Watered Down

Three years and eight months after the Benyon report on keeping the seas safe for sewage, the Government has announced its intention to do three-fifths of the bare minimum. In view of the issue's vital importance, two of the five sites originally proposed as highly protected marine areas have been dropped, ostensibly in the wake of a sudden attack of concern about socio-economic impacts. Those now feeling the benefits of the poverty crisis, the looting of the public sector and Global Britain's liberation from the Euro-wogs may possibly have some idea of the importance the Government generally attaches to socio-economic impacts; nevertheless, where dreary woke concerns such as keeping the world livable are involved, even the prospect of ripping the heart out of communities seems to lack its usual charm.

Some Right Royal Statecraft

With the Ruritanian glitterhat of Empire not yet plonked upon his venerable bonce, and despite being unable to intervene in politics except when his pocketbook is affected, His Majesty the King may soon be obliged to dirty his plump pink palm shaking hands with a ghastly Euro-wog. Squeals of outrage are emanating even now from those quarters which specialise in such traditional British fare, because treacherous and backsliding persons have forced the poor old duffer to approve, by reason of the company he keeps, the betrayal of Brexit, the destruction of democracy, the disuniting of the Kingdom, the victory of Fenianism and, for all we know, the inadequacy of the domestic turnip crop for the entirety of the foreseeable future. His Majesty's Government claims that the timing of the visit's occurrence (simultaneously with the signing of Absolutely the Last Oven-ready Word on the Irish Question between Global Britain and its enemies in Strasbrussels) is pure coincidence; but this assertion has been denounced as a crass falsehood, including by no less an expert on falsehood and crassness than Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee, Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. In response, a spokesbeing for Fishy Rishi plausibly played down any suggestion that the Government was being subtle.

Criminal and Inhumane

Patriots and other practitioners of British tolerance will rejoice at the news from the Mediterranean, where it appears that several dozen more jobs have been saved for British workers. In a commendable spirit of thrift, the Italian government has forbidden rescue ships to aid more than one refugee boat at a time before requesting a port, and the prime minister was quick to blame human traffickers rather than anyone who might have (to take a random example) blown up a country or two and then left the ruins to be picked over by religious maniacs. The reason anyone deigned to notice this particular incident seems to be that the invasion craft hit some rocks, whereupon the sea took much the same approach to waste disposal as British water companies and allowed a number of the bodies to wash up on a tourist beach. Economically and scientifically the Continent may still be cut off from the mainland; but the moral rapport looks as healthy as ever.

Under a Bushel

So certain in their righteousness are the Christian anti-abortion lobby, so strong in the Lord and the power of His might, that they are disguising their Google advertisements as exercises in lukewarm neutrality. Although adverts by Life, Christian Concern and other coathanger promoters comply with the search engine's rules, they market their propaganda as impartial support for women suffering unplanned pregancies. In a particularly godly touch given the casual contempt with which Britain treats actual health workers, some of the adverts don't have to be paid for because the god-botherers, slut-shamers and lady-killers also happen to be registered charities. Yet with all this and God on their side too, the saints persist in their sneaking. Anyone not knowing better might almost suspect them of modesty.

We the Very Small People

The Christian state of Florida is facing a moral dilemma in the wake of the Supreme Court's removal of women's right to bodily autonomy. A suspect in a homicide case was arrested when six weeks pregnant, and has been imprisoned without bail since last July. If one accepts the position that a foetus is a human being, this of course means that an unborn person has been subjected to arbitrary detention without having been lawfully charged with a crime or given any of the protections which are their right under due process. Whether sincerely or satirically, the woman's legal counsel is arguing precisely this, and has applied for a writ of habeas corpus on behalf of the uterine lump. For some reason, the Christian state of Florida claims that the petition should be dismissed, thereby implicityly denying the ensoulment of the foetus until a rather late stage of incubation. It remains as yet unclear what sanctions will be imposed upon the Christian state of Florida should it persist in this doctrinal waywardness.

