Until Next Time

One of Britain's greatest purveyors of trash outside the House of Commons has received a nearly-resounding slap on the wrist for treating its legal obligations with a degree of seriousness befitting Her Majesty's Government. Biffa was convicted of exporting household waste to India and Indonesia, circumventing red tape by the simple expedient of creative labelling. Having been prosecuted twice in two years and responded with loud squeals about being bullied by the bureaucrats at the Environment Agency, the company suddenly decided that it took its responsibilities seriously after all, and announced its laudable intention to proceed as legally as it can get away with from now on. Doubtless every assistance will be forthcoming thanks to the nation's independence from the beastly Euro-wogs, with its attendant opportunification for ramping up our world-beating planet-saving rhetoric.

Confidence Men

Doubtless to the relief of lesser breeds, Her Majesty's Government has announced that it has no immediate plans to start a war with the Heathen Chinee. The Royal Navy is leading a colonial fleet in some Far Eastern exercises, but there is unlikely to be a repetition of the incident three years ago when a pubescent fireplace salesman decided to have a bit of fun; or even of the incident two months ago when the Johnson administration was considering a new Crimean war to supplement our social progress. Amid burbles of confidence without confrontation (in gunnery terms, resounding barrels and empty breeches), Her Majesty's Government plans, if plan is the verb I want, to assign two warships to the region in order to contain Heathen Chinee aggression, enforce the Freedom of the Seas, and no doubt control the opium trade into the bargain.

Vote Blue, Get Wet

Although much of the recent flooding happened to foreigns and other expendables, some of it happened to London, so Her Majesty's Government has reacted with unwonted promptitude. After only a decade of taking climate change so seriously as to appoint deniers, Liberal Democrats and George Eustice to the relevant ministry, the Conservatives are shaking the magic money tree, dousing the bonfire of regulations and trumpeting the need for greater national resilience against the results of Conservative policy. It remains as yet unclear how much of the boasted new funding is the usual pre-allocated and re-announced; let alone whether the Chancellor will tolerate the spending being sustained beyond a month or two in the face of the perpetual necessity for tax cuts and cash for chums.

Seventy Glorious Years

At a time when the national lifeboat charity is being criticised for not letting more migrants drown, what could be more British than a celebration of our long and unpretentiously decent heritage of providing an occasional and perpetually away-snatchable haven for the victims of official enemies? In the best retro-rah tradition, various potential deportables have recreated the signing of the United Nations convention on refugees, to which even Her Majesty's Government has occasionally condescended to consider itself bound for at least some of the past seven decades. Participants included the daughter of two South African opponents to the apartheid régime enthusiastically endorsed by Britain's natural party of government, and a victim of the British-authored anti-gay laws in Uganda, which continued to be rigorously enforced even after the deposition of Idi Amin, late of the King's African Rifles; nevertheless, a notable omission from the proceedings appears to have been any sort of rah-rah for Britain's entrepreneurial pluck and gumption in motivating the convention's beneficiaries, from Afghanistan through Iraq to Libya, the Chagos Archipelago and any number of climate-change expendables. It was tactfully suggested that the master race might care to consider abiding by at least one of the international conventions to which it is a signatory; but cries of "Lebanon is full up" or "Jobs for indigenous Malians" appear to have been conspicuous by their British restraint.

Tuned Out

One of the country's most noted conductors, who seems regrettably indifferent on the matter of who won the war, has confessed to being uneasy with the Last Night of the Proms, in which the event shrugs off all the foreign rubbish in favour of "light-hearted" flag-waving to a medley of musical rah-rah from the days when the fuzzy-wuzzies knew their place. As when the touts of Britishness boast of our island history while purging the subject from the curriculum, the present state of British music follows naturally from several decades of cultural braggadoccio fortissimo without any tiresome fripperies such as a culture to back it all up. Like Rattle, many professional musicians are taking the hint and moving abroad, or else into more socially approved professions; while the handful of parliamentary expenses claimants whose interests extend beyond the last legitimate and understandable YouGammon focus group results are reduced to sneaking in and out of performances that might taint them with an élitism beyond the exalted fiscal.

