The Romans in Britain

Since the Church of England sprang from Henry Tudor's gonads in the sixteenth century, England has had only a handful of Catholic rulers; among them the noted culture warrior Bloody Mary, the would-be despot James II, and the Reverend Tony Blair who demonstrated his usual brand of moral courage by keeping his faith secret until after he left office. Now that another, almost equally controlled set of gonads has brought our present leader crashing back into the papal bosom, it is to be hoped that this plucky penetration by the rampant spirit of Britishness will enable the Vatican's greed, hypocrisy, self-righteousness, exclusionism and sexual creepiness to be entrepreneurially efficientised in line with those of the Conservative Party.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Acts of the Apostles 12 xx-xxiii

King Herod is annoyed with the people of Tyre and Sidon, and as their country's food supply depends on him they sue for peace through the king's servant. Herod delivers a ceremonial speech, which the people acclaim as the voice of a god, not of a man. Immediately an angel of the Lord strikes Herod down for neglecting to credit God with the glory.

It is notable that this episode occurs after Herod's persecution of the apostles, which included having James the Greater put to the sword and Peter imprisoned. In response to earnest prayer God sends an angel to rescue Peter; but James is deemed as expendable as the sentries and the inhabitants of Tyre and Sidon who fall victim to Herod's irritation.

Tyre and Sidon, whose people the Saviour clearly despised, was a place of restless natives as far back as the glorious days of the holy Canaanite genocide; this explains why the all-merciful Father did not see fit to intervene and stop the violence and starvation with which Herod was presumably inducing them to participate in the peace process. God's hired killer waits until Herod makes his ceremonial oration and omits to give God the proper tithe from the flattery of his vassals. Hence, as so often occurs upon a careful reading of Scripture, the mystery of God's priorities becomes rather simple to solve.

On the Naughty Pedestal

Doubtless aware that the Angel of the North will be broken up or sold to a private collector at the earliest opportunity, its creator has intervened in one of the culture war's more prolonged skirmishes. Regarding the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University's Oriel College, Antony Gormley has advanced a sensible compromise between the righteous demands of the woke and the bottom-shifting cowardice of the college authorities. Rather than removing the statue, or even making the inscription more informative as suggested by your correspondent some little time ago, Gormley proposes turning the statue to face the wall. This would be an apt and evocative symbol of collective shame; which of course is why it almost certainly will not be adopted.

Not Quite Assimilated

Sanctions against the Vatican remain about as likely as ever after the discovery of another mass grave of children. Remains of two hundred and fifteen failed Canadians were discovered on the grounds of a former cultural cleansing establishment in British Columbia. The "residential school" was essentially a boarding school run along healthy British lines, with copious bullying, under-feeding, racism and sexual abuse, and a Roman Catholic spiritual component of bullying, under-feeding, racism and sexual abuse. Fortunately for educational patriots, the number of students (inmates, in Standard English) who died of the Canadian government's attempt to raise them into deserving subjects of Her Majesty's British Commonwealth of Nations will probably never be known, since many deaths were too native to be counted.

Progressive Persecution

Oil companies and their chums are squealing with moral indignation after a Dutch court ordered Shell to stop doing less than nothing to mitigate the climate crisis and start doing too little too late. At the same time, an activist group gained two places on the board of Exxon Valdez Mobil; and investors at Chevron, the second dirtiest fossil fuel company, voted to force a cut in emissions. An outraged editorial in the Wall Street Murdoch proclaimed the whole ghastly day a "progressive political coup" and thus self-evidently a Bad Thing, while enjoining Exxon to continue its enterprises on behalf of the light and crude. Shell has announced its intention to appeal the court decision, but it remains as yet unclear which country's taxpayers will have the honour of footing the bill.

Worthy Partners

A Sky News Australia report on the shooting of Sasha Johnson has received thousands of appreciative comments from the kind of people who share Her Majesty's Government's much-touted instinct for free speech among the deserving. Johnson, a Black Lives Matter activist who in all probability harbours an irrational hatred of statues and dislikes even the most positive aspects of slavery, was reviled as a criminal and preacher of violence while various persons with legitimate and understandable concerns called for all the usual. Celebrations of Global Britain's new trade deal with its former prison colony will gain an extra sparkle from this latest demonstration that British values are as rampant in the land of Rupert Murdoch's nativity as they are among the head-chopping House of Saud.

