The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Saturday, April 30, 2022

Sniff of Corruption

Despite last year's treason in Barbados, it appears that British values remain robust in the Caribbean, where the government of the British Virgin Islands has been taking a bracingly Johnsonian approach to public service. The premier has been arrested by the Americans as a suspected drug-runner, and even a UK commission of inquiry went so far as to find that successive administrations "deliberately sought to avoid good governance by not putting processes in place and where such processes are in place by passing them or ignoring them as and when they wish." Nevertheless, while thus far stopping short of imposing direct rule from the mainland, Her Majesty's Government has expressed a degree of discontentment. Since British fair play forbids any suggestion of hypocrisy, presumably London's dissatisfaction relates to failures in equitably distributing the cocaine.

Friday, April 29, 2022

Truss On Manoeuvres

Among the more endearing traits of the master race is its habit of dispensing helpful advice to the lesser breeds on how they might best overcome their moral shortcomings. The Heathen Chinee have reacted with predictable ingratitude to the latest finger-wagging by Britain's Minister for Wogs, Frogs and Huns, who proclaimed that "countries must play by the rules. And that includes China." Self-evidently, it excludes NATO and the United Kingdom, whose government cannot even play by its own rules, let alone the petty-minded provisions of international treaty. To be fair, the lecture was doubtless aimed less at the Heathen Chinee themselves than at those clear-eyed, clean-limbed cadres which will elect the next leader of the Conservative Party. In military strategy one should always provide for a flexible response, and the sacred will of the people may dictate at any moment that Operation Save Big Dog should smoothly and sinuously metamorphose into Operation Promote Silly Bitch.

Thursday, April 28, 2022

A Distorted View of Reality

Patriotic Britons will no doubt sleep the more peacefully for knowing that the best enforcement agencies in the world (one hesitates, these days, to say law enforcement agencies) are doing a bang-up job of protecting them from children with mental health problems. A seventeen-year-old who had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act and who was receiving treatment for psychosis went missing from hospital and was subsequently arrested by British Tranport Police's finest on suspicion of fare evasion. Since they couldn't get much information out of him, he was naturally imprisoned by wog disposal operatives on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant from Nigeria, although mere facts later indicated that he is a Briton who has never been outside the most tolerant country in the world. It certainly is a good thing that our national sense of fairness remains undarkened by any taint of institutional racism, otherwise a case of this complexion might be some cause for concern.

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

Unsinkable

Like certain others one could mention, the head of the criminal enterprise P&O Ferries continues to squat securely in post while collecting slightly more than the minimum wage. In searching for an example to follow, Peter Hebblethwaite may possibly have considered Imran Ahmad Khan, a criminal who has refused to resign. Then again, Hebblethwaite may have lighted upon Fishy Rishi, also a criminal who has refused to resign; or he may have been thinking of the National Johnson himself, also a criminal who has refused to resign. Despite such luminous moral guidance, the grinning wideboy at the Ministry for Motoring proclaimed Hebblethwaite's position "completely unsustainable" while admitting that no legal penalties are likely to be imposed. Meanwhile, the secretary of state has somehow failed to induce Hebblethwaite's resignation by sheer force of personality; while the company has resumed its Channel crossings with the aptly-named Spirit of Britain.

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

The Personal Touch

While it's reassuring that Her Majesty's Government has moderated its hostile environment for experts, one should always be careful of taking things too far. The expenses claimant for Wakefield, who was recently found guilty of sexually molesting a teenage boy, was appointed to a panel advising the Government on grooming gangs and contributed to a policy document on child sexual exploitation. Naturally, he was allowed to continue his all-too-expert contributions while under investigation by the police and for some time after his victim had informed the Conservative Party's apparatchiki and had been duly scolded and shrugged off. Although the expenses claimant has been stripped of the blue rosette for the crime of being caught while not residing at Downing Street, he clearly stands steadfast in the Party's basic moral values: having been warned that he faces a prison sentence, he stated that he would resign his seat, and then did not resign. Despite his personal wealth, it remains as yet unclear whether the Government intends to help with his rehabilitation, perhaps by finding him a nice little orphanage to run.

