Stony Ground

With typical lack of theological sophistication, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police are seeking help with their inquiries from an alleged abuser of Inuit children. An elder who identified a friend of his as one of the victims even referred to the clergyman as a devil priest, for all the world as if there were something un-Christian about permitting derelictions unto the seventy-times-seventh recidivism, without regard for the feelings of past victims or the danger to potential ones. The Saviour Himself commanded that the faithful should adopt the same attitude of benign indifference to suffering as their Father in heaven; which makes it all the more bizarre that victims of Church abuses should call on God's appointed for mere worldly justice.

Good News is Where You Find It

Just as poverty can be fought by redefining who is poor, and pandemics can be countered by refusing to test for the disease, so the Met Office has solved the climate crisis in true Age of Infotainment fashion, by changing the definition of a heatwave. In order for a spell of hot weather to qualify as a heatwave, the temperature has to reach a certain level three days in a row; since temperatures are inexorably rising and nothing will be done to stop them, the Met Office has decided to raise the threshold so that it won't look as if there is too much to worry about. It remains as yet unclear whether the Met Office has sufficient pluck and gumption to follow through with this useful principle; whether by measuring greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by parts per more than a million, or by flexibilitising the definition of dry land to include limited and specific areas that may happen to be submerged.

That Blush of Shame Proclaims Thee

In keeping with patriotic standards of decency and fair play, the British Petroleum Museum has forbidden digital scanning of some stolen property by the Institute for Digital Archaeology, even though such scanning is explicitly permitted in the Museum's own guidelines. The Museum, after five weeks of thinking it over, refused to facilitate the making of the scans, apparently on the grounds that they might lead to new discoveries; and then squealed with violated entitlement when the IDA took matters into its own hands. As a result, the Museum faces legal action by the IDA, which nurses blasphemous hopes of replicating and reconstructing the Parthenon Marbles as they might have been seen by the beastly foreigners whose culture did nothing more than create them. Worse yet, the creation of digital replicas might also contribute to the termination of the endlessly constructive argument between the master race and its inferiors over whether artifacts rightly belong in their countries of origin or in the countries of their imperial plunderers; which would clearly be just too awful.

Glowing Prospects

Given that the most world-beating nuclear industry in the world has reached its seventh decade without working out how to clean up its own mess, no connoisseur of Britishness will be surprised that the National Johnson has gone all rah-rah for a new generation of reactors. The industry's past glories have left us with some seven hundred thousand cubic metres of toxic waste: the equivalent of two or three modestly-expensed Members of Parliament, with a nearly equivalent disposal cost of a hundred and thirty-one thousand million pounds and rising. The cost of processing waste from the new reactors cannot be calculated at all, because any policy simple enough to inveigle itself into the Johnson cranium has by definition little or no application to the real world. Doubtless a few more welfare cuts will take care of it when the time comes.

More British, More Right

Among the many wondrous virtues of patriotism is, of course, the way it can so vastly improve the lives of the simple-minded with nothing more than a rumble of rhetoric and the wave of a flag. Few minds are simpler than that of the Deputy Johnson, who has gone goose-stepping to the Rothermere Daily Stürmer for a bit of a yap about plans to efficientise human rights by abolishing the less convenient ones and then daubing a Union Jack on those that remain. An enemy of the people at Amnesty International, the very name of which is a blatant betrayal both of national pride and of world-beating wog-baiting, advised that in thinking of the Human Rights Act people should "think of Hillsborough, or the successful challenge to police banning women from holding a vigil for Sarah Everard, or how the government will be forced to hold a proper inquiry into its handling of the Covid pandemic." In all fairness, it seems unlikely that Her Majesty's Government has forgotten about any of them.

All Sharks Together

Careless of the regenerative powers of lamniform dentition, Oxford city council has attempted to pull the teeth of a twenty-five-foot sculpture of a shark. Originally installed in the roof of a private house on the forty-first anniversary of the glorious victory at Nagasaki, the sculpture was intended as an anti-war protest (a glorious wog-bombing of Libya was in progress at the time) and a gesture at planning officials who determine what lesser mortals should be permitted to see. Having campaigned for years to send the fish back to Amity, the council has now designated it a heritage white, three years after the death of the designer and against the wishes of his son, the present owner. It seems unlikely that the planning department's sensitivities have been reformed by the fiend Putin and his veiled threats to surpass the Truman administration by striking first with nuclear weapons against an enemy who isn't even trying to surrender; so presumably the council hopes to take the bite from the protest by incorporating it into the Establishment.

