Empty Gesture

That uniquely commercial synthesis of boorishness and squeamishness which characterises the classical British moral panic is visible to full, voluptuous advantage, with just a naughty touch of daring Situationist provocation, in a stunt by Manchester Art Gallery. An icky Pre-Raphaelite painting by John William Waterhouse, apparently the David Hamilton of the Victorian era, has been removed from display, and postcards reproducing the image will no longer be sold in the shop. The idea is to "prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks" by allowing the public to put Post-It notes in the empty space; which is unquestionably what Art should be all about. It is certainly a gesture worthy of a nation of entrepreneurs: there can be few more economical ways of stimulating discussion about paintings than by not displaying them.

Khan's Calamitous Communistic Clean-Air Caliphate

Everything slows down under Labour, and London under the yoke of the Islamo-Stalinoid Sadiq Khan is no exception. It has taken the capital thirty days to breach the legal limit for air pollution: something which, under the exhilarating rah-and-blah of the Imperial Haystack, never once took so much as a week. Strangely enough, given the issues involved, the opinion of the famously green anti-terrorist Zac Goldsmith does not appear to have been solicited. In any case, Khan's perfidious programme of respiratory cleansing has still not reached its fiendish climax, having been stalled by the devastating Britishness of environmental policy at national level. Not only do we have a jabbering homunculus instead of a secretary of state for the environment, but the dead-eyed warden herself is obliged to believe that climate change is a hoax by the Heathen Chinee. To maintain otherwise would be to risk alienating the big orange man-baby and his psychopathic head-tribble, with unfortunate results for the post-Brexit economy.

We Don't Need Your Kind Around Here

Britain's plucky little crusade against health tourists has notched up a new and glorious victory thanks to the Ministry for Wog Control, which has refused an NHS doctor permission to bring her three-year-old child into the country. Despite the millions of hard-working British families queueing up to work their way out of poverty by becoming junior doctors, Amany Abdelmeguid took advantage of an NHS recruitment drive and left her daughter in Egypt. Abdelmeguid's in-laws, who are looking after the girl, have been careless enough to let their health decline, and her husband is working near the Saudi-Yemeni border, which he claims is no place for a child despite the sterling efforts of Britain's weapons salesmen and the Ministry for Wog-Bombing. Abdelmeguid applied for the child's visa, was turned down, appealed, was turned down again, was invited by email to apply again on the grounds of exceptional circumstances, applied again and was turned down again on the same grounds as before. It would be difficult to imagine a clearer demonstration, either of Her Majesty's Government's determination to protect our newly global Britain from dusky foreign females, or of the precise degree of esteem in which Her Majesty's Government holds NHS doctors.

Bad Theology

Text for today: John 8 iii-xi

This incident is one of the most famous in Jesus' ministry; and not without reason, as it constitutes a rare example of a moral precept laid down by the Saviour which the majority of His followers have obeyed to the letter.

The Pharisees attempt to trap Jesus by bringing before Him a woman caught in the act of adultery, and asking Him whether she should be stoned to death in accordance with the law of Moses. Jesus at first pretends not to hear them and sits writing in the dust with his finger; regrettably, whether by human error or divine censorship, the substance of what He wrote has not come down to us. After repeated questioning, Jesus at last states that whoever is without sin should throw the first stone. By order of age and hence, presumably, experience and wisdom, the Pharisees leave, and Jesus tells the woman that He will not condemn her either.

According to Jesus, sadistic capital punishment is justifiable when carried out by those who consider themselves to be without sin. Fortunately for enthusiasts of divine chastisement, generations of the Saviour's followers have had more mercy from their consciences than either the vengeful Jesus or the legalistic Pharisees had from theirs. By contrast, once reminded of their own imperfections, the Pharisees show mercy to the woman despite the lack of any stipulation in the law of Moses as to the sinlessness or otherwise of earthly judges and executioners. As one who excoriated hypocrites almost as much as He did unbelievers, Jesus could hardly ignore His own blatant sins of wrath, pride and false prophecy, and therefore could do no other than follow the example of His honest and courageous enemies.

