Our Guidance Spurned

Not even the sacred wellsprings of private education can long remain free from the insidious taint of Heathen Chinee propaganda. The fanatical fiends have extended their treacherous tentacles even into élite British schools, where "patriotism" is soon to be enforced by law. Nor will the patriotism be of the clean and proper British variety, but a subtle and sinister substitute which is almost certain to emphasise Heathen Chinee virtues and victories rather than British ones. The state is even attempting to regulate what children are taught during the compulsory phase of their education, causing some educational staff to leave: a self-evidently less efficient way of getting rid of teachers than the democratic British method of simply starving them out.

Bad Etymology

Racism, n. from Swahili urasimu bureaucracy: an administrative rubric for preserving caste privilege in the British Empire.

Vilify, v.t. from Old French village: to address or discuss in a manner befitting a small and close-knit community.

Our New Tough Stance

Connoisseurs of clear blue water will be gratified to see that Team Starmer's spiritual godfather contemplated wog containment measures barely distinguishable from the present Government's policy of internment, transportation and occasional assisted suicide. Even before they set about their industrial-scale refugee creation programme in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Reverend Tony and his company of saints were plotting concentration camps in Scotland and deportations to Turkey, Kenya and the Falkland Islands. Someone suggested ordering the UN to set up "regional safe havens" to give the master race a choice of convenient locations; and the Downing Street chief of staff recommended breaking our international treaty obligations and then passing a law to say we hadn't, even as the present rabble plan to do over Rwanda. The Reverend himself decreed that "we must not allow the ECHR to stop us dealing with it," thereby pre-emptively bestowing his divine approval upon the doctrine, now universally accepted among the sensible and moderate, that politicians are above the law.

Blown Out

Given the current state of both the climate emergency and the poverty crisis, it is only natural that progress on expanding the country's capacity for onshore wind generation should remain at its accustomed level of Britishness, even though His Majesty's Government has modified its attitude from active hostility to hostile apathy. The planning rules by which the glistening pink Head Boy pushed back the green crap during the first Bullingdon Club administration have been made less obstructive; but, doubtless with the best interests of his chums at Shell and BP at heart, Fishy Rishi will go no further in making onshore wind projects any easier to develop than waste incinerators. In motivating the Government's refusal, advice to the contrary from mere experts at the National Infrastructure Commission was presumably second only to the horrid prospect of lowering the little people's energy bills.

The Life Cycle of the Misprint

Controversy remains as to whether the errata in ancient and mediaeval manuscripts can be considered misprints, since such manuscripts were of course produced by hand, with misspellings arising from fatigue or carelessness on the part of individual scribes. Crucially, this method produced a far lower quantity of copies for each manuscript than was later achieved through the printing press, so that the opportunities for intercourse and breeding between misprints were severely curtailed.

The current consensus is that the true misprint arose with the introduction of the printing press, and specifically with the appearance of moveable type. The origins of the species are still obscure, but experts have theorised that the first misprints may have evolved as a result of lax standards of hygiene in the kerning and leading process. Small chips of wood were customarily used to space out lines and letters, and it is possible that the first misprints invaded the pages of early documents as a sort of typographical splinter group.

In the wild, the primary misprint mating season is believed to occur mainly during the composition of the first draft: the so-called love letter phase. Misprints are detected and eliminated at this stage with deceptive ease, thanks to their exhibitionistic rituals of courtship. These can often be so obtrusive as to deflect the writer's typing fingers onto the wrong keys, thereby aiding the reproductive process.

Following completion of a first draft, it is usual for writers to pause before commencing revision. it is during these pauses that the fertilised female misprints bear and conceal their offspring, which at this stage are microscopic in size and visible only to the smallest predators and editors. On being exposed to the light when revisions begin, the infant misprints undergo a prodigious spate of growth, which causes many to be detected but leaves maximum opportunity for the fittest to mature and multiply through subsequent drafts. This cycle culminates when the process of printing and/or uploading triggers the second mating season, the so-called hot-off-the-press phase: an orgiastic debauch aimed at producing the greatest possible population of new misprints for enshrinement in the published version.