We've Got Your Number

Enemies of the people have once more attempted to impose their Nazi-Soviet woke cancellations upon an innocent and unsuspecting Ministry for Wog Disposal. Unelected experts at the high court have ruled that a secret policy of confiscating asylum seekers' phones and stealing their private data was unlawful, on the piffling grounds that Parliament had not approved it and that the Ministry had misinterpreted its own extensive legal powers of bullying, intimidation, harrassment and other manifestations of British fair play. The intelligence database for storing the stolen information was named Project Sunshine, presumably an hommage to the Murdoch guiding light from which Her Majesty's Government takes its moral complexion. It remains as yet unclear whether the Ministry will seek to have the ruling overturned, perhaps in the European Court of Human Rights.

Above Our Weight

Uppity colonials are once more wielding the blunt blade of protectionist isolationism to sacrifice the sacred cow of free trade upon the pagan altar of fanatical ideological wokeness. The chair of Washington's ways and means committee has reiterated that the US will not countenance a bilateral trade deal with the master race if Global Britain continues trying to undermine the Good Friday agreement. The National Johnson and his Northern Ireland flunkey have both given their personal assurance, for whatever it may be worth, that they have no desire to jeopardise the Good Friday agreement, as opposed to sitting back and pulling funny faces while others jeopardise it on their behalf. Nevertheless, a US trade minister has already blown an insouciant Churchillian raspberry at the idea that the Americans have much reason to bother with the UK now that it can no longer fulfil its traditional role as an Atlanticist brake on the beastly Euro-wogs. With such ingratitude openly on display, we may be closer than we imagine to the spectre of a Boston Marmite party.

Forgiveness Pre-Paid

Slave traders are perfectly godly provided the money they gave to the church was made by more virtuous means, according to one of the more pharisaical contributions to the culture war. A Church of England court has denied a request by the College of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist and the glorious Virgin Saint Radegund, near Cambridge, to remove a memorial to a seventeenth-century benefactor whose investments in the slave trade were made long after his spiritual purchases and in any case brought him no profits. The memorial's presence is all the more troubling because the present master of Jesus College is a black woman, whose ability to rejoice and be exceeding glad has been called into question by no less an authority than the Archbishop of Canterbury. Handing down the ruling, the deputy chancellor of the diocese of Ely acknowledged that slavery was "evil, utterly abhorrent, and repugnant" to almost all right-thinking people, but cited L P Hartley to the effect that people in more Christian centuries than our own did not always benefit from the advanced and forthright moral guidance which characterises the modern Church.

England v West Indies

Some ungrateful beneficiaries of the British slave trade are calling for an apology, even as a couple of their betters attempt to whip up a bit of jubilee spirit. As Jamaica inexplicably celebrates half a dozen decades of being foreign, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have been dispatched to dissuade the natives from any subversive emulations of the recent high treason in Barbados, which might mar the rah-rah for Her Madge Gawblesser's seventieth year of waving, grinning and squeaking. Nevertheless, a group of Jamaican notables has published an open letter in which forelock-tugging deference is conspicuous by its absence, and which even has the gall to suggest that the transatlantic jobseekers' opportunity programme was a greater human rights tragedy than the Annus Horribilis. At present, just to rub the message in, the Cambridges are fortifying themselves for the rigours of their charm offensive in Belize, the noted tax haven, among the ruins left by some other beneficiaries of European civilisation.

Four Legs Good

Astoundingly enough, the National Johnson may have said the thing that is not as regards the decision to prioritise an animal charity when Britain fled Afghanistan with its tail between its legs. Two unelected bureaucrats have now stated that staff and animals from the Nowzad charity were rescued in obedience to personal orders from Big Dog, who presumably had been told by some fox-hunting chums about the British being a nation of animal lovers. When questions were raised about whether Her Majesty's Government might have done better by helping real refugees to get away from the Taliban, the Johnson denied having had anything to do with the decision. After today's testimony before the foreign affairs select committee, the shadow Secretary for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets accused the Johnson of putting "the lives of animals ahead of humans on a personal whim," which is probably a little uncharitable given that few Afghan refugees of any species can file expenses claims of sufficient magnitude to be considered human by the Conservative Party.

