From a Comfortable Climatologist

You surely didn't think, you proles, that I would hang around
As long as there was food and better housing to be found,
Or that my little piggy eyes would spare a second glance
For Brexitannia, when I've got my pied-à-terre in France?
It's full of foreign people who speak funny, that is true,
But France has had the sense to keep its place in the EU;
While Britain stands alone, keeps calm and has its carry-on
And lives on beans and sovereignty, until the beans are gone.
But seriously, though: whatever glow we may have given it,
Nice place for dodging taxes, but you wouldn't want to live in it.

Blaby Flatt

Vaguely Remembering Chilcot

Like any other value judgement, the determination of what constitutes an elder statesman is necessarily subjective and relative; and in the era of Johnson, Gove and little Gavin it's possible that even a toadying thug like Bernard Jenkin may fancy himself the part. Jenkin has been uttering oracular warnings about the potential misdeeds of future prime ministers, one or two of whom may somehow sneak into high office despite lacking the strength, stability and moral fibre of Tumbledown Tessie. Specifically, Jenkin and the Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee are concerned about the prospect of a prime minister who might be tempted to engage in wog-bombing before due and proper consultation with every crook, thug, toady, sycophant, spiv, groupie, gargoyle, placeman, popinjay, nincompoop, nobody and cretin in the cabinet. Such, as we know, was the criminally erroneous if handily non-actionable course taken by the Reverend Blair while plotting the great wog-bombing in Iraq, despite the statesmanlike note of caution sounded by one Bernard Jenkin. Still, a mere two years after the Chilcot report was published, it is certainly encouraging that an entire parliamentary committee has been set up to make it look as if someone were interested.

Fertile Relations

One of the EU's major cultural centres, having just taken a major step towards implementing genuinely civilised values, has offered to share them with a primitive and superstitious neighbour. Ireland, a country noted as the main source of twentieth-century English literature, may soon permit women requiring abortions to cross the border from the English colony, which was left in such an uncivilised state by the British Empire that women's health and family planning still come under criminal law. In the interests of strength, stability and feminism within reasonable limits, Tin-Pot Tessie has decreed that decisions about Northern Ireland are best left to the devolved assembly; a judgement which contrasts rather subtly with her attitude to the coalition of chaos in the devolved assembly for Scotland. The Northern Ireland assembly, coincidentally enough, was recently disassembled with some help from the dead-eyed warden's fundamentalist friends in the Demagogic Ulsterpersons' Party.

Home Is...

Healthy new changes are clearly afoot at the Ministry for Wog Warehousing. Not only has the dynamic new Home Secretary and former minister for homelessness changed the word hostile in hostile environment to something else, but suspected refugees in detention are subject to an equally enlightened change of régime. Naturally, many are still being illegally held without trial, without appeal and without limits on their time as guests of Her Majesty's Government; and needless to say, many victims of persecution and torture are still being imprisoned for long periods or else thrown out onto the streets with no accommodation and no support. In the bad old days before the wholly accidental and thoroughly well-intentioned Windrush persecutions came to light, the Ministry for Wog Warehousing would simply have shrugged off such cases with some bureaucratic blather about its ever-increasing efficiency, leavened perhaps with a bit of Churchillian orotundity about protecting hard-working taxpayers from the migrant scourge. Now that lessons have been learned after the usual fashion, the Ministry is taking a more sophisticated approach, proclaiming that indefinite detention at the unlawful pleasure of the dead-eyed warden's boot-boys is really quite similar to living in emergency accommodation. Once her Majesty's Government has truly shaken itself free of all that nonsense about human rights, no doubt we can look to the day when everyday life in the Recrudescent Imperium will bear a similarly salubrious resemblance.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Luke 10 xxv-xxxvii

A lawyer requests Jesus to define the prerequisites for attaining eternal life. Jesus asks him to recite the law, which is that one must love God with all one's heart, soul, strength and mind, and love oneself and one's neighbour with the leftovers. When the lawyer asks Jesus to define his neighbour, Jesus tells a parable of a man who is set upon by bandits, stripped and left for dead. A priest and a Levite pass the victim by; but a Samaritan, a member of a group despised by the Jews, goes to some trouble and expense in order to help. Jesus asks the lawyer who was the man's neighbour; the lawyer says, "The one who showed him mercy" and Jesus tells him to do likewise.