Monday, April 25, 2022

Let Shame Come When It Will

In a realm of such political Britishness that Tumbledown Tessie can express disapproval of a hostile environment, and Jeremy C Hunt babbles about the virtues of the NHS, and Gordon Brown once wrote a book about courage, it should come as no surprise that the National Johnson has undergone a belated conversion in the matter of sexist, misogynistic tripe. Reaction to the Rothermere Stürmer on Sunday's smearing of Angela Rayner has brought forth a Shakespearean efflorescence of righteous fury, along with a doubtless robust commitment to the sort of standards which the Johnson dismissed as "humbug" when some filly on the opposition benches suggested that he might care to moderate his language. Apparently the Conservative Party's parliamentary enforcers are shining lights in eyes and applying electrodes to testicles in hopes of exposing the offensive member, and the Johnson himself has promised that "the terrors of the earth" shall descend upon anyone he finds it expedient to blame. As befits a Shakespeare scholar of the Johnson's depth and subtlety, the threat is a quotation from Act 2, scene IV of King Lear, in which a politically inept, clapped-out and humiliated leader proceeds to denounce and threaten some women who are stronger than he is.

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Taking Back Control

Not for the first time, the greatest democracy in the world (the United Kingdom, for those who came in late) must rely upon the unelected chamber of its Mother of Parliaments to prevent an excess of democratic zeal in interpreting the will of the people. The jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, on whose already erratic intellect the oeuvre of David Irving has exerted much the same stabilising influence as Gothic romances did upon Miss Catherine Morland, is plotting to castrate the Electoral Commission and give ministers yet more power to mark their own homework. A cross-party cabal of peers, including the sometime authoritarian Baron Blunkett of Brightside and Hillsborough, is supporting an amendment to preserve the Commission's independence; which may leave the National Johnson to decide whether an unseemly bout of intra-parliamentary ping-pong could mark a suitably sordid climax to his extensive career of constitutional vandalism.

Saturday, April 23, 2022

Not Our Sort of Saint

From immigration@ukhomeoffice.rw
To ylyddanos234@chainmail.an
Date 2022-04-23 13:48

Dear Yorgos Lyddanos

This is an official communication from the British Home Office regarding your application to enter the UK. I am happy to be able to inform you that your application has been rejected.

The reasons for this finding are set out below.

You have stated that your purpose in entering the UK was preach gospel and stab big lizard. This purpose does not meet the necessary criteria for either business or pleasure and, like every other known purpose, does not qualify you as a non-bogus asylum seeker.

Your purpose in preach gospel has been assessed as being in Greek. The UK is an Anglican country where God speaks English.

Your purpose in stab big lizard has been assessed as a cynical attempt to exploit the UK's current sheep-eating saurian crisis. It is true that the UK is currently undergoing a sheep shortage owing to the war, the plague, European intransigence and the policies of previous administrations. It is also true that the dragon has displayed an unprecedented lack of appetite when offered pre-packaged cuts of lamb imported without health checks or other red tape. However, you may rest assured that the UK has more than enough expendable citizens to substitute before there is any threat to nice people.

Your purpose in stab big lizard has also been assessed as a cynical excuse to import into the UK a 2.5-metre lance and a highly trained and accoutred stallion of some 14 hands, without appropriate tolls and duties.

On behalf of the UK Home Office, I would like to thank you for your application and wish you every legitimate success back where you belong.

Yours very truly with limited and specific exceptions,

Assessment Office
Freedom House, Kigali

If you wish to appeal against this finding, please start a new application. If you wish the appeal to succeed, please ensure that you have more ready cash than previously. Remember that the giving of false information will place you at risk of prosecution and deportation by the UK Home Office. In especially serious cases,you may also be at risk of a managerial position in Her Majesty's Government.

Friday, April 22, 2022

It's the Home Office - What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

While it is no doubt arguable, at least in theory, that Her Majesty's Government is capable of drafting policies which are neither illegal nor racist, a civil servant should know better than to back a mediocre case with a bad example. Nevertheless, staff at the Home Office expressing concern over the proposed Rwandan refugee gulag have been blustered at in no uncertain terms about not reasoning why. With typical extremism, the Public and Commercial Services union has proclaimed "absolute" opposition to the policy, in telling contrast to the sensible moderation of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition's moderate sensibility, which has merely expressed doubt as to cost-effectiveness. An equally economical line was taken by the permanent secretary, who seems blithely unaware of the evidence, dating back to at least 2016, that the great British taxpayer is prepared to tolerate considerable financial bruising when it comes to showing the wogs what's what. Staff have been reminded that they should be neutral and apolitical after the civilised British manner of Adolf Eichmann, and a spokesbeing at the Ministry for Wog Disposal was extruded to warn that in the National Johnson administration disrespect, rule-breaking and lack of integrity are tolerated only among the higher pay grades.

