Suitable for Very Young Participants

Snowflakes and bleeding hearts in the USA's two biggest teachers' unions are campaigning against the great American pedagogical tradition of show-and-tell, specifically as it relates to unauthorised gun attacks. Rather than merely informing children what to do and showing them where they should hide in the event of an NRA-sponsored emergency, schools are staging simulated attacks, complete with pellet guns, pretend corpses and fake blood, so that the student bodies can get properly into the spirit. These delightful jests are being inflicted on primary and even nursery schoolers (or, to non-native English speakers, grade-school and kindergarten receptivity personnel); but there seems to be some question as to how many of the beneficiaries will grow up into healthy and harmless supporters of the Second Amendment. Fortunately, the events are managed by private companies in what is now an extremely profitable industry; which will no doubt be more than enough to keep alive the necessary debate over what should be done instead of gun control.

Barnyard Noises

Keep calm and carry on. Everything is under control and nothing can go wrong. This is England and everything's fine. Mustn't grumble. Unfortunately, the enlightened sophistication of such arguments is beyond the grasp of many farmers, because their crude rustic sensibilities cannot rise to that refined degree of intellect which characterises a government whose central religious belief is that you can make a country more prosperous by withdrawing it from trade. Fortunately, the present Environment Secretary, successor to such luminaries as Owen Paterson, Andrea Leadsom and Michael Gove, has been doing what he can to straighten the poor yokels out. As usual, this benignant pedagogy consisted largely in boasting about future funds which may or may not materialise depending on how much the Government cares about flooded peons, as well as assurances to the ruined that there are hundreds of thousands of people far better off than themselves. There was a bit of extra finger-wagging at those who expect ministers to toddle about viewing the damage they have caused, for all the world as though official policy ought to languish under the crypto-foreign lash of mere reality; and the minister was moved to hint that he will push for the Government to deal with its self-created shortage of seasonal workers in much the same way as it has dealt with its self-created shortage of nurses, viz. by telling them how much it reveres them and then squealing that it deserves their most fervent and grateful obedience. George Eustice was apparently born on a farm, though it remains as yet unclear whether he originated in the pigsty or the chicken house; and remarkably enough, there seems some doubt among the peasants as to whether, as Environment Secretary in a government run by Dominic Cummings, he is quite so big a beast as he imagines.

Flighty Blighty

Business leaders have voiced alarm at the legal judgement that present plans for expanding Heathrow are incompatible even with our obligations under the pathetically inadequate Paris agreement. It is understandable that business leaders might have some small difficulty in parsing a judgement which carries the hitherto unthinkable implication that doing something about the climate emergency might involve doing something about the climate emergency; especially as the People's Government under Caudillo Cummings is no longer interested in holding the business community's sweaty little hands. Where infrastructure is concerned there is no such thing as society; as may readily be deduced from the presence of Grant Shapps as transport secretary, with Michael Green in charge of taking one step back and Sebastian Fox in charge of taking two steps forward wherever there's a convenient precipice. All three are agreed that the Government will not appeal the judgement, because the Government's lack of interest in planning for the economy is exceeded only by its lack of interest in planning for the climate emergency.

Wine into Water

Evangelical Christians in Brazil are gathering to fight against the manifest impieties of the carnival at Rio de Janeiro. Like similar noisy ministers of love and peace in the USA and elsewhere, the spiritual police have been enthusiastic campaigners for the political far right. They are naturally unconcerned by Jair Bolsonaro's homophobic remarks, which faithfully reflect the Saviour's own authoritarian belief that the Mosaic law was too free and easy; by his racist descriptions of indigenous people, which piously parallel the Saviour's disdain for the Canaanites; or by his praise for the military dictatorship, which echoes the Saviour's delight in genocide. It might even be argued that Bolsonaro's virulent campaign to destroy the Amazon forest constitutes nothing less than an industrialised tribute to the Saviour's demented loathing of trees. Beyond such theological subtleties, of course, the main point of the evangelical intervention is to further God's eternal purpose of preventing people having a good time. "The carnival revelry lasts four days but Jesus’s happiness is eternal," burbled the pastor of Attitude Baptist Church, where Bolsonaro's wife goes to commune with the Almighty. "We would only sing songs about family, about friendship, about goodness, and God. There would no alcoholic drinks nor drugs consumed. And everyone would be sober." Clearly much thought has been given to the means by which four days can be made to seem an eternity.

