Gallant Little Belgian

British values are once more under attack by the perfidious Euro-wogs, who have already sabotaged the simplest trading agreement in history and still seek to place hard borders in our Christmas turkeys. The Nazi-Soviet bureaucrats of Strasbrussels have taken their usual persecutory action against a former government minister, and a baron to boot, from the country that civilised the Congo. Although nominally a member of the bureaucracy himself, he cunningly championed the plucky entrepreneurialism of the master race by making fifty thousand pounds in fraudulent expenses claims. Having violated his right to privacy in search of mere evidence, the Euro-wog inquisitors reacted with predictable beastliness, cutting his pension as though he were nothing better than a British female expendable of a certain age. The entire affair is yet another demonstration of the kind of moral collapse which foreigners undergo when left to their own primitive devices.

Another Broken Egg in our Noble Freedomelette

Ten years after the glorious wog-bombing by Britain and its favouritest chum, the nation of Libya remains mysteriously unbuilt, having thus far failed to usher in a new era of peace, prosperity and stability; which shows once again what a perverse lot these fuzzy-wuzzies are. Nations such as Turkey and Russia, whose motives are less noble than our own, are lurking on the sidelines waiting to take tighter control, because they have noticed that Libya is oil-rich: a fact which self-evidently escaped the international community in its well-meaning fervour to level up the savages. Elections are due in three months, but no agreement has yet been reached on the laws governing the process; and the usual anonymous source has proclaimed that "it may come down to who pays which militia most to stuff the most ballot boxes." Looking on the bright side, this is certainly not an outcome that would displease the former Deputy Conservative leader and present-day Facebook flack Nick Clegg, let alone his gerrymandering bosses in the Bullingdon Club. As far as the present leadership of Global Britain is concerned, further statesmanlike witticisms about clearing up the bodies are undoubtedly a mere matter of time.

Diplomatic Channel

Since the Royal Navy has nothing better to do, Her Majesty's Government has used it on behalf of gallant little Formosa, celebrating the new Triple Alliance and giving a Churchillian V-sign to those beastly Heathen Chinee. Formosa, or Taiwan as the natives inexplicably refer to it, is a natural object for the affections of Her Majesty's Government, being a small island nation which traumatically lost control of its continental neighbour and whose glorious post-war government, under the decently-slanted Chinese Nationalists, dealt robustly with leftist metropolitan élites. For their own authoritarian part, the Heathen Chinee reacted to the Royal Navy's glorious expedition with regrettable racism, declining to identify the Britishness of the victorious vessel as if the American, Australian and aboriginal factions of the master race were somehow difficult to tell apart.

Expectably Unmanageable

Surprisingly, Global Britain is not about to save the world; remarkably, some nations will not be inspired by Alok Sharma's urging to push curves downwards in order to keep paths alive; astoundingly, a rah-and-blah boosted by Boris Johnson is not about to achieve what was claimed for it. Not even the National Haystack's solemn and statesmanlike Muppet speech at the UN will induce the world's biggest polluters to pledge, let alone take, effective action against the climate disaster. There is some doubt as to whether the Heathen Chinee will even bother to send anyone important, given that Global Britain and its most favouritest ally have just signalled the need for international co-operation by signing an anti-Chinese military pact. None of this is likely to deflate the nation's premier Johnson, whose entire domestic and foreign policy consists of promising everything to everyone and then finding someone to blame for the mess that follows. Still, even he may be a little nonplussed at the fiendish foreign subtlety involved in telling a truth even after that truth has been recognised as such by almost everyone who isn't a journalist.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Roots dclxxix-dccxiv

