The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Friday, August 31, 2018

The Treasonous Majority

Despite the cleansing purge carried out by the Bullingdon Club and their little yellow fags, it seems Whitehall remains riddled with traitors, enemies of the people and citizens of nowhere. No doubt the explanation partly resides in the fact that civil servants belong to a trade union, which has treacherously carried out a ballot and quite deliberately delivered the wrong results. Less than five per cent of mere experts are displaying the proper degree of rah-rah with regard to our approaching independence from the Brusso-Strasbourgian Nazi juggernaut; while almost eighty per cent showed a degree of pessimism and unconstructive criticality which may well be incompatible with patriotism, true Britishness and the Official Secrets Act. The bureaucratic blob's chief pseudopod openly gloried in the disgrace, proclaiming that the members are "measured and moderate, evidence-based people" with, it was implied, an almost total lack of interest in their sacred, supra-political duty of helping to placate the parliamentary expenses-claiming wing of the Farage Falange.

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Detention Time Again

Given that it consistently treats Her Majesty's loyal serfs as wayward schoolchildren in perpetual need of a thrashing, Her Majesty's Government can be remarkably dilatory about handing in its homework. The Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has been debating whether to hold an inquiry into British connivance with kidnap and torture antics during the late War on the Abstract Noun, and has followed up the lamentable performance of Master David Davis and his cronies by missing its own deadline for the decision. Since those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, one possible explanation is that the Ministry has been recently efficientised by sacking half its staff and shredding some purely random files; nevertheless, a few mere experts are concerned that some of the fun and games may be actionable in the international criminal court. British officialdom has thus far been immunised from prosecution by the fact that the ICC has hitherto specialised largely in punishing Africans; but there seems little reason why the court should continue to exercise such a Home Office degree of restraint beyond next March, when Britain's economy officially crashes into the Third World.

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Degenerate Art

Remarkably enough, despite the virtual omnipresence across British television, radio, social media and our free and balanced Press of the Farage Falange's strutting ex-Caudillo, visitors to the Royal Academy's summer exhibition have unanimously declined the opportunity to have the great man's image smirking down at them from a wall in their very own home. Even at the modest price of the late Head Boy's garden shed, no buyer could be found for the modern icon, whom the court painter David Griffiths has depicted smiling with modest self-satisfaction, as after an invigorating crusade against the Turkish horde, and apparently in the process of trying to remember how to fold his arms properly. The background is a sullen British grey, which sets off the sullen grey-green of the strutting ex-Caudillo's shiny snakeskin suit and the washed-out purple and yellow of his patriotically pickled visage; while the pocket-flap of the suit appears to have no pocket beneath it, symbolising the strutting ex-Caudillo's preference for keeping his hand in other people's.

A portrait of the strutting ex-Caudillo's acolyte, Jacob Rees-Mogg, sold for one fifty-fifth of the Griffiths altarpiece's asking price. Given the double-breasted vacuum inside the suit, we may be grateful for the small mercy that the subject kept his clothes on; but it remains as yet unclear for whose attic the horror was destined.

Tuesday, August 28, 2018

Evolution of Morals

The Ape, at rest one cloudless night
From leading of his troop,
Observed the stars' untidy flight
In group on random group.

A most peculiar way, he said,
For them to roam and hunt:
Why are they not more neatly led
With stars like me in front?

Through life and picking of his fleas
Until the day he died,
It seemed the worst of liberties
And most undignified.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Monday, August 27, 2018

Going South

Given the Conservative Party's deportation fetish and its laissez-faire attitude to such trivialities as manufacturing, it should be obvious what Britain's major export product is going to be once we have freed ourselves from the inconvenience of belonging to the world's biggest free trade area. With Jamaica temporarily full up thanks to the Home Office's Windrush indiscretions, the self-appointed chief guardian of Britain's racial purity is apparently hoping to find new dumping grounds in our African colonies for Britain's unwanted brown people. Anticipated highlights of the trip include haranguing the leaders of Kenya and Nigeria on keeping their natives out of nice people's countries, and observing British troops amid, no doubt, some happy reminiscences about dishing out the old what-for to the Mau Mau gorillas, their females and their piccaninnies. The dead-eyed warden will also be visiting Mandela's former prison at Robben Island, where no doubt she will gather some useful tips for her boot-boys at G4S; and she also apparently intends to lecture the South African government on taking a measured, rule-based approach to land reform, which in light of her own government's combination of casual law-breaking and squealing hysteria may elicit one or two diplomatic watermelon smiles.