To Appease or Not to Appease

Pearls are being clutched among the glorious victors of the Second World War over the delicate question of whether to attend a ceremony of commemoration in Russia. While recognising the USSR's minor contribution to victory (among other shared sacrifices, its defeat of up to three-quarters of the Wehrmacht's total strength may possibly have helped matters), western governments are anxious not to be perceived as accepting either Russia's present bad behaviour or its rewriting of history to suppress the pre-war Nazi-Soviet pact. For his own part, the fiend Putin has been tactful enough to leave Norway, scene of one of Mr Churchill's more farcical bungles, off the guest list. Despite its coarse and barbaric sensibilities, Russia has also omitted mention of the British initiation of city bombing, Mr Churchill's little Holodomor in Bengal, or the deliberate prolonging of the war against Japan for the purpose of using nuclear weapons against human beings. On the subject of present-day Russian morality, Western attendance at the ceremony could easily be used to imply acceptance by Moscow of western support for al-Qaeda in the Middle East, or even of its enthusiastic and profitable participation in the destruction of Yemen by the head-chopping House of Saud. Nevertheless, the perfidious French have already accepted Putin's invitation, leaving the mainland and its American ally to ponder the dreadful possibilities of a diplomatic faux pas.

Divisive Darkie Dressing Deepens Defiance

Fury at politically correct plaster horror

Mainstream Britain erupted in patriotic indignation today at Tesco's introduction of sticking plasters to match immigrant skin tones.

The plasters, which go on sale in all Tesco stores and online today, have been criticised as adhering to political correctness when other priorities need covering.

"It's disgraceful that supermarket bosses are pandering to minorities when there is flooding in the streets and a crisis in our NHS," said professional BBC Question Time audience member Letitia Noblett.

"This is just another corporate gamble to rip out hairs from the skin of ordinary people's lives and give them to people who can't even speak the language and it deserves to crash and burn in rivers of blood."

A spokesbeing for the Department of Business and Wog Control said that supermarkets were free to stock whatever they wished provided it was the right thing to do.

Asked about the crisis today, the Prime Minister's personal assistant, Boris Johnson, said that having a thicker skin than white people was nothing to be ashamed of and "in a less tolerant country might even be considered an unfair advantage."

The supermarket élite claims that the plasters will help coloured people feel less self-conscious about their handicap. It remains as yet unclear whether the plasters will be available in a gammon shade.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Enamel lxi-lxxiv

Extricating himself from these multifarious meanderings, however, the Father of Teeth came upon the funeral of a respected and popular citizen, whose family and friends were joined at the graveside by a substantial crowd of well-wishers.

Although the crowd exceeded by some dozens his average congregation, the priest began berating the mourners over their unnatural display of melancholy. "No-one with true faith in the Creator has any right to grieve at the death of a fellow sinner," he thundered; "for either the deceased is in heaven, in which case she is better off and your grief is selfish; or else she is deservedly damned, in which case you are better off without her and your grief is indulgent." He ended by noting compassionately that no human being is immune from sin, and that even the most profound grief might be forgiven on payment of suitable reparations.

A few family members nodded righteously at this, since the deceased had remembered some of them in her will almost as casually as she had failed to remember the church. Others complained that the priest's remarks were in poor taste; and for his own part the Father of Teeth, whose acquaintance with the Creator's little ways rivalled in length and profundity the blackest of his Sunday-best gums, suddenly came over all educative.

Soon after the Father of Teeth departed for regions elsewhere, therefore, the gnawed remains of the priest were discovered in various holy places soon to be hastily deconsecrated. Doubtless to the approval of the priest's transfigured soul, his funeral was a most joyful affair; and doing zealous duty at the very forefront of the riotous celebrations were the same grieving malcontents whose lachrymose impiety he had so vigorously scolded.