The parable was doubtless inspired by the incident (recounted at II Chronicles viii-xv) in which prisoners from Judah were saved and helped thanks to a prophet in Samaria. In the parable, the marauding armies of impious Israel are substituted with cowardly and hypocritical members of the priestly caste, whose reluctance to accept the Saviour's fundamentalist teachings earned them His enduring resentment and constant invective. One disreputable source interprets the parable as a promotion of the ascetic life; but this flippant reading is less than convincing. Although Jesus professed indifference to material comforts, He certainly did not object to them; what He disliked was not being pampered, but being doubted. In light of His willingness to be ministered from the substance of wealthy women, and His obsessive denunciations of the priests and scribes, it is reasonable to assume that His respect for ascetic values was comfortably outweighed by His hatred for His rivals.

Hence, the parable is anything but a paean to compassion without borders. Since the Saviour's contempt for "the heathen" is as consistent and well-documented as His lust for Judgement Day, it seems most unlikely that the legalistic put-down "Go and do likewise" was primarily intended as an exhortation to be nicer to people from Samaria. Rather, Jesus' intention is to turn the Jews' loathing for the Samaritans against His own enemies among the learned and literate, by implying that even a despised foreigner would make a worthier neighbour than they.

Our Patience Will Achieve More

British values continue rampant among Her Majesty's Government's favourite Islamic fundamentalists, whose commitment to law and order can only be admired by the traitor police and feminazi-hunters in the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. Crown Prince Mohammed, Tin-Pot Tessie's third-best international chum after the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble, is cementing his reputation as a moderate and centrist social reformer by imprisoning activists who campaigned for women's right to drive: a right which the head-chopping House of Saud will be granting in a month's time, though of course without going to extremes. Some governments have condemned the arrests, but the Recrudescent Imperium has taken a more nuanced position because, in contrast with the outrages against human rights perpetrated by the likes of Russia, Iran, Venezuela and Brussels, with the head-chopping House of Saud a discreet word in the right place is considered more effective; particularly when accompanied by another shipment of thoroughly practical aids to wog-bombing.

Careless Talk

Those notorious fifth-columnists at the Office for National Statistics have provided yet further proof of the need for immediate privatisation and staff purging. With the Recrudescent Imperium about to break free from the shackles of the Brusso-Strasbourgian axis of non-prosperity, the ONS maintains that the worst collapse in economic growth since the Osbornomic miracle cannot be blamed on either the weather or the wogs. Even the Bank of England is flirting with citizen-of-nowhere pessimism by awaiting, of all things, more evidence before attempting any repeat of the banking sector's hit performance of ten years ago. So thoroughly has Britain's robust and rampant economy been talked down that there is even some risk of thrift among the households of our entrepreneurial yeomanry. Should the plebs decide to save their money like tax-dodgers, rather than throw it around like spendthrifts, then the prospects would be bleak indeed.

Gavin's Ceptic Discharge

Something called Gavin has been flapping its adolescent genitalia at a roomful of senior navy figures, some of whom may possibly have seen worse. The navy's defensive missile system, which was named the Sea Wolf by a native speaker of Standard English, is to be replaced with Gavin's new toy, which has been named the Sea Ceptor by a native speaker of Whitehall rah-and-blah. The new system is designed to deter attack by Russia and other potential rivals, such as Russia. Gavin noted that Russia has increased its submarine activity in the Atlantic and has approached Britannic waters thirty-three rimes in the past year, compared with only a single time in 2010. This shows the increasingly aggressive assertiveness of Russia, and has nothing whatever to do with the increasingly whiny weakness and isolation of the newly-independent Recrudescent Imperium. Gavin also plans to send some frigates to the Gulf next year, because in a time of unprecedented uncertainty (far more uncertain than the Cold War, the World Wars, the Cuban crisis or the last time Gavin tidied his bedroom, for instance) there are few things more stabilising than a frigate or two, provided they happen not to be from Russia, or partially manufactured in Russia, or designed in Russia, or traced to Russia by a reliable source such as Boris Johnson. In a previous adventure, Gavin has expressed the wish that Russia would go away and shut up, but as of the present instalment it remains unclear whether Russia has properly absorbed the boy hero's ticking-off.