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Luke 17 vii-x

Jesus delivers a brief discourse against the idea that all human beings are of equal worth. Observing that no slave-owner will reward his property for following orders, He orders His disciples to obey God's commands without expecting His thanks, and to abase themselves as unworthy servants because they will only have done their duty.

The nature of the Father's love for His children emerges rather starkly in His dearly beloved Son's implication that slaves who do their duty are unworthy. With His famous dislike of hypocrisy, Jesus can hardly have wished His disciples to be insincere sycophants; hence He must actually have believed, or at least intended His disciples to believe, that doing one's duty to God is at best a neutral activity. Certainly it is not praiseworthy: the workman may be worthy of his meat, provided that he is spreading Jesus' doctrine and living on the hospitality of others (Matthew 10 x-xi); but as a servant of God he is worthy of nothing more.

Since the sole duty of humanity is to love God with all its heart, soul, strength and mind (Luke 10 xxvii), and since God has created human beings in such a way that they are incapable of fulfilling this duty and attaining the kingdom of Heaven without His help, it follows that for as long as the world endures there can be no such creature as a satisfactory slave for the Father: all human beings are unworthy by design. Doubtless the Father's eternal rage at this unfortunate state of affairs is a motivating factor behind both His much-proclaimed desire to destroy the bulk of His creation in fire and brimstone, and His penchant for treating even HIs most faithful retainers with the utmost contempt and disregard.

Jesus felt keenly the loneliness and resentment of the dedicated henchman whose master proves as tyrannical towards Him as towards others, as witness His occasional lapses into self-pity such as Matthew 8 xx. As a result, there is in this case a refreshing, peasant practicality to the Saviour's advice: when one's life in the hands of an all-powerful, arbitrarily murderous tyrant, it is of course only prudent to abandon all pride and sense of self-worth, to do as one is ordered, and to grovel.

Saturday, August 25, 2018

Not Quite the Right Sort

It appears that Arron Banks, the Farage Falange's famously frugal financial finagler, has applied to join the Conservative Party only to be blackballed, presumably on the grounds that there is no room for rich white male racists in the party of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Zac Goldsmith. Then again, the problem may have been that Banks lacked the intellectual distinction to be worthy of the party of Chris Graybeing, Nicholas Soames and Sayeeda Warsi; or perhaps he was found to be insufficiently capable and competent for the party of Theresa May, David Davis and Dominic Raab. Possibly it may have been thought that Banks lacked sufficient charisma to be useful to the party of John Major, Philip Hammond and Theresa May; or that he lacked sufficient debating skills to shine in a party already rampant with the membership of Philip Davies and Peter Bone; or that he was simply a bit shallow and silly for the party of David Cameron and Michael Gove. On the other hand, it may have been felt that Banks was not loyal enough for the party of Boris Johnson; or not honest enough for the party of Michael Gove and Boris Johnson; or not fiscally scrupulous enough for the party of Amber Rudd, Michael Ashcroft and Boris Johnson; or not discreet enough to keep from causing unnecessary embarrassment to the party of Liam Fox, Michael Fallon, Damian McBride and Boris Johnson; or not sebaceous enough for the party of George Osborne. Perhaps his sense of entitlement disturbed them, or some subtle hint of the foreign in his name. Perhaps they were simply disappointed to find that, despite his relaxed attitude to the welfare of others and the rule of law, Banks is not in fact a cartel of banks.

Friday, August 24, 2018

So Below

Encouraging scenes of imperial continuity are playing out among the descendants of some British convicts, as Australia undergoes yet another change of prime minister. In a near mirror-image of recent events here on the mainland, the ruling party has defenestrated its self-proclaimed social liberal leader, a former investment banker who lives in the antipodean equivalent of a twenty-thousand-pound garden shed. He supported equal marriage rights, but was also a dedicated appeaser of climate-change deniers who, like the back-bench baboons which proved the nemesis of Britain's late Head Boy, simply responded by demanding more. Like our purple-faced pigsticker's replacement, the new leader is a god-bothering migrant-basher whose strings are more or less openly yanked by our nations' common deity, Rupert Murdoch, and whose party is more and more openly divided into ever-warming hotbeds of mutual loathing and suspicion. Even the local Labor Party has got in on the act, efficiently amassing money for the next election campaign; while the government's largest donor happens to be the man whom the governing party has just humiliated. It just goes to show what a truly determined hard-right party can do when it puts its nose to the wheel and its arse to the grindstone; and this shining achievement was accomplished without aid from Brussels.