Your Lighthouse Lab is a Stalinist Ivory Tower

Despite all that has been achieved through sheer pluck, gumption and entrepreneurial fortitude, including world-beating profits for the right sort of people and the demise of a hundred and eighty-five thousand expendables, mere experts inexplicably continue to tout, of all things, public health measures. As part of its continuing battle for common sense against ideological fanaticism, the Government has shut down the Sage advisory group with its unhealthy real-world obsession; closed the Lighthouse laboratories which so impudently interrupted the managed decline of British public health research; and delivered several more kicks in the stomach to those NHS staff who have yet to take the hint. Nevertheless, a few absent-minded boffins have apparently failed to notice that the pandemic has been officially declared at an end; that all those tedious precautions have been dropped in time for the Conservative Party's Springtime for Churchill rah-and-blah; and that investment is at last being moved into worthier causes than merely protecting the plebs.

Hang the Kaiser

By comparison with the kind of games Britain likes to play, Russia's invasion of Ukraine is uncontroversially a model of humane restraint. Three weeks into the campaign, civilian fatalities are estimated at something under eight hundred: the sort of bag which the forces of Iraqi liberation typically averaged in two or three days. It's only natural, therefore, that the war crimes in Ukraine should have provoked two of the British Neoliberal Party's least effective has-beens into demanding that the fiend Putin be subjected to the glories of Allied justice after the fashion of the Nuremberg trials. Gordon Brown, the self-pity machine who bankrolled the Iraq catastrophe, has joined his voice to that of the whiny interregnum which presided over seven years of corruption and drift in the immediate aftermath of Thatcher's removal, to decree that somebody or other must create an international tribunal and ensure a "day of reckoning for Putin," so that the free, fair and cantankerous Russian media can start informing their customers of the truth. The moral component of the demand may presumably be gauged from Brown's declaration that, in return for an outcome which his conscience could approve, the reckoning might be commuted.

Native Virtue

Britishness is flourishing in Brazil, where the Boris Johnson of the southern hemisphere has capped a three-year assault on the rights of indigenous peoples by awarding himself the Medal of Indigenous Merit. Sharing in Bolsonaro's honour were a few favoured thugs, including the ministers for herd immunity and savannah enlargement; as well as the institutional security chief whose ideas about treason being synonymous with criticism of the government are worthy of the Home Office. The nation which pats itself on the back for abolishing slavery while revering the slavers' graven images, and which regards the battle of Stalingrad as a minor sideshow of the Dunkirk escapade, will undoubtedly consider Bolsonaro's gesture a fitting tribute to its renowned and historic values.

Insensitive

Trade unions and even Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition have reacted indignantly to P&O Ferries' arbitrary sacking of eight hundred crew who somehow lacked equivalent or superior protection to that given by the EU. Risking dismissal on grounds of left-wing extremism, the shadow transport secretary condemned "the actions of thugs" by foreign security hirelings manhandling British sailors. Her Majesty's Government was more cautious: taking a delicate leaf from the Blairite prayerbook, the Downing Street spokesbeing implied that the whole business would have been fine if only the company had used more emollient language. The Minister for Being All at Sea affirmed that P&O's finances, presumably including the loose change they received from the British taxpayer during the pandemic, were a matter for the company alone. On the other hand, even British law stipulates that employers must give the Government forty-five days' snigger time if they intend to sack more than a hundred people at once, and ministers are thus far denying that they received any such notice. Given the levels of hard work and efficiency within Her Majesty's Government, it is of course more than possible that the email in question was deleted unread when someone saw that no party favours were attached.

