Voices of the People

It would doubtless be unfair to assume that all of the abuse, intimidation and general British phlegm directed at government scientific advisers has been the work of Conservative "libertarians" or the Secretary of State for Profitable Healthcare. Although the National Johnson's response to the idea that the party might moderate its denunciations of traitors, shirkers, enemies of the people and citizens of nowhere was a robust, "I've never heard such humbug in all my life," Her Majesty's Government mostly prefers to express its contempt with applause and pay-cuts; while the back-bench baboons have less to gain from showing they've had enough of experts than from undermining the positions of fellow Party careerists. The minister for science, who must have quite an interesting life among the cretins, the magic-thinkers and the priests of Oligarchical Collectivism, burbled about "decisions taken in good faith by ministers accountable to parliament," although he does not seem to have specified which decisions not to decide anything and which dictatorial scrutiny-dodgers he had in mind. As befits a responsible opposition, his shadow agreed with him entirely and demanded that the Government proceed as quickly as possible with censoring the internet.

When and Beyond

Although ministers love their limousines, they tend to be less enthusiastic about transport. Transport comes under the rubric of infrastructure, which is one of those areas in which the private sector keeps begging the Government to interfere, in defiance of natural justice, fiscal probity and the national religion. The extent to which the present administration cares about transport may be deduced from the fact that the relevant department has been placed in the charge of Grant Shapps, who is also known as Michael Green and Sebastian Fox because those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear. Having observed, from his humble place beneath the Cabinet table, how ministers like to sneak out their more controversial announcements so that their fellow door-revolvers in the media will not be discommoded, Shapps has evidently decided to try his sticky little hand at emulating his betters. The beneficiaries of his discretion, chosen with characteristic aplomb, are various new provisions in the Highway Code, which are to be introduced in a month's time and of which two-thirds of the road-consuming public have not yet heard. Cycling UK's head of campaigns noted with commendable restraint that the changes "will be of limited benefit if the public aren't aware of them," while his organisation called for, of all things, a "long-term and well-funded communications campaign." For its own part, the Department for Lorry Parks and Shortages has established a working group, which may or may not get around to telling people things at some point, and a campaign with an exclamation mark in its title, which will ensure that "all road users are aware when the changes come into effect and beyond." Her Majesty's Government does not insult its plucky little public by telling them things in advance. If road users want to know what the rules are, they can break them and pay a fine to find out.

Greetings from the Kirk

One of the prime culprits of the Afghanistan fiasco has been giving his moral compass a bit of a twirl. Son of a preacher-man Gordon Brown, the implacable self-pity machine and bank-roller at the taxpayer's expense of the Reverend Tony Blair's various final solutions to the Eastern Question, is so disturbed about Afghanistan that he has deigned to inform readers of the Murdoch Times that somebody ought to do something about it. Brown, who once wrote a book of sermons about courage from much the same level of personal experience as Boris Johnson might bring to a book about integrity, seems to have attained no less than his usual depths. Like all foreseeable catastrophes of British military intervention, the consequences of the crusade in Afghanistan are self-evidently ironic rather than criminal, and should be tackled as much from the need to prevent waves of filthy migrants as from the innate decency and tolerance of Gordon Brown and the readers of the Murdoch Times.

Available Now

There is good news, at least, for fans of post-apocalyptic arachnoid workplace comedy: my latest is now available as both a PDF ebook and a real book. It starts with a variation on one of the world's shortest science-fiction/horror stories: The last person on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door, and matters head more or less steadily downhill from there. As with several previous items in my pantingly available backlist, the superb cover photograph is by Giovanna Ceroni.

Britannia Unplugged

As we approach what may be the warmest year's end on record, the response of Her Majesty's Government has been much as one would expect; namely, to level down the green crap. The National Johnson's boast of an electric thingummy for those wheely whatsits in every car park has been discreetly downgraded from rah-rah to um-ah, supposedly to arrange a "more tailored approach." It remains as yet unclear to whose bloated corporate body the tailoring will be suited, although the chancellor may conceivably have dropped a hint when he cut the duty on domestic flights. Perfidiously enough, the beastly Euro-wogs are already plotting a Nazi-Soviet Diktat to compel the fitting of existing buildings with cable routes for chargers, raising the possibility that Global Britain, as befits a government of public schoolboys, will once again be beating the world from behind.