Sea Legs

In order to raise money for the police, the homeless and other beneficiaries of the American Dream, a well-meaning gentleman has attempted to walk northwards across the ocean in a barrel-shaped bubble but ended up beached, after the usual fashion of sociopolitical allegory, some thirty miles in the wrong direction. A commendably deadpan communiqué from a Florida sheriff's office stated that he "came across some complications," presumably of a saline persuasion and in nature not altogether unaquatic. It appears that the Hollywood orthodoxy about chasing your dreams may be subject to certain paradoxes if you chase them in a giant hamster-wheel.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Genesis 11 i-ix

Despite God's precautionary measure of drowning everyone in the world aside from a single family, the descendants of this same family are soon so numerous that they migrate into new lands and cause Him renewed anxiety. Those who settle in the land of Shinar plan a great city with a tower whose top will reach the heavens, and prudently resolve not to stint in burning their bricks. Descending from His throne to observe, God fears that nothing will be beyond human beings as long as they can understand one another. He therefore confuses their language, whereupon they spread across the earth rather than ascending to heaven.

God is displeased at the idea of human beings aspiring to heaven on their own account rather than by reason of His personal whim. His motivation is essentially the same as in the regrettable incident at Eden, where He feared lest His creation should eat from the tree of life and become a god like Himself and others (Genesis 1 xxii). Possibly it is these others whom He addresses when resolving to destroy humanity's ability to communicate; or possibly He is merely demonstrating His eternal sanity, stability and singularity by talking aloud to Himself in the presence of a reliable chronicler.

Having created humanity in His own image, God demonstrates His usual degree of self-awareness with His indignant surprise at humanity's desire for heaven, to say nothing of its lust for burning. Within a few generations of God's philological intervention, the human race will establish itself at Ur of the Chaldeans, from where God will call forth Abram, the patriarch of Moses and Joshua, David and Jesus, proud génocidaires of Canaan and the cosmos.

Return of the Saint

Downing Street sources, who are doubtless as reliable as Alastair Campbell ever aspired to be, proclaim that Carrie Johnson's silly blond front-man is becoming less inclined towards the gruff reactionary rah-rah of Mr Churchill and more enamoured of the smarmy right-on sloganeering of the Blessed Anthony Blair. Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring, a long-time associate of his reverence, sputtered indignantly that "a vintage Blair project is one that is properly conceived, planned and executed," like ID cards or the war in Iraq; and of course for best results it should also include some sort of recurrence for Lord Mandelbrot himself. It is certainly understandable that people intensely relaxed about the doings of the filthy rich would rather not see the Imitation of Tony undertaken by a mendacious authoritarian with an addiction to empty rhetoric, an inordinate appetite for money, and a mid-life attachment to Mussolini's favourite city-state.

The Cash at Pooh Corner

The more we
Sell tiddly-pom
The more we
Swell tiddly-pom
The more we
Go tiddly-pom
On
Selling.

Although the
Prose tiddly-pom
May curl the
Toes tiddly-pom
Because it
Shows tiddly-pom
So
Flimsy,

Although the
Verse tiddly-pom
Is quite the
Curse tiddly-pom
And much the
Worse tiddly-pom
For
Whimsy,

As long as we
Care tiddly-pom
To flog such
Fare tiddly-pom
We'll flog this
Bear tiddly-pom
Past
Bearing.

Teddy Minter

Fabricated Rah-Rah

After a public campaign lasting almost a decade, following which a Conservative MP discovered she had nothing better to do, the county of Leicestershire has commissioned itself an official flag. Far from being merely pieces of cloth, flags are a vital expression of difference from one's inferiors, and according to Alicia Kearns MP Leicestershire has been sadly lacking in history, pride, self-definition and community spirit since the Domesday Survey of 1086. Even with the British Legion aboard, one wonders how they managed so long without her. The chief vexillologist at the Flag Institute noted that county flags were created as "flags of the people," which doubtless explains Leicestershire's choice of colours and motifs from a couple of unpretentious working earls: the Muslim-killing Robert de Beaumont, and the traitor and Jew-basher Simon de Montfort.