Whatever the origins of the misprint, there can be little doubt as to the means of their perpetuation. Many commercial publishers are known to keep private farms where British and American spelling conventions promiscuously interbreed, and where the hyphen lies down with the emdash in conditions of barely publishable dissipation. Meanwhile, small press houses not only misdirect apostrophes but allow all forms of degenerated diction to wander freely throughout their business premises, criminally spaced out on duplicated lines.

It is generally believed that the present explosion in the misprint population has resulted from the near-extinction of the common proofreader, owing to the calamitous habitat loss that came about when Context fell victim to various ongoing culture wars. Certain subspecies have also interbred with the computer virus, infiltrating electronic spell-checkers and giving birth to approximately ninety per cent of text messages. However, all theories remain speculative as very little scientific research has been carried out, with research institutions unwilling to invest and writers too busy swearing to engage in disinterested inquiry.

Reasonable Community Sensibilities

A woman in the Christian state of Ohio has been charged with treating a corpse in a manner unbecoming to reasonable community sensibilities. She suffered a miscarriage, presumably from divine justice; but she subsequenlty disposed of the twenty-one-week foetus without due regard for its status as an ensouled American citizen and, apparently after some hours of debate among the hospital staff, was medically denounced to the police. According to her legal representative, Ohio law does not yet accord foetal remains the legal status of dead human beings; and according to an ungodly cabal of physicians Ohio law does not even define what would constitute a proper method of disposal. Nevertheless, the Christian state is convening a grand jury to decide whether a prison sentence should be imposed for failing to pay due reverence to God's abortions.

Bad Etymology

Christmas, n. from Latin cariēs decay and Ancient Greek tmêsis a cutting; hence a degenerated custom from which all but the rot has been excised.

Hymn, n. from Middle English hummen to buzz or drone: the sound of insects praising the corpse that nourishes them.

Just for the Exercise

Presumably in hopes that a quick South American war might do for the current rabble what the Falklands farce did for the sainted Thatcher, His Majesty's Government is to dispatch a gunboat to keep an eye on Guyana. The plucky little Commmonwealth country is involved in a territorial spat with Venezuela, where a referendum three weeks ago resulted in a vote to claim two-thirds of Guyana as its own. Britain, being the last nation in the world to condone fantastically unrealistic expectations from a referendum result, has proclaimed the sanctity of all internationally recognised borders except those not recognised by Britain, the World Cop or the Righteous State, and will be sending a Sewer-class offshore patrol vessel to participate in "activities which will be carried out at sea." Doubtless it will come as a relief to all involved that the Ministry for Wog-Bombing has discovered, perhaps from some yachting chums, that for best results boat-related activities should tend towards the maritime.

Treasures in Heaven

With schools falling apart, teachers badly paid and pupils increasingly malnourished, connoisseurs of British values will no doubt rejoice that the Government has donated almost fifty million to the upkeep of some real estate erected to the glory of a genocidal Bronze Age djinn. Cathedrals and parish churches alike have humbly accepted grants for repairs and maintenance; doubtless while bearing in mind with all due piety both the Saviour's injunction to pray in private and His proclamation that two or three gathering in His name are a sufficient guarantee of His presence. In a superbly Anglican touch, the largest bung of all went to Leicester Cathedral, which is in the midst of a two-year, £15-million resurrection thanks in part to the recently re-interred relics of a rather worldly Roman Catholic.

World Beeting

Once more the pure sewage of British independence is being polluted by the waters of woke, which are now dampening the resolve of business leaders. A group of bee-hugging business types are demanding that the Government follow, of all things, scientific advice from experts in the matter of neonicotinoid pesticides, which the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove promised would be banned in the wake of victory over the Strasbrussels tyranny. Rather than simply breaking the promise, as would undoubtedly be done by the clean-limbed cadres of Team Starmer, the Government has sneaked around it by sanctioning one warship-monickered nicotinoid for "emergency use" each year since casting off the Euro-wog yoke. Having killed the aphids which threaten to reduce profit margins from sugar beet, the pesticide spreads to the soil and thence to the wildflowers which the bees pollinate. Such behaviour, of course, constitutes a blatant blasphemy against the free-market principles of competition and self-reliance, and the bees are justly and poetically punished for socialistically depriving the wildflowers of the opportunity to pollinate themselves.