New Bungs for Old Chums

Of all the mean and nasty and criminal aspects of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the meanest and nastiest and most criminal is of course the fact that it has been carried out with no particular advantage to British weapons dealers. Accordingly, the National Johnson has taken the opportunity to strengthen his personal bonds with Whitehall's favourite fundamentalist head-choppers, whose rampage in Yemen has been such a paragon of profitability for the right sort of people. The National Johnson made some noises about weaning the West from its addiction to Russian fossil fuels: an addiction which occurred largely because the West wished to rid itself of dependence on fossil fuels from the Middle East. Evidently the Churchillian hagiographer's research team has not carried its Wikipedia research to quite so recent a point in history, or else has thus far failed to simplify the facts to a degree sufficient for admission to the Johnson cranium. Noises were also made about the head-chopping House of Saud's human rights record, so with an access of near-Johnsonian wit the Saudis chose the same day to add three more to the year's bag of executions. The master diplomat himself burbled that noises about human rights were best made in private, presumably so that the requisite sniggering can be carried out at the appropriate duration and intensity with no risk of being misunderstood. With his domestic difficulties only temporarily in abeyance, it is also just possible that the National Johnson recalled the House of Saud's granting of asylum to Idi Amin, late of the King's African Rifles, whose political sophistication and personal self-restraint were uncannily reminiscent of Johnson's own.

Her Majesty's Servants

Doubtless to everyone's surprise, nearly half the massacres perpetrated during the process of civilising Australia were carried out by police and other government agents; while many others were independent actions by have-a-go heroes as the state pursued a policy of laissez-exterminer. The Colonial Frontier Massacres Digital Map Project has found that most mass killings of Aborigines were premeditated, often under the still-fashionable rubric of reprisals for unprovoked attacks on colonists after some legitimate and civilising incidence of theft, abduction, rape or murder. During the latter half of the nineteenth century, as commercial companies took over, the process was efficientised by the advent of private enterprise; total Aboriginal deaths were conservatively estimated to be twenty-seven to thirty-three times more numerous than settler deaths, which demonstrates just how sensible and moderate the whole business was.

Almost Nobody is Above the Law Rent Free

Sanctioning oligarchs may be all very well, especially when they are given thirty days to protect their assets from undue punishment; but one should not take things to extremes. The master race could hardly continue to punch above its weight on the global stage were it to condone the lesser breeds in disrespect for private property. Hence the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club has duly liberated a disused mansion from occupation by protesters, who had hung slogans from a balcony and demanded to be sent a questionnaire like the party-going National Johnson. Although at least one of the burglars admitted to being foreign, they were apparently too Caucasian to be tasered, let alone shot; which will no doubt draw protest from the more moderate and sensible factions of British Putinism.

That Civilising Influence Again

Traditional values have received another boost from Whitehall's favourite Islamic fundamentalists, as servants of the head-chopping House of Saud have subjected eighty-one people to one of the few punishments that even some patriots would consider not too soft. So reformed and democratised is the House of Saud these days that this single day's total exceeds the quantity of justice executed in the whole of last year; the state news agency took care to reassure its readers that the beneficiaries were guaranteed their full rights under the law. Since Saudi law aspires to reflect the will of the Abrahamic génocidaire in the sky, this may not constitute a particularly high standard of legal protection, although it remains comfortably in accordance with the moral component of British arms dealing.

Operational Deliverability Through Regulative Proportionality

Shockingly enough, it appears that the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club, while more or less acceptably racist, misogynistic, trigger-happy, clannish and arbitrary, has somehow managed to place itself in breach of the law. A vigil commemorating a murder victim and protesting violence against women was called off when the Met threatened the organisers with £10,000 fines and possible prosecution. In the event a spontaneous protest went ahead anyway; such disinclination towards gratefully consensual obedience of the best police force in the world may possibly have been influenced by the fact that the victim being commemorated had been kidnapped, raped and murdered by a serving Met officer. The high court has ruled that the Met breached the protesters' human rights: a judgement whose woke prejudice towards cancel culture and political correctness will doubtless be duly chastised in forthcoming criminal legislation. For its own part, the Met has reacted with characteristic grace and tact, utilising copious polysyllables to predict dire consequences for the land should law be allowed to get in the way of enforcement.

Resistance

It's war again, so English Lit refracts
Unpleasantness and shortages of facts:
A hireling bard has sent a little note,
Deploring TV images by rote
And daring hope because cathedral bells
Can still compete with modern battle knells.

It's positive, when cruelty invades,
To praise the clang that summoned the Crusades,
And take on Homer's mantle for a bit
While self-inflating for the tricky fit.
It's war again, and poets now are those
Whose lyrics soar as journalistic prose.