Arch Villainy

Although Her Majesty's Government remains deeply concerned to preserve Great Britain's graven slavers, its attitude towards other aspects of the nation's heritage is almost as casual as towards the demise of living citizens; the Stonehenge motorway extension being merely the most primitive example. More recently a Victorian railway arch has been filled up with concrete, ostensibly on the grounds that it was about to fall down. Like many arguments advanced by Her Majesty's Government, this collapses only when put to the strikingly unfair test of seeing what was said about the arch by the relevant organisation before it went ahead with the vandalism. The Government must now apply to the local authority for retrospective planning permission, since that particular piece of red tape has not yet been abolished in the quest for affordable hovels and prefabricated hospitals. Further cultural improvements are envisaged across the country, thereby cleansing our great nation of the moral burden inflicted upon her by the Victorians with their railways, functioning sewers, public works and manifold other ideological failings.

Sweet Reason

Food manufacturers, those delicious people whose advice the coalition solicited on how best to chew up and spit out the NHS, have warned against any attempt at making them pay towards the Government's pretence of caring about public health. Taxes on unhealthy pleb-feed would simply raise the grocery bills of hard-working families, because rather than averting the taxes by cleaning up their act, the obesity profiteers would simply pass on their costs to those same hard-working families. By contrast to the hedonistic wealth of hard-working families basking on a decade's worth of secure rights and rising wages, the obesity profiteers are suffering terribly and close to breaking point, and somebody ought to do something about it.

Boosting Britannicare

Even the most optimistic patriots have their off-days, and it appears that Her Majesty's Government is beginning to plan for a disappointing scenario in which Freedom Day and the Delta variant somehow fail to constitute a final solution to the social care problem. Still, having broken their manifesto pledge on foreign aid, the more libertarian elements are now expected to have little difficulty in breaking a few more. Ministers have chums whose companies need a handout; the only question is whether to levy a tax that would affect mainly those with higher incomes, or mainly those whose incomes have already been shredded by Her Majesty's Government's response to the pandemic. It is no doubt a cruel dilemma.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: II Canines clxxxvii-cciv

Why something rather than nothing, you ask, said the Father of Teeth unasked; well, it depends what you mean by something, of course, since what counts as something for some may be something closer to nothing for somebody else. The Creator of the universe is everlasting and eternal, so this whole unfortunate business of time and space and their associated misunderstandings barely registers on His attention. To be sure, He was amused enough when He first churned it all out, and for some while afterwards He even poked around a little and made a few minor adjustments, such as killing off all the trilobites. If you ask me, said the Father of Teeth unasked, I can't say I thought much of that particular improvement. But one of the many considerations that count for very little when you're outside time and space is whether any given sequel is up to the standard of its predecessor.

Of course, none of that helps much when time and space are pressing on you. I once had occasion, don't ask me how, said the Father of Teeth unasked, to dispense spiritual comfort to a self-proclaimed devotee of the Creator who was wavering in his faith. At the time, this favourite's bowels were being drawn out in a rather leisurely fashion by means of a device consisting of sharp metal hooks and squeaky cogwheels, and the squeaking was truly dystopian and set on edge my most cosily coated molars; I could have sworn I felt the plaque going crack. The people in charge of drawing out the bowels regarded almost all machinery as conducive to sloth and sinful worldliness, so that even their instruments of torture were considered infernal devices and kept only just functional and not in the best repair; and in the preliminary stages of persuasion the bowels had to be secured by hand with the most complicated ritual knots before anyone was allowed even to consider turning that squeaky labour-saving crank.

