Those Who Work Hard and Play by the Rules

As the House of Expenses Claimants bids its dewy-eyed farewell to its oldest inhabitant, the cheery bon vivant Kenneth Clarke, some corporate chums of his are falling victim to humourless legalism. British American Tobacco, with which Clarke was closely associated while it encouraged children to take up smoking, may be forced to pay compensation for misleading workers and enforcing child labour in its fields. Since regulation in Malawi exists at a level about which the Conservative Party can only dream rather damply, BAT was able to indulge in a bit of entrepreneurial buccaneering and, like any respectable slave-owner outsource its more uncompromising fiscal disciplines to an overseer. Despite BAT's precautions in commissioning a separate company to keep its own hands lily-white, the lawyers are maintaining the ludicrous fiction that BAT is responsible for the conditions of its workers even though it does nothing more than profit by their labour. We must certainly be glad, on behalf of Kenneth Clarke, that he has managed to retire before the dice became any more loaded and the world any more ruthless towards his all too vulnerable social class.

Team Luciana Drops In

I am in receipt of an election communication on behalf of Luciana Berger, the Liberal Democrat candidate apparently parachuted into the constituency because the local party couldn't find one of their own. Berger makes much of having resigned from Labour over racism, which presumably explains why she chose to make her new home among the more loyal partisans of the Go Home Van Coalition. Still, notwithstanding Jo Swinson's CBE for services to the Bullingdon Club, it cannot be denied that the Liberal Democrats are campaigning against the Conservatives for now; in fact, Team Berger claims that the ex-Deputy Conservatives are the only viable opposition, having polled nearly three and a half thousand votes in 2017 and thereby casually obliterated Labour's puny 22,942.

Berger "understands our communities", although regrettably she does not show her working, and the ex-Deputy Conservatives as a whole remain unfortunately vague about which policies they supported until 2015 and now plan to reverse. There seems a lack of ambition in the pledge that an ex-Deputy Conservative Government would "fight for proper funding for our NHS and schools" - why would it have to fight? Why not just look at what Lansley, Hancock, Gove and the rest of the rabble have been doing and then do the opposite? There is also a promise to "deliver action to tackle the climate emergency," but detail is again skimpy. The ex-Deputy Conservatives might be planning to steal Labour's clothes and radically re-shape the entire economy; but with a parliamentary presence made up of the likes of Luciana Berger it seems at least equally possible that the party will consider its pledge fulfilled if a few more benefits claimants can be driven to suicide in return for a penny on the price of a plastic bag.

There is also no hint as to what might happen in the event of another hung parliament: aside from the fundamental right of the Liberal Democrat leader to choose the leader of the Labour Party, what would be the red lines? We are reminded that the Liberal Democrats are, for now, a Remain party, and only those would doubt it who are foolish or fanatical enough to recall what happened to the Liberal Democrats' previous unique selling point at Nick Clegg's first whiff of a red box.

No Smoke Without Fire

No matter how glorious the epoch, there are always a few who simply can't keep up. At a time when the mainstream of tolerant Britishness is denouncing traitors, attacking shirkers, rooting out enemies of the people, hunting down citizens of nowhere and maintaining environmental hostility for the hordes of migrant cockroaches, a few backward provincials are demanding the problematisation of witch-hunts. In Scotland, mere historians have suggested that the proportion of witches tortured and executed was remarkably high even for a Christian country, and conspiracy theories are already emerging to the effect that the persecutors' motives may occasionally have been less than pure. As one would expect, a memorial is being called for by the kind of people who enjoy criticising the wealth creators of the Atlantic slave trade now that they're not here to defend themselves.