Thursday, April 21, 2022

Infra Digger

While the more principled stalwarts of his parliamentary party vociferously declare him a liar and cheat who probably ought not to resign just yet, the National Johnson has been demonstrating his own brand of statesmanlike tact on his rah-and-blah to the Empire. Although he has so far managed to refrain from quoting Kipling, telling wog jokes or trying to sell statues of Robert Clive, he did manage to inflict his presence on a JCB factory in the middle of a controversy about the use of JCBs to demolish Muslim settlements in Delhi. Asked whether he planned to discuss the demolitions with his fellow Muslim-baiter Narendra Modi, the bargain-basement Churchill replied that India is a democracy with an awful lot of people in it. Not very surprisingly, the chairman of the JCB company happens to be a Party donor, and in 2019 Johnson personally received an entirely coincidental five-figure donation from JCB a fairly unsurprising three days before praising the company in a speech. A little more surprisingly, especially in so eminent a Latin scholar and so prolific a breeder, while stressing the closeness of a corrupt, dirty, superstitious and caste-ridden country to India he also managed to confuse the umbilical cord with the navel.

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Careful What You Brief For

However terroristic it may be to warn of the climate crisis by inconveniencing motorists or gluing oneself to a building, it appears that following the example of the martyred Bobby Sands is now an acceptable form of protest. After a mere thirty-seven days of hunger strike by a campaigner outside Parliament, members of the House of Expenses Claimants have condescended to be briefed by the Government's chief scientific adviser. Those who remain sceptical of politicians' appetite for staking their careers on mere facts may see an encouraging precedent in the National Johnson, who was a climate denier as long as it profited him but then listened to that same scientific adviser and, like Saul of Tarsus stoning Ananias and Cephas, underwent a Damascene conversion to the merits of fracking, North Sea oil, and sustainable uranium.

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

From May to Mini-May

Readers whose memories are as long and unforgiving as your correspondent's may recall a time when the Ministry for Wogs, Frogs and Huns was a quite distinct department from the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets. Admittedly, this was some while ago: so long ago, in fact, that it was still customary in that era for ministers of the Crown, once caught breaking the rules, to resign or be dismissed from office. One such resignation was that of Priti Patel, whom Tumbledown Tessie sacked from Wogs, Beads and Trinkets for holding unofficial meetings while on official business, and who has now been questioned by that same Tumbledown Tessie over whether her Rwandan Konsentrasiekamp system will perpetuate Britain's labour shortage cheaply enough. Tumbledown Tessie, who originated the hostile environment and did not noticeably resign over her department's criminal deportation of black Britons, claimed to be against the Rwanda gulag on grounds of legality, practicality and efficiency; all of which self-evidently weighed heavy upon her robust Anglican conscience when some incompetent old bag appointed Boris Johnson to Wogs, Frogs and Huns.

Monday, April 18, 2022

Small Johnson Meets Big Choppers

There is no pleasing some people. Environmental campaigners are notoriously immune to the wonders of sustainable uranium and blanched radioactive pachyderms, and there may even be a few who object to being thrown into jail for slandering North Sea oil. In the same dreary spirit of pessimistic un-Britishness, certain groups have expressed concern about the future of the Central African rainforest, despite the National Johnson's having signed a deal with a government fully as honest as his own and very nearly as efficient. Half a dozen successive ministers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have illegally abetted logging companies in breaching a twenty-year moratorium; and while the government proposes to resolve the situation in sensible and moderate fashion by lifting the moratorium altogether, the environmental fanatics are demanding, of all things, that the law be enforced. So concerned was the National Johnson at the idea of penalising government officials just because they happen to be criminals that he sent his fellow race-baiter Lord Goldsmith to sort things out among the natives. Goldsmith expressed his determination that some people keep their promises; which will doubtless command due respect among those lesser breeds who are unaware of his government's record on international law, foreign aid, domestic taxation and other minor issues.

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Nicely Insulated, But a Bit Dim

Any Conservative administration, abetted or not by the Liberal Democrats, can plunge people into poverty; but it takes a Conservative turned Liberal Democrat to find a solution that is both pragmatic and humane. Lord Lee of Trafford, an octogenarian life peer and veteran of the English Tourist Board, proposes to drag Britain's idle plebs into the upland sunshine by moving the clocks forward an extra hour. Modern daylight saving time was invented by the owner of a construction firm specialising in houses for the rich, whose early-morning summer horse-rides were blighted by vistas of unprofitable working-class somnolence. Campaigners now estimate that further extension of the waking day might save the peasantry as much as twenty-five minutes' illumination a day from their soon-to-be doubled energy costs. Of course, thanks to the Britishness of our construction industry, the most wastage occurs in expenditure for heating; but an intellect of Lord Lee's wattage can scarcely be expected to light upon mere facts.