Mature Debate

Among the many complex managerial issues raised by the Holocaust, one of the most challenging is, of course, how to get across the all-important distinction between the despicable racist authoritarianism of the Nazis and the desirable racist authoritarianism of the merely strong, stable and patriotic. In less advanced societies, the means of keeping the record straight must necessarily be a little clumsy; hence the Polish government is seeking to make any use of the phrase Polish death camps a criminal offence, thereby implicitly admitting the Nazi claim that Upper Silesia with its pleasant town of Oświęcim is really part of Greater Germany. In highly developed democracies such as our own, this sort of conundrum is easily solved, because the rules of civilised discourse are more thoroughly internalised. What civilised English people have against the Nazis is that they were foreign, and what they have against the Holocaust is that its most mentionable victims were non-Communistic white Europeans: the British Empire's systematic use of slave labour, mass starvation and concentration camps elicited barely a squeak of protest when used for the moral improvement of Asians and Africans (although it did earn Hitler's enduring respect) and is even now simply ignored or shrugged off among the more urbane types of patriot.

In the Beginning

The discovery of a fossilised jawbone belonging to the world's oldest known Zionist will undoubtedly prompt much moral rejoicing among all true friends and allies of the Righteous State. Not only does the fossil's age prove that deeds to the Holy Land were granted by the reputable estate agent Yahweh, Inc. some two hundred thousand years ago, but the likely sins of its contemporaries tend to vindicate the Righteous State in more contemporary matters. According to scientists, the fossil's presence suggests that Homo sapiens ipsedixit was mingling and mating with other human species in the Middle East, anticipating the sins of Solomon over a period of several millennia. As a result, God ensured that they left no direct descendants behind, thereby providing both moral and genetic justification for the Righteous State's present alt-British attitude to African migrants.

Trumpnado

Despite the dead-eyed warden's attempts to smooth the ruffled head-tribble with a quick knee-trembler in Davos and a rescheduled rah-rah "later this year", it seems there are still a few malcontents in the world who remain obstinately unreceptive to the Trumpster's urbane charisma. Allegations by Stephanie Clifford that the Trumpster is terrified of sharks along with everything else have led to a sudden increase in donations to charities for selachimorphic elasmobranches of the cartilaginous persuasion. The Trumpster tweeted his dislike some years ago, proclaiming that sharks were "last on my list - other than perhaps the losers and haters of the world!" It is doubtful that he was referring to me personally, rather than to the Kenyan Muslim or that woman with the emails; but should you wish to contribute to the wellbeing of a species which may be even more last on the Trumpster's list than sharks, my backlist is as available as ever.

Me at Poetry24:
Comfort Zone

Bergoglio's Beam

To what shall one compare this generation, in which even Jesuitical casuistry is not what it once was? The chief salesman for one of the world's most venerable fake-news outlets has denounced fake news, comparing it to the "false and alluring arguments" of the serpent in Eden; from which it is sadly apparent that the Pope, like so many true believers, has an embarrassing tendency to skim his Bible. In tempting Eve, the serpent makes two statements: that eating the forbidden fruit will not cause Eve to die, and that it will give her the divine attribute of knowing good and evil. Both statements are perfectly true; the liar in the story is God, who told Adam that he would die on the very day he ate the fruit. Having eaten the fruit and survived the tyrant's hissy-fit, Adam lived some nine hundred years; and being omniscient, God must have known when He warned Adam that His warning was false. Given the degrees of responsibility involved, the slanders of a pack of unscrupulous journalists and social-media mobsters are by comparison a mere mote in society's eye.