Bad Theology

Text for today: Mark 14 lv-lxii

On trial before the Sanhedrin, Jesus at first refuses to speak, though many witnesses are called against Him. When the high priest asks directly if He is the Christ, Jesus affirms that He is, and boasts that He will be seen seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of Heaven.

The Gospel states that the Sanhedrin sought witnesses to put Jesus to death, but could find none because the testimony of the witnesses did not agree. As a kangaroo court, then, the Sanhedrin was a rank failure, since it failed to coach its witnesses properly and was too scrupulous to accept inconsistent testimony - a scruple which is shared by all too few believers in the corrupt, contradictory, mistranslated and manipulated Gospels. The Saviour's mention of the clouds of Heaven is not only a gloating reference to the fire and brimstone which He will rain upon the unworthy, but a cynical joke about the clouds of mystery and obfuscation with which His church will protect itself.

In the end, the only testimony the Sanhedrin does accept is that of Jesus, who clearly and unequivocally incriminates Himself on the charge of blasphemy. As one would expect from so perfect an exemplar of meekness and humility, His god is not love, nor law, nor righteousness, nor forgiveness, but power.

Pragmatic Adjustmentism

Doubtless from the purest motives, a flunkey at the Department of Meaningless Slogans, Homelessness and Atomisation has ordered local authorities to level up the hostile environment in accordance with what the flunkey is pleased to call "this challenging time." Presumably the Black Death would be considered downright strenuous. Those who have exercised their British freedoms in favour of sleeping rough are now to be offered accommodation and Covid vaccines, regardless of their immigration status. Although it remains as yet unclear how soon the Ministry for Wog Control will send in its boot-boys to tag, imprison or deport to a war-zone, patriots will rejoice that Her Majesty's Government has noticed, after only a single decade of laissez-geler ideological purity, that people are easier to persecute once you know their address.

Purple Haze

If there is one posture to which the posturing little squit who headed the first Bullingdon administration is terminally unsuited, it is that of elder statesman. Nevertheless, Britain's former Head Boy has taken it upon himself to dispense a few home truths about his colleague and successor, the National Johnson.

Leaving aside, in a spirit of seasonal charity, the fact that Johnson's hair falls all over the place while Daveybloke's mostly falls out, there are many notable resemblances between these overgrown school bullies. Johnson views public office as a cash-cow; Daveybloke viewed it as a networking opportunity. Johnson appointed the incompetent thug Priti Patel to the Home Office; Daveybloke appointed the incompetent thug Theresa May. When relaxed, Johnson is bluff, mendacious and vacuous; when relaxed, Daveybloke is smarmy, mendacious and vacuous. When at bay, both of them are loud, coarse, mean-spirited and treacherous.

Johnson's dishonesty, idiocy and laziness are so blatant as to stand out even in so crowded a field as the Conservative and Unionist Party; Daveybloke was dim enough to call the Brexit referendum and too lazy to win it. He once suffered a defeat on wog-bombing, of all the patriotic favourites, because he was too lazy to ensure that his MPs would fall into line. Having lost the Brexit referendum, Daveybloke promised to stay on and see it through, whereupon he resigned; then promised to stay in Parliament and work for his constituents, whereupon he resigned.

The reason for Daveybloke's latest re-emergence is a documentary about the media, in which he wags the finger at Johnson for relying on pre-recorded blah-blah instead of turning up to fib in person. Johnson boycotted (avoided, in Standard English) the BBC's Today programme because of its bias in favour of answers to questions, whereas Daveybloke was, in his own appraisal, "available and keen to engage and to answer questions," however falsely, evasively or inanely. Still, no doubt the sincerity shone through when Daveybloke lamented that the National Johnson can "get away with things that mere mortals can't seem to." Resentment, envy and hatred have always been powerful forces in the Conservative Party's market, especially when directed against a colleague, successor and frère et semblable.