Yet He Opened Not His Mouth

The lead counsel to the UK's independent inquiry on child sexual abuse has upbraided the Vatican for its continuing refusal to co-operate. Even after decades of scandal, the approach of Mussolini's holy city remains the same, namely to sit tight, do as little as can be got away with (or, when it comes to protecting the abusers, as much as can be got away with) and wait for it all to go away. In extremis the Holy See will snap out a peremptory complaint about the indignities to which a sovereign state should not be subjected: a nation whose citizenry consists entirely of officially celibate males with an invisible friend does not understand why its own domestic laws should come under scrutiny just because child abuse happens to be frowned upon in real countries. Still, it is encouraging to note that God's henchman in Westminster, whose response to the scandal in the Irish church ten years ago was to praise the abusers for their courage, discovered last February that the victims' point of view was not altogether incomprehensible, and found it quite a sobering experience.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Canines xcvii-cxxiii

In a completely different context, therefore, the Father of Teeth came upon a region which overflowed so maniacally with life that he quickly wore down even his most powerful gnashers. The trees were bowed with the weight of their fruit; the squirrels were horribly obese; and such was the bounty of the soil that the very stones were said to be fertile.

Being quite unable to chew it all up himself, the Father of Teeth spun a parable to send out among the region's thousands of well-fed inhabitants. According to this parable, the Creator of the universe had made everything just for them, and would guard their welfare provided they continually reproduced themselves and obeyed some peculiar commandments about their sex lives which the Father of Teeth sniggeringly inserted as a last-minute joke. The parable went in through the inhabitants' ears and settled among their cerebral synapses, urging them to breed and consume and breed again.

On returning some centuries later, the Father of Teeth found the last few dozen scraping the bare rocks for something slightly less than a living. They were thin and sour, and were singing dour hymns about their vitamin deficiencies. The parable, by contrast, had changed hardly at all, and burbled cheerily at the Father of Teeth as he hurried on his way.

Money Isn't Everything

Although for most of us the benefits of Brexit will be purely patriotic, Britain's approaching independence from the Euro-wog yoke does have one or two fiscal implications as well. Aside from our liberating ability to trade with countries with which we are already trading, the instability of sterling helps various gamblers to keep the wolf from the door and the uncertainty of the date enables the Royal Mint to produce post-truth commemorative coins. Since the compliant Sajid Javid has decided to take a bit of a holiday from all that tedious budgeteering, he will have all the more time for deciding what to do with the hoard proclaiming the Recrudescent Imperium's liberation on 31 October and friendship with all nations except uppity Irish, Empire-hating piccaninnies and the Nazi-Soviet serfs of Brussels and Strasbourg. One possibility is to melt the coins down and mint them anew with the date of the next cliff-edge; another is to flog them off as curiosities at sixteen hundred times their face value, presumably on the grounds that it's a rare coin indeed which can manage to be as inaccurate and over-priced as Her Majesty's Government.

Migrants Infest Britain's Entire Food Chain, Boffins Confirm

Fury at new immigrant horror

Ministers are often criticised for not listening, but scientists have discovered that using the proper language can make all the difference.

Experts have been trying for years to alert the Government to the ecological threat from non-native species, while the Government has responded by withholding funds and missing legal targets.

However, politicians immediately showed concern when scientists switched from the language of science to the language of immigrant-bashing.

MPs are now calling for the lynch mob tactics Britain has utilised against human cockroaches to be applied to other species of pest which threaten the national environment.

Scientists said they were "astounded" at the tactic's effectiveness. "We've been telling these people for ever about the ecological effects of invasive non-native species," said bio-security expert Dr Xanthe Rhizome.

"We've talked about the rapid decline of indigenous species of edible crustacean owing to the transmission of pathogens from Pacifastacus leniusculus and their eyes have just glazed over.

"But the moment we said 'wog seafood' they wanted to know what diseases were being spread and how soon a citizen army could be organised to burn down restaurants.

"It was like a light-bulb came on above their heads," Rhizome said. "Not necessarily an LED bulb, but you can't have everything."

Homage to Catalonia

Some old but still rather smelly garbage has been dug up in Spain for re-burial in less ostentatious surroundings, in what the country's acting prime minister has called "a step towards reconciliation." Presumably he meant reconciliation between supporters of the traitor who led a military coup against his country's legal government, and those moderate patriots who believe that peaceful opposition to the kingdom as presently constituted should be punished with imprisonment rather than death. A number of less circumspect persons, including servants of the Great Dictator in the Sky, turned out to commemorate the ludicrous Antonio Tejero, who had the dubious honour of being the farce that succeeded the Franco tragedy. It remains as yet unclear what length of prison sentence will be imposed on those who sloganised, saluted and displayed fascist-era flags while the trash was taken out.