Prevention is Better Than Deportation

Patients stuck on waiting lists and corridor trolleys will doubtless be comforted to learn that the Ministry for Wog Control is doing all it can to protect them from the hideous possibility of being treated by an immigrant doctor who is earning a moderate salary. The Government has been greatly concerned to create a properly hostile environment for wogs who earn less than £55,000 a year, especially now that so much progress has been made in driving away the Euro-wogs who earn rather less. In a typically underhanded bit of politically-correct posturing, the NHS has gone so far as to recruit actual darkies from the Caribbean, India and Pakistan. Fortunately for the cultural health of the nation, the salaries of these swarming hordes are somewhat below the Ministry's threshold, and they are being forced to leave their positions vacant for the millions of underemployed white Britons who are panting and straining to relieve the winter crisis.

Who Needs Green When it's Red, White and Blue?

Pessimists, nay-sayers and citizens of nowhere are making predictable grumbling noises over the prospects for environmental progress once the Recrudescent Imperium's independence from the ghastly Euro-wogs is finally finalised. Reassurances from the dead-eyed warden, to say nothing of endless chirrups of rah-rah from the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, have not been enough to silence those malcontents who seem to think that a department's ability to take on vast amounts of complicated new work may possibly be compromised by its budget and staff being repeatedly cut to ribbons. The fact that the department in question is run by the very same Michael Gove somehow provides only limited reassurance. Indeed, so far has the moral rot spread that one of the malcontents is a Conservative MEP, who presumably gets out a bit more than her colleagues in the Imperial Brexit-bunker at Westminster, and has thus had the party whip withdrawn for not being sufficiently on board the David Davis Tin-Pot Express to the sunlit uplands.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 20 i-xv

The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who agrees to pay some labourers a denarius for a day's work. He hires more labourers over the course of the day, so that some work nine hours, some six, some three and some only one. At the end of the day, he pays all the labourers one denarius. Those who have worked the longest, and who have been kept waiting in line to be paid, ask why they are being treated the same as those who have only worked a single hour. The landowner responds that he is keeping to the letter of their agreement, and that he has the right to do as he wishes with his own property.

This parable is essentially the same as that of the Prodigal Son, with the landowner in place of the father and the mugs who laboured for twelve hours in place of the virtuous brother who complains that his father favours the sinner over himself. The Prodigal Son appears in Luke's gospel, which attempts to smooth over some of the Saviour's more ugly and barbaric aspects; hence the father appeases the angry brother with the assurance that "everything I have is yours" - with the self-evident exceptions of the fatted calf and an occasional kid for a party.

By contrast, the landowner goes out of his way to insult the labourers who have worked the longest. He could have paid them extra, unless the spiritual wealth of the Kingdom of Heaven is to be considered finite (the fact that it can be measured out in portions is evident from II Kings 2 ix). Alternatively, the landowner could have paid the first labourers first and then dismissed them, rather than making them wait in line and rubbing their noses in the fact that they made a bad bargain. When the labourers complain, the landowner's answer is that he is more powerful than they are and can therefore do as he pleases. It is the voice of Job's tormentor, who replied to His victim's complaints by boasting of His power to create animals with impressive teeth and large genitals.

Gove Fights On

Although people who die from pollution in Britain tend to be poor, elderly or otherwise expendable, the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove has been summoned by the ghastly Euro-wogs to account for the country's persistent recidivism in breaking the law on air quality. As the glorious day approaches for final independence, no doubt our joke-shop Environment Secretary will be full of the defiant Dunkirk spirit and will inform the Euro-wog environment commissioner (a foreigner with a funny name, inevitably) exactly where he gets off. Environment ministers from eight other countries will also be at the meeting, so there will be much opportunity for the jabbering homunculus to negotiate individually and independently with each of them and thus cunningly undermine the sinister supra-nationalism of the Brusso-Strasbourgian axis. Once Britain's air is its own again, and she can fish her own waters without risk of Viking depredations from the banker-baiting barbarians of Iceland, then we can start getting rid of all those inconvenient rules and regulations which have prevented British business cleaning up.