Why We Fight

Although managed decline may be good enough for such fripperies as national infrastructure, public health, the courts and education, it clearly does not suffice for the business of killing foreigners. Nevertheless, a National Johnson review of Global Britain's strategy for picking up more chips in the Great Game despite being smaller, poorer and unable to negotiate an international agreement seems to have run into trouble. There are complaints that the military are being unimaginative, despite their portrayal of Russia as clownishly inept and permanently on the verge of defeat while simultaneously poised to send its tanks rolling across Western Europe towards Dunkirk and the mainland. Some fifteen per cent of defence contracts have been delayed, including the Ajax armoured rattletrap which is five years behind schedule but sounds as if it will be jolly well worth the wait. Accordingly, now that a decent interval has passed since the greatest armed services in the world fled Afghanistan yet again, the Ministry for Wog-Bombing has decided to demand its share of the three hundred and fifty million a week that isn't being spent on the NHS. However, quite apart from the need for pork-barrel carrots to balance the gerrymander stick in the next general election, the chancellor may prove reluctant to shake the magic money tree, since clarity is lacking as to whether it would be preferable to start World War III with Russia or with the Heathen Chinee, whose insidious cunning extends to trashing slightly fewer countries than the international community has managed recently.

Party Animals

Just as those entrepreneurs who profit from the labour shortage are being assiduously protected by the hostile environment and the Rwanda transportation programme, so those patriots who profit from the climate crisis are receiving scrupulous aid from the Minister for Greenrinsing and Whatever. Thérèse Coffey dismissed the merely expert view that re-wilding and reducing the amount of land given over to livestock would be good for the environment, then took a brief hobnailed walk across the face of the baroness in charge of the National Farmers' Union, who had the temerity to claim that the egg sector was undergoing a market failure on the transparently woke grounds that a million hens have been lost and supermarket shelves are empty. Coffey further assured the NFU that sea eagles will not be permitted to carry off their livestock, which should prove an easy promise to keep since sea eagles habitually feed on carrion; and she also ruled out the reintroduction of lynx and wolves into the wild, doubtless because her party has always been more comfortable with sharks and leeches.

Last and First Men

Jóhann Jóhannsson 2020

The Icelander Jóhann Jóhannsson contributed distinctive and haunting scores to Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, Sicario and another less worthy of their abilities; and Last and First Men, which Jóhannsson directed, co-wrote and co-scored, indicates that his untimely death robbed us of a pictorial and poetic talent as well as a musical one.

Olaf Stapledon's epic history of the future is not so much adapted as abstracted, dispensing entirely with the lengthy catalogue of human varieties which separate the present makeshift species from its much-improved descendants on Neptune. Also lacking are the near-future events whereby the far-future narrator, via the "colourless but useful creature" Stapledon (so rated in Last Men in London, which chronicles the same future entity's influence on a single present-day individual) lectures Homo sapiens ipsedixit on the defects that will doom it. This pruning of the middle-men pares down the story to Stapledon's basic premise: a member of the Eighteenth (and, owing to a minor cosmic incident, final) human species communicates with the first across two million millennia.

Published in 1930, Stapledon's book uses men to mean the sum total of humanity, and Jóhannsson neatly sidesteps accusations of archaic sexism by bestowing upon the far-future narrator the voice of Tilda Swinton, who in her time has also played an androgyne or two. The words are spoken over monochrome visuals featuring the remarkable abstract memorials commissioned by Tito to commemorate the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Shot from a wide variety of angles and distances, these forgotten reminders of the catastrophe awaiting Stapledon's future variously suggest massive spacecraft, titanic buildings, re-shaped human forms, and the round-eyed gaze of awe-struck primitives.

Early Retirement

On the mainland, as we are all aware, people have rather selfishly started living too long, so that the Government was eventually forced to steal their state pensions and compel them to work until they drop. It seems the colonies have the opposite problem, with uppity Aborigines demanding their state pension at an earlier age because of their lower life expectancy. Australians of immigrant and convict descent live an average of about seven years longer than their Indigenous compatriots, and an enterprising Queensland man has reached the federal court with the argument that, at sixty-five, he can expect to die three years younger than a non-Indigenous man of the same age and should therefore get his pension three years earlier. It is no doubt fortunate for the taxpayer that, should the federal court prove itself an enemy of the people by finding for the vexatious plaintiff, the government's retaliation will be three years less expensive than it might have been.