Sensible Moderation at the Temperate Centre

That sensible moderate, Justin Trudeau, is very sensibly urging the moderate, sensible virtues of sensible moderation upon those indigenous extremists who, as in days of yore, are interfering with progress on the railroads. So moderate and sensible is the Canadian prime minister that he has even taken the time-honoured North American approach of refusing to negotiate with the savages until they capitulate to his every demand, while blaming them for what, in less rugged and more refined cultures, would routinely be blamed on immigrants and sending in the Mounties to chastise the restless natives. Very sensibly too, he has chosen as his cause the moderate interests of those fossil fuel merchants who are doing so much for temperate values all across the world.

Black Ingratitude

Thanks to our great nation's multimillennial cultural heritage of buccaneering fustian, Britain's museums have long been notorious as receivers of stolen goods, many of them removed from the holy places of benighted and superstitious savages to be housed in profitable safekeeping by the Church of England's adventurous scions. The Indian government now claims to have made a formal request for the return of a bronze idol, which apparently was removed from a village temple by one of Lord Elgin's spiritual descendants and now resides at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford. Typically, the pagan usurpers of Queen Victoria's Empire have given no hint of willingness to settle the debt for its freely-bestowed inheritance of railways and colonial architecture; let alone to make reparation for the various historical inconveniences suffered by the East India Company.

Skilled Workers

British values are set to receive another boost as the Home Office prepares to throw yet more taxpayers' money at some of its favourite boot-boys. Those charmingly skilled Serco people will be taking over a couple of wog warehousing sites from the almost equally skilled and charming G4S people, despite the latter's consistent record of assault, abuse and fraud. Under the new contract, Serco will be obliged to discipline and punish (education), impose forced labour (skills-based activities) and teach its henchbeings to hit so the bruises won't show (safeguarding and vulnerability training). There will also be an increase in the number of staff who can take a lawful and proper approach to depriving the inmates of social security. The company's chief executive noted that the Ministry for Wog Control invested a significant quantity of envelope-backs drawing up the new contract, although it remains as yet unclear precisely by how much the penalties for abusing migrants or defrauding the taxpayer will outweigh the rewards for abusing migrants and defrauding the taxpayer.

Payment by Results

We are well aware, because the Conservative Party and its New Labour acolytes have been informing us for several decades now, that spending taxpayers' money directly on public services is far less efficient than throwing it at profiteers; and of course government bureaucracy and IT systems get along so famously as to require no reminder. Doubtless these two factors serve more than adequately to explain and excuse the failure of a private NHS contractor to dispatch almost thirty thousand pieces of correspondence to patients in north London. The error went undetected for six months, and the NHS still does not know whether anyone's health has suffered as a result, though fortunately the victims were mostly in places like Camden, Islington, Enfield and Haringey and will therefore include many habitual Labour voters. The IT company shrugged off the issue with a bit of coder-brag about "the unique design of a custom script" and will presumably continue to rake in the cash.

Future Crumble

A legal case against some expensive knead-and-primp merchants provides a useful glimpse at the workings of our new, deregulated nation, where buccaneering entrepreneurs steer by pluck and gumption, nail the skin of their teeth to the mast and talk through the seat of their pants. West Sussex county council has prosecuted the luxury "wellness centre" chain Champneys for allegedly claiming that cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease could all be avoided by taking the corporate apple crumble according to directions. At rates of up to £230 a night, such medical miracles might arguably be the least one should expect; but the humourless local authority has filed nineteen charges and the trial would have started today but for the minor legal technicality of neither side attending court. It would presumably be too much to hope that the defendants were kept away by an attack of food poisoning or a Biblical inundation of the mineral springs; for its own part, West Sussex county council is Conservative, and therefore no doubt has a conscientious objection to legal judgements being made by unelected enemies of the people just because they happen to know something about the law.