If Cripples Did Not Exist, It Would be Necessary to Break Some Legs

A new prenatal test for Down's syndrome has sent the Church of England into the usual contortions as it attempts once again to reconcile its divergent moral functions of crude superstition and smarmy hypocrisy. The Church does not particularly want to start a ludicrous moral panic over something it cannot control; but on the other hand, it would really rather like to. Social acceptance and living conditions for people with Down's syndrome have greatly improved since 1929, when there were rather more church-goers than there are now; and certainly since the era of Christianity's moral dominance, when such people, if they survived at all, presumably served as amusing freaks or as examples of saintly simplicity for priests to point at amid exhortations to pay the tithe. The Church is worried that women who take the test may choose to abort their foetuses, and that this will cause a lack of Down's syndrome with its attendant moral benefits. The Church has no wish to tell women what to do; but on the other hand, the matter is at least tangentially connected to one of the Holy Spirit's most obsessive concerns, namely what consenting adults get up to in the bedroom. Accordingly, the Church has demanded that parents should be given "comprehensive, unbiased information," just in case those maniacal, cackling abortionists in the medical profession might not have thought to offer it.

Structurally Unsound

O what can be the matter? Something threatening to shatter
Our Mother of all Parliaments to bits?
That cosy river palace with Imperial clock-phallus
Which stayed erect throughout the recent Blitz?
The joints are looking dodgy where a Member proud and podgy
Has sat and exercised his ample wits,
Sending belch of belly-laughter up to splinter tile and rafter
And frighten death-watch beetles into fits.

When fiscal roof is leaking and democracy is creaking,
A Member must be careful where he sits;
For the oratoric line has been in rather steep decline
Since your Gladstones, your Disraelis and your Pitts,
And outside a palace posh and full of antiquated tosh,
It really isn't easy, one admits,
To rule a grateful nation through the vocalised vibration
Of half a thousand bawling, braying twits.

Dicky Towers

Sensible Measures, Feasible Pledges

Astoundingly enough, the Committee on Climate Change has declared itself not entirely satisfied that the Government's renewed pious noises about greening the economy are going to be translated into anything so vulgar and un-British as action. Even assuming that ministers do everything they say they're going to do (credo quia absurdum), the UK will still fall short of its legally binding targets, according to the chair of the CCC who seems to think there is some sort of reason why, after all this time, the Government might start matching its actions to its words. Having promised the greenest government ever, the Bullingdon Club proceeded to frack the proles, slash funding for solar energy, cancel a major capture and storage initiative and attempt to privatise the nation's forests; while the London Haystack's eight years of self-promotion and thumb-twiddling helped to ensure that pollution in the capital defied the beastly Euro-wogs and their suffocating clean-air laws. In accordance with standard procedure under the dead-eyed warden, the present administration has decided to substitute rah-rah for planning; a sensible enough policy given that the dead-eyed warden herself has substituted a jabbering homunculus for an Environment Secretary.

Common Decency

Despite generous help from a plucky little nation of curtain-twitching, tale-tattling, tut-tutting amateur sleuths, and undoubtedly despite the best will in the world, the Department of Workfare and Privation is having some small difficulty maintaining a satisfactory quota of skiver-busting. Out of nearly three hundred thousand denunciations on the government's Shop-A-Shirker hotline, about eighty-seven per cent have proven false, even by the DWP's largely undemanding standards of fairness. With the noted food-bank fan and cripple-kicker Esther McVey only recently put in charge, it remains as yet unclear whether the DWP plans to set up any hotlines for those who suspect that their friends and neighbours have not been properly informed of the benefits to which they are entitled and are therefore receiving less than their due.

Nothing to Lose but our Supply Chains

Traitors and saboteurs in the notoriously communistic business sector are nagging the race-baiting Clegg-pledger at the Home Office to publish an investigation into how far the British economy has become a citizen of nowhere. Despite helpful hints of a hostile environment such as the random deportation orders and the minimum fiscal standard for spousal imports, it appears that the Recrudescent Imperium still depends to an excessive degree upon job-stealing health tourists. At a Conservative Party rah-and-blah only a couple of years ago, the Clegg-pledging race-baiter herself mentioned plans for a blacklist of companies that employed too many wogs; and a report on the subject is due a full forty-eight hours before David Davis capitulates in accordance with whatever terms the ghastly Euro-wogs see fit to offer. Yet still our so-called business leaders seem subversively united in their pessimistic, inflexible and non-entrepreneurial approach. Where international trade is concerned, one might almost think some of them would trust a wog more than a Werritty.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Mark 11 xii-xiv and xx-xxiv; Matthew 21 xviii-xxii

This unobtrusive incident (eight verses in Mark, five in Matthew) is central to Christ's ministry and illustrates the Gospel message at its most uncompromising. Jesus is hungry and sees a fig tree; on discovering that it has no figs, He curses the tree and it withers away.