Larry Littleprism

Qui Habet Aures Audiendi Audiat

Although it has been increasingly apparent for quite some time that the Church of Rome is implacably opposed to gays unless they happen to wear cassocks and abuse children, a number of people have professed surprise that a Catholic archdiocese took action to protect pupils at its faith schools from the heinous doctrine that non-heterosexuals might have much the same rights as the rest of us. A gay author of children's and young adults' books had been invited to visit two schools; the archdiocese objected, citing the Church's "unequivocal and well-known theological and moral precepts," and when the school governors proceeded with the visits, the archdiocese cancelled the visits and sacked the governors. By way of explanation, the chaplain of one school foamed an apocalyptic email to parents, proclaiming that the Church's hitherto unsullied international reputation had been imperilled by the soul-destroying presence of a consenting adult, and exulting in the defeat of woke tyranny by muscular Christian truth. A Catholic website backed the decision with a sermon upon the divinely bequeathed pedagogical privilege of Mussolini's approved club of eunuchs and rapists. Meanwhile, apparently under the impression that the stricter points of Catholic doctrine had been subsumed beneath a soggy post-Section 28 fuzz of liberal Britishness, some parents expressed shock and dismay at the idea that a British schooling might be less concerned with education than with obedience and licensed persecution.

Air Force None

Given that the Trumpster's cranial cavity is farctate with the radioactive defecations of his rabid tangerine head-tribble, a down-to-earth thought process is presumably too much to ask of fate. Still, one must take one's mercies as found, and Team Trumpster has been subjected to a landing described as "emergency in nature" after his jet suffered engine failure while doing its bit for the climate emergency over the Gulf of Mexico. Manufactured by the beastly French, the aircraft is the property of a donor, although it remains as yet unclear whether the fault resulted from a world-view incorporating an acquaintance with physical reality equivalent to the Trumpster's. At least equally plausible is that the head-tribble escaped into the workings and confounded the aerodynamics with its corrosive flatulence, or that the cabin suffered fatigue from the internal pressure of hot air. Both the Trumpster and his head-tribble will be flying again at the weekend, so let's hope to goodness that nothing goes wrong.

Greedy Pigs

A force of absolute destruction is bearing down upon the Canadian city of Edmonton - destroying grasslands, wetlands and water systems; consuming without discrimination; tearing up the natural environment in order to make its filthy home; and contaminating everyone's water with its waste. The prosperity of this most entrepreneurial animal has been implicated in the decline of twenty-two plant species and four amphibian species; not to mention the violation of Christian cars and graveyards without the excuse of religious fanaticism, and cataclysmic rates of garbage exposure. In short, it appears that North America's feral hogs have finally gotten above themselves, and are beginning to behave as if they had a right to act like human beings, or even (whisper it) like Murcans. They can be distinguished from the latter only by their maximum weight of one hundred kilograms and by their willingness to eat their neighbours' pets for mere nourishment rather than moral principle. Naturally, the only solution is to exterminate them tribe by tribe.

Wets and Wreckers

Even as Global Britain stands staunch and ready to repel the Ukrainian hordes which even now are menacing the gaps in our fruit-picking market, it appears that the most eminent echelons of Whitehall have been infiltrated by the black cancer of experts. The select committee on defence is expected to indulge pessimists and rumour-mongers with regard to the Royal Navy's mission to sweep the beastly migrants from the English Channel. Designated Operation Isotrope ("having properties which are equivalent in all directions") in tribute to the efficiency of Downing Street's command structure, the exercise has been greeted with a distinct lack of rah-rah considering its migrant-bashing potential. A former naval officer worried about the reputational damage involved in pulling into port with a brig full of filthy refugees, while the committee's Labour chair even went so far as to call the policy PR-driven before accusing Her Majesty's Government of not being PR-driven enough. Fortunately a spokesbeing was on hand to confirm that, presumably in accordance with Tumbledown Tessie's matronly philosophy that those who create a mess should be the ones to clear it up, refugees are a military problem.

World-Beating Humanity

One of the beastly French has had the temerity to accuse Her Majesty's Government, with all its various rats, swine, stick insects, intellectual paramecia and faeces-flinging howler monkeys, of lacking humanity, apparently just because a portion of the latest swarming horde has been told to go away and shut up. It remains as yet unclear whether France's interior minister had inhumanity or subhumanity in mind; unquestionably, an administration which includes Priti Patel and Dominic Raab can offer a plentiful supply of both. To the accusation that the Ministry for Wog Control was turning white people away, Patel responded that the UK's scheme was the first to be up and running - a moral victory far more significant in Global British terms than just standing around and helping. Patel also denied that Britain was turning people away, whereupon Raab confirmed that Britain is turning people away. Such is the robustness of British decency that a single refugee too many could short-circuit the whole affair, and might even cause an upsurge among the master race for the kind of racist populism which the fiend Putin and other lesser breeds have exploited for their own nefarious purposes.