Centre-Shot

Moderate Democrats have garnered moderate glory for the moderate virtues of the centre ground in the involuntary-celibate state of Virginia. The state governor has been trying to stop the sale of some varieties of semi-automatic assault weapon, and also to prohibit possession of magazines that enable more than a dozen people to be shot in a single burst. He claims the idea is to help prevent more Americans than absolutely necessary being perforationally disorganised in mass shootings; but of course such measures are merely the thin end of an Islamic Socialist wedge whose terminal extremity is gun control, confiscation of private property, the repeal of the Second Amendment, the triumph of terror, the Crescents and Stripes flying in every back-yard, and camel-crap in Mom's apple pie. In defence of civilised values, the state has been inundated with shooters' rights advocates, including a tribe of alleged white supremacists who allegedly hoped for another civil war, despite the Virgin State's indifferent fortunes in the last one. Accordingly, the moderate Democrats did what any sensible middle-of-the-road politicians would have done: they chose the lesser evil, sided with some colleagues of the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble, and voted for business as usual.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Esther 8 ix-xi, 9 i-xvi

When his queen refuses his drunken command to show herself off during a party, King Ahasuerus dismisses her in favour of the more ostensibly tractable Esther, whose cousin and guardian Mordecai thereby gains influence at the court. Esther foils a plot by Haman to have all the Jews in the realm exterminated, and the king gives Mordecai a free hand in exacting retribution. While Esther successfully pleads for the execution of Haman's ten sons, Mordecai writes to the king's officers throughout the realm, ordering that the Jews should be allowed to carry out a pogrom against their enemies. As a result, and with the collaboration of the authorities, more than seventy-five thousand people are lynched.

Although it was right in the sight of God to punish infractions by wiping out the perpetrator's family, the king is apparently inclined to stop after hanging Haman until Esther pushes for further measures. It is unclear by what means the Jews determined who should be subjected to their collective revenge: whether offenders were incriminated by their deeds, their words, their looks or simply by divine inspiration.

The book of Esther thus proudly presents the Jews as insidious and vengeful aliens perpetually worming their way into society's higher echelons in order to further their own tribal interests; it may even be the Ur-text for this disastrous stereotype. Of course God could not fail to foresee the consequences of this image for His chosen people; which no doubt explains why He inspired them not only to perpetuate the story but commemorate it with a festival. Like any abusive parent, He understood the need to make of the outside world an enemy in common, and thus give His victims no other choice but to rely on His own dubious mercies.

Paternal Warmth

Fifteen sons and daughters of Ham have been burned or suffocated to death as a result of the Christian States of America's continuing crusade to educate Haitians into a proper understanding of their ordained place in the world. An orphanage on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince caught fire, apparently as a result of efficiency savings by the Church of Bible Understanding, a non-profit Christian group which has consistently defied the Haitian bureaucracy and which the Almighty recently rewarded with a non-profit surplus three times the size of its charitable expenses.

Haiti, of course, is no stranger to efficiency savings. As the location of history's most successful slave revolt, Haiti has been a unique threat to the USA since the eighteenth century, and has frequently been considered to pose an existential peril on a par with Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala. Largely as a result of repeated benign interventions, little priority is given to such luxuries as ambulances and bottled oxygen; and thanks to a couple of centuries of enforced democratisation, the Haitian authorities lack the means to enforce the kind of repressive safety regulations that are even now inconveniencing Grenfell-positive landlords in Britain.

Unity Undermined

Plans to connect two provinces of the Recrudescent Imperium by stretching a large dead cat over the Irish Sea may be complicated by the presence of souvenirs from our various military and industrial triumphs. Bomb Squad boffins, who evidently haven't had enough to do since the Troubles came to an end, said that risks would be posed by unexploded munitions dumped during Mr Churchill's glorious victories against Prussian militarism, as well as by the nuclear waste thrown out in the hope of mutating the traitorous Fenians into tolerantly glowing, Trumpster-hued Ulstermen. Naturally Her Majesty's Government has more important things to do than monitor the dump-site, so that when a gas pipeline was under construction twenty years ago a child was injured by a phosphorous device; thus clearly demonstrating the advantages of confining public works of major Britishness to the expendable north. Even the boffins admit that in the present case nothing more would be at risk than the project and its personnel: a matter easily resolved by dispensing with all that nasty Health and Safety red tape which has held the nation for so long in its icy, Stalinistic grip. In any case, the People's Haystack would not be inconvenienced, since for any distance exceeding twenty miles he prefers to use a jet; and once completed the bridge will be an invaluable cavalry route, should it become necessary to take Cromwellian measures against the recalcitrant unionists of Dublin.

