Special Relationship

Whatever else may happen in the next few years, one certainty is that we have finally run out of First World War centenaries. Fortunately, beginning next September there are six years of eightieth anniversaries waiting for us; but the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble are apparently in a bit of a rush. Our American cousins, without whom Mr Churchill's personal victory over the forces of foreign racism and unauthorised authoritarianism would scarcely have been half so spectacular, are still owed the state visit with which Tumbledown Tessie pledged Global Britain's continuing vassalage after the Trumpster's famously crowd-free coronation. A visit did subsequently take place, but neither the Trumpster nor his head-tribble got to meet the Queen or accept an honorary doctorate or any of the usual honours which Her Majesty's Government habitually accords to despots, thieves, braggarts, swindlers and sex offenders. However, the possibility of a full-on pageant is receiving renewed consideration thanks to the increasingly urgent need for the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands to facilitate and dynamicise trade in chlorinated chicken and other exotic delicacies, and the Trumpster's ambassador has suggested that the inevitable VE-Day rah-rah in May might be an opportune time. Presumably it is hoped that the profusion of Spitfires in the sky will be sufficient to keep at bay any subversive orange Zeppelins of the manbaby class.

Gavin Gets One Off

Military adventurism is of course a Conservative favourite to rank with racism and sacking people, and the pubescent Minister for Wog-Bombing has accordingly responded to the present moment of national crisis by waving his willy in the Sabbath Barclaygraph. He noted that discussions about the EU have like actually coloured "much of our national viewpoint" for like literally decades; clearly the Conservative Party's demented thirty-year obsession with the issue has been purely the result of its intimate in-touchness with the petty and paranoid Britannic soul. Fortunately, we need no longer concern ourselves with mere allies and trading partners, and our liberation will allow us to concentrate on our manifest destiny and like actually create a deterrent and provide moral guidance for Australia, Canada, New Zealand and much of Africa and actually take a British presence to re-conquer Singapore and take the Caribbean back from Mandela's beastly Mau Mau or whoever. Little Gavin also proclaimed that, while the rest of the world thinks Britain is ten feet tall when actually Britain is six feet tall, Britain actually sees Britain as five feet tall and not six feet tall and certainly not ten feet tall at all. Little Gavin thinks this is wrong. Britain has been much too pessimistic about our future as we exit the European Union, and little Gavin actually has 3500 troops on hand to ensure that we all keep smiling.

Subtle

With characteristic piledriver political cunning, the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK has bestowed a Ruritanian rah-rah upon the doll-eyed woodentop John Redwood, one of many pathologically undistinguished figures whom the poisonous borborygmus of Brexit has eructated into noisy if undeserved national prominence.

Prior to present upheavals, the height of Redwood's career was his appointment as secretary for Wales under the equally forceful and charismatic John Major; his most noted achievement in that office was to rub in Westminster's customary contempt for the occupied territory by failing to learn the national anthem well enough to mouth the words at a party conference. A little later, he ran for the leadership of his party and had the privilege of being voted even less considerable than Major himself. Readers of a certain vintage may also recall Redwood's Elysian vision, expressed around the time Thatcher and her footpads were starting to plunder the country's utilities in earnest, of a People's Capitalism whereby every bathtub in Britain would have a dozen taps, each one connected to a different private water company whose unit price would be conveniently displayed with technology.

Like many on his side of the House, Redwood regards representation of the people as essentially a networking opportunity for his proper job; and as chief global strategist for an investment management company, he has very thriftily advised clients to steer well clear of Global Britain. Redwood's persona combines the chlorinated-chocolate monotone of a pantomime child molester and a pair of muddy soul-windows with all the expressive animation of month-old rabbit droppings; and for those reasons if for no other, the Prime Minister's admiration may well be sincere.