Saturday, April 16, 2022

More Lives Well Spent

At least thirty-five more British jobs are saved or presumed saved off the Libyan coast; this will certainly please all decent and pragmatic patriots, except possibly for those Rwandan warehouse staff who might one day have profited by the criminals' transportation. The Associated Press notes in Britain's leading liberal newspaper that traffickers are using the chaos in Libya to monetise victims of war and poverty; which would be a wholly admirable bit of entrepreneurial pluck were it not for the refugees' unfortunate habit of turning into economic migrants somewhere along the way. Quite apart from the time and effort which Britain put into creating the current free market in Libya (a sacrifice ungratefully omitted from the Associated Press report), the last thing the master race needs during a labour shortage is a swarming horde of potential workers.

Friday, April 15, 2022

Hard Pressed

Supreme Leader Rupert and his slightly foxed red-top Rebekah Brooks are once again suffering harassment over their little misadventures in the phone-hacking trade, with Zac Goldsmith and several real people lining up to sue the most scumbag rag of them all, the Falklands and Hillsborough Sun. This is all the more vindictive in that the Murdoch empire has thoroughly demonstrated its innocence: partly by paying people large sums of money not to ask questions, and partly by denouncing Brooks as a hopeless incompetent who didn't bother to check on how her hacks were obtaining their information. Perhaps, since it was after all the free and fearless British press, she and the Mirror's equally discreet Piers Morgan simply assumed that all the stories were made up. In any case, given the National Johnson's background in scumbag journalism, albeit for chickenfeed six-figure wages, it now seems possible that his whine about politically motivated lawyers may have had some resonance beyond merely asserting the moral superiority of race-baiting and refugee-bashing over the empty legalism of civilised behaviour.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

But Will It Be Hostile Enough?

Britain's proud return to the historical glories of the African-based concentration camp has got off to a splendid start, with a third-rate hostel in Kigali being allocated to house the tens of thousands by whose rapid transportation the National Johnson hopes to survive the next few news cycles. The scheme, if scheme is the word I want, has been denounced by the former Conservative Party token and area of outstanding natural fatuity Lady Warsi, who complained that it was "ineffective and costly" and, apparently as an afterthought, inhumane and shaming of the master race's comparatively generous treatment of the epidermally deserving. Nevertheless, the lack of red tape in Rwanda's uncompromising democracy will doubtless ensure that the hostel's fifty rooms, twelve toilets and five showers are allocated and utilised with due attention to spatial economy and migrant disincentivisation. A threefold increase in capacity is expected in due course, though it remains as yet unclear whether the expansion is to be achieved via the boringly traditional means of architectural construction, or by the more advanced and British method of dividing up the existing space with large bits of cardboard.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

Partners in Pragmatism

Despite being openly racist, anti-European and favourably inclined towards Russian gangsters, Marine Le Pen has somehow conceived the idea that Boris Johnson's Brexitannia might make her a credible ally. Like Winston Churchill and his present-day repetition-as-farce, Le Pen favours bilateral alliances forged through personal nods and winks between potentates of the master race. She is also gung-ho for the re-conquest of old empires, which in France's case would be mainly those uppity indochinois. If Le Pen were prepared to overlook the calculated insult to France by the Triple Alliance, this could dovetail nicely with the English-speaking peoples' policy of poking the Heathen Chinee with a sharp stick until something jolly occurs. Nevertheless, a former UK national security adviser and sock-puppet for Washington in Europe has delivered a stern rebuke, extolling the Special Atlanticist Dependence (SAD) and implying with almost equal realism that an attitude which is ignorant, superficial and misconceived as regards her country's place in the world might somehow be uncongenial to the régime in London.

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Fantastic Beasts

The Rare Breeds Survival Trust has published its annual watchlist of native breeds. Unlike the great British pleb, to say nothing of various dusky migrant species, the Hackney horse has had the decency to diminish its numbers in line with market forces. Now that horseless carriages seem to be catching on at last, only thirty-one breeding females remain in the country. Similarly, pure-bred Large White pigs are increasingly rare, having been comprehensively superseded by the well-fleshed Caucasian boar in Downing Street.