A Very British Babel

Parliamentarians are "extremely disappointed" to discover that their sycophantic naming of the clock tower at the Palace of Westminster after a prominent tax-dodger will not be enough to lower the bill for its repair. In defiance of beastly foreign Health and Safety rules, the tower is smeared with toxic lead paint and riddled with asbestos in unexpected places; and thanks to the degree of environmental Britishness permitted under the mayoral régime of the People's Haystack, levels of local pollution are highly corrosive. Most appropriately of all given the tower's status as a national symbol, there is bomb damage from the Second World War which nobody has bothered to fix properly. It has even been suggested that there might be a need to employ some sort of expert chronometrical specialist wallah who knows something about clocks; presumably because the clock itself remains in such unpatriotic disrepair as to imply that time in Westminster is moving forward.

Britannia is Not a Dyke

Fiendish foreign oceanographers have attempted to hijack climate change, diverting it from legitimate use as an advertising tool for fossil fuel corporations and perverting it into an excuse to belittle the British Isles into a mere bulwark against wet feet. They propose building two massive dams, one stretching from Scotland to Norway and the other from western France to the mainland, in order to enclose the North Sea and protect a few million inconsequential persons from rising water levels. Blithely estimating the cost of such a project at barely one-tenth of one per cent of the combined GDP of the countries that would benefit, they entirely ignore the calamitous potential for losing up to £500,000 million which might otherwise be spent on tax cuts for the deserving. It is fortunate for Britain's paragons of wealth creation that Her Majesty's Government has no interest in co-operating with Euro-wogs, and still less in protecting people from climate change; otherwise less pragmatically buccaneering breeds might be tempted to consider the situation an emergency.

Let's All Invade Abyssinia

Recently cleansed from the Italian government and subject to various criminal charges ranging from defamation to kidnapping, the Italian race-baiter Matteo Salvini has apparently adopted the way of the Reverend Blair and joined the international lecture circuit. An organisation called Lega del Mondo, founded by himself and presumably dedicated to peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations, is pushing tickets for speaking events in the UK, at the very populist price of £28 each. The mayor of Liverpool, among others, has responded with some rather inhospitable comments, thereby justifying yet further the low opinions of that city and its region expressed on various occasions by the People's Haystack. There is no hint as yet that Priti Patel's Home Office intends banning Salvini from our shores either for hate speech or for being a crook, despite the obvious comic potential in such a move.

Insidious Doctors, Yellow Perils

For our sub-verminous overlords at least, it appears that the Year of the Rat has got off to an auspicious start. With palpable relief, the more exalted specimens of Rattus bevani have declared that there exists at least one threat to the health of the nation more serious and imminent than that posed by Her Majesty's Government. By a remarkable stroke of good fortune, the origin of the threat is one of those inscrutable foreign places; and by a convenient coincidence, the Minister for Profitable Healthcare is facing some little embarrassment about his local hospital, where his close friend is chief executive and where a witch-hunt against the medical staff has gone a bit Head Boy-shaped. Hancock has recused himself from all responsibility, and doubtless the spads are rushing forth from the hatcheries to hurl themselves into the line of any fire that comes his way; but in the meantime a substitute witch-hunt is indubitably called for. The proles may still not be quite ready to acclaim the Conservatives for doctor-bashing; but they will surely stand shoulder to shoulder with Hancock when he's cleaning out the disease-spreading Heathen Chinee and closing all those Marmite-free restaurants.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Gingivitis xxiii-xxxi