When You've Got the Gammons, Who Needs a Letter-Box?

Like the Britain it naturally governs, the party of Winston Churchill is free from institutional racism; as is the party of Enoch Powell, Norman Tebbit, Theresa May, Zac Goldsmith and Boris Johnson. A report into the party's innocence, commissioned by the Home Secretary responsible for the hostile environment and the Windrush débâcle, has reached the predictable conclusion that certain people might care to moderate their language a bit. So blatant is the whitewash that the report has provoked scepticism even from a few of those Muslims who are greedy or stupid enough to be members of the party that despises them. One source was confident enough in the benevolent tolerance of their colleagues to note anonymously that others have noted that no Muslim Conservative MPs were quoted in the report; which must certainly have been helpful to those very few journalists who couldn't be bothered to read it. Someone else pondered why a report commissioned by Theresa May might possibly fail to examine the reasons why the Conservative Party was attracting racist bigots rather than decent Muslims like himself. Meanwhile Goldsmith, who ran a crudely racist mayoral campaign in London, simply denied everything; while Johnson issued the standard expression of regret that people from alien cultures can be so over-sensitive, and proclaimed that he considers abstention from Muslim-baiting one of the necessary burdens of his office. Lessons will no doubt be learned.

Aliens

Hurrah for the Heathen Chinee!
Along with the Land of the Free,
They're sending toy cars
To the surface of Mars,
Some xenomorph lichens to see!

Today worlds, tomorrow the stars!
More profits, more borders, more wars!
Incontinently,
The lichens shall be
Conscripted, with earthy huzzahs!

Pacifica Botts

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Incisors ccxxxix-cclxvii

Amid several further incidents of still more dubious attestation, therefore, the Father of Teeth wandered into a bar, where he encountered a Boggle-Eyed Corn God with drooping ears and an attitude of rootless discontent. "Alas!" mourned the Boggle-Eyed Corn God on the slightest provocation, and sometimes not even on that. "Alas for the old ways, the old days, the great tradition of sacrifice, which in these times is fled and corrupted beyond all measure and repair!"

"What's eating you?" inquired the Father of Teeth.
"Alas," replied the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, "once I had a tribe, a humble and dutiful tribe, which would sacrifice to me as was my due, and in return I made the corn grow season after season. The Creator alone knows what they did with the filthy stuff, but they reaped what they sowed and we all got along together."
"And then they found someone else," suggested the Father of Teeth, who had been in a bar before.
"Took up phallus worship, of all things," concurred the Boggle-Eyed Corn God. "Nothing stirs them now but priapic priests and wanton catamites: not a sacrifice to be had from one season to the next. All their best blood gets saved up and sold off, in return for fancy food and aphrodisiacs. Meanwhile I can hardly get the corn up any more, and those who still have to subsist on it are less and less grateful for my bounty. Alas!"

And the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's great hairy ears drooped even lower than before, while some whisky-makers at a far table glanced across and decided he wasn't worth mashing.

Upon the following morn the Father of Teeth resumed his wanderings, accompanied by a powerful hangover, and in due course he came upon the very tribe of which the Boggle-Eyed Corn God had spoken. Noisy rites were being enacted, involving some scantily-clad pubescents, some sleek and well-fed middle-aged men, and an unpleasantly blunt and beribboned maypole. Retreating from the undignified spectacle, the Father of Teeth encountered the Boggle-Eyed Corn God wandering amid the weeds with a hangover hardly less potent than his own. "Alas," said the Boggle-Eyed Corn God.
"He who chews the hardest evacuates the quickest," said the Father of Teeth. "You must evolve."
"Will it hurt?" asked the Boggle-Eyed Corn God.
"Probably," said the Father of Teeth; but he was considerate enough to bite off the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's drooping hairy ears at the very beginning, so that the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's agonies would not be aggravated by the sound of his own shrieks.