Anyway, said the Father of Teeth, I approached the needy disembowellee in a vision and reminded him that, from the perspective of eternity, his sufferings were really not all that significant, and that the Creator of the universe doubtless had other things on His mind, and that even from a temporal perspective the drawing out of a given individual's bowels, no matter how leisurely, must give way relatively soon to a condition in which pain and bowels were transcended, or at least irrelevant, and that there were many other people in the world whose bowels were not being drawn out at all, and wasn't that something? Sir, he replied, it is a most inefficient consolation, and if you ask me, said the Father of Teeth unasked, he did have a point. But then again, from outside space and time it's possible to see an end even to inefficiency, though not necessarily with a consoling sequel to follow.

Rose-Coloured Spectacle

We are all aware, because the howler monkeys gibber and squeal it from the treetops whenever a slave-trader's statue is molested, that our patriotic culture warriors simply despise censorship of British history and simply adore free speech. This no doubt explains the actions of a group of councillors from the party of the noted historian Mr Churchill, who have intervened to censor British history and restrict free speech by ordering the removal of a commemorative installation from a Southend park. The installation features flower-beds planted with a variety of rose cultivated about the time of North Korea's birth, and a plaque with some unpleasant details about Britain's independent US-owned peacekeeping nuclear deterrent, which was first tested on Indigenous land in Australia and which the mad mullahs of the modern Conservative Party continue to expand and proliferate. Naturally the culture warriors do not object that the plaque says anything untrue: instead, one of them submitted the eminently conclusive critique that he didn't like it, on the grounds that it portrayed nuclear weapons as harmful even when British. Even more naturally, the fact that the installation is not funded by the council or on council-managed land merely stokes the blue British flames of entitlement's trumpeting fart-fire.

No Science in Magna Carta

Mere experts are taking a predictably unconstructive attitude towards the approaching restoration of England's traditional freedoms. Grumblers and pessimists have pointed out that the mainland's position as a travel hub will result in the rapid spread of new strains of Covid, yet instead of embracing and boosting the glory of British globality they whinge and whine about the likely casualties among scroungers, piccaninnies and even the beastly Euro-wogs. New infections on the mainland are at their highest for six months; hospital admissions are doubling every three weeks; and there is every possibility that the hated National Health Service will shortly be overwhelmed to an extent that may not be significantly mitigated even by applause and the pay cut. Yet still there are those so possessed by the spirit of scientistic perverseness as to regard the demise of expendables and the approach of V-NHS Day as somehow to be avoided.

Once More unto the Breeches

Astoundingly enough, some rhodomontade of rah-rah by which a toadying playwright flattered his royal masters has been used by later princes to excuse their youthful follies. In his plays about the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, Shakespeare portrays England's revered frog-buster as a rascally youth who roisters and boisters alongside the blithering bladder Sir John Falstaff and some amusingly working-class females, only to resolve his daddy issues and show himself a great warrior and inspirational shouter. One commentator refers to this kind of thing as "addressing royal history," which seems a rather poetically licensed way of putting it: there is no historical evidence for Henry V's youthful escapades, and as an adult he was cold, calculating and sanctimonious, entirely devoid of the chivalrous flourishes that make the Conqueror, the Lionheart and Edward III legitimately admirable. Though not the merriest of monarchs, Henry did quite enjoy boiling heretics; and after his victory at Agincourt he had his prisoners massacred, though whether he did so as a phlegmatic response to the possibility of a new French assault or simply in a spirit of sporting English fun remains a matter for speculation. While understandably glossed over by Shakespeare, his end was singularly appropriate for our times: while killing yet more foreigners over rights to which he had no proper claim, he gloriously shat himself to death.