In the garden of the Creator, said the Father of Teeth unreliably, there are only two crops: namely carrots and sticks, and He favoured the sticks. I did my best, said the Father of Teeth, to widen His horticultural horizons, first by suggesting that His garden might benefit from a potato or two and then by smuggling them in while He was off smiting somebody. But it never worked, said the Father of Teeth, because He could spot anything that didn't look like a carrot or a stick from halfway across Creation and if anything looked like a potato or a radish, or even if He suspected a carrot of getting ideas above its station, He would send His angels to uproot it and cast it into outer darkness, the place of wailing and gnashing of roots. Whether because He preferred the dead and dry to the living and juicy, as He always did with scriptures and women; or whether He disapproved of all those tuberous reachings into the chthonic depths, or whether He just found the sticks a bit crunchier, said the Father of Teeth, He just always preferred the sticks; I couldn't do a thing about it.

Henry VIII, MD

Astoundingly enough, after a decade of Conservative government and four decades of Conservative policy, the National Health Service has still somehow managed to avoid being in tip-top shape. With the Brexit dividend mere months from delivery, the People's Haystack is naturally seeking emergency powers to ensure that the famous three hundred and fifty million a week are not spaffed up any hospital walls, especially in the four hundred or so staffless ones he's going to build with his own hands. New legislation will enable the Government to remove the operational independence of NHS England, whose chief executive has recently formulated some dangerous ideas about introducing "an integrated care system across England, with the ability to plan collectively." After the roaring successes of John Major's internal market, Gordon Brown's PFI boondoggle and the coalition's Turkey Twizzler-sponsored Health and Social Care Act, nothing could be more disastrous than to try turning the NHS into some sort of national health service.

A Princely Penance

For all Saxe-Coburg birthdays Britons fly the British flag:
Salute the Queen Gawblesser with the Union's cross-patch rag,
Salute her fossil consort for the jolly British way
His diplomatic tact so neatly fits our present day;
And, not to be out-tributed, the heir in waiting too
Must get his little kowtow with the old red, white and blue.
And baby Edward, fifty-five, should never be forgot;
Nor even Princess Anne, who is least worthless of the lot.
Tax-dodgers, noisy racists, cranks, entitled little twits
Must have their British pomp as British circumstance befits:
Lest others see a touch of Ruritania in our ranks,
We rah-rah for them all with our most sycophantic thanks.

But this year there is one for whom the colours will not fly:
The slightly wormy apple of his mother's glassy eye,
Too loyal to his chums to see that in among them sat
A sex offender got up as a friendly kleptocrat.
Because the vulgar foreigner's conveniently dead,
His Highness seemed to feel that there was no more to be said
Except that all the fuss had made him really rather tired,
And that his own nobility was much to be admired.
Uncharitable persons might have thought that he behaved
As if his clan's great Empire had been built by folk enslaved;
And so he is withdrawing from the business of the Crown,
While grovelling is rationed until all the fuss dies down.

Orgasmina Mite

In Other News

Mere scientists in the Antarctic have discovered that the Thwaites glacier is more vulnerable to melting than previously thought, being about the size of the UK and with only slightly more solid foundations. The glacier's collapse would expose much more of the region to warmer waters, and could precipitate global sea-level rises which would drown various major cities, though not of course their owners. This no doubt explains why the research was considered worthy of mention, however brief, in Britain's free and cantankerous Press. It remains as yet unclear whether Her Majesty's Government will welcome the extra freedom of movement for Britain's fish, or send out some silly Cnut to order the waters to retreat.

Squeak Loud and Wave a Soggy Twig

In keeping with the spirit of "friendly co-operation with sovereign equals" which implies that one Brexitannia is worth any twenty-seven beastly Euro-wogs, Her Majesty's Government is undertaking a stealthy re-armament programme. Should the Brusso-Strasbourgian Nazi-Soviet Politbunker refuse its unconditional surrender, convoys of Royal Navy patrol ships will stand by to keep Britain's fish safe for British anglers. Presumably the Government hopes to offset the economic consequences of no-deal by sending out the press-gangs to incentivise idle proles into a life of buccaneering and privateering. Nevertheless, despite the respective geographical dimensions of the mainland and the EU, it remains as yet unclear how many seaworthy vessels will be available should the need arise to fight a two-front war over cod and Gibraltar.

