trouble in the NHS. Nevertheless, mere research backed by a conspiracy of renegade employers purports to demonstrate that annual net migration of two hundred thousand will be needed to keep the country from a possible decade of near-Osbornomic depression. Fortunately, the blithering prima donna in charge of Brexit has had the foresight to proclaim that the health of the economy depends on the Euro-wogs falling into line; which means that even as the country is cleansed of nurses, plumbers and people who refuse to speak English on the bus, there will still be a plentiful supply of foreigners to blame.

The Company He Keeps

However little the Trumpster may scruple at being associated with neo-Nazi lunatics or being seen having his tiny orange pawlets held by Mad Tessie May, it appears that he does retain a few scraps of pride. The Trumpster is scheduled to be bundled off on a tour of the Middle East, which may bear results very nearly as constructive as the Ascended Incarnation of the Reverend Blair's appointment as peace envoy. Among the Trumpster's hosts will be the Islamic fundamentalist head-choppers of the House of Saud, whose régime is notable, among other peccadilloes, for breeding most of the 9/11 attackers and perpetrating a humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen. The Trumpster will then proceed to Israel, the terrorist state par excellence from its very foundation. It is therefore only natural that the Trumpster's handlers should be objecting vociferously to the planned presence at Riyadh of the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir. Unlike the head-chopping House of Saud, the state of Sudan is on the World Cop's little list of terrorist sponsors; and Bashir, being an African, is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

How to Impress the Natives

Tin-Pot Tessie's joke foreign secretary has been headline-hunting again, with a journalist-grabbing blather about exporting whisky to India. The Imperial Haystack made his latest contribution to international statesmanship in a Sikh temple in Bristol, though it remains as yet unclear whether the Conservatives regard Bristol in toto as foreign territory, or only that part of its population that wears an orange turban. In any case, the Imperial Haystack apologised for the fact that anyone had taken offence, lectured the Sikhs on alcohol consumption among Sikhs, and duly got his column-space without any mention of the three hundred and fifty million reasons why he ought to lose his seat. A spokesbeing was later extruded to claim that the natives had been jolly impressed, and certainly it seems that the Imperial Haystack was able to refrain from informing the assembly about the more rah-rah aspects of the Amritsar Massacre; which must, in the present context, be accounted a triumph of sorts.

Honest Dom

Enemies of the people have struck yet another subversive blow against the buccaneering entrepreneurialism of Global Britain by threatening to place the enterprising Dominic Chappell at the mercy of Sir Philip Green. Chappell, the lissom knight of industry who bought BHS for one pound and then ran it into the ground for seventeen million, could now be personally liable for the price of a yacht or two owed to the similarly balletic knight of the realm. Although Chappell claimed that Green owed his company five and a half million over the sale of the BHS headquarters, the enemies of the people ascribed the building a value of one pound. Doubtless they were acting on some perverted sense of poetic justice or, worse still, according to the law of the land.

Strong and Something or Other

While Mr Justice Stapley has suffered a missive from Team Tessie with the expectable degree of gladness, I am in receipt of a leaflet from the team of Jonathan Davies, who hopes to be the new parliamentary representative for the ex-Deputy Conservatives. "A disastrous hard Brexit will hit people in the pocket across the country, with the poorest families hit hardest," warns the party that voted through the disastrous Osbornomic recession, which hit people in the pocket across the country, with the poorest families hit hardest. "Liberal Democrats are the only party that has always fought for Britain's membership of the European Union;" this may be true, but there was a time when Liberal Democrats always fought for proportional representation, and we all know what happened to that after a quick knee-trembler in the rose garden and the whiff of a red box or two.

There is a certain forlorn chutzpah in the co-architects of the bedroom tax, the Gig Economy and their intimate neighbour Food Bank Britain posturing as friends of the poor; but the idea of the ex-Deputy Conservatives "standing up for the NHS" should really have been consigned to tactful oblivion. The present crisis has its roots a good deal further back than the Conservative government of 2010-15; but the short-staffing, underpaying and general demoralisation are all direct legacies from the expensive chaos of the Health and Social Care Act, endorsed with enthusiasm by the Deputy Conservatives. Jonathan Davies gives no indication as to which iniquitous coalition policies the Liberal Democrats would now reverse; the party promises only to give the NHS "the funds it needs," which might be jolly encouraging if every other party at every other election didn't promise to do the same.

Jonathan Davies also pledges to oppose school cuts, which presumably result from the swingeing cuts to local authority budgets which were initiated by the Conservatives with the help of somebody or other - the Green Party, perhaps? Anyway, Jonathan Davies at least has the modesty to keep this particular pledge within the confines of the Borough of Barnet, where the Conservatives have "stopped listening to local people" such as the Liberal Democrats. It really is too bad of them.