Something In It For Ourselves

The doom of the species by natural forces,
The drowning of cities with human resources,
The growth of the desert, the loss of the ice,
The tragic extinction of weather that's nice;
The prospect that gardening, hosepiping Man
Might languish beneath an indefinite ban:
These various prospects, it now is asserted,
Might best be enjoyed by being averted;
And should we prevail, let memorials state
That, faced with the need to determine its fate,
Our civilisation resolved to survive
And, seeking excuses for staying alive,
Found no reason better, no urgency deeper
Than that in the long run it's probably cheaper.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Trading Blows

Is there no end to the sneaking perfidiousness of those perfidiously sneaky Euro-wogs? No sooner does the dead-eyed warden announce that HM Prison UK will require a truly global environment for its hostilities, than the fiendish foreigners conspire to start pinching our Commonwealth. One might almost think that they read our newspapers; or even that there might really be people in the world who are faster off the mark than the vole-brained former Minister for Werritty. Of course, the ghastly Euro-wogs have tilted the playing field in characteristically cunning fashion, by imposing EU rules on Britain just because Britain happens to be a member of the EU and then, worse yet, by insisting that Britain remains bound by EU rules for exactly as long as Britain remains a member of the EU. Still, despite this new Nazi-style trick, and once our antipodean penal colonies have been reminded of their proper place within the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, the former Minister for Werritty will doubtless be able to negotiate something far more advantageous; always provided he has the backing of a nuclear submarine or two.

No Room for Blame

So concerned is Her Majesty's Government with what is happening in Britain that even the Home Office will occasionally notice, provided of course that what happens is sufficiently calamitous. Having spent the past eight years presiding over a boom in homelessness, the Government issued new guidelines at the beginning of this year specifying that local authorities should not target people for sleeping rough; although they can of course be targeted for being antisocial, behaving suspiciously or physically resembling an illegal immigrant with intent to cause a dilution of Britishness. Despite this laudable concern for fair play, it appears that certain uncharitable councils are handing out fines and prison sentences as though every day were a royal wedding day. A Home Office spokesbeing was at pains to emphasise that the Home Office is not responsible for such unfortunate occurrences, since the Government has stated its commitment to supporting the vulnerable and disadvantaged, and therefore bears no blame whatever for any Government policies that may happen to deliver them a good kicking instead.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Luke 17 xxvii-xxxvii; Luke 18 i-viii

After telling His disciples that the coming of the kingdom of Heaven will be a massacre along the lines of the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Jesus tells a parable about a judge who neither fears God nor respects humanity. A widow importunes the judge about her case, and eventually he resolves to give her justice for the sake of a quiet life. Hearing the judge's decision, God boasts that He will quickly give justice to His elect, but nevertheless questions whether His avatar will find faith among the people of earth.

In the parable, assuming that right is on the widow's side, justice is done without recourse to either holiness or philanthropy, and is thereby shown to be a mere earthly luxury. The judge acts from pure self-interest, and would no doubt be undiscerning enough to give justice to anyone at all, whether or not they belonged to God's elect, from the same tawdry motive. Holy vengeance and holy favour, by contrast, are both purely arbitrary, as Jesus has just emphasised in His foregoing remarks about His Father's approaching kingdom of flood, fire and brimstone.

The Saviour's own attitude to the importunities of needy women is apparent from the episode of the Canaanite woman, whose cries for help He seems happy to tolerate indefinitely. Hence God's rhetorical question at the end of the parable: Jesus eventually helps the woman not out of a desire for peace and quiet, but as a reward for faith and flattery. It is these, and not mere earthly notions of what is just or unjust, that carry weight in the kingdom of heaven.