Shoot a Brick

Humourless Danes have damped the habitual hilarity that reigns in the mormonic state of Utah, where an enterprising company was selling Lego kits designed to encase Glock handguns. Surprisingly enough, the sacred Second Amendment to the US Constitution includes no law of lèse-musketry, so it's apparently perfectly legal to disguise an adult fetish object as a child's plaything. Responding to Lego's cease and desist demand, Culper Precision proclaimed people's inalienable right "to customize their property to make it look like whatever they want": a claim with a certain resonance in the mormonic state of Utah, where a militia in customised clothing perpetrated the glorious Mountain Meadows massacre under a customised flag of truce.

Another Proud Legacy

Though our civilising mission in Afghanistan may be subject to a brief consolidating blip, it is clear that British values remain deeply embedded in the former territories of the War on Terror. Almost two decades after liberation by the forces of righteousness under the exalted leadership of the Reverend Blair and his faithful chimpanzee ally, Iraq is consistently rated one of the free world's most entrepreneurial countries. The public health sector is well funded, but plucky and innovative private finance initiatives at all levels ensure a satisfactory rate of attrition among the expendables. Even if the fledgling democracy clings to such outmoded tribal practices as ministerial resignations over fatalities, it is clear that conditions in the Iraqi health service may soon be brought within measurable distance of our own.

Social Science

Aside from racism and anti-virus restrictions being officially declared matters of individual and commercial conscience, the greatness of British democracy has been further demonstrated with an uncontested by-election for a hereditary seat in the upper house of our Mother of Parliaments. Modernised by the Reverend Blair, and hence nowadays largely the preserve of party donors, clapped-out placemen and the occasional private hairdresser, the House of Lumpenpatricians still pays expenses to ninety-two representatives of family values, one of whom died last year. The replacement is Viscount Stansgate, whose father Tony Benn renounced his own seat in the Lords; a Conservative peer was quick to welcome the family's return to the club, expressing the eminently realistic hope that Benn fils would serve the real people as well as his father served the rabble. The new arrival aims to focus on "developing the relationship between science and parliament," with the science of social advancement presumably uppermost in mind.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Romans 12 xvii-xx

In prudent preparation for the raising of the Jesus cult to the rank of Imperial doctrine, St Paul takes it upon himself to correct the Saviour on a couple of points. First, he orders that believers should do what is honourable "in the sight of all," thereby presumably allowing even their left hands to know what their right hands are doing. Given the Deity's ultimate ambition to utilise the army of Rome in persecuting those to whom He takes a dislike, the order to publicise one's good works constitutes a natural progression; as does the later order to submit to worldly authorities.

Second, Paul casually overrules the Saviour's commandment to love one's enemies: rather than imploring mercy upon those sinners who presumably need it the most, Paul orders his followers to abandon them to vengeance by the wrath of God. As befits a Jewish fanatic, albeit one less rabidly fundamentalist than Jesus, Paul returns the Saviour's commandment to the formula specified in Proverbs 25 xxi-xxii, where it is stated that by helping an enemy one heaps coals of fire on the enemy's head. Helping one's enemy, far from being a move towards peace and goodwill, is thus acknowledged as a method of attack and moral humiliation. In the interests of making the Church lukewarm enough to suit Rome's digestion, Paul promotes the comfortable advantages of passive aggression over the more difficult rigours of divine indifference. God was undoubtedly aware of His church's future alliance with the Roman Empire, and here cynically induces His apostle to begin smoothing the way.

Bonfire of Liberties

Yet further evidence has emerged of the tragic consequences for the lesser breeds in allowing themselves to be prematurely released from the benevolent discipline of the Raj. Wealth creators in the former British Empire have been detained in connection with a factory fire, which resulted in the loss of at least fifty-two human resources who had been padlocked into the building in order to spare them the temptations of idleness. The victims are the factory owner and four of his family values: forces of regulatory repression in the state bureaucracy are even threatening inquiries into the factory's juvenile opportunification scheme, in what economic moderates can only regard as a quasi-European denial of the wonders of personal responsibility.