You Can't Say Anything These Days

We have all been aware, since at least the "nigger for a neighbour" election campaign of 1964 and the subsequent cleansing of the right-wing soul, that there are no racists in the Conservative Party but only fun-loving straight talkers who are martyred by being taken out of context. In the latest example, a video which the Home Office posted online featured a black blogger discussing the abuse he receives, including injunctions to "go home." This of course was the slogan of Tumbledown Tessie's very own Powellite Pantechnicon initiative, from her period as Secretary of State for Windrush-cleansing. No doubt the young man in the video was a loyal piccaninny with a watermelon smile, rather than the sort who nurses an ancestral hatred of the British Empire; but it says something about the environmental hostility after half a century of political correctness when the Ministry for Wog Control is forced to take itself out of context.

Flogging a Dead Cow

Even though Argentina is no longer run by a vicious dictatorship with a liking for torture and detention without trial, Her Majesty's Government does not necessarily object to an investment here and there, particularly if it helps the fossil fuel industry. Although shale fracking has proved a bit of a fiasco on the mainland of the Recrudescent Imperium of Westminster, the Falkland Islands and the Falkland Islands, Argentina has some of the biggest shale reserves in the world, and frackers have already managed to vandalise the ancestral home of at least one lesser breed. Accordingly, and as befits the UK's position as a global leader in outsourcing pollution, Her Majesty's Government has plans to invest a green energy fund in the likes of Shell and BP, rather than wasting time and resources on meetings with renewable energy companies. Over the past two years, oil companies in Argentina have contributed more than £40,000 towards the British embassy's birthday rah-rah for the Queen Gawblesser, so clearly everything is fine.

Could We Have Some Cages With That Chlorinated Chicken?

Those plucky little chaps at the Home Office, who can be terrified into squealing hysteria at the thought of a few dozen refugees struggling across the Channel, have been granted a further opportunity to display their fortitude. The number of significant children stuck in northern Syria is larger than initially thought and may be in excess of sixty, many of whom have not even had the gumption to become orphaned. Indeed, the majority of the children are with their mothers, which means that the problem is unlikely to go away even if Her Majesty's Government persists with the compliant Sajid Javid's policy of removing citizenship from the parents and waiting for the offspring to die.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Incisors lxxxiii-xcvii

Is there anything, said the Father of Teeth, more miraculously redolent of the Creator's intentions than a toothache? A nerve which was encased in pulp which was encased in enamel is disturbed, and the result is an agony which can be appeased only by a visit to that most terrifying and humiliating of tormentors, the dentist. So large and distracting an event from so small a cause, said the Father of Teeth, must certainly give us pause to reflect upon the Creator's attitude, which punishes the humblest and most harmless life with death and, in higher organisms, with the pain of death and, in the highest organisms of all, with the fear of death and with the fear of the pain of death. And indeed, said the Father of Teeth, why stop there? Might the implications of toothache not inspire us to further reflections upon the nature of the Creator Himself, whose design for the lives of His creations is so entirely bound up with pain? For the crime of enjoying certain flavours, for the atrocity of failing to brush regularly and rigorously, for the sin of possessing unlucky genes or simply for living too long - for all these the punishment is pain, infection, humiliation and inconvenience, and even the very best dentures are but an imperfect remedy. The answer, said the Father of Teeth, the answer is faith. We must have faith that the Creator is vulnerable to our small transgressions and petty sins; we must have faith that they may crack the Creator's enamel, penetrate His pulp and act upon His raw nerves just as His divine dental decay acts on ours. And the Father of Teeth grinned, showing gaps as black as the benevolent void.

Further Deterioration

It appears that the Euro-wogs' confused approach to the English language (viz. taking every opportunity to speak other languages instead) has led to some unfortunate misunderstandings about the meaning of repatriation. Several provinces of the Nazi-Soviet Brusso-Strasbourgian empire are evacuating their own citizens from detention camps in Syria, despite the fact that the citizens in question may be women, children or otherwise intimidating to the British Home Office. Quite aside from the perverse re-definition of repatriation as bringing people back rather than throwing them out, the possibiity of returning alleged terrorists to their home countries for a fair trial is a sobering indication of how far from British values the Continent has allowed itself to drift.