Uncle Tom Javid's Seasonal Packages

In accordance with the moral principles long and firmly held by the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK and her mean little god, the Ministry for Wog Control celebrated her Saviour's birth by trying to deport a couple of brown people. One was a Congolese torture victim who was detained in a dawn raid a week before Christmas; the other was a slave trafficking victim who was "found to be working illegally" and whom even the Ministry minions accepted was a suicide risk. Although her account of her experiences was consistent with her physical scars, the consistency of her story fell short of the standard righteously expected by the kind of people who invoke the law while illegally deporting British citizens. The Ministry finds the festive period a particularly spiritual time for forced removals because the swarming hordes find it harder to gain access to legal advice; unfortunately for the safety of the nation, it appears that certain legalistic enemies of the people are failing to follow the example of the compliant Sajid Javid and his fellow honourable members, who have responded to the current national crisis by toddling off on holiday.

Loose Wiring

Well, here's a thing: Her Majesty's Government has failed to lead consumer uptake of electric cars despite Chris Graybeing having promised the contrary. The brilliant Graybeing, whose luminous achievements at the Ministry for Motorists and Fossil Fuels consist largely of applying laissez-faire principles to national railway timetables and clobbering cyclists with car doors, boasted about switching to electric cars during a recent blather about mitigating the legacy of his colleague, the former London Haystack. Apparently the levels of air pollution bequeathed by the Haystack, and their possible harmful effect upon the proles' capacity for gross domestic product, made some sort of vague impression upon the Graybeing nanocortex for a moment or two some months ago. Fortunately, the cranial capacity of this not-terribly-brightest of the Not Terribly Bright Party has since reasserted itself, and Graybeing duly carried out his master plan for electrifying the roads after the accustomed manner of Graybeing master plans, by removing incentives for people to buy electric cars. A spokesbeing was extruded to proclaim the virtues of saving taxpayers' money with which to incentivise the railway companies, who are doing so much to prove that the racist, authoritarian, nationalist and irrational Conservative Party is not actually Fascist by keeping the trains from running on time.

Family Time

Contrary to the trendy rationalism espoused by mere experts, there are of course a number of perfectly valid reasons why people become breeders, and why their lords and masters tend to urge them on. The first and most popular reason is that a supernatural entity ordered it a long time ago. Another, doubtless unrelated to the first thanks to the loftier perspective typical of priestly classes, is racism: if there are fewer of Us, there will be more of Them. A third, popular among leaders, is the principle of divide and rule: the more people, the more poverty, the fewer resources, the less education, the more people. The virtues of this circle have always been apparent to the kind of tribal saviour currently known as the "rightwing populist", whose characteristic enthusiasm for breeders and babies is often neatly counterbalanced by a tendency to get people killed in satisfyingly large quantities. Finally, the urge to breed in times of danger is well known, and since the present global extinction event cannot help but affect human populations eventually, it is only natural that parents should be anxious to give their own genetic inheritance the best possible chance of surviving this century's increasingly likely cull. That in doing so they should hasten and exacerbate the cull, for which their grandchildren will presumably blame and exterminate the grandchildren of The Others, is of course only human, and of course ever so sweet.

Path Logical

Since the dead-eyed warden of HM Prison UK is pledged to "leave the environment in a better state than we found it", her government's plans to pave over several dozen lots of woodland and wildlife will come as no surprise. Given the wealth of talent in the Cabinet, it is possible that the transport minister, Chris Graybeing, managed to force the policy through by sheer strength of intellect and personality; although the moral requirements of the motor industry have always held a prominent and precious degree of authority in present religious orthodoxy. Current government planning, if planning is the euphemism I want, of course allows for some large and orderly queues of vehicles in the region of Dover, which was recently discovered to be quite an important link between the mainland and the Continent. Presumably it was felt that if the amount of road in the country could be increased relative to the number of lorries, the pressure might be eased a bit next spring.