Robbed Again

Our latest loss on penalties, through no fault of management, in the eternal qualifying rounds of the Great Game has provoked a predictable outburst of impudence among the lesser breeds. In their various foreign ways Russia, Pakistan, Turkey and Iran have all sought to corrupt and pollute the nation-building process through a cunning diplomatic offensive that exposes the base and un-British nature of their motives. With their cowardly Asiatic emphasis on negotiation and stability, and their treacherously welcoming noises towards immigrants, the mad mullahs in particular have shown themselves the opposite of Global Britain and everything it stands for.

Now We Must Be Pure

It certainly is jolly fortunate that the Conservative Party has absolved its own lily-white soul of the stain of systemic racism, otherwise the actions of the police and crime commissioner for Leicester might fall victim to a nasty misunderstanding. Rupert Matthews, a new broom with all the accumulated expertise of seventy-two hours in post, has ordered his office staff to maintain social distancing from his inferiors in Black Lives Matter UK, on the grounds that such people approve of recent Conservative policy as regards police funding, and that they have desecrated Conservative Party property in London. Although Matthews ejaculated a blog entry about his boardroom machismo, a spokesbeing was later extruded to strike a more tolerant note and to emphasise the great man's support for BLM activists who know their place. Since there is no local BLM organisation in Leicester, the extent of the likely moral improvement remains as yet unclear.

Pachyderm Paternalism

Doubtless not entirely for tax purposes, the present Mistress Johnson has a senior communications role in the Aspinall Foundation, a conservation charity set up by a professional gambler and chum of the famously uxorious Seventh Earl of Lucan. Having carried out informal discussions, after the cosily statesmanlike fashion of Mr Churchill exchanging naughty documents with Stalin, the Foundation announced an unprecedented plan to re-wild the savannahs of Kenya by deporting thirteen elephants from Britain, only for the descendants of the Mau Mau to drop an iron curtain in the way. Informed about the plans via Her Majesty's Government's official diplomatic channel, the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, the Kenyan government hastened to state that it had not been properly consulted and that re-wilding is neither simple nor cheap; while mere experts indulged their usual penchant for pettifoggery by noting that Kenya is not, for the moment, noticeably short of elephants. Faced with such a snub to its goodwill, the Aspinall Foundation confessed itself as perplexed as a philanthropist whose truckload of gratuitous watermelon has been refused by some London coloureds.

Totem Trouble

Once more the master race has fallen victim to the scourge of racism, this time because of traditional values in education. Now that the collateral damage from a thorough schooling in civilised values is starting to emerge in Canada, certain elements among the lesser breeds have begun to manifest the usual symptoms of ingratitude, with graven images of Queen Victoria, Captain James Cook and even Her Madge Gawblesser suffering the most barbaric indignities. There are even those who claim that Britain bears some sort of responsibility for the no-nonsense teaching and treaty-making methods utilised in the Britishness-inducing colonies, with the result that several more of our Commonwealth subordinates now stand in imminent peril of joining the sinister trend towards statue genocide.

Spiritual Guts

As befits an institution recently honoured with sexual entry by Boris Johnson, the Church of Rome has spent much of its history urging sufferers to dedicate their pain to Him who inflicted it. Nevertheless, the Pope has condescended, doubtless in all humility, to submit himself and his intestinal complaint to the materialistic attentions of mere worldly medicine. Although presumably present by the will of the Almighty, the discomforts of His Holiness were evidently not severe enough to be offered up as a sacrifice in tribute to the divine mercy.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Enamel ccxiv-cclxxviii

A game show host consisting entirely of a pinstripe suit and a glittering grin beseeched the Creator's favour, but as always the Creator was otherwise engaged and the Father of Teeth happened upon the message. Materialising with a bright green puff of luminous halitosis in front of the glittering grin, the Father of Teeth intoned, "What is your wish?" and bared his best celebrity choppers.

The glittering grin answered nothing very coherent, for it was greatly discombobulated at the Father of Teeth's best celebrity choppers, the gums and gaps of which were coated with partially recognisable gobbets of the celebrities in question.