Student Politics

Well, that didn't take long. Less than three weeks after respectfully gushing her constructive admiration all over junior doctors, the Minister for Profitable Healthcare has resumed the Steve Baker (or Barclay) tactic of matching derisory pay offers with dismissive language. During a radio interview she proclaimed that she prefers to call them "doctors in training," and the increasingly non-Conservative ability to distinguish a preference from a fact appears unlikely to mitigate the offence. Junior doctors are fully qualified and may have up to a decade's experience; but they comprise nearly half of the doctors in the hated NHS, which doubtless explains why the Minister for Profitable Heathcare prefers to down-label them. In a further access of civility, the Minister claimed that the Government does have more money available than is currently being offered, but chooses to let patients endure a winter strike rather than bring it to the negotiating table. Presumably the thinking, if thinking is quite the word, is that anyone likely to die from an NHS winter crisis would be a fairly unlikely Party donor.

Colourful Wildlife

Two months ago the US Fish and Wildlife Service removed twenty-one species from the endangered list because they had attained the ultimate immunity of the passenger pigeon; but the state of Colorado is attempting to reintroduce the mis-spelled grey wolf into the wild. Alas, the state is also inducing a degree of habitat loss for rabid orange head-tribbles and their tangerine transportatoids, since the state supreme court has ruled the Trumpster an insurrectionist and therefore ineligible to hold any office reserved for more acceptable varieties of criminal. It appears that there are at least one or two extinction events about which the World Cop is slightly more concerned than that of the Palestinians; even so, ranchers and rural communities are worried about the dumb beasts in their charge, some of whom might easily take pot-shots at the wolves while letting Trumpsterites roam free.

All Greased Up Again

A few months after the end of its sponsorship deal with BP, George Osborne's greenwashing emporium is once more preparing to service its favourite fossil fuel profiteers. Aside from any sneaky little side-deals for pumping Osborne's sebaceous glands, BP will provide fifty million over ten years to modernise the building and rearrange the display of whatever items have still not been entrepreneurially relocated. The museum has stated that it will stay open during the redevelopment, which will doubtless help to ensure the classically British combination of maximum disruption for the visitors and maximum inefficiency from the employees of whichever Party donor is contracted to carry out the work.

Freer Wills

Mike Freer, to whose ignominious removal as local Commons expenses claimant the present writer hopes one day to have the pleasure of contributing, is quite the little loyalist. He was a Cameroon and a remainer under the glistening pink Head Boy, a Brexiteer under Tumbledown Tessie, and a bully-for-hire under the National Johnson; and he joined the herd resignations from Team Big Dog with a particularly abject little yap, as a married gay man invoking the prime minister responsible for Section 28. Naturally enough, under the régime of Fishy Rishi the loyal Freer has once more trimmed his pragmatism to the prevailing fashion by taking up the destruction of history. The Ministry for Profitable Incarceration, where the loyal Freer is now ensconced, has responded to the recent cyber-attack on the British Library in characteristic fashion: with the Library's online catalogue and digitised documents all unavailable for the past two months, the plan is to save the cost of a few ministerial lunches by digitising a hundred million historical documents and then throwing away any originals which do not appear noteworthy to the likes of Mike Freer. Among the incidental advantages of this policy is the likelihood of losing papers left by individuals who have little or no historical reputation at present but may appear more significant in the future, and thereby foiling the anti-patriotic machinations of Woke History. With his usual impeccable comic timing, the loyal Freer delivered an official boast about saving the taxpayer "valuable money" on the day when the headlines were bulging with the squillions which his most recent masters spaffed up the assets of pandemic profiteers Mone and Barroman Incorporated.

Bad Etymology

Bully, n. from Middle High German buole close relative: a favoured and much-used instrument of social acclimatisation.

Populism, n. from Old French popée a puppet and piauler to chirp, whence pule to whine: thus a political technique characterised by manipulation and noisy self-pity.