Not Quite His Sort of Latin

Having recently been sidelined over the Irish Question, the Imperial Haystack will soon be biffing off to Latin America which, although full of foreigners, has the indisputable advantage of being a very long way away. The Haystack will lay a wreath in Argentina, to commemorate the sainted Thatcher's famous victory over the forces of Michael Foot; and will also be visiting Peru and Chile, apparently in the hope of persuading their respective governments to throw money at British bankers once Her Majesty's Government runs out of taxpayers. The Haystack's accustomed humorous plain-speaking on such matters as the humane virtues of Augusto Pinochet and the hilarious racial characteristics of the dago species will no doubt go down a diplomatic treat.

Renewed Consolidation for Sustainable Pacification

Since the late Head Boy, with his famous good judgement and veracity, declared Victory in Afghanistan four years ago, it should come as no surprise that the Recrudescent Imperium has been called upon to double its military presence in that ever-fortunate country. Happily, thanks to the joined-up thinking which is nearly as common in Her Majesty's Government as joined-up writing, Britain's armed forces are shrinking while being simultaneously engaged in twenty-five separate bits of overseas liberation, peace-keeping and democratisation training. Despite the swingeing cuts initiated by the late Head Boy and his chums, and despite the inevitably entertaining combination of ministerial outsourcing and Capita's computer skills, they are also failing to recruit and suffering some little irregularity in the old moral fibre. Nevertheless, prompted by the megalomaniac squeakings of his hydrophobic head-tribble, the Trumpster keeps on ordering his subordinates in Downing Street to send reinforcements and help the Kabul democracy to prosper. It is to be hoped that the Ministry for Wog-Bombing can scrape together sufficient wherewithal to mount one final glorious crusade against those mad mullahs and their terroristic minions who, even after all these years of Western guidance, are still not civilised enough to realise that they've been beaten in a fair fight.

Woolly Thinking

City parks in Rome are becoming overgrown because, despite the past several years of fiscal discretion and technocratic efficiency in government, the authorities cannot afford to pay anyone to look after them. Lacking the entrepreneurial gumption to implement a British solution such as flogging off the good bits for development, walling off the rest and hiring a private security company to keep out the poor and incentivise "voluntary donations" from visitors, the ruling Five Star movement is considering the use of sheep and other animals to keep the grass under control. The proposal has been greeted with derision in some quarters: "What will we do with the faeces left by the sheep?" asked one worthy who is apparently unaware that animal faeces are biodegradable; while a political opponent asked if the mayor would also be providing geckoes to get rid of summer mosquitoes. All irreverence aside, it remains to be seen whether the Roman authorities will have sufficient vision to recruit assistance from the Vatican, and thus provide constructive employment at last for one of the world's most concentrated populations of shepherds and crooks.

Me at Poetry24:
Pharisee and Publican

Many Are Called, But...

In an unfortunate reversal of the Saviour's sleight of hand with those loaves and fishes, the bounty of a Brazilian evangelist seems to have resulted in a paucity of dupes. A film about Edir Macedo, bishop, sometime jailbird and alleged money-launderer, has sold nine million tickets, but consistently plays to empty cinemas. Critics have also been unkind; according to one, Nada a Perder "leaves the impression that art was less important and the film was made to glorify the protagonist and his religion," not unlike the Gospels. Satan's minions are already putting about the fake news that large quantities of tickets have been purchased by the church itself; and this despite the church's setting up of an initiative on behalf of the needy, to which the needy have apparently responded by not attending the spiritual banquet. Since Macedo claims almost ten million followers, the church may also be wondering why the last million have failed to make due fiscal obeisance; particularly as the film was promoted and partly funded by Macedo's own TV channel and released, with superb self-effacement, on the Easter weekend.