"Come along, come along," said the Father of Teeth, producing a glittering envelope and waving it in the glittering vicinity of the grin's upper incisors, where the nasal septum would have been had the glittering grin fallen heir to such facial advantages. "Is this your prayer?" demanded the Father of Teeth.
"I believe so," stammered the glittering grin.
"It is flattering, no doubt," said the Father of Teeth; "that was a prudent precaution, as the Creator of the universe is notoriously addicted to flattery, not that He has ever felt the slightest obligation to reciprocate in any practical fashion. Nevertheless, your request is so hedged about with confessions of unworthiness and effusions of pre-emptive gratitude that its substance is virtually undetectable."
"Surely the eternal Producer knows my desires before I voice them," stammered the glittering grin.
"Of course," said the Father of Teeth, "but He isn't here, and I am. What is your wish?"
"I'm not made for imparting information," stammered the glittering grin, wishing earnestly for a scoreboard or large microphone behind which to conceal its shame. "I can give away nothing but gadgets and holidays and the like, which some other smile has paid for."
"I'll have to hurry you," said the Father of Teeth.

Now the glitter of the grin dimmed and flickered, and though its hands were made mostly for greeting, it reached up with clawed manicure and desperately rent its puce-and-burgundy bow-tie. "It is against the natural order for you to ask me questions," protested the less-than-glittering grin; "the eternal Producer from His control-room in the sky did not so ordain it."

"Not quite the answer I'm looking for," said the Father of Teeth, while a klaxon shriek proceeded from the quaking uvula of the feebly effulgent grin. Then the suit collapsed in upon itself like a pinstriped premolar whose pulp has turned putrid, and fell to double-breasted dust while the last of the glitter winked out. Only limp lengths of lip remained.

"Out of time, I'm afraid," said the Father of Teeth.

To a Dilatory Chronicler

Shall I compare thee to a stack of hay?
Thou art more idle and more irritant.
Complacent while the plague doth have its way,
Acrawl with insect, worm and sycophant,
Thou squattest at the far right of the field,
A tempting dish for drooling English sheep.
Their bleats did raise thee up when thou appealed;
Ah me! what windblown weedstalks shall they reap.

And then what hands will work to augment thee,
Or flap thy sudden flame of rhetoric?
Who risk a tumble in thy company,
To suffer by a scratchy little prick?
By pitchfork to the trough shalt thou be spurred,
To take on thy true form as horse's turd.

with apologies to William Shakespeare

Better Luck Next Time

After the deaths of four hundred and fifty-four Britons and fifty thousand largely ungrateful expendables, our latest famous victory in the fight to civilise those barbarians on the margins of the Raj will conclude this weekend. Amid an understandably sparse degree of rah-rah, the last foreign fighters will sneak out of Afghanistan despite, or in Oldspeak because of the forces of the Taliban once more becoming stronger. US troops are departing in time for Independence Day, Her Majesty's Government having condescended to give permission as a courtesy to our colonial allies while deciding, with typically independent can-do pluck and gumption, to flee the scene of the disaster at approximately the same time. A few mercenaries may be left behind to ensure that the British embassy in Kabul upholds the necessary values, but it remains as yet unclear whether on this occasion God really put the proper effort into matching us with His hour.

They Just Don't Think Things Through

Mere scientists have once more demonstrated that pie-in-the-ivory-tower economic illiteracy by which they always manage to spoil their case with those moderate, sensible types for whom an unhealthy status quo is a healthy source of profit. A report in the flagrantly theoretical journal Science recommends a binding international treaty to interfere with the market forces that make plastic packaging so vital to the life, liberty and happiness of our beloved corporate citizenry. There is, of course, no reason why Global Britain should be averse to such a treaty, since the master race is under no obligation to abide by its word to the lesser breeds. Nevertheless, it is remarkable that so few scientists comprehend how their chronic wokeness regarding mere facts has caused so much of their funding to be recycled for the sustainability of capitalists' gambling debts.