Do Labour's Black Fillies Have a Facial Diversity Problem?

"Three leading British media outlets" or, in Standard English, two Conservative Party outlets and Getty Images, have misidentified pictures of Labour MPs, all of whom just happen to be black and female: the BBC misnamed a backbencher, apparently because a front-bencher looked very similar, and the London Evening Osborne used a picture of a third MP in reporting on the BBC's error. The sniggering schoolboy's free-sheet blamed Getty Images for captioning the picture wrongly, since the London Evening Osborne editorial staff does not include any ex-parliamentarians with facial recognition abilities that extend beyond the glistening pink dough of the standard Conservative gluteus magniloquens. Even in a country where Boris Johnson can make a bit of pocket-money as a journalist, it seems the free, fair and cantankerous media are not as good with the female coloureds as one might hope.

United in Pragmatism

I am sure we all rejoice with Tumbledown Tessie, who has been granted that sublime democratic privilege of those expunged from high office: the opportunity to show up their successor. Having been the successor to Britain's glistening pink Head Boy, the dead-eyed warden herself was spared the sharp end of this ritual: Daveybloke is nothing if not lazy, and once his privileges were withdrawn he couldn't get out of Big School fast enough. The dead-eyed warden belongs to the obsessively, rather than casually, brutish wing of the party, and has a work ethic to match her bigotry; not that the task of humiliating her successor was made more difficult by the fact that her successor was Dominic Raab. Being Tumbledown Tessie, who liked to threaten the beastly Euro-wogs with terminating Britain's shared security arrangements, she naturally chose to criticise Raab on the grounds of endangering Britain's shared security arrangements with the beastly Euro-wogs; but Raab was too scared or too stupid even to throw that back at her. Instead he scuttled ignominiously for the centre ground by raising the spectre of free movement: if there is one thing on which Tumbledown Tessie and her hated usurpers can find common, if not positively vulgar ground, it is that no amount of law and order can justify allowing mere immigrants to behave like expatriate workers.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Exodus 10 i-iii

After sending seven plagues upon Egypt, God boasts to Moses that He has hardened Pharaoh's heart and the hearts of his servants, purely in order that He may afflict them with further plagues. Israelite parents and grandparents will, God proclaims, be at liberty to recount His cruelties in order to scare children into obedience.

God informs Moses of His personal responsibility for at least some of the foregoing plagues and for all those to follow, including the summary execution of every first-born child in Egypt as punishment for the policy which God Himself has imposed on Pharaoh. There is no reason to believe that this sadistic modus operandi was subject to the slightest modification by the Saviour: God's addiction to collective punishment is unabated in the New Testament, as Jesus made clear when He promised a fate worse than that of Sodom and Gomorrah for any city in which His message is not heard (Matthew 10 xv). Jesus also clearly stated that all things are possible for God but not for humanity, thereby brazenly admitting His Father's culpability in the damnation of all those whom He made incapable of gaining His arbitrary favour.

God's mass torture and murder of Egyptians as an object-lesson for His chosen is a clear forerunner of the Saviour's proclamation that God had blinded a man from birth in order to gain advertising mileage from his eventual cure. Whether this dubious refinement offers much in the way of redeeming moral value must remain a matter for debate.

Zelo Street Legalballs

Most of us make mistakes, although society's more exalted echelons are generally prepared to admit to them only as a euphemism for crimes. Even your own correspondent has been known to confuse the noun practice with the verb practise, until corrected by an immigrant. No wonder, then, that professional journalists err here and there, and occasionally even on matters of fact; and if you wait patiently and don't blink too much, you might witness one of them taking the responsibility.

Tim Fenton of Zelo Street, the Crewe-based scourge of the factually-challenged, has made a factual error, which he subsequently withdrew with apologies. Nevertheless, he has been hit with a large legal bill; and being a civilian operator he lacks the resources upon which more professional and scumbag outfits can call for the purpose of exhausting those who fight against them. If you're able and you haven't already, please do us all a favour and help him out here. Thanks.