Then the Father of Teeth took the skeleton of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, and gnawed the long bones into a long cylindrical frame, rounded at one end and tapering at the other. He took the skin of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, and stretched it taut over the frame; and beneath the frame he hung a basket woven of the hairs from the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's ears. On each side of the basket the Father of Teeth fixed a propeller with blades made from three of his best-oiled canines; and the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's two boggly eyes he stuck out in front on their thick green stalks.

As night came on again, and the doings about the maypole were building to a frenzy of almost-reassured middle-aged masculinity, the Father of Teeth clambered cursing and complaining into the basket. Stretching up to the great cylinder above, he unscrewed a nozzle fashioned from the most delicate bones of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God's seventh fingers. Into this the Father of Teeth belched prodigiously, causing the air inside the cylinder to flee in disorder and the cylinder to rise slowly and disgustedly above the ground. When the basket cleared the tree-tops the Father of Teeth started up the propellers, and with loud grinding and chattering the vast zeppelin which had been the Boggle-Eyed Corn God made its way towards the faithless tribe.

The racket was audible from a great distance, so all ceremonies were in abeyance long before the zeppelin appeared above their heads. The zeppelin clattered and hovered directly above the maypole, with the Father of Teeth grinning from the gondola and the two boggly eyes of the Boggle-Eyed Corn God glowering and rotating like mad dancing blood-moons. While the potency of the middle-aged men shrivelled considerably, the draught from the propellers drew the scantily-clad pubescents up into the air, where their brief angelic flight was terminated in a rich spray of pulp that splattered the village and its neglected fields in thick and glistening black.

"Now," said the Father of Teeth to the zeppelin which had been the Boggle-Eyed Corn God, as he clambered from the basket and made ready to slide down the maypole, "with a little imagination I am sure that you and these shivering gentlemen can arrive at some new and mutually beneficial arrangement; especially as I see that many among the congregation have already collected their scythes."

Comic Flight

Flag-defiling bunny-huggers at the New Economics Foundation have made the outrageous claim that expanding British airports might exacerbate the climate crisis, rather than helping to resolve it through the powers of patriotic rah-rah. The NEF's report even implies that capitalists infused with British values might ignore or distort any information which may treacherously neglect to assist them in their relentless quest for economic prosperity and social justice. Fortunately, any need for the Ministry for Motoring to confiscate and redact the report is prevented by the British sense of humour: the authors recommend that the matter should be placed in the hands of Richard Desmond, via his official channel Robert Jenrick, who would no doubt be only too glad to advise the drowned, the deafened and the asthmatic as to what they can do with their problems.

We Abolished Slavery, Too

After it emerged that the Ministry for Wog Control had illegally harassed, persecuted and deported thousands of Britons, Her Majesty's Government set up a compensation scheme and invited victims of the Ministry for Wog Control to hand over their personal details to the Ministry for Wog Control. Many victims have apparently proved reluctant to enter into the spirit of this healing exercise, possibly because they are descended from immigrants and thus insufficiently sympathetic to the notion of British fair play. Indeed, twenty-one people have gone to such fanatical extremes of vindictiveness as to die before their claims could be processed. In the face of such black ingratitude, the Ministry has felt disinclined to trouble itself with recruiting and training the necessary case-workers, especially when it has so much important work to do in depriving Britain's remaining lesser breeds of their vote. Genuine patriots will once more sigh with relief at the lack of structural racism which has kept Theresa May, the responsible Home Secretary, as a Member of Parliament on full salary.

Oxford Blues

It certainly is a jolly good thing that the realm of Albion has no structural racism, otherwise the University of Oxford's decision against removing its statue of Cecil Rhodes might be prone to misinterpretation. Despite the advice of an independent commission, Oriel College has declined to begin the "legal process" of taking down its monument to Rhodes' generosity towards the élite sons of the master race because of the associated "regulatory and financial challenges." The nature of these challenges may perhaps be inferred from the gushing approbation of Her Majesty's Government's junior education and fireplace monitor, who praised the decision on the grounds that toning down the rah-rah about our glorious racists would constitute censorship of history. Still, it would be unfair to claim that the college authorities are taking no action. They have pledged to increase provisions for the piccaninnies, so that Oxford's grovelling tribute to the great munificence of Rhodes may be witnessed and shared by even more of the lesser breeds than before.