Tough Love

Since his god has recently seen fit to kill three hundred men, women and children, and to injure and make homeless thousands more, our thoughts and prayers must of course be with the fisher of men who has used his Christmas message to attack the evils of secularism. The Church in Australia faces persecution even unto being denied permission to hire and fire employees on the whims of a megalomaniacal Bronze Age djinn, and an inquisitorial tribunal on priestly indiscretions has even recommended breaking the seal of confession to help prevent, of all things, the suffering of little children. It is no doubt a great tragedy when an archbishop must yet again overrule the Saviour's commandment at Matthew 5 xi-xii; but clearly the need for love and service, liberally understood and discreetly supplied, must take precedence over such merely spiritual matters.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 1 xviii-xxv; Luke 1 xi-xxxv

An angel visits Mary and Joseph, and Mary's kinswoman Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah. The angel foretells the births of Jesus and John the Baptist, specifies the names they are to be given and predicts that John will abstain from drink. Mary and Zechariah both question the angel's predictions, and Zechariah is punished by being struck dumb for the duration of his wife's pregnancy.

The name of John the Baptist, as ordered by the angel, means graced by God or God has been gracious; the name of Jesus is a Greek corruption of Joshua, which connotes salvation or deliverance by God. Both names reflect the Father's characteristic sense of humour. Having been ordered to name his son after God's grace, John's priestly father is ungraciously deprived of speech for daring to doubt the word of his employer; while Mary, in an equally ungracious display of arbitrary favouritism, escapes a similar punishment despite voicing similar doubts. Presumably, what annoyed the Father's messenger is that Zechariah's scepticism is based on demonstrable fact (he and his wife are both elderly), while Mary takes the opportunity to turn her question into a boast about her own chastity.

The name of Jesus, of course, has its most glorious precedent in Moses' successor, the génocidaire of Canaan. While Moses let God do his killing in Egypt and at the Red Sea, Joshua and his soldiers themselves put entire cities to fire and sword at the Father's command. It is appropriate, therefore, that the name of Moses' military heir should be bestowed upon the Saviour who found the laws of Moses insufficiently harsh, and whose gospel proclaimed that a genocide even more sadistic than Joshua's would soon befall the whole world.

Buck Up, Plebs

Having spent only four decades breaking up communities, casualising the workplace and demonising the different, Her Majesty's Government has appointed someone called Mims to nag a few people into mucking in a bit more. The minister for loneliness, a private landlord whose past record of human sympathy includes voting against a bill that would have compelled private landlords to keep their properties fit for human habitation, has been thrown a bit of loose change with which to fund furniture restoration projects and organised rambles. Such laudable concern for the lonely is of course natural for an administration predominantly staffed by sagging middle-aged adolescents, self-pitying tax dodgers and stupid old women; it is doubtless due to pure if benign coincidence that a recent study associates loneliness with a cash cost to private-sector employers.

Ignorance is the Best Medicine

In mediaeval Europe, which arguably was the last phase of our civilisation to attain pinnacles of cultural hysteria comparable to those we are now achieving, personal hygiene was considered at best a snobbish affectation and at worst a blasphemy against God's lice. Then, when an epidemic struck, the church could burn a few humanists while the children of God went forth and lynched the local Jews, all without besmirching their lily-white Christian conscience. A similar logic is now at work over vaccination, which is subject to "scepticism" from those swamp-dredging idealists who seek to free us from the yoke of oppressive learning and the suffocating bonds of mere factuality. Touting the right of parents to leave their children vulnerable to avoidable diseases, the freedom-fighters have already succeeded in driving up the incidence of measles; although it remains unclear how many right-wing populists have abstained from having their own offspring immunised. Meanwhile the children of Europe continue to die of their parents' credulity; and if we run out of immigrants by the time the next pandemic gets started, no doubt there will still be experts around to take the blame.