"Our country needs a strong opposition," urges the leaflet, and apparently the implication is meant to be that such an opposition will emerge from the party that sold out its policies, its councillors, its activists and forty-nine of its MPs in return for the privilege of fagging for a handful of sniggering public-school louts. We have, at least, the small mercy that Jonathan Davies' team decided against going the whole hog in imitating their erstwhile masters, and excised the words "and stable" before going to print.

Poodling Our Resources

Traitors, saboteurs, enemies of the people and metropolitan élitists are pestering the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK to help provide, of all things, strength and stability for the Paris agreement on climate change. Having re-established Britain's special relationship with the US by being only slightly behind the strutting ex-Caudillo of the Farage Falange on the Trumpster's guest list, Tin-Pot Tessie is now being criticised for failing to exert the traditional calming British influence on our impetuous former colony. Of course, the dead-eyed warden has already made the extent of her own concern with climate change quite clear, by abolishing the relevant ministry and putting the gormless Andrea Leadsom at the Department for Environment, Flooding and Whatever. Despite this strong and stable leadership, lesser breeds such as the Euro-wogs and the Heathen Chinee have registered concern about the Trumpster's intentions, and subversive organisations from Oxfam to the RSPB have requested Her Majesty's Government to follow suit; but it appears that Tin-Pot Tessie and her joke Foreign Secretary have for once been overcome with tact. It would hardly be sporting to rub in the fact that America needs the liberated global imperium of England, Wales, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands far more than we need America.

Amber More or Less Alert

There are, it appears, a few people in the world who are less concerned than the Health Secretary about the survival of the National Health Service. NHS computers have been using outdated software, which has been vulnerable to hacking ever since the coalition decided to stop paying Microsoft for security updates in 2014. A cyber-attack has now occurred; the attacking software apparently originated with the security agency of our dead-eyed warden's greatest ally, whose security measures permitted the software to be stolen and adapted for nefarious purposes. This is of course the cyber-war equivalent of developing a nice new bacteriological weapon and forgetting to immunise one's own personnel; a scenario of which Her Majesty's Government has considerable experience. Cyber-security is the responsibility of the Home Office; so the present stand-in for a Home Secretary has naturally been concerned to emphasise that the question of the moment is whether any lessons should be learned from the incompetence of her predecessor, whose name nobody seems to remember at the moment. As a preliminary measure, the NHS has been ordered to get itself properly equipped, presumably by utilising the efficiency savings made through the departure of all those wog doctors and bursary-scrounging nurses.

Of Little Shepherds and Big Crooks

One of the most prominent aspects of the Christian churches has always been their tolerant attitude towards the poverty and illiteracy of those who do not happen to be priests or popes; and their invisible friend and His virgin mother have naturally sought to reflect this favour, bestowing upon the great unwashed those visions of divine grace which tend to lose something in translation when filtered through minds afflicted with the blasphemous tendency to think. A century ago, such a vision was vouchsafed to some Portuguese peasant children, in the form of messages which foreshadowed the Second World War and the rise and fall of the USSR in terms sufficiently unambiguous to be parroted by the Associated Press and reproduced without noticeable scepticism in Britain's leading liberal newspaper. Regrettably, these messages of love and forgiveness failed to include any remedy for Spanish influenza, which two years later carried off two of the children in the pandemic that followed the First World War. Fortunately, their cousin survived to beat the drum, and the pair are now to be canonised, which will certainly help matters.

Their Not Entirely Glorious Dead

Not content with defying the will of the British people over Gibraltar, the Spanish parliament has piled insult upon insult by voting to relocate the mortal remains of Tin-Pot Tessie's spiritual predecessor, Francisco Franco Bahamonde. The vote in the Cortes is non-binding and unlikely to be acted upon, much like the word of Tin-Pot Tessie and her cohorts; but it has clearly stirred up some painful memories and dubiously legitimate concerns. A scourge of traitors and crusher of saboteurs, as well as a noted enthusiast of patriotism, Christianity and family values, Franco is one of the only two named occupants of a vast kitsch mausoleum forty miles from Madrid; the other, in the interests of truth and reconciliation, being the founder of the Falangist party, the political wing of Franco's terrorist organisation. An estimated half-million victims of the civil war have had to rest content with anonymity, and with the symbolism of the hundred-and-fifty-metre cross commemorating the Church's famously vocal disapproval of Franco's inquisition.

Bad Moon Rising

Sinister developments continue in Korea, where the South has elected a president who favours, of all things, lasting peace with the global menace to the north, despite the latter's fanatical persistence in blowing up fish in the Sea of Japan. Although he is apparently among the very few people to have attained prominence in the last year or two without the direct intervention of Vladimir Putin, Moon Jae-in has already threatened to reconsider the Thaad missile defence system, about whose purpose Britain's leading liberal newspaper is wholly in agreement with Washington. That the new president is a former human rights lawyer who won by a landslide after his predecessor was impeached for corruption, can only increase concerns in the free world that the Trumpster may yet take sufficient offence to decide that any impending nuclear war might just as well extend over the whole peninsula.