What We Can Do When We Try

Necessity being the mother of invention and the stakes not much more significant than the viability of the species, it was only a matter of time before a viable solution was found for the climate crisis. After only a decade's work, seventeen per cent of terrestrial ecosystems and a full eight per cent of marine areas have been brought under the formal rubric of "protected areas." It is true that many such areas lack anything so crass and materialistic as actual protection, and that anything more ambitious is likely remain politically impracticable because of the potential inconvenience to the politicians and their paymasters. Nevertheless, the perpetrators and abettors of the Anthropocene Extinction Event certainly deserve credit for having the imagination to set themselves at least one target so paltry that they could almost more or less manage to achieve it.

Virtuous Proliferation

Accelerating the nuclear arms race may retard the objectives of the non-proliferation treaty, according to what Britain's leading liberal newspaper calls a "surprise conclusion" by a former civil servant, abetted by some ghastly little academics at the hotbed of treasonous wokery that is the London School of Economics. The Stratton-Symonds administration has had its silly blond front-man announce an increase in the UK's US-dependent independent nuclear deterrent, which has done such a fine job protecting the Freedom of the Seas from Islamist terrorism and Euro-wog fish-filchers. The former permanent secretary at the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets has informed his colleagues at the House of Donors, Sycophants and Loose-Sphinctered Catamites that such a move would represent a step away from the objectives of the treaty, even though the Minister for Misnomer, James Cleverly, has explicitly mouthed that the nation's "priority is to reinforce the non-proliferation treaty." With such extremism running rampant in the upper chamber of our Mother of Parliaments, it can only be a matter of time before some sort of moral equivalence is claimed between the mad mullahs of Tehran and those of the Conservative and Unionist Party.

All Hail the Spring

All hail the Spring! Let fragrant Breeze
Bring forth the chubby Buds to Trees,
While Yammerings of Birds new born
Slice hungry through the bloodied Dawn.

Let vengeful Heaven's Ice descend,
The Greenish Flab of Buds to rend
And brain the Nestling, without Fail!
O Gelid Dispensation, hail!

Samuel Grimsnipe

Bad Theology

Text for today: Matthew 10 xxix-xxxvii

Jesus tells His apostles that sparrows, despite their insignificance in the market, cannot fall to the ground without the will of God. He assures the apostles that they are worth more than many sparrows, and states that His mercy is sufficiently finite to encompass only those who acknowledge Him. He then states that He has not come to bring peace but a sword and that He will set family members against one another, because those who value earthly ties above Him are unworthy of Him.

The Saviour boasts that no suffering or death, even of the most insignificant creatures, can take place without His Father's consent, and pledges that He will reward the loyalty of His vassals by interceding with the Heavenly tyrant on their behalf. The earthly price of such loyalty will be further suffering, up to and including ostracism and persecution by one's own family. According to the Saviour, such discord should be considered advantageous, since earthly relationships are no more than a distraction and a temptation away from servitude to Himself.

This pronouncement to His most trusted followers shows the Saviour at His most cynically frank. As is common in abusive relationships, the Father and His accomplice cannot allow their victims to depend on anyone other than themselves; and we may safely assume that human beings are worth more to the Father than small reformed dinosaurs because the sufferings of human beings tend to be more varied and more prolonged.