Rubbed Out

Although the Ministry for Wog Control does everything it can to prevent the swarming hordes from harming Britain's national interest, there are always a few troublemakers who manage to slip through the net. Some are even so vile and vindictive as to inflict harm and death on themselves for the sake of making Britain look bad, and this can lead to all sorts of nasty bureaucratic complications which the newly-compliant Ministry has done its very best to negotiate. However, an enemy of the people with a funny foreign name has been making a bit of a fuss over a Polish detainee who had lived and worked in the UK for twelve years, and who self-deteriorated maximally when informed that this would not be enough to expiate the kind of short prison sentence which a native tax-dodger would have no difficulty in avoiding. Anxious to spare the nation undue grief and inconvenience, the minions at the Ministry redacted from the records some of the more tactless details of the inconsiderate act, only to be subjected to the usual chorus of traitorous ingratitude. Evidently the Government's policy of reducing suicide by deleting its victims has some way to go before finding general acceptance.

Decline and Fall

"This queue-jumping chaff," said Ms May,
"Cannot be permitted to stay.
Just winnow it down
And weed out the brown,
And make sure the others can pay."

But many a well-filled grey suit
Stood up for its lucre and loot,
Demanding, "Where then
Will come the cheap men
To clean out our drains and pick fruit?"

With the empire grown ever more nude,
Its ministers sag, flop and feud:
Churchill's heirs cannot see
Any way to agree
On how many wogs to exclude.

Rev. Hubert Cherwell

Politically Homeless

Those spending the winter without a roof over their heads will be relieved and gratified to learn that the housing secretary has blandly disclaimed all responsibility for their plight. "Rough sleeping," proclaimed James Brokenshire, "does not represent the values and the country that I strongly believe in." Meanwhile, in the country which the rest of us are forced to inhabit, James Brokenshire's party has been in power for eight years; and in each of those years, doubtless through some EU-fostered bureaucratic oversight, homelessness has somehow managed to increase. Naturally, the Government's eight-year assault on wages and welfare has nothing whatever to do with it; let alone the Government's total lack of interest in either building homes or regulating landlords. Instead, the blame rests conveniently upon the usual Conservative scapegoats: drug addicts, post-Victorian family values and, of course, immigrants; although Brokenshire does seem to have exercised sufficient restraint to avoid blaming market distortions caused by the still-unhoused leftovers from Grenfell Tower. Regrettably, despite the noble values of the country in which he strongly believes, Brokenshire does not appear to have provided any very precise estimate of when he expects the rest of the Government to aspire to his level of idealism.

Business Just Isn't British Enough

Traitors, Trotskyites and enemies of the people in the notoriously Marxist hospitality industry have criticised the compliant Sajid Javid's Christmas greetings to the parliamentary wing of the Farage Falange. Taking on the fuck-business mantle of the People's Haystack and the strutting ex-Caudillo himself, Javid has been goose-stepping around the place with promises to cut Euro-wog infiltration of the British workplace by eighty per cent and to let in only those who earn £30,000 or more. Although the resulting lack of medical personnel, students, builders and plumbers will warm Conservative cockles and allow Tumbledown Tessie to be defenestrated in the knowledge that she has left an enduring legacy, there remains some doubt as to whether it would be enough to earn Javid forgiveness for not knowing his place. Such Britishness-laden scruples are far from the conscience of the notoriously cosmopolitan hospitality industry, which persists in concerning itself with such transparent excuses for queue-jumping as recruitment, training and talent pools.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 10 xvi-xxiii

Having selected twelve apostles to spread His message, Jesus instructs them to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. He warns that they will be prosecuted and punished, but enjoins them not to worry about what to say because they will not be speaking: the spirit of their Father will speak through them. When faced with danger, He instructs them to flee their persecutors and go on to the next town, and He assures them that they will not have reached every town in Israel before the coming of the Son of Man.

The question inevitably arises why Jesus selected men of this quality as His apostles. He wishes them to be as wise as serpents, yet they cannot understand the simplest parables by which He expounds the doctrine He expects them to spread. Small wonder that neither He nor His Father can trust the apostles to speak for themselves, and that soon after the Saviour's ascension He essentially abandoned them in favour of a rabid little Tarsus tentmaker. Brute economics would dictate that as long as God must preach His own gospel an empty vessel makes the best megaphone; but undoubtedly Jesus had an ulterior purpose too. Thanks to His double tactic of flattering the disciples' wisdom and power while taking every opportunity to show up their stupidity and faithlessness, Jesus appeals to the arrogance of posterity. He flatters the intelligence of future disciples who believe they can follow His words: comparing themselves to the dull-witted and uncomprehending apostles, such people will feel superior to His original chosen and hence a fortiori among the elect.