The Blue Pencil Event Horizon

Let it not be thought, just because Her Majesty's Government has issued a belated though doubtless sincere apology for its complicity in kidnapping and torture, that genuine British values will be permitted to slacken any further. A request under the Freedom of Information Act, by a professor of international history at the notoriously subversive London School of Economics, is to be shrugged off as "vexatious" by the Cabinet Office at a hearing tomorrow. The information under restraint relates to the dewy-eyed bromance between a grinning, authoritarian torture fan and war criminal and the late Colonel Gaddafi; and Her Majesty's Government has so little to hide or to fear that the amount of space-time continuum necessary to redact the relevant papers would place the civil service at risk of gravitational collapse.

Compliantly Hostile

One reason why crime statistics keep rising, despite the nation's moral tenor leaping ever further into the empyrean castrato, is the fact that more crimes are being reported. With commendable initiative, various police forces have taken assertive action to deal with this trend, by looking up victims of crime on their national database and handing over anyone who seems a bit Windrush to the Ministry for Wog Control. A spokesbeing has proclaimed that "victims of crime must be treated first and foremost as victims," but the official guidelines stipulate that police can look up anyone they choose and make an arrest on swarming-horde grounds, provided only that there is "an immediate risk of harm to a specific individual". As a wog-hunting licence this could hardly be clearer, since each and every immigrant who remains at large in the Recrudescent Imperium self-evidently constitutes a real and immediate risk to the psychological well-being of the Prime Minister and much of the Conservative and Demagogic Unionist Party. Still, there may well be legitimate and understandable concerns over whether police forces are taking due care to ensure that whatever crimes against cockroaches they do condone are committed exclusively by genuine British nationals.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 7 xii; Luke 6 xxxi

Jesus proclaims that we should do to others as we would wish them to do to us. According to Matthew He ascribes this injunction to the law and the prophets; according to Luke He enunciates the rule moments after telling the wealthy, the well-fed and the mirthful of the sufferings which their loving Father has in store for them.

As to the law and the prophets, the law commands that those who act on certain wishes be stoned to death; while at least one of the prophets says that the human heart is deceitful, desperately wicked and unknowable except to God (Jeremiah 17 ix). Since we cannot know our own hearts, let alone those of other people, it is difficult to see how we can estimate anyone's wishes with sufficient accuracy to oblige them; particularly if their tastes and ours do not happen to coincide. As often with the teaching of Jesus, it is tempting to see this commandment as deliberately setting an impossible task, in order to ensure a steady supply of penitent dupes for His nascent blood cult.

What, according to Jesus, is the nature of our wishes? People are evil (Matthew 7 xi); the things of men are Satanic and opposed to the wishes of God (Matthew 16 xxiii); people deserve worse than the massacred Canaanites and the Cities of the Plain (Matthew 11 xx-xxiv). It is even conceivable that there are some people so unworthy as to prefer ploughshares to swords, who would rather not have their families set against them (Matthew 10 xxxiv-xxxvii). There seems little reason for Jesus to require us to tailor our actions to such depraved preferences, unless perhaps He wishes to spare Himself the bother of looking after too many sheep.

But let us not be uncharitable. Of course it must be admitted from the outset that the commandment is meaningless. Taken in itself, it is neither sane nor benign; taken in the context of the Saviour's consistently punitive and fundamentalist doctrine, it looks like the purest hypocrisy. Nevertheless, this in itself may provide a paradoxical clue to His real intentions. Jesus openly admitted His policy of deliberately confusing and misleading the chaff (Mark 4 xi-xii), and since on this occasion He was speaking in front of a large crowd rather than to His chosen disciples, the most charitable interpretation may be that His statement is a harmless political anodyne, much along the lines of a modern demagogue proclaiming a new and radical preference for prosperity, fair play and the survival of the species.

Drained of Much Blood

Despite the Windrush persecutions being All a Terrible Mistake, they seem to merge rather conveniently with the Government's long-term plans for the National Health Service. Medical staff of the piccaninny persuasion are being assertively incentivised to stay at home or, if they must steal jobs from bursary-deprived British nurses, to refrain from polluting the Recrudescent Imperium with their horribly extended tribal families. The effect on the staffing crisis, which currently runs to a deficit of forty-three thousand nurses, has been most salutary; so naturally Her Majesty's Government is plotting to extend its compliant approach to medical staff who have the temerity to be Euro-wogs. At the moment the NHS is incubating 140,000 such hostile aliens, who for the moment must build their lives upon the somewhat sandy foundation of a reassurance by Caroline Nokes, the hapless Minister for an Unbloodied River Tiber, that their fate will depend on a future agreement which Her Majesty's Government cannot even agree among itself, let alone with the Brusso-Strasbourgian jackboot. Yet still, astoundingly enough, the Stalinist malcontents at the Royal College of Nursing persist in defying the people's will.