Wormwood 28

Robert Aickman and Tartarus Press go back a long way. Almost two decades ago, Tartarus brought out a two-volume omnibus edition of Aickman's stories; and later re-issued, in their trademark high-quality hardcover, the original collections and Aickman's two volumes of autobiography. The press also issues Mark Valentine's semi-annual journal Wormwood, which published a previously unknown Aickman story in 2005, and has also printed critical explorations by Peter Bell, Joel Lane and others.

Courtesy of Douglas A Anderson, the latest issue of Wormwood includes an intriguing glimpse at the contents of Panacea: The Synthesis of an Attitude, a massive (over a quarter of a million words) philosophical ramble which Aickman apparently wrote during his early twenties. In addition, Reggie Oliver reviews Artemis Cooper's biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard, who among much else was Aickman's sometime lover and his collaborator on the 1951 story collection We are for the Dark; and there is also an article by me on Aickman's story "Meeting Mr Millar", from his outstanding 1975 collection Cold Hand in Mine.

Further attractions include two pieces on David Lindsay's massif Devil's Tor; one on Kipling's story "Wireless"; essays on a Hibernian hierophant and a disconsolate decadent; and "The Fairy Suffragettes", which treats of three Victorian writers who advanced a progressive agenda through the medium of children's fiction. All things considered, you should definitely fork out for this one before the monsters get you.

No Regulation Without Representation

Today is the anniversary of the only significant event in world history between the November rah-rah of 1918 and the election of Margaret Thatcher: VE Day, on which the British Empire led the Americans to victory in Europe and made the world safe for democracy, with no help worth mentioning from any Frenchies, Poles, Czechoslovakians, Russians, dusky colonials or other lesser breeds. Although the perfidious French have attempted to dampen the occasion by electing their president without due deference to the requirements of the Farage Falange, the Trumpster has indicated his own nation's gratitude and respect by continuing to follow where Britain leads and purging the mere experts from the US Environmental Protection Agency. The aim is to replace them with representatives of those industries against which the environment has hitherto been at least nominally protected, on the grounds that "we should have people on this board who understand the impact of regulations on the regulated community." This approach has, of course, been pioneered in Britain with the independent regulators for police and press which are run, respectively, by the police and the press, and with the appointment of a social disease as the minister in charge of public health. It remains as yet unclear whether the Trumpster intends following through to apply this great Imperial innovation to other regulated communities: holding off executions until the death warrant is signed by the condemned, for example, or giving women affected by anti-abortion laws a say in what happens to that nasty little uterine growth which may one day grow into a Republican. But of course - as with fighting fascism and keeping the planet habitable - one must always beware of taking a theoretically good idea to dangerous extremes.

Winning Through by Making Do

Since so many civil servants were efficientised away in the bonfire of red tape that lit the Osbornomic miracle - to the usual chorus of hosannas from the Liberal Democrats - the Government has been forced to look elsewhere for expert negotiators towards our forthcoming victory. Naturally, the first choice of the Department for Accepting Unconditional Euro-wog Surrender is a specialist in war. William Ury claims to have helped the American and Soviet governments avert accidental nuclear war during the 1980s; although of course that was a long time ago, before deregulation, when everybody's missiles were commonly expected to fly towards the enemy. Ury is a Harvard Fellow (couldn't they afford an Oxbridge man?) who has mediated in conflicts ranging from the Colombian civil war to the Balkans and the Middle East, the latter presumably without treading over-much upon the financial perks of Tony the Peacemaker. It is to be hoped that Ury's previous experience will serve him well in dealing with the Anglo-Brussels War; particularly when it comes to such fundamental matters as distinguishing between the goodies and the baddies.

Mau Mau Redux

A very big blob representing thirty-two million teachers and other subversives has communicated, for all the good it will do, with the Department for Profitable Aid expressing concern over legal action by Bridge International Academies. BIA is a private education company which uses such wholesome British cost-cutting methods as rote learning, unqualified staff, substandard conditions and the gradual undermining of the hated public sector. It has run into trouble with some enemies of the people in Uganda; and, in accordance with modern British attitudes towards freedom of speech and political debate, BIA has taken legal action to prevent criticism from the national teaching union in Kenya, and thus has the full support of the Imperial taxpayer. Although social inequality in Africa remains, for the moment, insufficiently severe for the purposes of Her Majesty's Government, there seems every chance that the situation will be quickly remedied.