Diplomatic Inscrutability

Will those Heathen Chinee never learn their proper place? After the failure of their insidious plot to balloon America into submission, the announcement of a possible peace plan for the Russia-Ukraine war has been greeted in the free world with a mixture of trepidation and finger-wagging. The foreign minister of Germany, one of the most enthusiastic suppliers of the Righteous State's wherewithal to perpetuate its half-century breach of international law in Palestine, lectured the interfering Orientals on their obligation not to reward the aggressor. Britain's leading liberal newspaper pondered the risk that the Heathen Chinee plan might itself amount to nothing more than those vacuities about peaceful solutions which are an occasional feature of Oriental diplomacy, in contrast to the straightforward eloquence and robust urgings of the master race. Undeniably the Chinese announcement is compromised by its endorsement of the sinister idea that Russia might have legitimate security interests. There is even a chance that the Heathen Chinee might seek to portray the free world as warmongers: a slant to which, despite the West's history of pacification from Nicaragua through Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and elsewhere, the gullible global south is potentially susceptible.

Environmental Non-Hostility

In keeping with the Conservative Party's rigorous environmental standards, which include killing children with illegal pollution levels and allowing water profiteers a decade or three to stop dumping raw sewage into rivers, the Secretary of State for Greenrinsing has been lecturing the financial sector on what else the Government isn't going to bother about. There is a substantial amount of protected land somewhere or other, and much of it is not in a condition to satisfy even Thérèse Coffey; this means that some targeting will have to be done in order to target some of it. Coffey also mentioned farming payments, which the Government has spent the past few years thinking through, with the usual inestimable results. Doubtless with her post-parliamentary career in mind, Coffey informed financiers that they would be "encouraged" to continue protecting the environment to the extent they find convenient. This is obviously more efficient than any system involving legal compulsion, which would force the financial sector to break laws, pay fines and endure the endless bother of taking another bailout from the taxpayer.

Corporate Crude

Environmental campaigners and other humourless persons have expressed concern because an institution which received corporate sponsorship agreed not to discredit or damage the sponsor's reputation. The institution is the Science Museum in London, which claimed not to have been censored by the oil companies, Shell and Equinor, whose money it was taking. This claim was corroborated by Equinor, which stated that the museum had imposed the gagging clause on itself without needing so much as a hint from the benefactor. The museum stated that all its contracts assert its editorial control so clearly and unambiguously that the standard clause in which the museum clearly and unambiguously gave up its editorial control would be taken out of future contracts. Possibly this sudden attack of independence will enable the Science Museum to publicise the climate research by Exxon and others from the 1950s onward, the emergence of which has done so much to demonstrate the business community's dedication to scientific rigour.

Every Little Helps

It appears that Fishy Rishi and his Minister for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets may have negotiated yet another solution to the Irish Question. The National Johnson's oven-ready deal having proved a little half-baked, the latest administration has opted for appeasement in the hope of staving off the various and competing wraths of the Farage Falange, the Dour Ultra Protestants, and those peculiar and vexatious tradesmen who seem not to realise what a sunlit upland the Irish border might be. Of course nothing short of a policy based in mere reality could satisfy the business community for very long, while the DUP is unlikely to consent with much enthusiasm to anything short of a Cromwell-with-nukes re-conquest of the Free State; but Fishy Rishi and his chums will mainly be hoping that the Farage Falange can be kept quiet long enough for the party to crawl through the May elections. Since these will be the first to take place under the Conservatives' voter suppression law, the losses may well prove less severe than a competent expectation manager could anticipate, and the Government and its chums will have postponed oblivion long enough to fill their boots just a few more times.