Tangerine Eidolon

Though many traitors escape hanging, the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble have been strung up in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC, albeit only in pictorial form: a Time magazine photograph is substituting until a portraitist can be found with sufficiently few artistic scruples and industrial quantities of orange paint. The Trumpster is shown seated at the Resolute Desk, with one of his little handettes stretched out on the surface and the other close to the magnifying camera, in a pose suggesting resolute haemorrhoids. His operator, the head-tribble, is framed with appropriate grandeur against one of the room's ludicrously pompous door-frames. Rather unfairly, the correspondent for Britain's leading liberal newspaper makes much of the picture's setting amid portraits of genuine statesmen and George H W Bush, as though the Trumpster régime were the first US presidential term with no chief executive. In fact, unlike the ga-ga Hollywood mediocrity in the 1980s and the grinning chimpanzee in the 2000s, the Trumpster and his head-tribble are merely the first interregnum in recent history to lose after only one term.

Subtler Shadings

Contrary to the racialist prejudices manifested by the woke metropolitan élite, not all wogs are the same. Many, it is true, are beastly job-stealing benefit-claiming asylum seekers, and several more are beastly foreign students attempting to infect the British university industry with the beastly foreign idea that education might be a matter of cultural and intellectual exchange rather than nationalistic self-promotion. There are certain wogs, however, who fall into neither of these categories, leading the Ministry for Wog Control to the distinctly unusual conclusion that there are some for whom an environment may occasionally be too hostile. Unaware that Brexit has been satisfactorily defined as Brexit, and doubtless trusting naïvely in their own governments' pedantic adherence to international law and other scraps of paper, EU citizens have continued blatantly arriving in Britain; where wog disposal personnel, all gassed up on their zeal to save the NHS, have naturally and Britishly responded by imprisoning them behind barbed wire. The Ministry has now intervened to remind its boot-boys that Euro-wogs, though undeniably beastly, are relatively white and wealthy and should therefore be bullied only within appropriate limits.

Chopper Trouble

Unpatriotic and backsliding persons have cast doubt upon, of all things, the National Haystack's commitment to mitigating the climate catastrophe. The Haystack was due in the Midlands to rah-rah a bike hire scheme; and although he managed to stop short of claiming credit for inventing the scheme, he did eschew the cleaner but inconveniently plebeian railway in favour of a helicopter registered to a company chaired by one of his squillionaire chumlies. It was Britain's former Head Boy, the present Lord Puce of Greensill, who pioneered the Bullingdon Club's version of sustainable transport, pedal-pushing for the paparazzi while his limousine followed behind; but the man who spent eight glorious years poisoning Londoners with illegal levels of air pollution could hardly be expected to keep his hypocrisy on so rudimentary a level. Nevertheless, it seems increasingly likely that a dim view will be taken at the forthcoming Bozza Saves the World bash, especially by some of the more mean-spirited piccaninnies.

Eat the Sky

Not only will the climate catastrophe cause uncomfortable turbulence on business flights, drown valuable real estate and give rise to swarming hordes of beastly migrants. The changes in the composition of the air are thinning out the stratosphere, which is just upstairs and which matters to some Guardian readers owing to the potential for deterioration in the performance of the Global Positioning System. Still, the Anthropocene Extinction Event remains something less than front-page news; nevertheless, within a few decades the inconvenience may be so significant as to affect mobile phones and navigation robots, and thereby impinge even upon the consciousness of mainstream journalists.

Looming Threat

Britain is to be invaded by an eleven-foot Turkish golem girl asylum seeker, which will spend twelve weeks from 27 July tramping across Europe from the Syrian border. The giant stealer of British jobs is part of a vast project involving art installations, performances and events designed to show that Europeans will occasionally welcome undrowned refugee children as long as they keep on walking. Propelled by a swarming horde of puppeteers, the crowder-out of native stock will eventually fetch up in Manchester where a breeding colony has been established. It remains as yet unclear what plans the Ministry for Wog Control has hatched for the peril's destruction, but doubtless they are working on it.

America a Prophecy

Tyger, Tyger, let and loosed on
Streets and residents of Houston,
What immortal hand or mind
Spared thee shooting from behind?

What God of justice swift and sure
Could not thy lynching yet endure?
What Demiurge so limp and lame
Stopped Texas freemen killing game?