Keeping the Enemy Closer

Now that the important lessons from the Grenfell Tower fire have been learned (viz. that the rehousing of victims, far from being a priority, should barely even count as a concern; and that unsafe cladding should continue to be used unless residents are prepared to pay for its replacement), Her Majesty's Government has made a small condescension to the expendables and their families. The inquiry panel is now to include "people with the skills to examine the cultural and community reasons" behind the disaster, something the Prime Minister had previously refused to countenance. Being something slightly other than a born diplomat, and possessing an authoritarian streak nearly as wide as the yellow stripe running up her back, Tin-Pot Tessie presumably lacked the subtlety to see their inclusion as anything other than a hindrance to her will (in Modern Standard Whitehall English, the Will of the People) and an unacceptable adulteration of Sir Martin Moore-Bick's anticipated whitewash with a subversive touch of the tar-brush. Given the absence of much in the way of mind, heart or policy, her change of position is no doubt an encouraging sign; at least for anyone who believes that anyone with an interest in the larger causes of the disaster should be cosily outvoted and democratically marginalised, rather than excluded outright.

A Sorry State

We'd like to say without reserve, and with all due humility,
That we apologise without accepting liability;
For torture's isn't British, save when certain of our pals
Decide to share our liking for some laws of Bluff King Hal's.
Though Brexit, Windrush, Grenfell make quite tolerable looks,
It truly is a pity when we cannot trust our spooks.
You have our best assurance, as from all our little men:
We've learned the proper lessons, and will not be caught again.
It's taken far too long for us to say what we are saying;
We're glad to compensate you, as it isn't us who's paying;
We've done it now, and all is well, and things can stay the same;
And in a week or two we'll say that Corbyn was to blame.

Jack Warts

We Level the Playing Field with the Foreignness of our Unwanteds

Even at the Ministry for Wog Control, where knowledge of English is hardly a major requirement (see, for example, the persistent conflation of British citizen with illegal immigrant in ministerial excuses for the Windrush persecutions), a few of the boot-boys seem to have realised that ignorance of the language can be a bit of a handicap for some when trying to find employment. Accordingly, Syrian hordes have been sanctioned by the Idleness Police for debasing the tongue of Enoch Powell by sneaking off and learning it, rather than filling out applications in Arabic. In addition, and still further to the creation of a compliant environment for the kind of people who want British workers for British jobs, the swarming cockroaches are given only two days of "cultural orientation" to prepare them for their careers as job-stealers, welfare parasites and health tourists. After all, quite aside from the Ministry's moral obligations to the racist demographic, it would be a little insensitive to orient people very thoroughly towards a culture which wants nothing better than to kick them out as soon as possible.

Beelzebub's Birthday

Twenty years ago today, after the opening paragraph dictated itself to me out of nowhere in particular, I started writing Beelzebub. It wasn't my first attempt at a novel, or even the first completed attempt having been preceded by several miscarriages and at least two stillbirths; but for all its borrowings from William Hope Hodgson, James Blish and others, it was the first that didn't feel like a laboured imitation of one or more better writers. Being a genius at the time, I naturally jumped in with only the sketchiest excuse for a story; hence the birth-pangs of the first draft, which lasted until the end of August and which, when I had to stop inventing delightful details and start trying to pull everything into some sort of shape, very nearly killed me. Beelzebub remains the longest work I've ever written; longer even than my latest, which has two more point-of-view characters and a somewhat wider geographical scope. Anyway, if you need a better reason than VE Day to raise a glass or a devil, please feel free.