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Dimmest Hour

Yet another punishment beating from the Brusso-Strasbourgian axis has been spotted creeping around the Maginot Line towards the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. The victim this time is the great British halogen bulb, which has lighted our homes for more than sixty years, or nearly as long as Queen Victoria reigned, and which the ghastly Euro-wogs have now banned in favour of light-emitting diodes, which use less energy and will therefore do irreparable harm to the great British trades of sustainable uranium and shale-gas fracking. Naturally, the nation's doughy defenders in the Farage Falange have been eructating the customary Churchillian borborygmus of moral outrage: "Customers should have the freedom of choice in bulbs and it shouldn’t be imposed by the EU," mooed the Falange's spokesbeing for energy, Jonathan Bullock, who apparently favours letting the Heathen Chinee impose bulbs instead, since the ghastly Euro-wogs have, with fiendish foreign cunning, induced their fellow foreigners to ban traditional bulbs as well. Still, if the Falange's fantasy Brexit should actually materialise, with the country keeping calm and carrying on and Britain's stout yeomanry lighting their homes by burning granny-fat in the old bat's Tupperware bowls, that would almost certainly teach our oppressors a thing or two about something or other.

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Heads Up

Even as Tin-Pot Tessie's favourite Muslim-basher and his hydrophobic head-tribble are undergoing their little local difficulties, Her Majesty's Government's favourite Islamic terrorists continue to embody British values at their most uncompromising. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for five human rights activists, including a Shia couple whose exposure as tools of the mad mullahs of Iran can only be a matter of time. Their crimes include protesting, chanting, attempting to inflame public opinion, filming protests and publishing on social media: all heinous activities for which the likes of Tin-Pot Tessie would undoubtedly rejoice to see the decapitation strategy deployed here on the mainland. Having already made it clear that Britain has no objection to judicial termination as practised in the Christian Caliphate of Trumpsterstan, Her Majesty's Government has apparently seen no need to comment on what may be the head-chopping House of Saud's first execution of a woman for political activism. Like our own beloved régime, the head-chopping House of Saud has a long and courageous record of annoying such meddlesome bureaucrats as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the United Nations; so perhaps a brief diplomatic note of approval can be slipped into the next consignment of school bus rearrangement exports.

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Plucky British Battlers

Now that the Ministry for Wog Disposal is more or less banned from deporting British citizens, it is natural that the Conservative Party's own special, non-racist brand of British fair play should make itself felt on the hides of lesser breeds. Hence the case of a Nigerian woman with chronic kidney disease and dangerously high blood pressure, who applied for leave to remain in the country and continue paying taxes on her £38,000 earnings, only for the Home Office to invoke anti-terrorism law in an undignified scramble to kick her out. She was uppity enough to contest the ruling, despite the usual incentivisation of being denied the chance to work; and naturally the party of Twizzler Lansley and Jeremy Hunt did everything it could to protect the NHS from her depredations. Nevertheless, some enemies of the people have ordered that she be given access to essential services and permitted to sully the job market with her migratory presence, and have ruled that the Ministry for Wog Disposal has, for once in its life, acted incorrectly. Given their underdog status in the face of such brutal treachery, it seems there is now some question as to how much longer Britain's heroes at the Ministry can hold out.