When the first carnivore chomped the first herbivore, said the Father of Teeth unreliably, of course I was there. But I was also there when the first herbivore plucked its first leaves, and when the first worm parted its sideways gnashers and took its fill of some innocent root; and each of those evolutionary progressions was equally something to chew on. For it is the will of the Creator of the universe, said the Father of Teeth, that whatever moves must eat, and that whatever eats in order temporarily and contingently to confound its own entropy must work to enhance, often rather more permanently, the entropy of something else. Having created life that could draw its energies directly from the sun, causing pain and death to nobody, the Creator was quick, relatively speaking, to ensure that other life must prey upon it. For having created finitude out of His own infinity and inferiority out of His own perfection, said the Father of Teeth, the Creator wished to observe the lengths to which His deliberately limited creatures would go in attempting to cope with the limitations He had imposed upon them, given that the only other choice He allowed them was downing teeth and giving up. Having created famine, He demanded sacrifice; having created lust, He demanded chastity; and having carelessly allowed the bare rudiments of reason to arise in one of His more ludicrous experiments, He denied the resulting creature any reliable co-operative instincts beyond those of the tribe, the choir and the lynch mob. There are those who say that the present devours the future and excretes progress, and others who say that the great worm of time bites its own tail and then comes back to haunt itself; but what I say, said the Father of Teeth, and I have said it before and will say it again, is that time is relative and teeth are an absolute, more or less.

Deserving and Undeserving

Despite a decade of strong and stable economic prudence by the Conservatives and their little orange fags, Britain's care industry (and what a fine, entrepreneurial piece of pragmatic Britishness that phrase is: care industry) is apparently not considered a good bet by leading professional gamblers. The sector whose benefit claims the National Haystack takes pride in defending is unwilling to invest in care homes, thanks apparently to the Bullingdon Club's no-nonsense attitude towards long-term viability. A spokesbeing pointed out that the poor have already been ordered to pay up what the bankers will not; while the former Deputy Conservatives have been swotting up in the Commons library, and been shocked to discover that their former Cabinet colleagues are still in office and still kicking social care to pieces, and that, even less excusably, the former Deputy Conservatives are no longer in office helping them to do so.

Ethical Chickenfeed

Since the great British public has no particular interest in whether those on low incomes can survive another benefits cut, some enterprising journalists have asked the National Haystack whether he could manage on £118 a week. The Haystack responded that wages had been falling throughout his party's time in office, but were now about to rise thanks to his government's National Insurance hike. Besides, the pandemic had cost a good deal, and somebody would have to pay for it; and of course, with the prospect of so many empty shelves in the supermarkets it will be all the easier for the little people to cut back on luxuries. Meanwhile, in the Labour leadership's absence no less an elder statesman than Gordon Brown has proclaimed the Universal Credit cut less morally defensible than bankrolling the Iraq crusade or selling out the NHS with the PFI boondoggle, and more socially divisive than pandering to the migrant-bashers. No doubt as a result of this flinging of the moral compass, the Treasury is considering some stuff that Johnson would never bother to understand, in order to prevent hard-working families becoming poor enough to be undeserving.

So Great a Day as This is Cheaply Bought

Much as the pandemic has been linked to the deaths of a few hundred people, and the British Home Office to a witch-hunt or two, and our free, fearless and cantankerous Press to an occasional untruth, so it appears that, in the process of losing that last unfortunate round of the Great Game, the British armed forces may have detrimented a few collaterals. Altogether the Ministry for Wog-Bombing is prepared to admit to compensating the families of two hundred and eighty-nine security indiscretions, including payments to "calm local atmospherics" after Britain's brave boys in the SAS did a bit too much civilising. Other cases include a payment of £104.17 for a killing and some property damage, although the precise division of the total remains unclear; and one family received a munificent £4,233.60 for the fatal shootings of four children. The .17 and the .60 are a particularly charming touch, showing pragmatic British parsimony at its most righteously accountable.

You Can't Get the Staff These Days

Afghan scroungers who think that helping the master race lose at the Great Game is the route to a Britannic paradise of houri and chips are soon to be righteously disabused. The Ministry for Wog Warehousing has assured the great British public that families and unaccompanied minors will be kept in hotels until at least the end of the year, while local authorities dealing with chronic underfunding for housing and public services receive finger-wagging lectures about failing to do their part. Refugees too lazy to arrange their life-threatening emergencies according to the convenience of the Ministry will be prosecuted and thrown into prison once the new Purity of Britishness law comes in. Despite such hygienic efficiencies, average waiting times for "processing" asylum applications now exceed one year, and the Ministry is aiming to take on another thousand caseworkers, although it is as yet unclear how long it will take to instil them with the requisite patriotic values.