Why should the Saviour destroy a fig tree which, in accordance with the laws laid down by God, does not bear figs when figs are not in season? As theologians, we are not permitted the vulgar and literalist rationalisation that Jesus was a fundamentalist bumpkin who didn't know when figs in the Jerusalem area became ripe. Rather, we must look to the Saviour's own interpretation of His miracle, whereby He informs the disciples that the power of belief will enable them not only to curse fig trees, but to move mountains as well.

The moral here is twofold. First, the Son of God curses and destroys a humble part of God's creation because it abides by God's law. Here we recognise the arbitrary and vindictive persecutor of the faithful servant Job, the divine génocidaire of the Flood and the Book of Joshua, the cruel prankster who ensured that Jephthah's daughter would be the first to greet her father. God's punishment, like His grace, is unreasoning and merciless, and descends entirely without reference to whether or not we keep His law.

Second, Jesus instructs His disciples that provided they pray in faith, whatever they demand will be theirs, even unto the casting of mountains into the sea. The fig tree's calvary therefore serves as an allegory, not of love or forgiveness, but of the same destructive power which smote Sodom and Gomorrah and which Jesus was forever wishing upon His enemies. More even than the formal adoption at His baptism, the blasting of the fig tree shows Jesus as the true Son of His Father in heaven.

Flame Out

The only person to face manslaughter (sic) charges over the lynching of three civil rights workers in the Mississippi Burning case has died in prison. The case was dramatised in Alan Parker's 1988 film, in which truth and justice are pluckily pursued by two white liberal employees of the well-known civil rights campaigner J Edgar Hoover. None of Edgar Ray Killen's accomplices ever faced trial for murder, doubtless because there were very fine people on both sides. In the immediate aftermath of the killings, comparatively few unarmed Klansmen were shot to death by law enforcement officers, and it took forty years before Killen was convicted. When the state government of Mississippi refused to prosecute anyone, the federal government charged eighteen people with conspiring to deprive American citizens of their constitutional rights; and in the regrettable greatness-lacking spirit of the sixties, seven of the accused served prison sentences of up to six years rather than being allowed to run for President.

New Threats

There can be few more archetypal citizens of nowhere than the secretary general of the United Nations, an organisation whose very name implies some sort of moral equivalence between Britain and the lesser breeds. In recent years the UN has somewhat exceeded its proper function of rubber-stamping Anglo-American wog-bombing adventures, and has dispatched various Rolniks and Manjoos to interfere with the sovereignty of Her Majesty's Government. The present secretary general, being yet another foreigner with a funny name, has continued this regrettable trend with a diatribe on the benefits of migration, apparently in the hope that governments hitherto united in their financial self-interest and racist pandering will change their alarmist and stigmatising ways just because of mere social and economic facts. Certainly neither the late Bullingdon administration nor the present Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands has given any indication of being swayed by anything so unpatriotic as evidence; and the UN secretary general has patently failed to distinguish between undeserving migrants such as refugees, terrorists, nurses and so forth, and deserving migrants like Rupert Murdoch.