Flexible Transparency

O rah for the deal we have done
Securing our place in the sun,
Regaining control
Of our national soul,
Defying the wog, Frog and Hun!

O rah for this frabjous new day!
This is the real deal, I must say,
And just slightly worse
For the common folks' purse
Than that of poor mad Tessie May!

O rah for this wonderful deal
In all its tax-haven appeal!
We'll soon buccaneer
With nothing to fear
And certainly not to conceal!

Uncle Tom Pliant

Cliffs of Dover to Gain Matching Sepulchre

Pragmatic parliamentary charity towards the homeless is not limited to hand-wringing expenses claimants like Heidi "The Waterworks" Allen. The Speaker's chaplain, who next month will take up the ascetic burdens of the Dover bishopric, has exercised the Commons' brand of Christian charity towards a group of rough sleepers who were using the tunnel between the Houses of Parliament and Westminster tube station. While claiming to be devastated by the deaths of homeless people at the station, the bishop-in-waiting was indignant at the standards of hygiene in the tunnel, which the rough sleepers blame on late-night drunks relieving themselves after closing time. She also worried that the piles of bedding might be a security risk; the number of MPs recently assassinated with homeless people's bedding escapes me for the moment, but presumably God has the information to hand. The bishop-in-waiting acknowledged that simply moving the people on would solve nothing, but as regards the minor matter of finding a more humane alternative she seems to have left things to the mercy of Providence and the vagrancy laws. The police moved the rough sleepers on, with the result that they now have to sleep outside the tunnel rather than inside, and with the winter coming on there is every chance that some of them will meet God face to face before too long.

Labour Fail to Cost What Might Have Been

That paragon of economic sanity and fiscal stability, the Confabulation of Business Interests, has pronounced that Labour has questions to answer about the costs of its rail nationalisation policy. A recent bit of CBI headline-whoring squealed that the cost would be a hundred and ninety-six billion, a figure which was based on Labour policy in an alternate universe. Of course, there are other, devastatingly accurate aspects to the CBI's figures, but the CBI doesn't wish to disclose them as it would hurt the members' itsy-bitsy feelings. It is certainly fortunate that the Labour party is the one which has questions to answer, and that this fact has been determined by so reliable a source as the CBI.

Are You Doing Your Part, Too?

We are all aware, because the Conservative Party and its New Labour soul-mates have wagged their admonitory fingers at us often enough, that the proper democratic way to get things done in a democracy is for everyone to fall in line behind the Government. This is most democratically and emphatically the case when the Government has gone to several years' worth of trouble to monosyllabificate matters for the plebeian understanding and to ensure that all the country's ills can be summed up in a single four-letter word: wogs. Hence it should come as no surprise that, along with teachers, the police and the National Health Service, charities are now subject to the new, optimistic order to pull together by authority of the Ministry for Wog Control. The Ministry is dispatching its special squads to charities, religious and community centres, with the assurance that they wish only to help vulnerable human resources in the regularisation of their status. If the special squads actually use language like that, it is to be hoped that the vulnerable persons in question speak English badly enough to understand them. Naturally, once the cockroaches take the bait, the Ministry makes them an offer it hopes they will not refuse; and in the event of further non-cooperativity the boot-boys may come calling with a plane ticket back to the jolly old war-zone. The Ministry's web-page, which of course the more entrepreneurial vulnerables will have accessed as a matter of course, gives fair warning that "the service was not designed to undertake enforcement action but it may be considered on a case-by-case basis." As with the appointments of Theresa May, Sajid Javid and Priti Patel to a nominally great office of state, it is certainly reassuring to know that the Ministry's process of Gleichschaltung operates in the buccaneering British tradition of putting things to purposes for which they were not designed.

Due Solemnity

O rah for the Queen and her Speech!
Gawblesser old Madge! What a peach!
There's naught so unique
As an hour's plummy squeak
From nonagenarian leech!

O rah for the Speech of the Queen!
The finest our nation has seen!
Our programme all picked,
In tushery tricked,
With promises not worth a bean!

We'll fight Euro-wogs on the beach,
We'll starve those who nurse and who teach,
Make jail more improving
And stop you from moving -
Rah rah for the Queen and her Speech!