The Master Race is Dying Out Again

As the nation's independence from the greasy Euro-wogs reveals itself in all its empty-shelved, unheated glory, so the doughty denizens of the realm's marketplace of ideas are striving to portray the new and magnificent vistas of Britishness that still await us. A centrist (right-wing, in Oldspeak) think-tank, the Social Market Foundation, has detected a continuing decline in the birth-rate despite the exertions of the country's premier Johnson, and has eructated forth an oracular squeal about the perils of quantitative shrinkage in the work-force. Since government-funded child-care is as much against the national religion as letting the wogs back in, we may yet have to rely on good old Vatican morals to keep the pleb-stock breeding and ensure a numerically adequate and racially pure drudge-force. Nevertheless, whatever labour pains lie ahead, it is impossible not to stand in awe at the degree of Britishness involved in spending years and fortunes on a hostile environment for migrants only to end up with a shortage of natives.

Low Cunning

There are, it appears, still some among the beastly Euro-wogs whose image of British planning and pragmatism remains almost as deluded as Britain's own. The National Haystack had a bit of a burble to his fellow journalists that the Dutch prime minister was on our side and in the right and ready to kick Brussels buttock to help the jolly old UK break the withdrawal agreement and get the Fenian rabble back in line. However, according to the beastly Netherwogs their prime minister stuck solidly to the Nazi-Soviet communiqué, and the Carrie Johnson administration is about as likely to divide and rule the EU through Churchillian charm and banter as was the Nick Timothy administration before it. Nevertheless, a few incurable optimists among the Dutch diplomatic corps have expressed surprise that the National Haystack might have said the thing that was not.

Bad Theology

Text for today: II Kings 22 viii-xx; II Chronicles 34 viii-xxviii

God causes the book of the law to be found so that His people may know how far they have strayed from its precepts and how much they deserve His latest round of punishments.

Having become a religious fanatic at the age of sixteen, and spent eighteen happy years persecuting those who do not share his beliefs, King Josiah is disturbed when the book of God's law is discovered during a refurbishment of the temple. The priest's secretary reads him the book, and Josiah is astounded and horrified to discover that the laws of a wandering desert community are not being strictly kept by the people of a settled nation some half-dozen centuries later. Doubtless it was this combination of realism and acumen which caused Josiah to accept the book at face value, and to continue his persecutions even after being informed that they would make no difference to the fate of his realm.

Josiah sends to a prophetess, who promises that God will bring new disasters to the nation because of the people's religious tolerance. In subsequent chapters, He duly sets up these disasters by appointing a sequence of impious kings and then venting His righteous wrath in the accustomed manner. However, in His infinite compassion God takes account of Josiah's grovelling, and graciously promises to have the king killed before any unpleasantness occurs.

Le Chagrin et la Pitié

French resentment at Britain's refusal to surrender to Hitler, de Gaulle or the Nazi-Soviet commissars of Strasbrussels has once again erupted in an unseemly diplomatic row over the behaviour of Britain's most famous penal colony. The new Triple Alliance against the Heathen Chinee was accompanied by the cancellation of an Australian order for French-built submarines and a decision instead to transfer the delaying and cost over-runs to Canberra's new paddling partners in the Pacific play-pool. Certainly Britain's experience in completing the Astute-class vessel should be more than sufficient to qualify it for creating a submarine that can detect Australia, if not the subtler and more enigmatic reaches of the Heathen Chinee homeland. Nevertheless, the perfidious French have contrived to snub Britain by recalling only the American and Australian ambassadors, as if they expected no better where the UK was concerned, and almost as if the doings and undoings of the Carrie Johnson administration simply didn't matter very much.