Yellow Alert

Despite being corrupt, callous, authoritarian and prone to operatic displays of nationalistic pique, the Communist Party of the Heathen Chinee is apparently some sort of systematic challenge to British values. Accordingly, the defenders of the free world are gaming the economic consequences if plucky little Formosa should fall to Beijing. In such an event the master race would presumably feel obliged to impose a sanction or two, and our foresighted Government has thought it wise to plan ahead how to make sure that any burden falls on the little people rather than on the deserving. Doubtless it was a similar prudence that kept the scenarios short of another full-scale War on Evil™ against a power so insidiously subtle that it can get an occasional balloon to stay aloft.

Moderate Progress at a Sensible Pace

Among the immediate and tangible benefits of liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke was, as we know, the chance to adopt those ever more stringent environmental standards which had been forbidden us by the beastly Euro-wogs. As one would expect, the Conservatives seized this opportunity and gave the water profiteers fourteen years to start thinking about cleaning up their act, and another fifteen in which to refrain from dumping raw sewage; and, as one would expect, vexatious remainers are even now complaining to the enemies of the people that it isn't good enough. Judging by these traitorous importunities, one would almost think that real people with private pools didn't exist, or that some people would be happy to see the cleansing blessings of sovereignty swept away on a filthy tide of infrastructure.

Spiritual Penetration

To the Church of Rome's little embarrassments in Ireland, Italy, France, Canada and other countries must now be added some five thousand little indiscretions in Portugal, where a Church-commissioned inquiry has published another of those reports. The head of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference approved the document as "dramatic," and was able to spare one whole thought for the victims, although it remains as yet unclear how deeply the episcopal stipends will be slashed in order to pay due compensation. On a more exalted level, the Bishop of Rome is scheduled to visit Lisbon in the summer, and may well condescend to make the usual noises.

Joined-Up Government

Although the climate breakdown will continue to result in large numbers of foreigns being broiled, drowned, starved, made homeless, or caught up in wars over vanishing resources, Britain's leading liberal newspaper has discovered that it has its downsides too. Britain's increasingly murderous heat in the summer and lack of sustained cold periods in the winter is disrupting the life cycle of indigenous apple trees, which may lead to an invasion by swarming hordes of lesser fruit. At the same time, the migrant workers who used to work in Britain's orchards have all been thrown out, so it's fortunate that for the moment there is nothing for them to pick.

National Government

Where the lesser breeds have corruption and the one-party state, the master race has consensus politics, whereby the nominally opposed factions of the corporate welfare party can gather together for a friendly blah-blah about how much they agree with one another. Both the Conservatives and the Wannabe Conservatives are increasingly exercised about the surprising lack of material benefits accruing from cutting the country free of its biggest trading partner, although the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove has sought to stiffen spines by promising sunlit uplands in the long run. Whether that run will be completed within the lifetime of anyone now extant seems to have been left rather vague. Nevertheless, the Conservatives are adamant that closer ties with the EU are not an option, and Labour agrees with them. On the other hand, the Conservatives would like Britain to have a bigger stake in energy profiteering and wog-bombing and the kind of science thingy that doesn't make Lee Anderson's head hurt, and Labour agrees with them. The Conservatives are also concerned to keep Northern Ireland within the Empire, and Labour agrees with them. It all sounds frightfully constructive.

Better to Burn than to Marry

The Church of England's decision to vote a new booby-prize for second-order human beings has brought forth predictable squeals of outrage from those instruments of the divine love who incline more to the Saviour's punitive fundamentalism than to emollient British hypocrisy. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches complained that the decision to legitimise mumbling magic words over same-sex couples goes against Biblical doctrine and against the mind, such as it is, of the Anglican Communion; which of course is perfectly true. The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose moral courage is such that he has promised not to bestow in person the blessings he advocated and defended, acknowledged the likely worldly suffering of Anglicans as a result of the vote, and proclaimed that there was nothing he held so dear as the safety of those he was joyfully endangering. Doubtless he referred to the safety of their souls rather than their bodies: most Anglican churches agree with Leviticus 18 xxii as unequivocally endorsed by the Saviour at Matthew 5 xviii, but the Church of England takes the more nuanced view that the teachings of Christ are secondary to its own convenience.

Who Could Have Foreseen It?