Tyger, Tyger, no man's rug,
No dealer of illicit drug,
Suspected of no urban sin:
Thy stripes are black, but not thy skin.

with apologies to William Blake

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Cavities clviii-clxxiii

Biting his way through the rock, the Father of Teeth nevertheless broke through into a vast cavern, where by the greenish glow of his luminous grin he saw a great gleaming pile of pink and white. Almost to the scraped ceiling rose the main mound of choppers and chompers, with surrounding subsidiary hillocks of glossy gums and moulded molars, their persistent plastic smiles glimmering in the gloom with more-than-organic insincerity.

Having widened the aperture a little more, the Father of Teeth clenched his unpardonable feet and executed a triple back somersault with insectoid flailings that brought him clattering into the midst of the grinding and chattering pile. For aeons he swam and sported among the shallows and depths of the dentures, which snapped and scraped most spiritually while he dived ever deeper among them.

At the very roots of the main mound, beneath a stratum where gums and gnashers were melted together in bubbly smiles that seemed fairly innovative even to the Father of Teeth, he discovered the fossilised remnants of the dragon. Upon the smeared and scattered imprints of its long-vanished bones, carved out in the incisive fluorescence of the stalagmites and stalactites that glowed from the Father of Teeth's tar-pit grin. the bite-marks were plainly visible.

"Truly it has been said," mused the Father of Teeth, as he rose once more to the surface and resumed a leisurely, rattling backstroke, "that he who digs a treasure-pit shall be eaten up by his appetites, and that in the hoarding of worldly goods it is generally best to diversify one's investments."

Death Dibs

Like all precious and wonderful things, law and order come at a cost; which explains why the Christian state of Idaho is beginning to worry about the fiscal implications of executing dying people. Quite apart from the problems involved in obtaining the necessary drugs, at least one lawyer has pointed out that some death rows are "starting to feel like assisted living," handing out room and board and even medical care to elderly residents who have been awaiting execution for an average of almost two decades. Evidently the spectre of penitentiary Socialism has stirred the Christian state of Idaho into virtuous action, as it's now readying itself to put to death a sixty-five-year-old with diabetes, bladder tumours and diseases of the heart and lung. The prisoner's sister has expressed the hope that God will take him first; although given that God sat complacently by while her brother committed two murders, she may yet be disappointed. During the man's childhood his stepfather beat him badly enough to cause brain damage, raped him and hired him out for others to rape; since God was presumably in conference with the Vatican at the time, it remains as yet unclear whether His mercy will exceed that of the Christian state of Idaho.

Just Another Trash-fire

Instead of taking the advice of the Conservative candidate for mayor of London, and utilising their residential liberty as a chance to save for a mortgage, the newly homeless residents of a London high-rise have done nothing but complain. Following the Grenfell disaster in June 2017, the Government pledged to remove dangerous cladding by June 2020; that pledge has been fulfilled after the usual Johnsonian manner, thanks to the miserly attitude of leaseholders. Owing to vital considerations of slumlord protection, leaseholders are expected to cough up tens of thousands in order to make up the shortfall between what safer cladding costs and what landlords and Her Majesty's Government feel inclined to contribute towards the safety of expendables. It appears that many tenants are shirking their duty in this regard, despite the useful advice available from the Richard Desmond Charity helpline.

Justice Discharged

The Christian state of South Carolina will shortly join the Christian states of Utah, Mississippi and Oklahoma in carrying out executions by firing squad, despite the risk of giving rise to a perceived if tenuous link between violence and guns. The long-standing shortage of drugs for lethal injections has caused several Christian states to re-evaluate their options for mortificatory justice, and South Carolina has been itching for a fix these past ten years, during which thirty-seven potential beneficiaries have piled up on Death Row. Liberal snowflakes attempted to emasculate the new law with pettifogging amendments, such as forcing those who impose the death penalty to observe the process of implementation; but in the Christian state of South Carolina the Lord has laid down a self-evident and inalienable distinction between those who do and those who do not, morally speaking, need to face the consequences of their actions.