A Bestial Atrocity

Long known for its dedication to cool reason and rhetorical restraint, the Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland has found yet another reason for its customary posture of towering indignation. The president of those beastly Euro-wogs who have been causing all the trouble on the other side of the border has declined to join the Queen at a god-bother and rah-rah for the centenary of partition, perhaps not least because those who invited him couldn't be bothered to address him by his correct title. As the DUP's towering indignation indignantly towered into accusations of snubbing Her Madge Gawblesser and failing to recognise the existence of the British Empire, the treacherous Fenian responded with infuriating calm that he has been in Northern Ireland a number of times, while his DUP critics have been reluctant to return the gesture. Meanwhile, the Irish government has gleefully added to the confusion by promising to consider any invitation to a representative of its own; although it is as yet unclear whether any servant of the Union can be aware of the Irish government's address and still remain unpurged.

Chinks of Hope

If there's one lesson to be learned from the recent disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is that somebody ought to do something about containing the short-sighted adventurism and military aggression of the Heathen Chinee. Fortunately, a new special relationship has been forged between Global Britain and its goodness-forcing chums in the colonies, resulting in a triple alliance to keep the peace in the Pacific. Despite the handy potential for a war against the yellow peril to keep the peace in the Conservative and Unionist Party, the US is employing a "dual-track strategy" which appears to consist of telling the Heathen Chinee that they'll have an easier time of it provided they do as they're told. Doubtless for reasons connected with the internal contradictions of the communist one-party state, the Heathen Chinee seem to be finding this approach excessively subtle and enigmatic.

Fury at Interview Bias Scandal

Britain's brave battle against Bolshevism at the BBC and other hotbeds of Stalinist woggery has suffered another setback thanks to the enemy within. An insidious interview panel rejected Paul Dacre, the mellifluous former editor of the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, for the role of Secretary of State for Rupert Murdoch, so Her Majesty's Government attempted to rectify the balance by appointing a new panel which would reach a more impartial verdict. Now the Conservative chair of the cultural select committee has implied that a candidate who has already been deemed unsuitable should suffer permanent ostracism from the application process, for all the world as though he were some job-stealing migrant who couldn't pronounce the c-word properly. Such a prejudiced course would run a very real risk of failing Dacre a second time, and thereby calling into question the entire purpose for which Her Majesty's Government set up the interviews in the first place. At the very least, the traitor's attitude seems likely to bring rigorous moral scrutiny upon any real and fictitious private life and personal associations which he may still happen to possess.

It Won't Wash

Fish-hugging do-gooders are showing a severe lack of Britishness by wilfully misconstruing the meaning of the realm's new independence from the Euro-wogs. The purpose of Britain's glorious rebellion against the Nazi-Soviet empire of Brusso-Strasbourg was, of course, to help tighten up the rules and ensure that moisture provision profiteers were not short-changed by arbitrary bureaucratic limitations on their ability to poison rivers. Nevertheless, Salmon and Trout Conservation has accused the Secretary of State for the Environment of, if you please, failing to enforce the law; which is a little unfair given that Her Majesty's Government patently has no interest in either the law or the environment. The charity has even complained to the Office for Environmental Protection, as if that august body would ever dream of attempting to prevent water companies discharging their sacred duty.

Decent British Business

There are few better guides to a nation's moral fibre than the company it chooses for the gun-room and, by all that's soft-powered and do-gooding, there's a nice fat weapons bazaar in London this very week. The Defence and Security Equipment International is the biggest arms fair either in Europe or on the mainland, so Her Majesty's Government has invited delegates from half a dozen countries listed as "human rights priority." A doormat at the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets burbled a few months ago that the list includes nations where "we consider that the UK can make a real difference;" which presumably explains why the six include Iraq, where the difference made by the UK and its allies has been nothing if not real. The doormat also burbled that the list includes nations "where we are particularly concerned about human rights issues," which presumably explains why the six do not include the fundamentalist monarchy of the head-chopping House of Saud. Fortunately, in order to avoid any misunderstanding about the possibility of an oversight, a spokesbeing for Her Majesty's Government was on hand to confirm that the lesser breeds had been invited to buy weapons only after stringent checks into their qualifications, character and capacity for repeat orders.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Caries clix-clxxiv