Dubious Recognition

It is, as we know, the mark of a civilised nation to be able to face honestly the less salubrious aspects of its own history. On this score the conscience of the English-speaking peoples is as white as ever, as witness the quantity of statues and memorials throughout the realms of the master race which are dedicated to the victims rather than the perpetrators of our various colonial embarrassments. The Heathen Chinee, being inhibited by no such scruples, have dared to remove a statue in Hong Kong which commemorated the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. So appalled was the British colonial administration by the killing and imprisonment of protesters that it waited a mere eight years before commissioning the piece and installing it just before Hong Kong was handed back to its rightful owners. By coincidence, 1997 was approximately the point at which the master race began to demonstrate serious concern about democracy in Hong Kong, having absent-mindedly tolerated the régime of a governor by royal appointment rather than an elected leader, let alone a leader afflicted with the slanted moral vision of the natives.

Beginnings of Britishness

Despite the likelihood that Great Britain's original inhabitants were beastly dark-skinned Euro-wogs, researchers in the Cotswolds have unearthed encouraging evidence of cultural continuity. Analysis of DNA from the remains of thirty-five individuals buried in a neolithic tomb has shown that they were closely related, and that most were descended from four women who had children with one man. Such Johnsonian levels of gross national product are no less inspiring than the apparent fact that nepotism was as much a feature of British society in the fourth millennium BCE as it is now. As one would expect, the remains of contemporary lesser breeds in Ireland demonstrate no such advancement in family values; and patriotic hearts will be warmed by the idea that the élites who eventually ordered the construction of Stonehenge were just as corrupt, incestuous and exclusionary as the ones who now want to build a road through it.

Coming Soon

You Can't Trust Anything These Days

With plebs eaten up by disease,
Let's out on the lawn at our ease:
The day is so fine,
Let's guzzle some wine
While scoffing a nice bit of cheese!

O horror and fury! What dogs,
What fiends are those vile Euro-wogs!
That damnable cheese
We thought Japanese -
Was made by perfidious Frogs!

What is this bouquet in my conk?
A hanky, I pray! I must honk!
The scandal that's brewing
Could prove our undoing:
This is an Australian plonk!

Marnus Barnier

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Extractions i-xvii

As night comes on at last, however, the Father of Teeth will stumble into a ditch, the floor of which will rattle with layers of bones and plastic; and beyond the ditch he will come upon a circled crowd, all chanting and muttering in terror. Small children and other animals, not nearly so starved and deformed as most these days, will be struggling in cages of wood and plastic, shunted reverently from hand to hand towards the centre. Here the chanting will be loudest and the muttering most insistent. Each cage will be taken reverently by an acolyte, its occupant hauled forth and closely inspected for impious attributes. Within a ring of standing stones, surrounded by a plastic fence and centred upon a great bonfire, seventeen priests at seventeen altars will be keeping up a steady rhythm of throat-cutting, skull-smashing, dismemberment and vociferous propitiation. At each hacking and clubbing, the crowd will raise its voice and gaze reverently toward the east, while the priests hurl the offering into the fire; and after every sacrifice the horizon will remain obstinately dark. Having witnessed several millennia of human progress, the Father of Teeth will know better than to point out that it is still the middle of the night, and that no amount of blood or burning can make the slightest difference. He will know, too, that in the year whose birth now approaches the floods will come again, to sweep away the trees; and then again the desert, to burn the soil to dust; so that soon enough there will be nothing to fuel a fire, nothing for priests to bleed or bludgeon, and no more crowds. And the gums of the Father of Teeth will be another darkness upon the darkness, and the breath of his halitosis another poison upon the air.

Another Day, Another Nigel

Rain falls, the sun rises and sets, the tides advance and retreat, and the Democratic Unionist Party is furious. This time, someone else called Nigel has threatened action if Her Majesty's Government does not immediately and unequivocally renew its demands that the beastly Euro-wogs abolish their own laws for the convenience of a non-member. It remains as yet unclear whether Nigel's routine bluster is the sort of thing that could get a lesser breed a prison sentence under the Conservatives' über-Blairite policing laws. Gay-baiting Nigel, whose achievements include claiming the highest expenses of any Northern Ireland MP, lost his parliamentary seat to Sinn Féin in 2019 and was hurriedly ennobled by the National Johnson. He therefore arguably qualifies as the superior, British variety of unelected waste of money; so it seems likely that he will escape immediate arrest.