Lackbod de Pfiffel

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Enamel clxiii-clxxix

Once upon a time, said the Father of Teeth unreliably, the Creator of the universe was so annoyed by the behaviour of certain people that He smote two entire cities with fire and brimstone and killed every single inhabitant. Cinders poured from the sky, which blackened and thundered; the earth shook and cracked open in great chasms that swallowed alive those sinners not already incinerated.

It was, said the Father of Teeth, a rather show-offy spectacle indeed, and not at all suitable for those of a sensitive or impressionable temperament. Such a one was a minor wife of a man who escaped, having been forewarned that the Creator's mercy was about to make one of its more assertive manifestations. She looked back to where her friends and cousins and the gossips at the market were all being scalded and broiled and crushed and suffocated, and she was so traumatised by the sight that from that moment forth she was paralysed and rooted to the spot, unable to move or speak, her face white as salt. After a while, of course, those who had fled began to drift back, and they took out their knives and their trowels and cut bits out of her to chew on because the ground was so scorched that food was hard to come by. She never objected or cried out, so they told each other as they chewed that she was nothing more than a pillar and it served her right for looking where she shouldn't.

In the end, said the Father of Teeth, there was nothing left of her but white bones and terrified white eyeballs, which still faced towards the scene of devastation because no-one, least of all her husband or her family, had thought to cover her eyes or close them or point them away; and at last I ground them to dust in my seventeen-carat diamond molars and scattered them grain by grain on the Creator's hurricanes over the next five thousand years. Eventually a few of the grains will find their way into people's eyes, and in this way, said the Father of Teeth, a few people may gain some small homeopathic insight at last into the nature of the Creator's mercy.

Britain Fights Back

More and more Britons are taking back control to aggressively incentivise those shirkers and scroungers who also have the impudence to be freaks. Inspired by the healthy playground rhetoric of Her Majesty's Government, have-a-go heroes across the country are doing their part to ensure that even our most amusing citizens have no doubt as to their place on the social scale and its attendant obligations. With the effects of the Osbornomic miracle on the police and of the May-Graybeing reforms on the legal system, a substantial hint has been dropped that the beneficiaries of these life-lessons could start to man up and refrain from complaining quite so much. Nevertheless, reports of abuse have continued to increase: a development which the Home Office has welcomed, presumably on the grounds that further re-education is needed and therefore the fun can continue.

Not Very Well Brought Up

Dear Mater, for all of our sakes,
Do please keep in mind that it makes
Such trouble for us
When you cause a fuss
Because a few plebs have the shakes.

We know there's no profit or perk
In letting an invalid shirk.
The ones who can pay
Will do as they may;
The others can get out and work.

I've trouble enough and to spare
With bearding the wogs in their lair.
Now dash it, old stick,
When it comes to the sick,
You silly old bag, we don't care!

Trouble with Gas

Elderly voters for British independence will almost certainly survive at least the first winter outside the EU, according to a refreshingly optimistic statement by the electricity system operator, National Grid. However, depending on how clean a break is achieved, the Continent's self-imposed isolation from the mainland may induce a certain buoyancy where prices are concerned. Spooked by the possibility that the Recrudescent Imperium may be forced to compete for gas with "energy-hungry Asian countries" whose corporate and other coolies lack Britannia's buccaneering thrift, the Stakhanovite extremists at the CBI persist in urging that Her Majesty's Government interfere in the free market to provide, of all things, infrastructure. Meanwhile, those of us with the temerity to wish for continued lighting, heating and other luxuries must certainly be grateful for the foresight displayed by the Conservatives and their little yellow fags, who have spent the last decade slashing funds for sustainable power and subsidising the shale-frackers whose major contribution to the country's energy efficiency comprises a few rather small earthquakes.