Monday, August 20, 2018

Little Grey Cells

Atmospheric conditions in Conservative cranial interiors are, as we know, notoriously inimical to the rapid descent of pennies; but something called Rory at the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration has undergone a bit of a shift in his paradigms. After only eight years and yet another bang-up performance by those efficient G4S people, Rory has discovered that sacking thousands of people from an already overstretched workforce may on occasion lead to a deterioration in service quality, even when the said workforce has previously been ministered by the likes of Chris Graybeing and Michael Gove. Further proof of Rory's acumen is apparent in his chosen solution to the staffing problem (viz. bringing in more staff), which would almost certainly have been far too crude and obvious a tactic for his illustrious predecessors. I am sure Rory's intellectual leap deserves our most sincere and sustained rah-rah, although it is only fair to note that the regrettable situation at Her Majesty's Birmingham warehouse is at least partly the fault of drugs which have only been around for five years, and which therefore have not had sufficient time to obtrude themselves upon the snow-white ministerial consciousness.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 22 i-xiv

Jesus relates a parable comparing the kingdom of Heaven to a king who gives a wedding feast. Many of the invited guests are busy with worldly concerns, while others seize the king's servants, treat them with disrespect and murder them. The king retaliates by burning the murderers' city, and then sends his servants to bring in whoever they can find on the streets. One of the guests is found to lack a wedding garment, and when the king questions him he is speechless. The king orders him cast into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

This parable combines features from that of the tenants with that of the banquet and the image of the bridegroom, with an additional twist in the person of the man who has been arbitrarily plucked off the streets by the king's servants and ordered to attend a banquet, only for the king to kick him out again for not being appropriately dressed. Jesus notes that the man was speechless, and therefore unfortunately unable to remind the king that the body is more than raiment; the moral, which Jesus helpfully points out, is that many are called but few chosen. In other words, Jesus makes clear yet again that entry into the kingdom of Heaven is not in humanity's power but in God's alone.

The figure of the rejected guest, who has sinfully failed to keep himself in readiness by walking the streets in a wedding garment on the off-chance that the king's servants might descend upon him with an invitation, prefigures Jesus' later statement about the approaching massacre of the unworthy: "the one shall be taken and the other left" (Matthew 24 xxxvii-xlii). The kingdom of Heaven can be lost through disobedience or through lack of preparation; but no amount of preparation or obedience will gain it for those whom God has decided, presumably from the beginning of time, to shut out for ever because He dislikes the cut of their clothes.

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Brains on Walls

Some malign and ungodly agency has put up a poster in the middle of Belfast, which not only suggests that Protestant values may be something other than decent, tolerant and forward-looking, but also blatantly implies the presence of cerebral matter inside the skulls of certain slogan-spouting bigots. This insult to Democratic Unionist phrenology has enraged at least one councillor, who has reported it as a hate crime. The Democratic Unionists, of course, have shown their commitment to nuance and tolerance on any number of occasions; not least when they accepted a taxpayer-funded bribe to prop up a prime minister who regards her own policies as the Will of the People, her opponents as citizens of nowhere, and the Good Friday agreements as a minor inconvenience to be casually thrown aside in the interests of prosecuting a holy war against Brussels. Whether, as a principled gesture against hate speech, the DUP would now be prepared to forego the next round of bribes and the concomitant privilege of pulling Tumbledown Tessie's strings at Westminster, remains as yet unclear.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Upon This Rock

The Christian state of Arkansas, which has previously attracted your correspondent's attention with its forgiving of enemies and its charity towards the coathanger trade, is once again battling the deadly forces of eternal un-Americanism. A monument to the Ten Commandments, doubtless clearly distinguishable from any kind of graven image, has been raised on the grounds of the State Capitol building in Little Rock; to which the local Satanists have responded by putting up a bronze image of Baphomet. The senator from Arkansas recognised the Satanists' right under the First Amendment to practise their religion, but denied their right to be offensive on the grounds of the State Capitol. Self-evidently, the statue of Baphomet was considerably less innocuous than Yahweh's injunction to forsake all gods save Himself, His wholly uncontroversial recognition of slavery and His entirely inoffensive listing of wives among the property which a man may not covet.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Targeted Tracking for Sensible Attitudes

However much Britain's ghastly Euro-wog oppressors may try to hide behind their elected junta of proportionally-representing parliamentarians, one of the most important reasons for taking back control of British democracy is, of course, the building of an economy that works for everyone who matters without interference from the great unwashed. It has long been known, for instance, that the plebs have a deplorable lack of perspective when it comes to having their homes undermined and their tap-water spiked with methane; accordingly, the Department of Business, Energy and Decapitated Poultry Impersonation has removed the question of fracking from its public attitudes tracker, because polling began long, long ago when the department had a different name and a remit so ludicrously narrow as to incorporate climate change. Now that the green crap has been thoroughly dumped, and the frackers given the go-ahead despite the pestilential machinations of the Environment Agency, it seems officials are worried that feelings might be hurt if the snowflakes at Cuadrilla should find out what the provincials think of them. Her Majesty's Government has therefore decided that, on the question of shale fracking, the will of the people is something it can manage quite comfortably without, except for a quick annual check-up once the initial impact has been diluted in the perspective-inducing delights of Brexit.