Jesus predicts that His coming will occur before everyone in Israel has heard His teachings. Presumably their zeal for righteousness blinds the apostles to the implications of this statement in light of the fate which the Saviour and His Father have in store for anyone who fails to hear the gospel: far from yearning to save the world, it seems Jesus does not even care to save all the towns in Israel. Fortunately for His reputation, the statement is clearly a deliberate lie: most authorities agree that the Second Coming did not in fact occur before the apostles had reached every town in Israel, and Jesus as the Son of God must have known that it would not. Jesus merely intended to keep the apostles in good spirits by assuring them of their power to consign an entire community to eternal fire simply by keeping away from it for long enough.

Turn the Other One

Some well-fed gentlemen with reasonable pension plans are asking their invisible friend to make the rest of us a bit more civil to each other. Presumably stirred to compassion by the recent characterisation of a prominent congregant as nebulous, the bishops of the Church of England have urged that the country "bring grace and generosity back into our national life" as it was in the good old days. The bishops proclaim, in the teeth of the Gospels and two thousand years of church history, that the heart of the Christian message is Jesus' command to love our neighbour, including those with whom we disagree. They urge that the homeless show magnanimity to their evictors, that the citizen of nowhere be more respectful of the nationalist, and that the truth-teller reconcile with the Rees-Mogg. There are fine people on all sides, and an urgent need for the United Kingdom to recover a shared vision and identity, and a great many church roofs needing repair.

Polite Insistence on Truth

Any freedom fighter who achieves canonisation by the greatest oppressor of their time should arguably be treated with caution, and the University of Ghana has accordingly taken down a statue of the revered mediaeval preacher Mohandas K Gandhi. Unveiled two years ago, the graven image has caused some controversy because of the views expressed by its subject during the South African phase of his career: Gandhi's problem with the British régime was not that non-whites were being mistreated, but that Indians were being treated like blacks. This may not put Gandhi in quite the same league of African heroism as Cecil Rhodes, but the students and faculty at the University of Ghana have expressed discontent, and the management has applied a healthy dose of post-colonial discretion by sneaking out to the plinth and removing the statue in the middle of the night.

Help Wanted for Reasonable Scenario

About ten thousand people have been hired and a thousand million pounds spent in a concerted push by Her Majesty's Government to frighten MPs into voting for Tumbledown Tessie's ludicrous deal, according to the First Flunkey at the Cabinet Office. After a mere two years of squealing from the private sector, the Government has achieved some sort of vague awareness that stability might be a bit of a thing; so the Department for Flooding and Fracking has set up a call centre just in case of emergencies, and is advertising for civil servants to work shifts assuring people that nothing has changed and our precious Union is safe and it's just going to be the easiest thing in the world ever from now on, or anyway as soon as the last saboteur has been extirpated and the last citizen of nowhere run into the Irish Sea. Since the ministry in question is nominally run by the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, staff will be expected to "see through the fog" which will inevitably be created by mere experts trying to do down Britain's success, and to focus on the more rah-rah aspects such as the miraculously-expanded Marmite trade with Tasmania. There are also vacancies for liaison staff who will be required to "react quickly to obtain the facts and delegate the immediate and next-day agenda" by correctly interpreting the shrieks, roars and grunts which will inevitably start to emanate from the Government's bunker at the Civil Contingencies Secretariat. Fifty new staff are being recruited for the Secretariat, on the sensible grounds that the Cabinet Office now considers Tumbledown Tessie's administration to be much the same category of event as a terrorist attack, a flood or an epidemic.