You Only Lie Twice

Has the depth of the national rot no limits at all? In accordance with its established policy of rehashing past policy at 72rpm instead of 33, the Cummings-Johnson administration has let fly a hob-nailed reboot of Tumbledown Tessie's fatuous threat to stop co-operating with the Euro-wogs' notoriously foreign intelligence agents if Brussels persisted in refusing to do as it was told. The Cummings-Johnson version is a turbo-charged, cocaine-fuelled squeal of righteous indignation proclaiming that a failure to drop over the cliff on 31 October will result in Britain summarily dividing the EU into nice countries and nasty countries and leaving the latter to the terrorists. Despite this, even a former head of MI6, the international benevolent organisation whose most famous operative shared 2012 Olympic opening prominence with Her Madge Gawblesser, is apparently not entirely immune from non-plucky thoughts.

We Didn't Win the War by Getting Depressed, You Know

Given that the Continent's determination to cut itself off from the mainland may cause the supply of medication coming over the Channel to undergo a slight interruption, Her Majesty's Government is naturally making due provision for the health of deserving Britons. Mental health is a matter of particular interest because it is all in the mind, so that successive governments have found it encouragingly easy to diagnose, treat and cure; and in today's atmosphere of compulsory optimism, aggressive pluck enforcement and ever more rigorous rah-rah, mental health problems are a natural source of guinea pigs for the latest variation in the perennial political cure-all that is Buck Up and Get a Job. Accordingly, the Department of Workfare and Privation in Poole has come up with a sophisticated practical programme for the management of severe and enduring mental health conditions, namely ordering the shirkers and scroungers to play down their little megrims and not use too many long words. A spokesbeing was duly extruded to dismiss the idea as "well-intentioned" and therefore rapidly withdrawn; but similar instructions on compiling a pluckier CV have been circulated by the delightfully-named Dorset Community Pain Service and will doubtless continue to be circulated until they become normalised, after which Britons will presumably be ready for instructions on successfully hiding their irrational urges towards weekends, paid holidays, lunch hours and bathroom breaks.

Extreme Stimulation

Mainstream patriots and other reasonable persons will be relieved to find that extremist attitudes on the far right are being fuelled by toxic rhetoric in the mainstream, rather than the other way around. Fascists, racists and other mavens of militant self-pity share the vocabulary of the Conservative Party because they are "stimulated" by Boris Johnson, who is part of the political mainstream so could not possibly have been stimulated by them. To claim otherwise would imply that the race-baiting, migrant-bashing, Muslim-monstering, Windrush-deporting, citizenship-stealing policies of the Conservatives, their little yellow enablers and their New Labour forebears might somehow be construed as extreme in themselves. Nevertheless, it is of course undeniable that genuine upholders of British values must long for the old civil days of polite yet robust political discourse, when sensible Conservatives and Labour centrists could agree on the definition of a scrounger, a shirker, a Saddam-lover or a bogus asylum seeker, and the only grounds for legitimate divergence were whether they were all being treated harshly enough.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Bicuspid xciv-cxvii

Nevertheless, the Father of Teeth acquired all sorts of groupies who continually proclaimed their love for him and all his dentures and demanded that he minister to their substance. Some of them wanted to take him in hand and make him dress more fashionably; these usually fled when they saw the state of his underclothes. Others wanted to mother him; these were generally cured when he started biting their ankles. Still others wanted only to learn at his feet, but the emanations exuded by the feet of the Father of Teeth were not exactly conducive to a pedagogic atmosphere.

A few of the most troublesome developed emotional fixations and spoke much of love, a biochemical twitch invented by the Creator of the universe to beguile them from the fact that their only real concern was obeying the prompting of their hormones in order to perpetuate the existence of certain molecules.

"I wish to share your burden," said one.
"You'll need a hell of a gum transplant," said the Father of Teeth, flaunting his tar-glistening gingival vista.
"I wish to live with you for ever," said another.
"You haven't got for ever," pointed out the Father of Teeth.
"I wish to bear your child," said a third.
"Then what you're feeling isn't love," said the Father of Teeth. "It's eugenics."

Her Kind of Foreigner

Never let it be said that the British Conservative Party indulges in racist stereotyping. Despite being seriously let down by a favoured friend and business partner, one Leopoldo Galtieri, the sainted Thatcher did not tar other Latin American fascist dictators with the same brush, but maintained her personal regard for General Augusto Pinochet even after his tragic arrest at the end of the last century. The New Labour government of the time had not yet thrown off the party's atavistic dislike of torture, murder and military authoritarianism, and the old bag was horrified at the overriding of Pinochet's diplomatic immunity to permit his arrest by vindictive opponents of freedom, the Falklands and fiscal discipline. She sent Pinochet a good Scotch whisky and paid him an emotional tribute at the annual Conservative rah-and-blah; nevertheless, she was careful enough to aspire only to see him "returned safely to his own country." It would have been a poor repayment to treat so noble a friend as a mere immigrant and asylum seeker.