After various and multifarious inconveniences, therefore, the Father of Teeth found himself arbitrarily deposited in a town where not a single door opened in the same way as the next. Some were shutters that folded, rattling and squealing, until they jammed halfway up or halfway down; others were like blunted guillotine blades that were raised and lowered on a string, and could crack a skull when slammed. Some were fixed at the bottom and had to be walked over quickly, before they snapped shut and catapulted the Father of Teeth over the horizon; others were fixed at the top and came close to decapitating him. The majority, which doled out entrance and exit to the poor, were simple openings through which the wind and rain blew, the sun faded rhomboids onto the floor, and privacy was not to be had.

Much annoyed by all these arbitrary apertures which, like many security arrangements, swung and lunged from all sides or else were never there when needed, the Father of Teeth took up residence in a humble hovel with no doors at all. Here each ghastly thing he did with his dentition was visible for all to see; and after a week of chewing and viewing, the townspeople nailed a board across the only exit and set fire to the hovel.

Emerging amid an explosion of splinters, which permanently cured several wide-eyed persons of voyeurism, the Father of Teeth addressed the august personage who had led the mob to his lodging and who had provided exhortation and guidance for the democratic enforcement of public decency: "The doors in this place are so universally devoid of convenience," said the Father of Teeth, "that this nailed and flavourless impediment of yours would seem little more than the logical conclusion. Yet I cannot help wondering why you have not yet adopted the principle of the hinge, a technological advancement which helpfully combines the principle of privacy with the privilege of free access."
"Foolish and blasphemous stranger," replied the august personage, "the principle of the hinge has long been known in our community, but the diabolic device itself was expelled, expunged and exorcised many years ago on grounds of gross immorality. For does not the whole principle of the hinge depend upon the placing of rods into cavities, and upon the subsequent repetitive yet voluptuous movement of said rods in their oily and darkened spaces? Set against the cleansing from our town of such a taint of sinfulness, what matters the sacrifice of our privacy, when the Creator in any case sees all?"
"If the Creator sees all," said the Father of Teeth, "then He also sees the torments of the innocent and the tortures of the helpless; which demonstrates rather conclusively that seeing is not the same as caring. But I take it that your question was rhetorical."
"There are no innocents born upon this carnal plane of being," confirmed the august personage; "for we are all the product of that same filthy and sinful act, which I blush and shudder to mention in the presence of the uncastrated: the placing of rods into cavities for purposes of lubricated, squeaky and occasionally swinging motions. Our more subtle philosophers have even detected, in this bestial and loathsome reproductive process, a transparent metaphor for the evil of the hinge."

So the Father of Teeth uncoupled his mandibles and extended his maw to a chaste, yawning void. At full stretch he resembled Ginnungagap framed by a fence of splintery stakes. The jaw of the august personage dropped so far that it dislocated; and upon examination by the local philosophers it was found to be a hinge in itself, which led to consequences of the utmost indignity.

Régime Change

O innocence rudely departed
And Christendom shocked from her dream!
Past time that the Middle East started
Good business, demoxey and freem.

From this moment all will be dreading
The next Muslim terror attack:
Let's bomb us an Afghani wedding
And oil ourselves up in Iraq!

Huzzah for the fall of the towers!
Just think of the fun that's in store:
Let's grab some emergency powers
And toddle right off to the war!

Britney Murca

Those Who Fail to Learn from History

The insolence of the beastly Euro-wogs has extended its Nazi-Soviet tentacles even unto the ultimate in British territory, namely Northern Ireland. Backing up the master race in its demands that Her Majesty's Government be allowed to edit its treaty obligations at whim, the latest leader of the hilariously-named Democratic Unionist Party recently threatened to abolish Stormont if unconditional surrender was not forthcoming within weeks. A foreigner with a funny name responded with an address at Queen's University in Belfast, but it appears that no such undertaking has been received. Instead, the vice-president of the Brusso-Strasbourg cabal involuntarily revealed his anti-Britishness agenda with talk of dialling down the rah-rah and, of all things, working together. We didn't win the war by working together, any more than we single-handedly imposed the Good Friday agreements by negotiating with terrorists.