Two Eligible Gentlemen

Political necessity is the mother of reinstatement, so it should come as no surprise that when Tumbledown Tessie promised to fight the confidence vote with everything she had, this by no means excluded throwing a couple of suspected sex pests into the fray. Two honourable members who had been deprived of the Conservative whip while under investigation for bullying and sexually inappropriate conduct have been welcomed back into the fleshy, fragrant fold, just in time to take part in the ballot. Doubtless by benign coincidence, at least one of them has expressed the intention of supporting the Prime Minister. Whatever the result may be, we can at least be reassured that even the Conservative Party occasionally sees some point in the now largely treasonous and un-British idea of the presumption of innocence.

New Broom Has Limp Bristles

Last week the compliant Sajid Javid dispatched his hapless henchbeing Caroline Nokes, who has apparently just about cobbled her face back together after Yvette Cooper walked across it in her Windrush-cleated boots, to announce a sweeping crackdown on financial crime. Coming from the Conservative Party, of course, this sounds about as convincing as a sweeping crackdown on poverty, climate change, slum landlords, arms sales to aggressor states, contempt of Parliament, sexual harassment or racism; and inevitably, so it has proved. Five days ago the Ministry for Wog Control issued five hundred words proclaiming that it would suspend its programme of selling visas to wealthy foreigners; today, after being prompted like a sullen brat in the forced-confession stage of a well-deserved trip to Whacksville, the Ministry for Wog Control issued thirty words to the effect that, of course, the proclamation has not been implemented. Doubtless, with a sudden defenestration from the Conservative Party's battiest belfry looming ever further into the realms of possibility, the compliant Sajid Javid has taken advantage of his department's characteristic efficiency to sneak in a bit of foreign policy on the side.

Not Our Way of Doing Things

A notoriously corrupt and inefficient country with a decrepit judiciary and a loathed political class is lagging considerably behind Peru in its search for strength and stability. A referendum in Peru has asked whether the system for appointing judges and prosecutors should be changed; under our own enlightened system access to justice is being closed off to the many, while the few blithely ignore the law on the grounds that it contains too many experts. Public disapproval of politicians in Peru has led to a referendum question on the structure of the legislature; public disapproval of our own enlightened system has manifested itself in a referendum the dubious result of which has been hijacked to entrench corruption even further. Four former Peruvian presidents are under investigation for corruption, but there is no realistic possibility of justice overtaking the various torturers, war criminals and thieves of public assets who have ruled our own aspiring Third World nation for the past twenty years. It is doubtless to the Peruvians' lasting chagrin that they lack the exalted patriotic perspective of a nation such as our own.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 9 xxxv-xxxviii

Wandering among the cities and villages, Jesus sees the crowds and feels compassion because they are helpless. He compares them to a harvest with too few labourers to gather it, and instructs His disciples to pray earnestly for more labourers.

Assuming that the human and fallible evangelist's assessment of the Son of God's state of mind is correct, Jesus has compassion for the crowds because they are like sheep without a shepherd; in other words, because they have no master to shear their coats and prepare them for slaughter. As always, the Saviour's concern for His fellow man is a matter of ownership: as the Son and heir of the Father, Jesus does not want His presumed inheritance damaged or diminished. Anyone refusing to submit to this master-and-sheep relationship is destined for the usual compassionate helpings of eternal fire, outer darkness, wailing and gnashing of teeth.

As in the famous parable of the wheat and the tares, Jesus likens humanity to a harvest; and here He extends the metaphor to instruct His disciples to pray for a larger supply of priests. Superficially this order is puzzling: since the Father knows everything, He must know who will be saved and who damned. Therefore the destiny of every human soul has been fixed from the beginning of time, as has the deafening silence which, whether the petitioner hears it or not, is the answer to every prayer.

Since the fate of every human soul is foreordained, no amount of praying for an extra bushel of evangelists can make the slightest difference; but of course the Saviour's meaning is more sophisticated than a mere requirement to petition the Father. When dealing with an all-powerful and murderous tyrant, the most prudent policy is always to beg the tyrant to do what he intended to do in the first place; which of course is also the purpose of the Son's last desperate gambit in Gethsemane: "not my will but yours".