Britain Kicks the Underdog One More Time

Although the Recrudescent Imperium will be having its cake and eating it after 31 October, this does not of course mean that there will be cake to spare for the undeserving. Three years ago the Government assured charities and NGOs which look after refugees that their funding will be guaranteed after independence from the Brussels yoke; naturally, it now turns out that funding for charities and NGOs which look after refugees will not be guaranteed. A spokesbeing for the Ministry of Wog Control proclaimed the Government's commitment to "effective integration," so we can be assured that at least some native proles will be reduced to the status of bogus asylum seekers. Meanwhile, those liberal metropolitan cockroach-lovers who fail to put Britain first can hardly expect a dividend from the prosperity which will result from depriving taxpayers of the right to live here.

Light Touch

Britain's energy profiteers are being regulated just sternly enough to permit double-digit profits while energy bills are hiked up, according to the regulator's report. In accordance with modern fashion, the chief executive of the Energy Networks Association decided not to recognise the figures, proclaiming that investment was in the stratosphere, costs heading for the earth's core and that nothing had ever been more reliable, as witness the recent blackouts in the north of England. They may have left a million homes, a hospital and an airport with no electricity, but they were at least confined to the north of England. Nevertheless, it appears with hindsight that even consumers in a captive market may sometimes be charged more than they need to be, although it remains as yet unclear what degree of financial compensation will be awarded to the victims.

Facts Off-Message Again

Mere scientists have once again shown their chronic lack of Britishness by daring to differ with the scientific opinion of a jumped-up newspaper columnist. In the interests of saving Britain from Labour's calamitously clumsy plot to cut emissions by actually cutting emissions, the Imperial Haystack decreed that British scientists were on the verge of producing virtually unlimited clean energy by means of optimistic nuclear fusion. Despite the Haystack's famous powers of reportage, large amounts of energy can in fact be released by means of nuclear fusion; but, rather like the Conservative Party, the process tends to consume more than it produces. Probably because of their pedantic adherence to facts regardless of patriotic duty, scientists in general are among the least optimistic commentators when it comes to deploying our native Britishness in the war on unnecessary preservation of the species.

More Charm, More Offensive

Since the whole point of Brexit is essentially militant self-pity - our sunlit uplands are cold and drizzly and it's got to be somebody's fault, so let's go out and kick a Muslim - it is just possible to see a sort of sense in the Imperial Haystack's latest wheeze to bring the EU in line with mainstream thinking. The idea is for the Imperial Haystack to engage in a bit of personal diplomacy, much as his spiritual father Churchill attempted with increasingly pathetic results during his interminable senility. Tired of Nazi-style punishment beatings from the legalistic commissars of Brussels, the Imperial Haystack will toddle off and negotiate the country's withdrawal from the EU with somebody other than the EU, because the EU's negotiator is a bit of a stickler for EU rules, which individual EU members, being merely members of the EU and probably gagging for independence themselves, self-evidently will not be. In addition, Angela Merkel is a filly, and we all know what the Haystack can do when he gets his hands on a filly. If the plan succeeds, well and good; but if it fails, as it did when the Tumbledown Tessie administration tried it at some point more or less within living memory, that will be fine too; just as it will be fine if the Imperial Haystack is eventually driven to seek an extension to Article 50. It will be fine because, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Norway Campaign and the last few hundred times a Conservative was caught in a lie, it will represent merely a temporary setback against overwhelming odds, to be borne with all the pluck and fortitude of a brave little nation of fox-hunting wog-bashers, until the deserved victory materialises at due cost to somebody else. Then again, it may simply be that the Haystack, like Tumbledown Tessie before him and the puce Head Boy before her, cannot in fact be bothered to plan very much beyond the present news cycle, because he's got the media, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the Liberal Democrats making sure he doesn't have to.