A racist policy devised by racists in a racist government for the delectation of racists has, mirabile dictu, achieved a racist result. A grudgingly undertaken and much delayed Government impact assessment states that the hostile environment instituted by Tumbledown Tessie, the Bullingdon Club and their Liberal Democrat accomplices exerts its greatest hostility against Indians, Pakistanis, Nigerians and Bangladeshis, while letting less coloured people off the hook. Difficult as it may be to believe for anyone who has met a British landlord, even the conscription of landlords as Border Force assets may have led to an excess of zeal in pursuing the policy's noble British aim. The policy's greatest triumph, of course, was the orgasm of Britishness rampant that constituted the Windrush persecutions, following which the blithering thug Priti Patel promised to implement the recommendations of an independent investigation - a promise now casually broken by the blithering thug Suella Braverman; and as one would expect, the Ministry for Wog Control responded to the impact assessment with the standard assertion that nothing was wrong and anyway it had all been fixed beforehand.

Our Worthy Heirs

As Britain edges closer to independence from the unelected European Convention on Human Rights, a former protectorate of the master race has made encouraging progress in a similar direction. Uganda, whose most famous past president was a graduate of the King's African Rifles, has formally evicted the interfering busybodies of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, thereby freeing the government to deal robustly with migrant hordes, disruptive protesters, and those who fail to work hard and play by the rules. The current president has perhaps gone a little further than is strictly British in his incentivisation of non-traitorous voting practice; but unlike the British government he has apparently been forced to deal with actual political opposition.

Perilous Relativism

Not content with disparaging the decency and fair play of Britain's war on wogs, the United Nations has once more indicated its chronic unsuitability for world leadership by implying that even the heart of darkness has its reasons. Contradicting all that British pragmatism, American moralism and the transatlantic arms trade tell us concerning the innate evil of the terrorist, UN researchers working across eight countries have concluded that people tend to become susceptible to recruitment by extremists when they find themselves endangered by security forces and impoverished by wealth creators. Astoundingly, certain militant groups even stoop so low as to capitalise on these good intentions gone awry, by feeding their adherents and restoring a measure of order. It is fortunate that all eight of the countries surveyed were in Africa; otherwise one or two of the Free World's recent ventures in benevolence, with their tail-between-legs exit strategies, might have suffered some hurtful remarks.

Fly Open

An understandable if none too aesthetic way of dealing with impotence is to wave the old chopper in the air; and it appears that the ever smaller and more flaccid person of Fishy Rishi includes a substantial enough smidgen of the common man to render him susceptible to that primal urge. Since he can presumably negotiate a turnstile or a ticket purchase about as well as he can negotiate an equitable pay deal for a few million public sector expendables, rail travel would naturally be out of the question even if Britain had railway companies disposed to facilitate it; so as there seems to be no alternative Fishy Rishi has been flitting about the country in private helicopters, and incidentally flashing the turgidity of his government's green agenda for all the world to see. Supposedly he has used taxpayers' money only when travelling on government business, and his wife's money the rest of the time; and of course there is almost no reason to disbelieve him.

Targeted Insulation

It is an economic truth universally acknowledged, that pay rises for little people tend to push up prices, while making little people pay more for the necessities tends to protect taxpayers against inflation. Hence Jeremy Chunt's disinclination to prevent, or even greatly mitigate, another steep rise in energy costs from the beginnning of the new financial year. Any such action might have to be paid for with a tax on energy profits: a policy of such Communistic extremism that it has the support of Rachel "Scourge of the Scroungers" Reeves. However, Treasury anonymoids have informed the moderate and sensible press that the present windfall tax has not performed as well as expected, despite HMRC's famously high levels of zeal and efficiency when collecting from those who can afford not to pay; so an increase remains impracticable as long as profits have not yet penetrated a sufficient quantity of roofs for the cartel to feel wholly secure.