We Can Always Barter Dialysis For Marmite Elsewhere

Sixteen treacherous fifth-columnists for the ghastly Euro-wogs are seeking to overturn the will of the British people on the pretext of concern for the deserving unwell, who could face massive costs for necessary treatments should the Recrudescent Imperium gain too much independence from the bureaucratic assault on democracy that is the European Health Insurance Card. The effort by the sixteen MEPs to appear concerned for public health is somewhat undermined by their bizarre decision to appeal to Jeremy C Rhymes-with-Hunt, whose blithe indifference to anything but the will of Rupert Murdoch is a matter of long and fragrant record. As might be expected, the Minister for Profitable Healthcare did not deign to respond, instead extruding a spokesbeing to reiterate Her Majesty's Government's standard line on all negotiations with the ghastly Euro-wogs: namely that Britain has made perfectly clear that it wants to keep all the perks and the Continent will just have to fall in line with the mainland.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Mark 4 i-xx

In front of a large crowd, Jesus relates the parable of a sower whose seed is variously choked by God's thorns, scorched by God's sun, or devoured by the birds which cannot fall to earth without God. A small portion of the seed falls on soil which God has made fertile, and this seed grows and yields a good crop. Once the crowd has dispersed, Jesus explains to His disciples that He couches His message in parables so that only the elect will understand and be saved. He then explains the parable.

Since Jesus believed that those who missed His message deserved worse than Sodom and Gomorrah, His explanation to the disciples is a parable in itself. The disciples are saved because He has personally aided their understanding; the men, women and children in the crowd must all fend for themselves, and for the most part face hell-fire at their loving Father's whim. Willingness to listen is not enough; those non-disciples who listen and do not understand can expect neither help nor mercy. Only the Saviour's personal favour, arbitrarily bestowed (though He seems to have had a marked preference for people who cannot interpret a parable on their own), will bring salvation from eternal torment.

The parable of the sower admirably reflects this attitude of whimsical cruelty. Given the precious nature of his seed, and the hellish consequences for any place where it fails to flourish, the sower is astoundingly careless at his work. He has not cleared the ground of thorns and rocks; he does nothing to keep the birds away; and he makes no attempt to nurture or care for his crop once the seed has been scattered. Presumably we are to take it that the work of preparing the ground is the Father's; in which case the responsibility for the sower's abject performance rests largely with the crazed despot who creates thorns and rocks only to blame and punish them for not being flowers and vineyards, and whose régime Jesus aspired to fulfil and not to abolish.

Faithful Followers

Despite the recent Schlieffenesque pronunciamento by the strutting ex-Caudillo of the Farage Falange to the effect that Belgium is not a real nation, it appears that British values are thriving and metastasising among some beneficiaries from the legacy of King Leopold II. Following the sterling example set by the shale-fracking obsessives in Her Majesty's Government, the Democratic Republic of Congo plans to carve up a couple of national parks in order to provide sustenance for underprivileged oil companies. Whereas the British government's fracking plans would inconvenience few apart from some natives in the north of England, the DRC's national parks include Africa's largest tropical rain forest and are occupied, apparently rent-free, by a quarter of the world population of mountain gorillas; so laudable as its efforts may be, the Congolese government still has some distance to travel before it can aspire to true civilisation.

Purple Buboes, Yellow Pus

Now that the Farage Falange vote has been more or less completely absorbed by the Conservatives, the general secretary of the smaller racist rabble has tried to look on the bright side by comparing his party to one of the biggest disasters in human history. The Black Death, a fourteenth-century pandemic most likely caused by an ancestor of the present-day Yersinia pestis bacillus, "led to economic growth and the Renaissance" by the benign expedient of killing off between a quarter and a third of Europe's population, as well as a few non-whites. The plague was an Asian immigrant, but on the positive side it was spread by fleas that were parasitic on rats, which makes for a fair enough parallel with the doctrines of the Farage Falange. The bacillus has apparently not been approached for comment, so it remains as yet unclear whether Yersinia pestis plans to sue the Farage Falange for defamation.