Ellipsis

Difficulties in coming to terms with a violently racist past are not confined to the nation that spawned Cecil Rhodes and Winston Churchill. The French publisher Gallimard has cancelled its proposed reissue of Céline's anti-semitic pamphlets, which in the words of one objector "influenced a whole generation of collaborationists who sent French Jews to their deaths." Just how many people got through Bagatelles pour un massacre, L'École des cadavres and Les Beaux Draps is uncertain, but it seems most unlikely that an entire generation was influenced. The essence of racism lies in optimism and romanticism: human greatness distilled in the master race, which will achieve its full potential once the vermin have been cleared away. Céline had his faults, but optimism was never one of them; and although his anti-semitism was genuine enough he never showed the least interest in making it respectable. The idea that his rants might somehow be sanctified by the mere act of publication is a strange one: by the same brilliant logic a bowdlerised Céline would be less holy than the uncensored text, and his publishable writings have been whitewashed by leaving the controversial parts just as he wrote them.

For Strength and Stability

Astoundingly enough, almost a full seven years after the liberation of Libya by Britain's Head Boy and a few of his chums, there still remains some doubt as to whether the country is ready for elections. As a CIA hireling and hence a "strongman" rather than a terrorist or a suspected war criminal, Khalifa Haftar has demonstrated the expectable degree of commitment to democracy, proclaiming that the forthcoming elections had better proceed to his satisfaction or else. Despite the forward-planning capabilities of the late Head Boy and his chums, Libya remains divided and rudderless, quite unlike other oil-rich states which have undergone the benefits of freedomisation by wog-bombing; and Haftar has made a stab at Tin-Pot Tessie's style of tautological threat by defining "enough" as enough. It remains to be seen how the country will adapt the supreme example of Britain's Mother of Parliaments to its own cruder requirements: whether by gerrymandering like the Bullingdon Club, pandering to extremists like Tumbledown Tessie, or simply executing traitors and citizens of nowhere in the name of Libya First.

Virgin House Price Cancer Scare Shock

Traitors, saboteurs and citizens of nowhere at Virgin Trains have conspired to censor that permanently persecuted bastion of Britishness, the Rothermere Daily Stürmer. Although passengers will be free to peruse the paper's wisdom, they will not be able to buy copies or receive them as give-aways on Virgin Trains. The company claims that the Stürmer is incompatible with its brand and beliefs, at least partly because of concerns over such traditional British values as racism, gay-baiting, poor-bashing and permanent, pure-blooded, pearl-clutching, blue-rinsed squealing hysteria from one end of the week to the other. Although the Stürmer prides itself on speaking for the little people (its editor being by all accounts one of the smallest men in the country), it also didn't sell very well, which was apparently incompatible with the famously Stalinist values espoused by Sir Richard Branson, Knight of the NHS.

Well Ahead of the Bad Guys

The values that built the British Empire continue to bear their world-improving fruit, in the shape of a forty-two per cent increase in productivity with regard to suspected enemy combatant pre-emptive detrimentation. There is, as usual, no credible evidence of British airstrikes resulting in civilian deaths, although the Ministry for Wog-Bombing has looked in all the cupboards and Her Majesty's Government has even asked the head-chopping House of Saud if everything was tickety-boo. (The head-chopping House of Saud, after an investigation rigorous enough to satisfy Michael Fallon, confirmed that everything was.) By contrast, the terrorists' bag of civilians for the past year showed hardly any change, which may partly account for the present boom in casualties among unarmed asymmetrical combatants in civilian uniform. If the terrorist market is bottoming out, or even flatlining, responsible governments have no other recourse but to seek alternative targets. To have bombs and not to use them would be almost as wasteful as leaving oil in the ground.

Break Out the Opium

Despite having perpetrated a hoax so hilarious that it melts roads in Australia, the Heathen Chinee still clearly have much to learn. In a calculated manoeuvre quite foreign to the disinterested idealism that pertains in Western politics, Xi Jinping has not only declared a war on poverty, but has made the primitive, literalist error of taking action to reduce poverty rather than increase it. Besides repressive interference with the housing market, the policy includes disincentivisation of initiative among the poor, some of whom may die of thirst when they realise they no longer have to carry their own water. To complete the blasphemous litany, there are even hints that the careers of government officials may depend on the results they obtain. Alongside other recent provocations by the Heathen Chinee, notably taking radical action against climate change and attempting to prevent nuclear war in Korea, such irresponsible conduct can only risk the displeasure of the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.