Al Dente

Some little time ago I was privileged to set before the public a few of the more refined and coherent documents concerning this vagabond avatar, whose subtle yet pervasive influence wafts across the vistas of history, literature and legend like a simoom of halitosis. Revised and corrected versions are now available as a real book and a PDF ebook, both of which include a brief outline of the manuscripts' discovery and the problems involved in their translation and interpretation; as well as a timely scraping away of the plaque of myth and fantasy which has all too often discoloured and obscured the enamel of veracity. For this concise yet erudite account I am indebted to the learned Dr Dominic dos Santos SJ, whose current legal difficulties I am certain will eventually prove not entirely unamenable to a more or less acceptable resolution.

Sinfully Constituted

Righteous indignation is abroad once more in the Christian state of Tennessee, where an ungodly after-school club has been formed by an organisation associated with the Satanic Temple. With truly fiendish cunning, the After School Satan Club claims that Satan is no more than a symbol; and the combined vices of secularity and non-profitability constitute a blatant anathema to followers of the true faith, who prize their federal tax breaks nearly as much as their otherworldly immortality. The national director of the ASSC was even devilish enough to invoke the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and religion and which Christians generally respect about as deeply and sincerely as they love their enemies, forgive others their trespasses, or hold all persons created equal.

Scattered Marbles

Lord Frost of Lesser Brexitannia has declared himself in favour of returning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. However, before panic ensues lest Lord Frost's having said something sensible provoke the imminent collapse of our present reality, let the reader be assured that Lord Frost's version of returning the marbles does nothing so sensible as just returning the marbles. To begin with, Lord Frost wants the marbles returned as a one-off gift, because obviously returning stolen property is an act of generosity; the Parthenon Marbles are not, after all, ghastly human foreigns working and paying tax thanks to some horrid freedom of movement. Again, as befits a negotiator for the National Johnson, Lord Frost does not fall into the delusion that might beset a mere native speaker of Standard English and regard a gift as something that is given: Lord Frost's gift would come at a price to the recipients, who would have to promise never to mention the matter again; and also to the Germans, the Austrians, the French and the Danes, who would also have to repatriate those parts of the marbles in their possession; and also to former colonies such as Nigeria, who would have to understand that gifts from the master race need to be earned. Lord Frost would also require the Greeks to send items from their own museums to be privatised by British entrepreneurs, and take part in closer diplomatic and cultural relations of the kind that were utterly taboo and forbidden under the yoke of the Strasbrussels dictatorship. Whether Lord Frost's diplomacy in this matter will meet with the same success as his negotiations for British independence remains as yet unclear.

Prepare for Peace, Hope for War

As custodian of the sole Western-style democracy among the barbarisms of the Middle East, the Righteous State's political establishment is naturally disposed to condemn any breach of etiquette which might bring into disrepute a perfectly good war crime. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians has done little to repair the poll ratings for the Netanyahoo government, which is widely blamed for the intelligence failures that enabled the Hamas attack on 7 October; and Bibi has accordingly gone into full campaign mode, since elections are likely to take place soon after the Gaza ghetto has been satisfactorily pacified. In response, the leader of the opposition fretted about "an evil political campaign ... to create hatred" against non-Arabs, while Bibi's own party officials briefed the right-wing Press about the undesirability of sowing division while half a million Israeli troops are dropping bombs on Israeli hostages. Even without the likelihood that the government will be removed by internal divisions or far-right wrecking measures rather than by the official opposition, so fine a combination of reason and humanity would almost be worthy of Westminster.

Urgent Business Elsewhere

Even before Fishy Rishi uprooted his government's chief negotiator in Dubai and hauled him back home to help push the Rwanda transportation bill through the House of Expenses Claimants, it seems fair to say that British leadership in the battle for climate compromise has demonstrated considerably more Britishness than leadership. The master race has wagged the finger at beastly foreigns who refuse to agree a complete phasing out of fossil fuels, causing some of the beastlier foreigns to point out the latest round of new North Sea oil and gas licenses. With his usual aplomb, Fishy Rishi himself managed to make a brief appearance at Dubai, only for its brevity to be unfavourably compared with the time spent on the private jet that fossil-fuelled him there and back. Fortunately, unlike those of the beastly foreigns, His Majesty's Government's chief negotiator is only a junior minister, and a minister for climate change at that, which is to say a hybrid of doormat, time-waster and laughing stock; so even Fishy Rishi found him expendable enough to order straight back to Dubai once the wog disposal scheme was safely through.