Inflatable Threats

Now that the latest Great Game sudden-death round has concluded with the ignominious ejection of the master race (Henman's Helmand, anyone?), it seems only reasonable that the Regency wastrels in charge of Her Majesty's Government should occupy themselves with similarly historical concerns such as the Freedom of the Seas. Sure enough, the Minister for Wog Control has initiated another dignified discussion with the beastly Euro-wogs, ordering that boats of migrants be turned back towards France and shrieking at the beastly Euro-frogs to do more to protect British jobs, on pain of being fined a portion of Britain's bounty towards French patrols. The merely knowledgeable and experienced have raised the usual quibbling objections, ranging from the vulgar and worldly (such as the necessity for perfect weather in the English Channel and the need for wog redirection personnel to ascertain that suspect vessels have sufficient fuel) to the legalistic and vexatious (such as the requirement to ensure that no minors or infants are aboard and that there is no risk of fatalities). It has even been suggested that Britain's renewed posturing is no more than a headline-grabbing exercise, despite the convenient approach of colder weather with the likely benefit that a few bodies washing up on our beaches would require no excess hurry to clear up.

Tidemarks from the Greenwash

Those ghastly leftists at the National Audit Office have once again hastened their privatisation by carping and criticising Her Majesty's Government just because some green crap went a bit British. The scheme to Build Back Green (remember that?) was given a three-month start-up timetable, which was far too short for administrators, suppliers and home-owners, but had the dual compensation of going against the pessimism of mere experts and paying appropriate respect to the Cabinet's attention span. As so often, the real world proved tragically unequal to the Government's vision, with long delays in processing applications and an average of five hundred complaints a month. Fortunately the pandemic was on hand to take the blame, just as the Heathen Chinee and other beastly foreigners will soon be available to take whatever blame may happen to arise at the Johnson administration's doubtless equally well-organised international climate thingy.

Well, I Guess We Got Our Own Back

Citizens of the World Cop by the grace of God will be proud yet humbled to discover that a single American civilian is worth between seven and sixteen lesser breeds, provided that the good guy is a relatively affluent New Yorker. The two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six real people who died in the World Trade Center attack have been avenged with twenty-two to forty-eight thousand incidences of collateral airstrike detrimentation phenomena. This figure is based on the assertions of the World Cop's nation-building division, and does not include civilians pacified by hired hands on the ground, or by the World Cop's glorious allies; yet still the unpatriots claim that nothing has been achieved.

May Bring the Phoney War Within Fairly Measurable Distance of a Measurable Distance of a Bit of a Fudge

David Frost, who is trying to weasel Global Britain out of its treaty obligations on the grounds that Euro-wogs are beastly and ought to do as they're told or else he'll thqueam and thqueam and thqueam, has announced another new extension to the previous extension of the extended grace period for the simplification of the exports of which the sovereign independent nation of Global Britain recently took back control. With his usual Talleyrandian subtlety, the master race's chief blusterer has been urging the beastly Euro-wogs to take him seriously, which no-one can deny would be an acceptable basis for negotiation. Unfortunately Frost was accompanied by the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, which cannot have done much to encourage the solemn respect of the lesser breeds. Her Majesty's Government, which simply couldn't wait to get Brexit done, is now squealing that the whole thing involves too many deadlines and not enough holiday time and it's just not fair. For their own part, it seems the beastly Euro-wogs have finally resigned themselves to the Johnson administration's entire bad faith and have decided to let Global Britain stew in its silver sea.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Acts of the Apostles 17 xxv-xxxi

Preaching to the Athenians, St Paul states that God is not served by human hands, since He is Himself the source of all life and everything in the universe. Paul then states that God has ordered all people everywhere to repent, as He has fixed a day of judgement and appointed a man to carry out His vengeance on the disobedient.