Sunny Uplands

Doubtless thanks to the dusty doings of desiccated Euro-wog regulators, much of south-eastern England could face drought should there be a summer this year. The autumn and winter have been unusually dry, and summer rain is very selfishly taken up and used by various non-parliamentary forms of vegetation. A good deal of piped water is lost because moisture profitability agencies don't bother to repair their pipes; and since the moisture profitability agencies are private companies, any attempt to force them to do so would contradict the most fundamental tenets of the prevailing religious orthodoxy. Still, even the Government is aware that the south-east of England is not the north of England, so it is possible that some sort of measures will be taken; but since instead of an environment secretary we have the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, the chances of the south-west being either submerged or sandscaped by next September cannot altogether be discounted.

A British Family

You plebs in the corridors waiting,
With health service crisis inflating,
Stop lazing about,
Buck up, sing and shout:
Rejoice, for the toffs have been mating!

To pump out more Royals is jolly!
To grumble is treason and folly,
And won't she look fine
While waiting in line
To labour on gold-plated trolley!

Kingsley Sprogporne

Menstrual Detention

Despite six years of tender loving care under the previous Home Secretary (what was her name again?), to say nothing of the Bullingdon Club's apocalyptic efficientisation of their backroom staff, many police forces are routinely breaching the human rights of women and girls in custody. A monitoring association funded by the Home Office and police and crime commissioners has found that female suspects are being warehoused without adequate sanitary facilities, without concern for menstruation, and without the assistance of female officers: conditions which are likely to be in breach of the European convention on human rights. Since the Recrudescent Imperium still has some way to go before consummating its independence from the Brusso-Strasbourgian militant feminist axis, the race-baiting Clegg-pledger at the Home Office will apparently be taking time off from her tax avoidance duties in the Bahamas in order to work out how matters can be improved, perhaps via on-the-spot penalties for leaking without due care and attention.

Compassionate Cleansing

The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, being home to Windsor Castle, Eton and Ascot, is of course a compassionate community. There is no place for homelessness in a compassionate community, therefore the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead has no place for the homeless. The local council's leader, who is on a compassionate skiing holiday in Wyoming, has ordered Thames Valley police to clear away the beggars and their detritus in time for the next scheduled royal wedding. The council leader's letter has been copied to the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK, whose election as parliamentary expenses claimant for Maidenhead shows just what a compassionate community the Royal Borough really is. A list of the council's support services for the vulnerable is provided, in case Thames Valley police were unaware of them; the fact that certain persons remain homeless despite the compassion of a Conservative council can mean only that they are homeless by choice, or else that they are mansion-dwelling Bolshie scroungers who seek only to frighten the tourists. The royal family, who never interfere in politics save where their personal finances are concerned, have nobly refrained from comment, despite the fact that one of the happy couple's relatives heads that compassionate church which mediates between the country and the Great Anglican in the Sky.

Of Shoulders and Burdens

Vulnerable private members' clubs are being forced into desperate measures in order to protect themselves from the Stalinist horrors of national insurance. The Devonshire Club in London, where real people pay two hundred a month to take advantage of sixty-eight rooms, a restaurant, a champagne bar and some plebs, has requested (the Oldspeak equivalent need hardly be specified) the servants to take a pay cut to minimum wage level and rely on gratuities to top up their salaries. Since the members are so very upstanding, the gratuities cannot of course be guaranteed, but any fiscal inconvenience for the lower orders will be more than offset by liberation from such outdated fripperies as redundancy pay, the breeders' bounty and the state pension. Even more importantly, the Devonshire will pay less tax; and since the Devonshire is part-owned by no less a Belizean patriot than Lord Non-Dom the Dodgy, that can only be good for Britain.

Ever Onward

This is the time each year, perforce,
When merriment has belched its course,
And we resolve to purge our vice,
And to be good, or even nice -

And in a twelvemonth, give or take,
Those promises again to make;
And to our virtues' ample score
Resolve to add a couple more.

Samuel Grimsnipe