Bad Etymology

Campaign, n. from Late Latin campāna bell: a noisy alarm preceding an influx of political burglars.

Tenderness, n. from Middle English tenden to attend or serve: an emotion worthy of being expended upon a slave or a meal ticket.

Putting the Britain in Grate

New heights of symbolic Britishness continue to be scaled with the tottering state of Parliament's office building. Intended to last a hundred and twenty years, Portcullis House is, as one might expect, falling to bits after twenty-two. Since it was constructed in accordance with the British government's idea of a high standard, little account was taken of silly old maintenance requirements, let alone of the possibility that a couple more decades' greenwashing might lead to heavier and more frequent rain. As a result, maintenance personnel are unable to get onto the roof in order to stop leaks in MPs' offices; while the electrical and mechanical systems all need ripping out and replacing, at slightly lower cost than it would take to rip out and replace the poisonous mould and parasitic fungus which constitute the two major right wings of the Parliamentary Britishness Party. Routine maintenance has to be carried out by drones and abseiling teams, and the system for cleaning and replacing glass panes has seized up in line with current standards of transparency. Fortunately, a net is to be installed in order to catch falling glass, as it would hardly be in line with British values for our elected expenses claimants to be afflicted with any sort of point.

Shopping is for Life, Not Just for Christmas

As will be apparent to anyone lacking the blessed faculty of hibernation, the corporate ejaculation in the annual cycle of consumer-screwing has become increasingly premature. This year certain plucky little pumpers decreed the season open in August: a possibility which, like many recent heights of cultural Britishness, had once seemed merely satirical. Nor is the trend confined to Christmas: a few years ago a well-known manufacturer of sickly chocolate eggs was sugar-rushing the Resurrection by the first week in January. It is to be hoped that the logical end result - year-round grunting and squealing that there are only three hundred and sixty-five shopping days before everything - will produce an appropriate afterglow of spiritual consolation and family values.

Elizabeth the Great

Aptly enough for something named after a monarch whose reign started with the Kenyan Emergency and the Suez Crisis and ended with the National Johnson and La Truss, the Elizabeth Line is experiencing one or two technical difficulties. Along with services named, respectively, after a major pollution hub and a rail network that was founded in 1833 and closed the year India was partitioned, the Madge Gawblesser Railway experienced an unscheduled non-mobility incident as a result of an electrical fault, apparently when some cables were fallen on by the wrong kind of leaves. Some delays achieved so British a magnitude that the batteries powering the backup systems ran out and left passengers in conditions approximating those of shirkers and scroungers, although one who described the experience to the Press was prudent enough to compare it to wartime instead.

Too Broad a Church

After a spate of protests in Denmark and Sweden involving the burning of some rather lurid fantasy fiction, the Danish parliament has passed a law against the desecration of religious texts. This has roused the ire of the political right, whose historical enthusiasm for book-burning rivals that of the pious and is surpassed only by their mutual enthusiasm for burning human beings. Though hastily amended to excuse the Kingdom of Denmark from sheltering the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the scrawls of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and other disreputable scriptures, the statute is still tactless enough to protect both of the false and heretical manifestations of the Abrahamic delusion; so it remains to be seen whether its concomitant protection of the true one will be enough to procure redemption.

Toxic Environment

Ministers who proclaimed to the public that dispensing with air quality regulations would not lead to a decline in air quality may possibly have been saying the thing that was not. The existing rules were imposed by Strasbrussels Diktat and place actual obligations on the Secretary of State for the Environment to protect the environment, and are therefore to be stripped of their legality and deported to Rwanda at the end of the year. Thérèse Coffey, the macabre whoopee-cushion in nominal charge of the process, was advised by her officials to carry out a public consultation, but instead simply signed off on the option which would not oblige Thérèse Coffey to do an honest day's work now and then. The officials had warned that this option would diminish the Government's ability to track progress on emissions targets or take action in the event of targets being missed; which doubtless had much the same effect as warning a British Home Secretary about a risk of looking excessively tough on immigration. Subsequently Coffey stated that there would be no reduction in environmental protection levels and, more candidly, that the Government "uses" expert advice with regard to rolling back the green crap; which at least demonstrates that her recent excretion from the Cabinet did not come about through any violation of prevailing standards of integrity, professionalism and accountability.