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

5,000

Five thousand posts, inflicted here
Upon a stoic blogosphere,
Engorging this from years ago
By sixty-six per cent or so,
Have seen some change, and some the same,
While treating both to bile and blame.

My thanks to that exclusive crew
(Refined of taste, splendid though few),
Who drop in here to run their eyes
Along these brief scurrilities;
And, while in these unwonted ways
Of distributing grateful praise,
I also thank those bags of pus
(More famous and more numerous),
Those patriot politi-punks,
God-botherers and canting clunks,
Those forkers of the English tongue
With tons of Ho and piles of Gung,
Who'll never do one thing so well
As handing me matériel.

Thus onward to the thousand ten
(If anything's still here by then);
For I can only guarantee,
Upon this anniversary,
That future posts will try no less
In blaming and in biliousness.

Hallmark E. Greets

Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Agrippina

Empress, Exile, Hustler, Whore

Agrippina the Younger was a most remarkable woman, and not only because she managed to produce her own autobiography in a time and culture where a woman's place was either behind the scenes or else dead and moral. She was reviled by Tacitus, gossiped about by Suetonius and libellously caricatured by Dio Cassius, Robert Graves and the British Broadcasting Corporation. She was the daughter of a man who had a month named after him; she founded a city which remains a major European centre; she was the wife of an Emperor and the mother of his successor. Unfortunately for Agrippina, for the Empire and possibly for the Roman stage, the successor turned out to be Nero.

Since the history of Rome according to the Romans was produced exclusively by and for Roman senatorial males, the business of writing a life of Agrippina must have been rather like reconstructing a portrait from which some vandal has cut out the subject's face: there isn't much to go on except the shape of the hole. Even without the astounding details of her life and the sweary verve of Emma Southon's often hilarious account, the process of reconstruction is fascinating in itself, and Southon makes clear at every point what is deduction and what is informed speculation, and how each detail is sourced from what other people say about Agrippina or (more often) from what they don't.

Along the way, there is much information about the culture and customs of the Roman Empire in the first century CE; there are numerous illuminating analogies drawn from recent history, popular culture and the author's mum; there are assorted and well-deserved imprecations against the Romans for not having enough names between them; and various ancient and contemporary sources are favoured with various pungent sarcasms. The supporting characters in Agrippina's story are trenchantly and memorably sketched, and the spectacular, shunned heroine emerges in convincing detail.

Monday, August 13, 2018

Glorious Gove

Assuming one is genuinely serious about protecting the environment, of course, mere Euro-wog jiggery-pokery with solar panels and other green crap will hardly suffice. As is well known, because the wealth creators have said so, nothing protects the environment so effectively as starting the occasional fire on a peat-bog and fattening up grouse so they can fly slowly enough for the marksmanship of the inbred chinless and the aspiring tasteless. Such measures help immeasurably in preventing the landscape becoming lost (sic) to the pollutive filth of windfarms or, worse yet, trees. Accordingly, the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove has very courageously and forthrightly suggested that the mighty hunters might care to sign up to some voluntary commitments, if it wouldn't inconvenience them too much. Present at the audience was the Duke of Northumberland, whose donation of £11,100 to the Conservative Party doubtless incentivised the jabbering homunculus to ensure that all due rigour was imposed.

Sunday, August 12, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Mark 10 xvii-xxvii

A wealthy man approaches Jesus and asks what he should do to inherit eternal life; Jesus replies that he should keep the commandments of Moses. When the man responds that he has kept these commandments since his youth, Jesus tells him to sell everything he owns and give the proceeds to the poor, in return for treasure in heaven; and then to follow Him. The man departs in sorrow, and Jesus proclaims that the wealthy will find it extremely difficult to enter the kingdom of God. When the disciples ask who can be saved, Jesus replies that it is impossible for human beings, but that everything is possible for God.