Missed Call

One of the more significant evolutionary black marks against human consciousness is that morons are far from being a self-solving problem. Homo sapiens ipsedixit is a tribal rather than a rational animal, and being in conformity with one's group is accordingly far more important than being in touch with reality. Even when the idiots are obliging enough to self-destruct, the first instinct is usually to save them from themselves, as witness the efforts by the authority for nuclear safety in the Netherlands on behalf of a meta-paranoid fringe faction of the anti-5G lunatics. Among the idiots who believe that mobile phone masts emit dangerous radiation are idiots who take the protective measure of wearing "quantum pendants" and "negative ion" jewellery which, as one would expect, actually do emit dangerous radiation. Rather than allow nature to take its course, and incidentally make the poor souls' death-beds happier for a genuine cancer to blame on the 5G infrastructure, the Dutch nuclear authority has chosen to come between the conspiracy theorists and their carcinoma - a tragic failure of society and species.

Past Abuses

Among the more unattractive aspects of wokeness is, of course, its reliance on mere facts when what the master race requires are myths, tales, simplifications and other forms of journalism. Accordingly, the violent criminals who de-pedestalled the sainted Edward Colston last June have called a mere historian to their defence. Someone from a university in a place nobody much cares about testified that Colston's company enslaved more Africans than any in the history of the legitimate and understandable Atlantic trade. The futility of dragging historical fact into British justice must have been obvious even to the vandals, as one of the condemned quickly resorted to a blatant attempt at appropriating the birthright of every patriotic Briton, invoking the central mythographer of our island story and saviour of Winston Churchill's reputation, Adolf Hitler.

Not Quite Fully Plugged In

Given that a proper public transport network would place us on the road to low-emission serfdom, it was only to be expected that Her Majesty's Government would be reluctant to subsidise electric cars. Despite the Brexit bonanza and the money saved through not having to match nurses' pay with inflation, the Treasury has voiced concern about costs. Since interference with the free market in fossil fuels is against the national religion, the grant has been cut for the second time in twelve months, reducing it to half of what it was a year ago. Even so, the leftist metropolitan élites in charge of car manufacture have demanded larger incentives for buyers and even a "strategic, longer-term approach," by which, hilariously enough, they seem to mean some sort of planning beyond the next press conference.

Un-Britishness Has No Rights

As one would expect of a government department run by the former party of law and order, the Ministry for Wog Control is languishing beneath a vexatious legal action by the Independent Monitoring Authority. The IMA is attempting to connive with enemies of the people at a judicial review, on the grounds that the Ministry of Wog Control may be breaching, of all things, the basic rights of deportees-in-waiting. Unelected and almost certainly bureaucratic, the IMA is a statutory body set up to protect the rights of all those beastly Euro-wogs who stayed in the UK after independence from the Strasbrussels dictatorship; and with so unpatriotic a remit we can hardly be surprised that it has so easily fallen prey to the pervasive metropolitan-élitist agenda which threatens our very statues with the wanton blackness of life-mattering.

Pigs and Bishoprics

Rights of enunciation, indoctrination and unctional distribution have been sternly withdrawn from a Catalan bishop who married a clinical psychologist and author of "dynamic and transgressive" erotic literature. The bishop, who was Spain's youngest when appointed eleven years ago, is reportedly a sometime participant in "conversion therapy" for gays, where possibly things went a bit too far; supposedly he now works for a company that reaches porcine parts before which even the Prodigal Son might have baulked. Among his good lady's works are such titles as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and a trilogy which pits "the logical against the illogical, the rational against the irrational, good against evil, and madness against sanity" - rather like the Gospels but presumably with different winners. The Church has refrained from depriving the bishop of his own title, perhaps because that would imply some want of infallibility in judging his original vocation.

Bad Theology

Text for today: I Peter 4 xvi-xix

Posing as a Galilean peasant, a highly educated Greek-speaking forger instructs the faithful to submit to those whom God has placed above them. Subjects must obey emperors, slaves their masters and wives their husbands, and unjust punishment from any of these reliable sources is to be welcomed, as implied by the Saviour (Matthew 5 xi-xii). Towards the end of the epistle, the forger invites his audience to rejoice and be exceedingly glad at the prospects of still greater suffering for their inferiors.