Clean Common Sense

Since those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, it's only natural that the Government should choose to release its clean air plan, if plan is the word I want, on the day when the headlines are choked with local elections. Having been chivvied through the courts not once but several times, and having at last come to the regrettable realisation that the enemies of the people still wield a certain influence, the Government has knocked up a few proposals intended mainly to protect the same car manufacturers who were caught lying about their products' emissions some little time ago. Everything that is wrong with the country's air is due to a mess left by Labour; particularly, no doubt, the Imperial Haystack, who as Labour mayor of London presided over persistently illegal levels of pollution. The responsibility for cleaning up (without, of course, inconveniencing any actual polluters) rests entirely with local authorities, who must simply buckle down and deliver new and creative solutions while, in accordance with the dictates of common sense, the Secretary of State for Environment, Floods and Badger Apocalypse gets on with more important things.

Raising Them to Our Own Level

It is a well-known fact, because historians of Boris Johnson's calibre never cease to inform us, that a central precept of the British Empire was the moral and material advancement of the lesser breeds. Hence the introduction of railways in India, land reform in Kenya and liberal democracy in Malaya; because inside every wog, fuzzy-wuzzy, nigger and coolie a Briton is struggling to burst forth. The New Global Imperium of England, Wales, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands will doubtless continue the civilising trend; and already impressive progress has been made in Yemen, where one of our few remaining growth industries is carrying out sterling work to motivate the natives. British arms dealers, in benign collaboration with the sharers of British values in the head-chopping House of Saud, have helped to put nineteen million out of twenty-seven million people in need of aid, with an option on famine for four to seven million. Teachers, health workers and engineers have not been paid for eight months, while the price of basic commodities has gone up by a third: the sort of social and economic miracle for which even the master race may have to wait for another two years and the anticipated final victory over the Euro-wog menace.

Shoddy Foreign Shelving

Meanwhile, on the continent that witnessed Captain Scott's moral triumph a century ago, there is the minor matter of two thousand square miles of ice which seems just about ready to drop into the ocean. A crack a hundred miles long and a thousand feet wide has appeared on the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, and is becoming wider at the rate of three feet a day. About ten per cent of the Larsen C ice shelf is expected to join the rising seas, which could make the rest of the shelf more unstable; a neighbouring ice shelf, Larsen B, collapsed fifteen years ago, and another, Larsen A, seven years before that. The hoaxes of the Heathen Chinee are drawn-out and subtle: far too long-winded to merit front-page headlines, especially when the Prime Minister of Her Majesty's Government is throwing dead cats in all directions. On its own, the collapse of Larsen C could raise sea levels by another centimetre, which would be unlikely to harm the immediate interests of the British Conservative Party or its chums. However, given that the quantity of ice on Antarctica is considered by mere experts to be significant, it is just possible that the shelf might be damming more of it up, and that the shelf's collapse might therefore cause still more ice to be released. The likely magnitude and consequences of such an event for the British Conservative Party remain as yet unknown, particularly to the Secretary of State for the Environment and most people who read the news.

Blagging Through the Smog

Well, here's a thing: it seems that the Government's plan for reducing deaths from the illegally toxic air quality favoured by the Imperial Haystack was ready to go all along, just like the plan for Brexit; and all the enemies of the people had to do was ask nicely for the fag-packet it's been scrawled on. After months of Government prevarication, the high court ordered the Conservatives to hand in their homework by next week, so the reliably gormless Andrea Leadsom toddled into the Commons to proclaim that a few tens of thousands of extra prole deaths could not in her view be said to constitute an emergency without some risk of terminological inexactitude. Rather, the situation was a mere matter of significant and urgent concern; so urgent and significant that the Government tried to use the election as an excuse for further delay. After all, one of the main concerns behind the calling of the election is that much of the Conservatives' majority has the Crown Prosecution Service breathing down its collective dewlap, and if it comes to a choice between strength and stability versus legalistic mumbo-jumbo we all know which will look more appetising to the former party of law and order.

Indian Mutiny

Yet more evidence has emerged of the urgent necessity for a new Pax Britannica extending far beyond the present glorious reaches of Belfast, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. A former jewel in the imperial crown seems hell-bent on misusing its independence, falling away from the advances in civilisation so recently bequeathed it.The government of India is threatening to tilt the level playing field that is the free market in fossil fuels, and force every car in the Raj to become electrically-powered within a decade and a half; all because of a trifling depreciation in serfs and sepoys of the kind which our own Imperial Haystack has been shrugging off with a manly British snigger for years on end. Should India continue in this unconstructive behaviour, at a time when the British government is leading the world into a frackable future of methane-heated growth, the Imperial Haystack's sense of duty may yet dictate that he dust off the pith helmets and polish up the rah-rah from 1857. Meanwhile, Britain's secretary of state for the environment continues to be Andrea Leadsom.