Addressed by the young man as "good teacher", Jesus rejects the title and states that only God is good. He thereby admits His own moral imperfection as a preliminary to claiming that the only way to attain eternal life is to follow Him. The combination of false modesty with brazen arrogance is of course characteristic, as witness the many occasions on which Jesus demanded that His followers do the will of His Father in Heaven, without troubling to indicate how His Father's will might diverge from His own fallible and no doubt infinitely humbler predilections.

All things are possible with God, but not with humanity. This is because God created human beings in such a way that certain things are impossible for them. Indeed, God made it so difficult for certain human beings to avoid the fires of Hell that it would be easier to force a camel through a needle's eye than to herd certain people through St Peter's gates. The argument that humanity is free to choose God is therefore an irrelevance, since Jesus explicitly states that salvation is unattainable for human beings without the whimsical intervention of His Father.

Attaining the kingdom of Heaven is so difficult as to be humanly impossible according to the judgement of God's own Son, who presumably ought to know. Since all things are possible for God, it was undoubtedly possible for Him to have created a humanity more susceptible to redemption; but He did not choose to take that merciful course, preferring instead to consign the vast majority of His creation to eternal torment as a penalty for the imperfections with which He personally endowed it.

Saturday, August 11, 2018

More Wind, Less Rush

Since the stated aim of the Ministry for Wog Control is to resolve the cases of its victims in the Windrush persecutions within two weeks, it will come as no surprise that many are still waiting after a period of months. Nor will the Ministry's clever little plots to impose gagging orders and cap compensation payments be remotely shocking to anyone familiar with the Whitehall style of penitent contrition. What is remarkable is that the Ministry is, after at least eight years of highly purposeful race-baiting and migrant-bashing, still being subjected to accusations of unfitness for purpose. The victims of the Windrush persecutions arrived in the UK between the late forties and the early seventies, which means that they are no longer young; obviously the Ministry has determined that the most economically efficient way to resolve the matter is simply to keep on blustering until a merciful Nature can remove the sources of the problem to the great detention centre in the sky.

Friday, August 10, 2018

They Learned it From the Best

While Britain's great and good foregather to rah-rah the centenary of the Battle of Amiens, with which commenced the ultimate decisive triumph of British values and Muscular Christianity over the barbarism of the Hun, Britain's favourite Islamic fundamentalists have been so considerate as to add their own contribution to the general merriment. The British-armed and British-trained holy warriors of the head-chopping House of Saud have killed almost thirty children in an airstrike, at least some of whom might well have grown up to be terrorists or even migrants; so although the means were messy, the end may well be considered by the dispassionate observer to have been not altogether outside the bounds of civilised human collateral damage. This is certainly the view of Britain's owners in the Trumpster administration, who have urged the head-chopping House of Saud to investigate its own activities with the usual unsparing thoroughness. Similarly forthright is the view of Britain's leading liberal newspaper, whose headline has swaddled the unpleasant business in a flurry of cosy indirection.

Thursday, August 09, 2018

Keep Our Paper White

Although the Farage Falange's fellow-travellers in the Home Office are not yet required to take patriotic measures against bookshops, it appears that the glories of English literature are nevertheless safe in their hands. A dozen foreign authors, who were plotting to dilute Britain's literary heritage with their pidgin scrawls and terrorist screeds, have been kept from our shores through the zeal and efficiency of the Ministry for Wog Control. Tellingly, the director of the Edinburgh international book festival used the adjective Kafkaesque to describe the situation, invoking the name of a foreign author whose country was on the losing side in the Great War and who shared his dubious ethnic credentials with the Britain-hating Ralph Miliband. Clearly, the Ministry's crusade has a long way to go before our literary heritage can be truly cleansed, and Britons can return without fear to their long-forbidden re-readings of the witch-hunting King James's Bible and the toadying Jew-baiter Shakespeare's great works of history.

Wednesday, August 08, 2018

Tier One Moral Power

Some of Britain's favourite Islamic fundamentalists have rather selfishly become embroiled in a diplomatic dispute with Canada. Although the Canadians have been British enough to export nine hundred armoured vehicles to the liberators of Yemen, they have also expressed concern over the arrest of political activists. Since both countries are close partners of the UK, a spokesbeing has urged restraint on both sides, on the grounds that it would be jolly unfair as well as indiscreet for Britain to choose between a government which has expressed concern over human rights and a government which is run by the head-chopping House of Saud. On the bright side, it appears from this that the UK has some much-needed common ground with Russia, which has expressed its own dislike of people who regard human rights as a political issue.