Proclaiming the continued imminence of God's final glorious genocide, the forger cites His assaults on the righteous as grounds for quiet contentment, since the privations of the pious will indubitably pale into insignificance compared with His punishment of those who disobey. While we are not permitted to judge our neighbours, the teachings of Jesus make it abundantly clear that there is nothing wrong with anticipating their judgement by the Father and rejoicing in the agonies to which He has predestined them. The more the righteous suffer, the more they should rejoice in their faith that their loving Father will increase in due proportion the sufferings of their enemies.

School Fuel

Education is, as we know, a purely commercial matter in which governments should not interfere except when maintaining the nation's intellectual purity by kicking out the wog students. It is therefore only natural and British that our world-beating universities should accept sponsorship from some of Her Majesty's Government's favourite people. Oxford, Cambridge and the nominally Victorian-valued Imperial College London are among thirty-six prestigious institutions which admit to taking money from the fossil fuel industry. As always, the squillions in question have no effect whatever on curriculum or research; which doubtless explains why the London School of Economics was so parsimonious with the facts as to refuse any disclosure, on the grounds that it would prejudice the university's chances of raising funds in the future. Similarly, although the actions of the University of Surrey are not in the least straitjacketed by sponsorship from BP, the university declined to provide details of its BP sponsorship after BP decreed that it would be "commercially sensitive" and therefore educationally unsound.

Struthious Truth

Vaccine denialists, anti-maskkkers and other champions of Individualist Realism will rejoice at the development of a filter which glows under ultraviolet light when the Covid-19 virus is present. Scientists at Kyoto Prefectural University coated the filter with ostrich antibodies, which clearly points the way towards a mask suitable for those with their heads in the sand. Unfortunately, even with planned modifications in place to permit the use of natural light, the heads in question will still need to emerge from their holes into a clearer atmosphere before testing. For a solution to this conundrum, as well as to the problem of those with heads in more intimate and backward-looking orifices, the search must doubtless continue.

More Than They Deserve

Squeals of righteous indignation have erupted from the Ministry of Wog Disposal after a cross-party group of parliamentarians criticised the use of "barracks-style accommodation" (barracks, in Oldspeak) to contain asylum seekers while Her Majesty's Government decides the pretext for their deportation. People who have suffered imprisonment, torture and rape, often at the hands of uniformed personnel with less exalted moral values than the erstwhile conquerors of Afghanistan, are being warehoused behind barbed wire, under visible surveillance, without privacy among themselves or contact with native Britons whose jobs they might end up stealing. The parliamentarians even went so far as to recommend that asylum seekers be housed in safe accommodation; which, given that Her Majesty's Government does not believe landlords should be obliged to house the master race in conditions fit for human habitation, would obviously be nothing more than a recipe for legitimate and understandable concerns. The Ministry for Wog Disposal waxed indignant at the idea that the kind of accommodation which drives the occasional recruit to suicide might not be good enough for a bunch of migrants; such a suggestion is, foamed a spokesbeing, "an insult" to anyone who has served in the armed forces or worn a really big poppy.

Inexplicable Resistance

Since the Conservative Party despises the Human Rights Act, withdrew from Afghanistan in a spirit of dogs before wogs, and will soon get around to outlawing peaceful protest and restricting the vote to paying customers, it seems only natural and British that Her Majesty's Government (it is not, you will note, a régime) should be minded to boycott the Winter Olympics on the pretext of human rights. An exception was apparently the party's intellectual firebucket Iain Duncan Smith, who wanted the boycott because our American colonies were doing it and there was risk of a boycott gap. In any case, and for whatever profound reasons of Global Britannic statesmanship, the games will just have to get by without the towering moral presence of Liz Truss, Nadine Dorries or Nigel Huddleston, or any of their toadies, gofers and flunkeys. Inexplicably, the Heathen Chinee régime (it is not, you will note, a government) has thus far seemed subtly disinclined to manifest humility or contrition in any significant degree.