Yet Another Victim

From the way Amber Rudd has presented herself since losing the Ministry for Wog Control, one might be forgiven for thinking that the only sufferer from the Windrush persecutions has been a certain Amber Rudd. Abetted by the London Evening Osborne and some braying sycophants in the House of Expenses Claimants, the race-baiting Clegg-pledger and sometime Parliamentary sayer of the thing that was not has vanished in a fog of self-righteousness, to be replaced by a courageous champion of immigrants and the NHS whose promising yet compassionate career was tragically cut short by a hidebound boss. Comprising roughly equal portions of Edith Cavell, Princess Diana and Albert Speer, the new Amber Rudd will doubtless be much surprised and hurt should its brazen and hollow likeness fail to get a plinth in Trafalgar Square by the end of the month.

Nevertheless, the Windrush crisis has affected one or two other people, notably a swarming horde of Afghans who worked as interpreters for British troops in Helmand. Her Majesty's Government has been treating them with expectable contempt, charging them £2,389 each to apply for leave to remain; but thanks to the Windrush fiasco something called Gavin at the Ministry for Wog-Bombing has been forced to go cap in hand to his rivals at the Ministry for Wog Control and request that the interpreters be reclassified as deserving wogs, at least until the Government's tattered credibility is resoundingly restored by the Home Office's investigation of itself. Whatever Amber Rudd may have suffered, for the refined sensibilities of the brave little chap who once told Russia to go away and shut up the pain of this humiliation must be acute.

A Compliant Environment

Among the fascinating subtleties of the Ministry for Wog Control is the eternal question of where the border lies between the department's chronic incompetence and whatever happy commingling of Press-pleasing sadism and blithe indifference characterises any particular policy. In the case of the Windrush persecutions and the booting-out of the ghastly Euro-wogs, it seems clear that thuggery is the favoured option; in the case of the Home Office's ambitious strategy for dealing with modern slavery, it looks as if shruggery has prevailed. So ambitious was the Ministry's programme that nobody has bothered to implement the systems necessary to monitor its results, or managed to gather the data required to understand what kind of people are involved and where they come from. Of course, Her Majesty's Government has no real objections to modern slavery: the idea of forcing people to work for nothing, without being bothered by trade unions or heath and safety regulations, can hardly be unattractive to the modern Conservative Party. On the other hand, most associate it vaguely with dark-skinned migrant hordes, and many no doubt believe that human trafficking is the same thing as freedom of movement, and is thus obligatory under the monstrous EU constitution. Given that the first three years of effort led to prosecution in only six per cent of recorded cases, perhaps the lack of monitoring simply reflects a reluctance to get anyone into trouble.

What Friends Are For

Approximately the only policy from which Tumbledown Tessie has neither retreated nor deviated, either during her six years as a vicious, skittish and authoritarian Home Secretary or during her two years as a skittish, authoritarian and vicious prime minister, is of course the instinctive, doctrinaire and unrelenting racism. Now that this particular British value has become a bit of an embarrassment even to the Parliamentary wing of UKIP, it is only to be expected that all the professional racists, opportunistic racists, casual racists and just-a-bit-of-fun racists in the Conservative Party will feel obliged to distance themselves from the ideological racist at the head of the trough. Unto which, it appears that the first to embrace the new and enlightened régime annunciated by Javid of Grenfell under the thrilling rubric of "compliant environment" has been the jobsworth racist Amber Rudd. Somebody or other, at any rate, has rushed to a glistening little chum of hers who happens to have a toy newspaper, and has accused Tumbledown Tessie of endangering the public's health by blocking the admission of immigrant doctors. Happy as always to drop a spider down the scolding Headmistress's knickers, the London Evening Osborne has gone full-splurge, conjuring poignant memories of better days when the NHS was in the care of the bursary-slashing, doctor-bashing Bullingdon Club and its much-missed Secretary of State for Privatisation, Jeremy Rhymes-with-Hunt. Still and all, it is encouraging to find that even in the modern Conservative Party one can still use a transparently feigned concern about public health to stab a colleague deeply and sincerely in the back.