Tuesday, August 07, 2018

Gove Gums It Up

Will they never learn? Mere legal experts are once more presuming to question the judgements of the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, this time over the dentition-deficient environmental watchdog which will replace the pitifully inadequate yet dictatorially dastardly régime of the ghastly Euro-wogs. The Bar Council has pointed out that the Recrudescent Imperium's new monitoring body, gloriously independent and wholly British as it might be, will have no powers to take the Government to court, as is subversively permitted under the Brusso-Strasbourgian axis of punishment beatings. Of course, Brexit is about nothing if not the avoidance of petty legalistic inconveniences like being sued over a few tens of thousands of excess deaths among the plebs; but the Bar Council mentality does not extend to such subtleties, and this despite ministers' pledges that new and British legislation will offer protection equivalent to EU law the moment independence is accomplished and the traitors are silenced once and for all.

Monday, August 06, 2018

British Bobbies Bossed by Brussels

As long as the Government is brightened by such intellectual firebuckets as Tumbledown Tessie, Michael Gove and the disgraced former Minister for Wog-Bombing, complacency would of course be foolish; but there seems a distinct possibility that the present talk of a no-deal Brexit is a bluff. When you wish to do something stupid, the best way is to propose something insane and allow yourself to be bargained down; although, since the whole ghastly process of Brexit is essentially a factional squabble in the Conservative Party, the boundaries between idiocy and lunacy are admittedly rather fluid. Still, talking up the consequences of a move to WTO rules is most likely intended to scare the more dim-witted and cowardly members of the House of Expenses Claimants (viz. the majority) into voting through whatever deal the EU foists upon us, rather than taking either the ridiculous option favoured by the jabbering homunculus and the vole-brained Werritty-warmer, or the substantially saner option of forgetting the whole thing, rescinding the Artlcle 50 declaration and committing mass seppuku to the chimes of Big Ben.

Crowd control is a matter for the police, so it should come as no surprise that Tumbledown Tessie's erstwhile enemies have mucked in with enthusiasm. A leaked letter to the Home Secretary warns of "significant risks to our local communities" and a "significant loss of operational capacity" given that the British police work according to more than thirty measures which depend on EU membership, and the remnants of the British courts depend on European databases for access to the history of those foreign criminals about whom certain people used to worry so legitimately, understandably and vociferously. The Brexiteers have already suggested their solution - sit back and blame the Euro-wogs - but for some reason the citizens of nowhere in the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners working group seem to think this may not be enough. Doubtless it won't be long before someone in the former party of law and order suggests using groups of patriotic volunteers to raise the standards of British justice to the necessary level.

Sunday, August 05, 2018

Bad Theology

Text for today: Luke 19 xi-xxvii

Jesus relates a parable about a nobleman who departs to take over a kingdom in a far country. Before he leaves, the nobleman gives ten of his servants a mina each (about three months' wages for a labourer) and orders them to engage in business until his return. The people of the nobleman's new kingdom send a delegation expressing their wish that he not rule over them, but the nobleman takes over the kingdom anyway. When he returns, he calls his servants and orders them to hand over the money they have made. Those who have turned a profit are given authority over cities, while one who simply returns the original sum is chastised. Then the nobleman orders that those who did not want him to rule over them should be brought and slaughtered in front of him.

The character of the nobleman is one of Jesus' more honest self-portraits: a ruthless, arbitrary, punitive potentate refreshingly free of the Saviour's usual sanctimonious self-pity. Having instructed his servants, the nobleman goes away to take over a kingdom whose people hate him. Unlike the unruly tenants in the parable of the vineyard, these people send a peaceful delegation with a message, but no more mercy is shown them than is granted to the murderous tenants. As the nobleman represents Jesus and his new kingdom represents the world, so the slaughter, as always, represents the one part that can safely be taken literally. To reject the teaching of Jesus is to invite death at the hands of His servants, while the Saviour sits back and watches the carnage.

