Not Merely Players

Scandal continues to rock Shakespeare's Globe theatre over the question of whether a stage actor spouting iambic pentameters should be permitted to pretend to be something they're not. A new pressure group has efficiently if perversely courted headlines by insisting that the Christian notion of physical affliction being an indicator of moral depravity (if you didn't deserve it, God wouldn't have given it to you) should be faithfully reflected in the exclusive casting of disabled people as Shakespeare's rather more than half made-up Richard III. The role in a forthcoming production has been taken by the Globe's female artistic director, so perhaps it was felt that gender blindness in casting should be balanced by galumphing literalism in other regards. Since morals and opinions, like other disabilities, are socially determined at least in part (I myself was unaware of my antisemitism until alerted to it by the acolytes of Team Starmer), presumably we can look forward to the same group campaigning against non-betrayers playing Iago, or non-bigots playing Henry V, or non-Royalists performing any works at all by a prominent member of the King's Men.

Slipping Behind

For all the honorary status conferred by their royal family, their respect for tradition and their robust attitude to human rights, it is clear that Whitehall's favourite Islamic fundamentalists persist in retaining certain undesirable attributes of the swarthy Oriental. Mere months after Fishy Rishi gloriously inaugurated a new British age of oil production, the head-chopping House of Saud has cancelled plans to expand its own kingdom's production. Apparently the Saudis have been spooked by a report from the International Energy Agency which predicts a peak in global oil demand within a few years; doubtless the British government discounted the report as being unduly tainted by expertise, especially as Shell promptly announced its continuing resolve to hasten and exacerbate the climate catastrophe by whatever means profitable. It is to be hoped that Britain's glistening pink Minister for Wogs, Frogs and Huns, himself no mean avatar of the light and crude, will take all necessary pains to inform the Saudis of their duty to the master race, to say nothing of the Communistic perils of a planned economy.

Freeman at Last

I am sure we all sympathise deeply with George Freeman MP, whose well-fed appearance belies a life of suffering and privation under the cruel mistress that is government. Having been thrust reluctantly into high office, doubtless via one of the numerous non-sycophantic and un-backstabbing routes which are so very customary in our mother of democracies, Freeman has discovered that he can't keep up with his mortgage payments. Even a brief stab at PPE profiteering during the pandemic has not significantly alleviated his difficulties, and doubtless his most recent ministerial stint, as Minister for Science, Research and Innovation in a government that doesn't believe in facts or planning or keeping schools from falling down, has proven stressful above and beyond the consolations that a beggarly hundred and eighteen thousand a year can bring.

There's No Pleasing Some

Levels of Britishness at the Ministry for Wog Disposal remain commendably high, as it now emerges that several Rwandans have been granted refugee status owing to fears of persecution which even the British Home Office considered well-founded. Uncharitable observers are already hinting that this might be thought to compromise the Government's assertions that Rwanda is a safe country; although in all fairness the Government has only ever really asserted that it's safe enough for wogs. In any case, the unelected supreme court has ruled Rwanda unsafe, so it seems only natural that the famously law-abiding Home Office should demonstrate due alacrity in granting refugee status according to the ruling. Once the democratic process of embodying the will of the people has run its glorious course and declared Rwanda safe by Act of Parliament and Royal Assent, any stray natives can be rounded up with a clear conscience and sent back to bask in the sunshine.

Shocked, Appalled and Concerned

Much like her brother in ineptitude Sir John Major, who began the formal demolition of the hated NHS and then became terribly concerned about the process once other people were being paid to expedite it, Lady May of Windrush has gone all citizen of nowhere over the hostile environment. It appears that the Ministry for Wog Disposal has chosen not to implement the legal rights of slavery and trafficking victims, whom Tumbledown Tessie and the brilliant Iain Duncan Smith have done the honour of using as reputational human shields. May's fellow churchgoer and sometime Cabinet accomplice Alistair Carmichael joined her in being shocked and appalled at the cruelty and spinelessness which have resulted from giving little red boxes to Conservatives and not to Liberal Democrats. Team Starmer has thus far not deigned to comment, but is doubtless considering how best to remove all the inconvenient legal loopholes that continue to assert the existence of non-bogus asylum seekers.

Bad Etymology

Genocide, n. from Ancient Greek génos race and Latin caedō kill: the systematic, deliberate and criminal destruction of an entire ethnic or national group.

Genocide, n. from Latin gens clan and occidentalis western: the systematic, deliberate and meritorious destruction of an entire ethnic or national group.