Letters from the Front

We won't stop selling meat
To keep the world from warming;
But tyrants we'll defeat
Though refugees be swarming.

As flesh is re-arranged
Where nothing's off the table,
We've done our bit, and changed
The spelling of a label.

Samuel Grimsnipe

A Holy Mystery

Throughout its recent sexual escapades, the Church of Rome has been commendably consistent in applying the Saviour's decree which places the onus on victims to forgive their abusers unto the seventy times seventh offence. Somehow or other this has failed to keep the sinners in line: a problem now resurrected once again in the case of an Argentine bishop who has just been sentenced to four and a half years' imprisonment for pressing unwelcome opportunities for forgiveness upon a handful of dupes. The bishop "defended himself well" to his peers in the Church; and since the allegations against him included a degree of financial creativity he was moved to a post in the Vatican treasury, presumably according to the Jesuitical reasoning that dirty hands are safe hands for whoever is keeping the handcuffs away. Nevertheless, as more and more offences are exposed in this fallen world the Church must continue its titanic and tireless struggle with the eternal moral question of how to avoid further embarrassment.

Yet Another Moral Victory

Among the many benefits of independence from the ghastly Euro-wogs is, as we know, Global Britain's increased flexibility of action upon the international stage. Freed from the yoke of unelected red tape, Her Majesty's Government is empowered to embody the will of the people with unprecedented promptness and efficiency, at least when it comes to enabling polluters and criminalising protest. Doubtless the hesitancy of the master race in applying sanctions to Conservative Party donors is due entirely to a distracting sense of awe at the liberating vistas of the sunlit uplands. Naturally, the beastly Euro-wogs have taken unfair advantage of the situation to get their sanctions in first, as at least one foreigner with a funny name has smugly pointed out. Retaliation, firm yet proportionate, was not long in coming: asked why the master race was acting so much more slowly than the Nazi-Soviet bureaucrats of Strasbrussels, a flunkey from the Ministry of Wog Control was quick to make clear that the business of being world-beating is not a competition.

Beets Beat Bees

Having liberated Britain from the beastly Euro-wogs in order to ensure our freedom to adopt more stringent environmental protections, Her Majesty's Government has now intervened decisively to keep up the nation's world-beating sugar intake. A disease of sugar beet, spread by some relatives of Michael Gove, is predicted to reach very high levels this year. One need only look at the National Johnson's cabinet to see how far human beings are prioritised over vegetables, and herd immunity was understandably not considered adequate protection for the beets. Once more disregarding the fifth-column pessimism of mere scientists, Her Majesty's Government has authorised an emergency exemption to the ban on the insecticide thiamethoxam, which pollutes rivers and flowering plants, and causes damage to bees and other insects. Fortunately, the impact on significant life forms is likely to be minimal, as the vegetation in the National Johnson's cabinet tends not to be the flowering kind.

Mushrooming Myopia

Shinzo Abe, the "conservative" (hard-right, in Oldspeak) former prime minister of Japan, is the scion of an illustrious line. His maternal grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, was a prominent war criminal under the military junta during the 1930s, and was imprisoned by the Americans before taking the Wernher von Braun-Klaus Barbie amendment. Installed as prime minister in the fifties, Kishi redeemed his war record by helping to create a pro-American one-party state, and was later denounced as "a tiny little nihilist ... unable to believe in his political principles" by no less a patriot than Yukio Mishima.

This honourable ancestry will not have been lost upon the Heathen Chinee, who have reacted with irritation to Abe's latest helpful intervention in Japanese politics. Abe has a long record of minimising or dismissing Japanese crimes against China, Korea and other involuntary beneficiaries of the twentieth-century imperial expansion, and of agitating for ever more military spending. He is now calling for "open discussion" about the prospect of Japan's serving as the carrier for a US-controlled "independent nuclear deterrent." The present prime minister slapped the suggestion down, having apparently allowed himself to be biased against patriotism, family values, Britishness and the lessons of history by the mere fact that his constituency is in Hiroshima.