Jesus delivers this parable on the way to Jerusalem, because His disciples believe that the kingdom of God is at hand. Although the Gospel does not specify their reasons, they may possibly have thought so because Jesus had spent His entire ministry telling them that the kingdom of God was at hand. But it is not for human beings to anticipate the divine will, even when that will has been explicitly stated: the parable counsels that God's servants should continue accumulating their spiritual wealth until their owner explicitly demands that they render up an account. A satisfactory ledger of obedience and zeal is rewarded with power and authority; the parable leaves more or less open the question of how much time the promoted servants will be expected to spend washing their new subjects' feet.

Saturday, August 04, 2018

Glimpses of Future Glory

As is surely uncontroversial by now, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is something of a world leader in British values. Racially homogenous, with enviable levels of child poverty and a strong and stable government which takes a robust line with non-patriots, North Korea is, perhaps most Britannically of all, still fighting a war in which the actual shooting stopped around the middle of the twentieth century. As a result of this close moral harmony, the present state of the Republic may offer a useful indication of future trends in the newly-independent Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. Both great powers are basking in unprecedented heatwaves, and both populations are being exhorted to muddle through on their own as a matter of patriotic duty. The main difference is that the Democratic People's Republic is in danger of famine because of its independent nuclear deterrent; while the Recrudescent Imperium will have to rely on WTO trading rules before its workers can attain a similar degree of tight-belted discipline.

Friday, August 03, 2018

Teen Resource Enhancement Through Societal Biggification

From the perspective of our present era of vigorous witch-hunting and exuberant wog-bashing, it may occasionally be difficult to recall the more emollient slogans that once were pushed by the sniggering louts of the Bullingdon Club and their little yellow fags. Prominent among these burbled nothings was the Big Society thingy, a much-relaunched attempt at promoting social responsibility among the great unwashed, about which the Head Boy would have a bit of a simper whenever the opportunity occurred. Remarkably, despite its entire and characteristic vacuity the remnants of that glorious legacy are still in evidence today, as millions are spent putting selected teenagers through a short, sharp shock of rah-and-blah while millions have been cut from those outmoded quangos which had drifted into the quaint yet dangerous habit of doing effective work. Hence, ninety-five per cent of the Government's youth services budget has been spent on the National Citizen Service, resulting in a massive twelve per cent take-up among eligible ephebic resources. Doubtless the rest prefer a life on benefits, or have unmarried parents or something of the sort; after all, if the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove can out-expert the experts after writing a few squibs for Rupert Murdoch, there seems no good reason why it should take more than a week or two to socialise the better breed of pleb-whelp.

Thursday, August 02, 2018

Those With Nothing to Hide

Having very frankly and courageously sneaked out, on the last day of Parliament, its permission for Cuadrilla to frack the great prole wastes of Lancashire, the Government has very courageously and frankly sneaked out a report which says that the process could make the country's air quality even more illegal than it already is. Some of the report's conclusions were based on American data, which made some difference because British wells are likely to be fewer and deeper; and by a charming coincidence it has taken until four days after Cuadrilla got the go-ahead to sort everything out, much as happened in the case of a 2014 report which ministers delayed, at great cost to their conscience no doubt, so that house prices would retain their blimpish buoyancy until a more opportune time. Published on 27 July, the report on air quality was compiled three years ago by the Government's own Air Quality Expert Group, but was delayed because of the unfortunate intrusion into the group of some experts on air quality, who seem to have behaved in the customary expert fashion and tarnished the entrepreneurial glossiness of the document with their pessimistic, citizen-of-nowhere doom-mongering.

Wednesday, August 01, 2018

In Safer Hands

Now that the police are finishing up their examination of the crime scene at Grenfell Tower, the Government has been demonstrating, in its accustomed eloquent fashion, exactly how much it cares about what the survivors might think. Residents had been given to believe that an independent organisation would be set up to take responsibility for the site when the police were done with it; in fact the Government, as one would expect, planned to hand it back to the local authority. If the Conservatives have learned only a single lesson from the fire, that lesson is inevitably that no-one is better qualified than the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to make a healthy profit from the ashes. However, it seems that the idea caused a certain restlessness among the natives, so despite the council's entrepreneurial gumption in the period leading up to the disaster, the Government has now decided to set up an independent organisation after all; doubtless in the compassionate expectation that members with an excess of independence can eventually be manipulated, vilified or deported as convenient.

Me at Poetry24:
Sunset, Sunrise