Monday, April 11, 2022

A BOP on the Head

As might be expected, the Land of the Free has the largest prison population in the world, almost forty per cent of whom have a history of mental illness: a metastasis of human warehousing such as Britain's gluttons for punishment at the Ministry for Profitable Incarceration can manage only in their dankest dreams. So severe and widespread are the psychiatric problems in the World Cop's gulag that the Bureau of Prisons has co-opted them as an advertising gimmick. "The clinical diversity you find at the Federal Bureau of Prisons is far beyond private practice," chirrups an Atlanta-based psychologist, with what is doubtless typical Georgian wisdom, justice and moderation. These days even Southern patriots can take pride in diversity at the workplace, provided it refers to the varieties of mental incompetence.

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Cleaning House

Those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, so the Chancellor has initiated a manhunt for the backbiting scoundrel who has been telling the truth about him. Team Fishy Rishi claim, or believe as the journalese hath it, that they have been harbouring a supporter of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition; while at least one hanger-on accuses the minions of the National Johnson. The crime minister (whether for or against is not specified) went on television for a bit of an ooze, while the innocent himself took the precaution of transferring the sacred cash-cow and their junior assets out of Downing Street and into a less disreputable neighbourhood.

Saturday, April 09, 2022

Mating America's Girls Again

Good Christian folk will be righteously indignant that at least two states have shown the white feather in America's continuing crusade for motherhood against ungodly sluttishness. Idaho's supreme court has stayed a bill modelled after the Texas law which permits lawsuits against doctors who perform abortions and conscripts citizens as bounty-hunters in the war on straying females. Displaying a distinctly non-Republican level of foresight, the Idaho state governor had previously expressed misgivings that similar laws might one day be used against gun owners, god-botherers and other followers of the American Way. Meanwhile, the governor of Kentucky has overruled the Trumpster-league state legislature, whose bill would criminalise abortions after fifteen weeks regardless of the circumstances whereby the blastula Americana was implanted in the incubator. A Greater Orange Party spokesbeing fulminated against the governor's "ideological war on the conservative values held by Kentuckians," among which rape, incest and victim-blaming are apparently prominent.

Friday, April 08, 2022

Lebensraum Denied

Enemies of the people at the high court have scuppered the Government's plans to build a Who Won the Holocaust Anyway centre in a public park. The puce Head Boy of the first Bullingdon Club administration dreamed up the idea, or got a little man to dream it up for him, some three years into the hostile environment and six years after the Conservative Party formally aligned itself with the neo-Nazi faction in Europe. Naturally it was considered appropriate to raise the virtue-signal on land appropriated from those little people to whom the rules apply; and all would have been jolly if it hadn't been for the London Historic Parks and Gardens Trust, which brought a case against the Government and which Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition will presumably lose no time in denouncing for antisemitism. The claim was even made that the rah-rah over Mr Churchill and the Conservative Party saving the Jews might drown out the national self-congratulation at having abolished slavery: a rather unfortunate result, given that the aspect of the Holocaust most abhorrent to patriotic Britons was undoubtedly the subjecting of white Europeans to treatment which civilised nations habitually reserve for the lesser breeds.

Thursday, April 07, 2022

The Cataract of the Mind's Eye

Now that the human species is more less saturated, it appears that mobile phone consciousness has begun to percolate into more innocent apes than Homo sapiens ipsedixit. Thanks to hours of exposure to visitors' photos and videos, the attention span of a young gorilla at Chicago's Lincoln Park zoo is showing signs of infiltration. So clogged has his brain become with the pervasive intellectual microplastic that even an invitation to a hormonal exercise with one of his less technologically-inclined room-mates apparently went unnoticed. Staff are now worried that the problem may spread to the other gorillas, and have roped off the enclosure and tried to explain the problem to visitors. It is to be hoped that their efforts do not suffer from a tactless intervention by the director of the Lester E Fisher Centre for the Study and Conservation of Apes, who dismissed the pixellated culture of his fellow hominids as "more of a quantity issue than a quality issue."

Wednesday, April 06, 2022

Market Forces Flee Disaster Zone

So efficient has the private sector proved at dealing with the climate crisis that the Government has found itself obliged to re-nationalise part of the National Grid. Apparently the flexible gumption and adaptive pluck that inevitably accompany the profit motive are insufficient to deal with the challenges of decarbonising the British way, namely by carbonising as fast as our national inefficiency permits. Having failed in their duty to the public, to future generations and to civilisation at large, shareholders will naturally be compensated at the taxpayer's expense, and a new public body with the eminently sane title of Future System Operator will be created to take the blame when the lights go out.