Model Democracy

We are the very model of a modern British Government;
We've patriotic platitudes and racialistic otherment;
We'll blithely break a treaty with a treacherous and foreign dog,
And happily deport a darkie or a ghastly Euro-wog.

Because our major interests are mostly egotistical,
We have no truck with vexing regulations legalistical;
We've laws for little people in the order hierarchical,
And for our wealthy chums a spot of something more anarchical.

Our promises are almost worth inhaling to enunciate;
Our flaws we blame on shirkers, wogs and other ugly whims of fate;
With blatancy of crookedness and disregard for covenant,
We are the very model of a modern British Government.

We are the very model of a modern British Government:
A pustular furuncle of corruption and of blunderment,
Derailing public transport from the comfort of a limousine,
Then flying in a jet to lecture lesser breeds on going green.

We cannot let Democracy fall prey to any skittishness
That leads to higher taxes or some other anti-Britishness.
When plague is running rampant in the nation, we're concerned of course,
But keep our head for business and pay medics with sincere applause.

We'll sell you down the river and then charge you transportation fees,
And then you'll re-elect us when we burble Freedom of the Seas.
We'll kick you in the knackers and we'll fuck you up the fundament;
We are the very model of a modern British Government.

with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan

Nominal Liberty

The last educational establishment in Bristol to commemorate the dunked and de-pedestalled slave trader Edward Colston is to change its name, despite an overwhelming majority vote against the move by people who have nothing to do with the place. Of the two and a half thousand responses to a consultation on the matter, two-fifths were from concerned citizens with no connection to the school; and more than eighty per cent of these altruistic persons were in favour of retaining the name. Whether these crusaders against the censoring of history are also the kind of people who squeal woke totalitarianism whenever the Atlantic slave trade replaces Who Won the Bloody War Anyway on the history curriculum, remains as yet unclear.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Incisors ccxi-ccxxiii

Having thus once more cunningly eluded the angry mobs of oral hygienists, the Father of Teeth continued upon his way, grumbling and cracking beetles with his entomoclastic premolars. Soon he heard a wailing in the distance, which lent to his grumbles a lachrymose counterpoint; and as the Father of Teeth drew closer a soft and steady rhythmical pounding was added to the medley.

Approaching directly the origin of these noises, for the delicate vibrations of beetle-bits between his premolars provided a superbly accurate sonar heading, the Father of Teeth soon observed a ragged group whose grief at a recent demise was clearly the source of the wailing. The corpse lay formally sprawled within a circle of the bereaved, who chorused their inarticulate eulogy while administering hefty kicks to the departed.

On closer inspection the mourners proved weedy types, without the contoured brow-ridge or the robust jawline which then characterised the dominant species. When the Father of Teeth appeared, they greeted him with cold politeness and gave him to understand that he had interrupted a most vital procedure, the premature curtailment of which, particularly by so mangy and disreputable an interloper, might lead to the direst moral and economic consequences.

Inquiring what they hoped to achieve by their wailing at the uncomprehending atmosphere and abuse of their colleague's inanimate flesh, the Father of Teeth was informed, in tones that left little doubt as to the excusability of his ignorance, that the deceased had occupied a somewhat lowly position in the local hierarchy, but nevertheless displayed sufficient temerity to turn up in the dreams of his social superiors even after his capacity for labour had been permanently vitiated. Therefore, the wails were intended to call back the wayward soul before his vacated body decayed so far as to lack potential for redemptive employment; while the kicks were meant to motivate a prompt resurrection in case the soul should have sneaked back unobserved. Until resurrection was achieved, or the corpse disintegrated beyond hope of utilisation as a human resource, any interruption of the ritual was forbidden, on pain of the Creator's intense displeasure. Indeed, such was the Creator's dislike of idleness that, on the rather frequent occasions when the ritual failed to reanimate, He would visit upon the incompetent participants various unpleasant miasmas and other forms of uncleanliness, which were so distasteful that certain people had been known to contract agonising infections and drop dead in the hope of escaping any further intimations of disapproval.