Pick a Boney

Rather than giving thanks for Mr Churchill, the beastly French have had the gall to commemorate the anniversary of Napoleon's death, even though his memory remains rather more controversial than that of sundry Anglophone slave-owners. Some see the Emperor as a military genius and founder of a reasonably enlightened and durable political system; others regard him as a despot whose greed and egomania spread death and suffering all over Europe. In their postmodern Gallic way, of course, both sides are correct. Napoleon was an enlightened despot: England would almost certainly be less stupid and better run today if he had managed to conquer it. But he also re-introduced slavery, which had been abolished by the beastly revolutionaries; and he tried to conquer Russia, the hardships of whose people are sometimes acknowledged because on that occasion they perished for tsars and not for commissars. With characteristic duplicity, the French president acknowledged both sides of the Emperor during the commemorations; which is certainly not the sort of thing any British patriot would do with Mr Churchill.

An Awfully Big Deal

A corrupt, caste-ridden and viciously nationalistic country, whose government betrays an atavistic urge towards worship of the milk-snatching sacred cow, has stumbled at last to the brink of a trade deal with Narendra Modi's India. The Symonds-Stratton administration's rah-rah team bragged that the results would be bigger than the EU and the USA combined: an assertion which, for Britain's leading liberal newspaper, brooked neither analysis nor contradiction. Of more material importance is the possibility that Her Majesty's systematically non-racist Ministry for Wog Control will be able to deport more migrants in return for permitting Indian students to pay British university fees without being immediately locked up. The chancellor's father-in-law has graciously agreed to create a thousand jobs; but that of course is a mere detail, and Little Rishi's kickback not even that.

How Mr Churchill and his Chums Freed the Brilliant Realm of Ulster from its Blight of Seditious Evil

Her Madge Gawblesser has issued an official rah-rah to commemorate the centenary of the Government of Ireland Act, which divided the island into Northern Ireland and another bit that doesn't matter very much. One of the speech-writers was puckish enough to sneak in a line crediting the recently tossed-aside peace to "a generation of leaders who had the vision and courage to put reconciliation before division," rather than aspiring to the methods used by the generation of Johnson, May, Foster and Poots. The National Haystack himself had a bit of a blather about "the formation of the United Kingdom as we know it today," a self-evident blessing to all concerned, though the border question may have been a little clearer in 1921. While strangely disinclined towards optimistic references to bridges, tunnels or increased employment for border guards, Johnson just about managed to acknowledge the fact that different people will have differing perspectives on the jubilee, even though a London-based rah-rah is self-evidently the correct one.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Acts of the Apostles 5 i-xi

As the cult of Jesus spreads, the believers share their goods in common, and those who own property sell it and give the proceeds to the apostles. A man and his wife keep back part of the profits from a sale, and are punished with instant death when Peter disapproves. In accordance with the spirit of the new covenant, the result is that a great fear spreads throughout the church.

Concerning personal assets, the Saviour commanded that they should be sold and the proceeds given to the poor, while the elect should live as wandering beggars, preaching the gospel and performing conjuring tricks. Following the crucifixion, these rules have been prudently updated and clarified, with the proceeds of pious sales now being laid at the apostles' feet and utilised to motivate the faithful. Doubtless the same prudence explains the similarly minor adjustment to the church's complaints procedure, whereby the Saviour's command to pardon seventy-seven infractions has been jettisoned in favour of summary execution. With His usual sledgehammer subtlety, God rams the lesson home by conferring the inquisitorial office upon Peter, the very same disciple who asked how many times a straying cultist should be forgiven.

Property Populism

Although Her Majesty's Government will never shirk its duty of punishing the plebs for making such a fuss about the Grenfell Tower fire, the Ministry for Landlords is not altogether without sensitivity to the problems involved. A leaseholder facing a crippling bill for fire safety repairs in the wake of the Government's slumlord safety legislation has been officially advised to cough up and call the Samaritans, presumably on the grounds that he lacks both the foresight to own more than one home and the moral fibre to be a Party donor. A survey last year found that many people's mental health had deteriorated when they discovered that nobody cared very much whether they burned to a crisp or not; which just goes to show how far the innate pluck and gumption of the British race have been depleted by filthy foreign values.