Bad Etymology

Certainty, n. from Mediaeval Latin cōrtīna curtain: a protective screen against inexpedient perception.

Parable, n. from Greek pará beside or contrary to, and -able: a moral anecdote subject to misinterpretation.

Kigali Counsel

Patriots still itching for that first Rwanda flight will rejoice that His Majesty's Government is once more preparing to sock it to those enemies of the people in the supreme court. The latest wheeze is apparently to circumvent the court's ruling against the lawfulness of the Rwanda transportation scheme by sending lawyers to Rwanda. There is a certain logic to this: if one can make a room more stupid by putting Iain Duncan Smith inside it, and a ministry more crooked by putting Grant Shapps at the head of it, why shouldn't it be possible to make something more legal by throwing a few lawyers at it? Alas, there remains some doubt whether the lawyers will agree to be thrown: the president of the Law Society has already blamed the asylum and immigration backlog on silly old capacity, while a solicitor noted that the defects in Rwanda's wog disposal machinery are serious and systematic, and therefore presumably too British for legal representatives of the master race to be able to make much difference.

Richard Rampant

Superb levels of Britishness are on display from Dirty Dick Desmond, the plucky little entrepreneur whose plans for affordable accommodation once gained him the rare distinction of finding a use for Robert Jenrick. Formerly the owner of the Daily Express, which plays Tweedledullard to the Rothermere Daily Stürmer's Tweedledastard, Desmond naturally supported the Farage Falange in the debate over independence from the beastly Euro-wogs; so he must find it terribly traumatic to be forced to rely on a Strasbrussels Diktat for the accommodation of his latest hissy-fit. Not only did the regulator reject Desmond's bid to run the National Lottery: it ventured to call the bid "fanciful" while scoring it substantially below those from rival companies, and awarding the contract to a foreign operator. Desmond is invoking retained EU law to sue the Gambling Commission for a couple of hundred million, and the commission's chief executive disingenuously claims the money might have to come out of lottery funding for good causes, as if any cause in modern Britain could be more worthy than the offended feelings of a Brexiteer.

Let Them Eat Admiration

With the need to call a general election within the next thirteen months, and the increasing likelihood that blaming the wogs and disenfranchising a few million voters will not be enough to win, the Government has been driven to the extreme recourse of making soothing noises at junior doctors. Rather than echoing the previous incumbent's denunciations of the medical profession as militant deviationists and political saboteurs, the new Minister for Profitable Healthcare used words like respect and admiration and even constructive in a burble for the Murdoch Times. Those junior doctors who are fluent in English may be less impressed than she hopes by this rhetorical emollience, given that she also demonstrated an apparent lack of awareness that the word ask is a verb. A Downing Street spokesbeing reiterated that pay, being merely the substance of the dispute, is not negotiable; nevertheless, it remains as yet unclear how far the junior doctors will be pacified by hints that their applause ration may be tentatively restored.

Bit of a Blow

An enemy of the people has dismissed a libel claim against Mirror Group Newspapers by Sir James Dyson, the plucky little entrepreneur who campaigned for independence from the beastly Strasbrussels bureaucracy only to toddle off to Singapore in order to reap the benefits of liberty at a safe distance. A journalist in the Daily Mirror accused Dyson of setting a bad example for youth: "Kids, talk the talk but then screw your country and if anyone complains, tell them to suck it up;" the final phrase being a gratuitous and deeply hurtful reference to the great man's vacuum cleaner empire. However, the judge threw out the claim, while providing a handy legal definition of "screw the country," thereby condoning the vandalism of Dyson's reputation. The lustre of the Dyson name had of course been ineffably enhanced by his forthright show of confidence in whatever nebulous yet advantageous trade treaties may one day be negotiated between Singapore and Global Britain.