The Father of Teeth asked whether they had tried burying the shirkers under the ground, which would most likely provide the newly reanimated with a fairly strong stimulus towards activity; but when he was compelled to admit that he could not guarantee the absence of the dead from the dreams of the living, they cursed him for a blasphemer and a lazy, impractical fellow, and threatened him with the usual. Yawning prodigiously, the Father of Teeth exhaled innumerable finely-ground shards of coleopterous carapace. They were still picking these out of their bald and chinless faces when, long after the Father of Teeth had discreetly disappeared, the oral hygienists descended upon them.

National Means National

Patriotic Britons will rejoice that the Royal National Lifeboat Institute has received a salutary lesson about which lives matter. The unofficial Conservative think-tank and New Labour focus group Britain First has mobilised its purple-faced cadres to caution the RNLI against saving refugees who try to cross the Channel, and the charity's website has been taken down after "suspicious activity" and threatening messages to workers. No comment from the architects and supporters of the hostile environment seems to have been thought necessary; presumably because the online competence of Her Majesty's Government was considered an alibi in itself.

Arms and the Man

Whatever the machinations of the Nazi-Soviet dictatorship in Strasbrussels, and despite the incessant treachery of the perfidious French, occasionally a story emerges which must give even the most patriotic Brexiteer a sliver of hope for the Euro-wogs. A man in the Piedmontese town of Biella (where, perhaps not coincidentally, the mayor is a member of the far-right Northern League) has attempted to thwart whatever devilish conspiracies are currently afoot by turning up to his vaccination appointment wearing a prosthetic arm. With fiendish subtlety, the health worker observed the lack of veins and foiled the cunning plan by getting him to uncover more; since the health worker was female, the gentleman responded with near-Johnsonian wit, "Would you have imagined that I’d have such a physique?" Although our hero has not been named, there is a social media post inquiring about the effectiveness in turning aside the needle of oppression of torso-faking body suits (available on Amazon for £416), perhaps with the aid of extra clothes beneath. Such pluck and ingenuity, especially when spiced with the piquant assumption that trained health workers would be considerate enough to share his ignorance, must surely entitle this glorious failure to the privilege of Britishness in at least an honorary degree.

Honoured in the Breach

As the times continue turbulent, it's reassuring to observe that the relationship between Her Majesty's Government and its own data technology remains as happy as ever. The Ministry for Administrative Ministrations has been fined at least the price of a Commons frontbencher for broadcasting online the postal addresses of the 2020 New Year gongs-and-gladrags squad. Quite aside from necessitating the use of the verb ennobled in the same sentence as the name of Iain Duncan Smith, the error resulted in almost two and a half hours' public exposure for the personal data of over a thousand people, many of whose Ruritanian rah-rah may well have been paid for in good faith. Among those listed were senior counter-terrorism officers and employees of the Ministry for Wog-Bombing, so it is fortunate that there are still a few migrants and Muslims in the country who can afford to share the blame for any resulting national security mishaps with the beastly Russians, the perfidious Euro-wogs and the Heathen Chinee. Nevertheless, the Ministry for Administrative Ministrations has "completed an internal review" and "implemented a number of measures" (sacked a few juniors, in Oldspeak), and reiterated its determination to master, once and for all, those pesky Babbage recording engines.

Insidious Ironies

Connoisseurs of liberty, especially those from plucky little nations with a history of standing up to looming and formidable foes, will recall the regrettable position of Central America in the nineteen-eighties. Menaced by the spectre of imminent and overwhelming attack from Communist superpowers on the order of Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the USA was forced to take defensive measures. After the usual fashion of such noble endeavours, these soon went ironically awry and led to the emergence of "fledgling democracies" overseen by fascist death squads ironically trained and funded by courtesy of the US taxpayer. Ironically, Honduras is skirting dangerously close to scaring the ever-cowering Pentagon into a newly defensive posture. Having elected a president named Castro, which alone would be bad enough, Honduras may withdraw its recognition of plucky little Formosa in order to strengthen ties with the Heathen Chinee, despite the US government having made clear its own continuing good wishes for Honduran sovereignty and economic stability. The diplomatic move towards Beijing is even seen in some quarters as an attempt to balance the influence of the World Cop by appointment to God, the international community and Manifest Destiny. It is certainly to be hoped that this latest ironic twist of fate does not lead Washington to any unprofitable overreactions in favour of peace, freedom, justice or decency.