Bedrock Britishness

In the terror-blighted Middle East, there are certain violent factions who go around blowing up ancient historical monuments; which, along with incentivising thousands to commit the sin of migrancy, just goes to show what bad people they are. In the civilised West, of course, we do things rather differently: engineers for Highways England have apparently managed to vandalise a structure dating back six thousand years thanks to sheer Britishness. While constructing a tunnel near Stonehenge, Highways England had agreed to monitor the water table, which evidently distracted their gaze from such minor details as excavated artificial platforms imprinted by the hoofs of giant prehistoric cows. Archaeologists are livid, but a spokesbeing has been extruded to proclaim that Highways England doesn't understand what the fuss is about. After all, a few flints and animal bones don't exactly amount to a statue of Winston Churchill, or even Cecil Rhodes; and archaeologists have been known to claim that Britain's earliest inhabitants may themselves have sneaked in as migrants, so their artifacts would necessarily be less than authentic.

An Amicable Parting

To Dacre in his bunker came Lord Haw-Haw Rothermere:
"Here's two point six eight million; go spend it in good cheer."
Said Dacre to Lord Rothermere: "Now that's a bit of luck.
About time too, you penny-pinching fucking cunting fuck."
Said Rothermere to Dacre: "You're polite beyond your league,
So just clear out your desk and make it nice for Geordie Grieg."
Said Dacre to Lord Rothermere: "You're giving me the punt?
You cunting fucking cunting fucking cunting fucking cunt."

D A Crapule

Low Blow from High Court

Once again the enemies of the people have refused to put Britain first, preferring to consider the interests of a swarming asylum seeker above the sacred vocation of the Ministry for Wog Disposal. A child at the time of deportation, the menace to Britishness in question is an Afghan who seems suspiciously reluctant to go back home to the horde, despite the ever more accomplished state of our civilising mission there. The High Court has ruled that the Home Office acted illegally in separating him from his family and kicking him out without the pettifogging legalism of five working days' holiday at the taxpayers' expense. With typical foreign cunning, the environmental hostility recipient and his family had provided the Ministry's boot-boys with proof that he was under eighteen, so naturally the Ministry's boot-boys sought a second opinion which was more to their taste. In spite of such precautions the Home Office accepted that the rules had been broken, but demanded to be let off as they would have found other grounds to deport the boy in any case. Rather brilliantly, the Ministry also argued that having already been deported the boy was outside the High Court's jurisdiction and that therefore the court could not order him to be returned. Owing to that inflexible disregard for plucky little amateurs which so taints the attitude of many a mere expert, the judge disagreed.

Basking Comfortably in the Business Climate

Given that the disastrous consequences of climate change became apparent some twenty years ago, and that we have spent those twenty years being ruled by various factions of the British Neoliberal Party, it should come as no surprise that our precious United Kingdom remains at the very forefront of the nothing and worse-than-nothing that is being done. In a year when global carbon emissions broke new records, ninety per cent of Britain's business community has no interest in reduction targets and seventy per cent of executives for sustainable corporativity are quite satisfied with their CEO's opinion that sufficient dynamism is being applied and that no staff changes in the department of corporate sustainability will be necessary for a little while yet. A few companies have carried out "consultations", some of which, it is to be hoped, adequately served the usual purpose of such exercises by drawing out potential troublemakers and making them ripe for the next round of human resource efficiency savings. In a pleasingly postmodern twist, the second most popular idea in response to the invitation to provide ideas was that companies should invite staff to provide ideas. It is, of course, precisely this barnstorming spirit of buccaneering entrepreneurialism that has brought our great nation to the enviable position we occupy today.