A Question of Priorities

"Let us ask ourselves what it means for us to be ministers of God in a land scarred by war, hatred, violence and poverty," suggested the leader of an organisation which numbers among its more notable historic achievements the Crusades, the Inquisition, numerous pogroms and witch-burnings, the accumulation of vast worldly wealth, and the formation and protection of one of the world's most extensive and commercially successful societies for the promulgation of sexual abuse. In the context of South Sudan, where His Holiness was speaking, it means justifying the consequences of civil war, flooding and extreme poverty, to which the Deity has thus far responded after His usual manner, by sitting back complacently upon His Heavenly throne and watching His children suffer. The Pope is on a pilgrimage of peace alongside his counterparts from the Churches of England and Scotland: the first expedition of its kind in Christian history, although adherents of all three factions spent the colonial era and the period of the Atlantic slave trade bestowing upon the African continent spiritual gifts which were no doubt extensive. Another meaning of the joint ministry, therefore, is that since the middle of the sixteenth century Christian leaders have had more important things to do.

It Shouldn't Be A Holiday For Them

Apparently the ignorant, the impoverished and the bombed are guilty of a hideous misunderstanding of the spirit of Dunkirk. There can be no other explanation for the fact that, even so long after taking back control of her plucky little borders, Britain continues to stand in perpetual peril of being swamped by invading small boats. Hence the perennial problem of wog warehousing has once again reared its inconvenient head. Although present accommodation in hotels has the advantage of creating business opportunities for entrepreneurial child-traffickers, the Ministry for Wog Disposal is seeking alternatives, amid fears that present expenses will cut into our democracy's electoral tax cuts. Now plans to level up Merseyside by storing asylum seekers at a local holiday resort have apparently been abandoned, although a new and potentially final solution may perhaps be in sight. Ministry officials will be holding a mini-competition in June, following which companies will be invited to design, build or renovate economically viable camps. Those with appropriate numbers of Party donors among their shareholders will doubtless meet the challenge with due concentration.

Cleverly Slanted

Britain's Misnomer for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets has put yet another uppity foreigner in their place. His Australian counterpart, who has carelessly allowed her British heritage to become tainted with Heathen Chinee, was indiscreet enough to mention the colonial exploitation of Chinese workers, which Mr Churchill once defended with such famous terminological exactitude. The Misnomer shrugged off the matter with his usual sledgehammer tact, proclaiming to a press conference that the Conservative Party now promotes ethnic minorities to the highest offices of state, and that therefore the master race will take no lectures from the different-but-equal. Some may recall how the Soviet Communist Party stopped falsifying history the moment the Georgians Dzhugashvili and Beria were permitted to take charge in Russia; but it seems doubtful that such historical analogies are equal to Cleverly's powers of cognition. More likely his remarks, as usual in the past three or four administrations, were not addressed to their ostensible audience at all, but to the domestic rabble of back-bench baboons who might at any moment gang up to kick him off the gravy train. If nothing else, Cleverly's bragging about the coloureds in the Cabinet shows that he subscribes unequivocally to the great Conservative axiom that policy is less important than parentage.

Vexatious Litigation

Just as the natural party of racism and sexism is prepared to tolerate wogs, women and gays provided they are sufficiently greedy, thuggish, hypocritical and stupid, so the ideological prejudice against taxpayer-funded legal aid for workshy criminals tends to become a bit more nuanced when real people are in the dock. Being no longer in a position to trade government sinecures for cash loans, the National Johnson has been allocated nearly a quarter of a million in public funds, with the prospect of more, to defend himself against the charge of deliberately saying the thing that was not, as opposed to undergoing a timely lapse of memory, within the hallowed chamber of the House of Expenses Claimants. Fishy Rishi, whose lack of affinity for the kind of mugs who pay their taxes has been on edifying display more than once, proclaimed that there is a precedent for ex-ministers to receive handouts should their conduct as ministers come under legal scrutiny; which is no more than to say that a liar may also, on occasion, be a parasite. By way of demonstrating that he deserves another bung, the National Johnson has declared chickenfeed of two point three million from the cluck-for-bucks circuit and the final instalment of his trilogy on Churchill, Shakespeare and Boris Johnson; as well as the public money he receives in his purely nominal role as the representative of a parliamentary constituency.