To support his claim that human beings are God's offspring, Paul disingenuously quotes the Greek poets Epimenides and Aratus, both of whom were speaking of Zeus: a somewhat less sexually inhibited deity than Christ's Father in heaven, though almost equally violent. One might with equal honesty claim that the self-harm of the priests of Baal is a blood-sacrifice that validates the cult of Jesus.

Paul argues that God has no needs. This being true, His love of blood and His obsession with control and punishment must be considered matters of choice rather than involuntary personal crotchets. In virtually the next breath, Paul states that God requires repentance and has marked out a day of judgement. Rather than specifying the day and providing an unequivocal sign to every individual in the world, God has appointed a henchman whom He has raised from the dead as proof of His intentions. God has allowed this resurrection to be directly witnessed only by a handful of barbarian peasants; everyone else must take it on trust. Again, according to Paul's statement not a single one of these little inconveniences results from necessity: each is imposed through the Father's free choice, undertaken in the light of full and absolute knowledge. What this might indicate about God's famously supreme moral status may perhaps be expounded by more charitable theologians than myself.

Our Sort of Expert

Expert Medicals, a private company claiming to provide travellers with Covid tests, has been deprived of its coveted place on the Government's website. Profiteering from travellers has been a growth industry for the past three and a half months, yielding some very entrepreneurial returns since Her Majesty's Government ruled that people arriving in England are required to pay private companies for the compulsory tests. Far from giving the rah-rah to this fostering of individual responsibility and enterprising gumption, many travellers have complained of false advertising and unsatisfactory service in the delivery and processing of tests. Certain importunate persons refuse to be mollified even by the provision of a free insult to go with the original injury, in the form of a failure to provide refunds. There is as yet no decision on whether Expert Medicals has broken the law, so the Johnson administration has prudently removed it from the list of official providers until the day when definite proof of incompetence and illegality can hasten its glorious restoration.

Heavy Undertaking

They're waiting on death at Buckingham Palace:
Tourist crowds and terrorist malice!
The plebs will get no holiday,
But management can grieve as they may -
Who's jealous?

There's funeral planning at Buckingham Palace;
Human resources are shedding their ballast.
We've sacked the chap who'll lower the flag,
And still can't afford to mourn the old bag -
Be zealous!

They're awfully solemn at Buckingham Palace:
The heir awaits the rusty chalice.
It really is a difficult goal
To drop some rubbish into a hole -
Fate's callous!

Bridget Downing

We Shall Fight on the Shelves

Those among the Fifty-Two Per Cent whose jobs were stolen by beastly Euro-wogs are rushing rather slowly to fill the vacancies in the food and haulage industries, resulting in empty shelves and a precipitous decline in exports from the mainland to the Continent. Thus the Brusso-Strasbourgian enemy is being systematically starved of British meat and dairy products, although some of them are filling up on whisky and salmon provided by the treacherous Celts. Doubtless owing to ideological fanaticism on the part of the Nazi-Soviet bureaucratic state, the timetable for unconditional surrender remains as yet unclear; as does the extent to which Global Britain's new and free trading agreements with Japan and Australia will enable us to win the subsequent peace.

Pious Words

It is common enough for religious leaders to attribute to gods the words of mere fallible mortals; and the present heir of St Peter has continued this divine tradition by attributing to Angela Merkel a quote from Vladimir Putin. The villain called for an end to the "irresponsible policy of imposing foreign values from abroad" and to the West's attempts to "build democracy in other countries according to foreign templates." Even coming from the Kremlin, such sentiments might have a little more credibility had the West ever attempted to "build democracy" according to any template whatever; which may explain the moral appeal of Putin's words for the divinely appointed head of a single-sex pseudo-mediaeval city state founded by Mussolini. His Holiness' own prescription for the Afghan Problem was "prayer, penance and fasting," which certainly ought to help as much as anything else he's done.