Dusting Up

Since there is no prospect of any effective measures being taken to prevent further climate change, a Harvard research team is taking the sensible step of experimenting with one possible method of mitigating the likely effects. The scientists will suspend a balloon twelve miles above the ground and use it to spray particles into the atmosphere, hoping thereby to reproduce the effect of a volcanic eruption: the débris from Mount Pinatubo in 1991 blocked out enough sunlight to cool the planet by half a degree for eighteen months. If the experiment works, the scientists have only to present the results in terms that will catch the political imagination: think of the potential for attitudinal readjustment in Washington should it happen that climate change can be halted with exactly the tonnage of atmospheric fallout that would result from the nuclear obliteration of Pyongyang, Tehran and Beijing.

Breaking Point

Since the membership of the United Kingdom Independence Party is not generally given to hysteria except when the non-natives are restless, we must take with all due solemnity the disturbing allegation that this most salubrious of political movements is under threat of turning into a mere racist joke party under the leadership of a notorious racist. Of course, the poor things have never really been the same since losing their shrewder representatives to the racist joke party which that great reconciler Theresa May is now attempting to hold together by sheer force of personality. Still, even among the gammon at its most thoroughly broiled one would have thought that the glory years under the strutting racist Caudillo and the cheap comedy sequel starring the racist Paul Nuttall, followed by a bit of in-fighting under the racist Henry Bolton and the present doldrums under the racist Gerard Batten, might have made for a bit of a hint at the slightest whiff of a subtly discernible trend. But it was not to be; and now, alas, things look as if they might finally turn nasty.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 6 ix-xiii; Luke 11 i-iv

According to Matthew's gospel, Jesus told His disciples the Lord's Prayer as part of the Sermon on the Mount; according to Luke's gospel He gave them a slightly different version when one of them asked Him after His own prayers. Common to both versions are the hallowing of the Father's name; the wish for the coming of the Kingdom with its attendant massacre and torment; the request for bread; the request for forgiveness; the claim to have forgiven others; and the request not to be led into temptation.

Matthew's version begins with a possessive: Our Father, not simply Father, and certainly not Father of all. This emphasises what Luke's simple address to the Father merely implies; namely the brotherly bond of shared subordination to paternal authority, and the exclusion of anyone who does not have blood and body in common. The hallowing of the paterfamiliar name serves a similar purpose by expressing the petitioner's fervour for appropriate family values.

Both versions hail the coming of the Kingdom, with its fire and brimstone, its wailing and gnashing of teeth; Matthew's version adds the line Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, which expresses the petitioner's subservience and dutiful complicity in whatever tortures the Father may see fit to visit upon the world. As always, God demands not only obedience but zealous participation by His children in the crimes He commits against them. Similarly, the begging for bread is purely and simply an act of self-abasement. Given that the Father knows what we need before we ask for it, the purpose of the request cannot be to obtain food, since only the faithless ever go hungry in any case. The request for bread emphasises and flatters the Father's omnipotent will which, whether the bread is earthly or heavenly, alone determines who will eat and who will starve.

Next, forgiveness is requested on the grounds of having forgiven others. Like God's love, which is not unconditional but dependent on humanity's unquestioning obedience and grovelling praise, God's forgiveness is not unconditional but must be obtained through a transaction. The request not to be led into temptation, to which Matthew adds a request to be delivered from evil, is the Saviour's response to His own observation that the Father has ensured the inevitability of temptation but will nevertheless mercilessly punish those whom He appoints as His instruments in delivering it. Jesus prudently orders His followers to beg that others, rather than themselves, be granted this dubious honour and the chastisement that will inevitably follow.

His Crude Legacy

Here lie the bones of George Aitch-Dubya Bush,
Who served a single term, then got the push.
Patrician in his manner and his whine,
He worked to keep the little guys in line.

He led the great crusade to liberate
A plucky, democratic emirate:
Proclaiming that whatever We say goes,
He timed the slaughter for the TV shows.

He conquered only once, but conquered fast
To prove he was an oil-man first and last;
And is assured his place in history
As Forty-one, who spawned the chimpanzee.

Wyner Shrubley III