Tuesday, April 05, 2022

Cancelled

Although Her Majesty's Government's rah-and-blah in favour of conversion therapy for the filthy transwhatsits has not suffered the ignominy of having Alok Sharma appointed master of ceremonies, widespread defections by unconstructive woke types have brought about an equally unimpressive result. Even some Conservatives are beginning to wonder if the National Johnson might have been a bit indiscreet when he promised to ban conversion and then announced that actually he was all bullied up for a bit of good old-fashioned queer-bashing - and so soon after joining Vatican Incorporated, too. In accordance with the now standard policy of extremist bluster followed by tactical row-back, Johnson later levelled the queer-bashing down to trans-bashing, just in time for one of his own backbenchers to come out as the country's first openly transgender MP. Finally the Government's own adviser for profitable noncisness, who apparently had more important things to do before taking the job than glance over his employer's CV, resigned in shock and declared his trust eroded when he discovered that the National Johnson, of all people, had somehow said the thing that was not. Even the tokenism isn't what it used to be.

Monday, April 04, 2022

This Little Piggy Went to Market

Among the blessings of taking back control and paunching above our weight is, of course, that when things go a bit Michael Gove everyone else is still to blame. If it isn't the beastly Russians acting like Britain's favourite allies, it's the beastly Nazis in Strasbrussels who perversely refuse to level the playing field and continue to behave as if membership or non-membership of a trading bloc made some sort of difference to trade. Since the British Neoliberal Party's instinct is always to deregulate except where it might convenience the little people, Her Majesty's Government is now minded, if mind is the word I want, to dispense with border checks on food and livestock. Mere experts are already carping about the risk of African swine fever, as if the master race had not spent the past two years showing Johnny Covid what's what through sheer force of Britishness. As with the Heathen Chinee virus, the inferior foreign pedigree of the wog hog fever will undoubtedly prove its undoing against the ham-fists and pork-barrels of Her Majesty's grunters and squealers.

Sunday, April 03, 2022

They Never Learn

Four decades after the triumphant conclusion of Margaret Thatcher's most famous party political broadcast, the beastly Argies still haven't worked out who won. The enemy's foreign minister complains that Britain's treatment of Argentina resembles that normally reserved for countries in breach of human rights, and he even has the gall to point out that negotiations over the status of the Falklands were in progress at the time of the invasion. It seems that people can still be surprised, provided they live in a different hemisphere, that Her Majesty's Government would be more willing to compromise with a military dictatorship than with a forty-year-old democracy. Although the Falkland Islanders' desire to remain British has been repeatedly affirmed with North Korean levels of unanimity, the idea of the master race taking human rights into account is nearly as quaint as the idea that it might have some interest in soiling its second-best war nostalgia by negotiating with greasy foreigners.

Saturday, April 02, 2022

Doing Our Part

Some lucky little people in Yemen could be in for yet another invigorating dose of British fair play. Not content with the straight dealing of its arms sales to the head-chopping House of Saud, nor yet with the unpretentious decency of its cuts to the aid budget, Her Majesty's Government is now considering designating the Houthi rebels a terrorist organisation. Since this policy was sane and compassionate enough for the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble last year, it is of course only natural that the British Home Office should be slavering to follow suit. Proscribing the rebels as terrorists would prevent funds getting through to the areas they control, allowing up to half a million families to make the happy transition to what the late Madeleine Albright would term a price worth paying. Perhaps it might even incentivise those meddling aid organisations to get out of Yemen and do something useful instead, like helping that nice Mrs Sunak with her money troubles.

Friday, April 01, 2022

A Sorrier Britishness

Following a report by unelected academics, Glasgow authorities have acknowledged and apologised for the intimate connections between the city and the profits of woke-free pluck and gumption. At least eleven buildings and eight monuments are connected to people involved in the Atlantic slave trade; and no less than sixty-two streets are named after entrepreneurs who utilised slave labour to grow an addictive carcinogen for profit, possibly without even the redeeming modern practice of selling the poison back to the slaves. The Agence France-Presse report refers optimistically to Britain's increasing reckoning with its colonial legacy, and it is to be hoped that the Glaswegian example will encourage further reassessment. Unlike the English, who famously had no significant involvement in the slave trade other than a world-beating abolition, it appears that lesser Britons were in it up to their necks.