Wise Guys

Even as Britain's unelected prepare to sabotage Fishy Rishi's wog transportation bill, another group of cultural traitors have inflicted hideous injury upon the will of the beastly French. Members of the Constitutional Council, known as les sages, are appointed in threes for non-renewable nine-year terms, thereby denying the Fifth Republic those lifetimes of experience on which the British Mother of Parliaments can draw, as well as the civilised conviviality that can only prevail in an institution packed to the rafters with political placebeings, seat-warming sycophants, pork-barrel peddlers and obliging crooks. The Constitutional Council has invalidated about forty per cent of the amendments to a new immigration law: mostly on the grounds that they are irrelevant to the matter in hand, but in three cases because their essence is worthy of censure. Coincidentally, the victimised amendments are those inserted to appease the far right; and while the interior minister emitted a gloat about the government's text having been accepted, the purveyors of the people's swill are emitting the usual squeals about the legislature being insufficiently supportive of the right sort of illegality. Patriotic Britons will doubtless count themselves fortunate that a similar unseemly spectacle on the sovereign side of the English Channel is likely to be forestalled, thanks to the mainland's long-standing tradition of constitutional abstentionism and gentlemen's nodding and winking.

Clear Blue Water

Something called Steve is threatening to get tough on moisture provision profiteers, at least to the extent of perhaps no longer permitting them to monitor their own pollution. The former Minister for Profitable Healthcare informed the plucky little entrepreneurs that the régime of self-regulation (non-regulation, in Oldspeak) introduced via the bonfire of bureaucracy ignited by the glistening pink Head Boy and his little yellow fags will almost possibly be coming to an end at some point or other. It all sounds jolly believable, especially as a similar pledge was made three years ago by Rebecca Pow, whom everyone remembers these days, with the usual memorable results. Whatever happens, we may at least take it for granted that nothing so Euro-Stalinist as planning will be involved: the Steve in question did not deign to specify when or to what extent the rules will be tightened, let alone hint what salutary sanctions will be imposed for breaking them, and the likelihood that anything of the kind will occur before the general election is only slightly smaller than the chance of its occurring afterward.

Where Neither Moth Nor Rust Destroys

Current events in Gaza constitute a timely reminder of the hijinks that can ensue when the Deity deals in real estate; but it seems this is by no means the limit of Honest Jehovah's commercial competence. A couple of religious hustlers in Colorado, evidently unable to get by on the federal tax breaks habitually awarded to spiritual fraudsters, took their dupes for $1.3 million in a cryptocurrency scam and are now testifying that they acted on God's advice. Nor was the Lord sparing in His recommendations of how to dispose of the profits: the wages of virtue included a divinely sanctioned domestic refurbishment, doubtless heavily biased towards humility, and a substantial share for the upkeep of their online-only Victorious Grace church, whose entire lack of physical existence may have moved God to a certain fellow-feeling. The couple, aptly surnamed Regalado (Spanish for given as a present), are now relying on their heavenly fiscal adviser to "work a miracle in the financial sector."

Uppity Incubators

In accordance with the ongoing Trumpsterisation of our Mother of Democracies, there has been a significant increase in the number of women investigated and prosecuted for undergoing abortions. In the two decades to 2022, there were three prosecutions of women for terminating pregnancies illegally; since 2022 there have been at least six, with corresponding growth in pestering, harassment and trauma. Mere experts at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have now weighed in, proclaiming that prosecutions for failing to birth new Britons are never in the public interest, and that healthcare staff are under no legal obligation to report such cases to the police. The Society for the Production of Unwanted Children objected that public trust in health workers would be undermined if health workers went around respecting patient confidentiality; while a government spokesbeing acknowledged the sensitivity of the issue and deemed it a fine excuse for not modernising the law. In the absence of a Vatican communiqué interpreting the will of the deified Blair upon the matter, His Majesty's Abortive Opposition seems not to have expressed an opinion.

Proms in Peril

A cellist, and a coloured one to boot, who played at the wedding of those notorious royal miscegenates the Sussexes, has courted the Windrush treatment by polluting Desert Island Discs with a suggestion that the jingo anthem Rule, Britannia! should be dropped from the Last Night of the Proms. So black is his ingratitude that he blatantly boycotted the whole rousing rah-rah, exclamation mark and all, after performing as a soloist last year; and he now has the temerity to claim that it could be replaced with music that the plebs and peasants produced for their own delectation rather than for that of such icons of Britishness as Friedrich Ludwig, Prince of Wales. Fortunately, civilisation was saved for the moment when a spokesbeing at the British Broadcasting Conservatives swiftly slapped down the revolt, citing those long-standing and cast-iron traditions which are so vital in keeping degenerate art at bay. In accordance with British cultural values, the spokesbeing invoked the name of the Proms' co-founder Sir Henry Wood, who himself skirted treason by allowing women to play in the orchestra, letting the musicians stand with the conductor to acknowledge applause, and even trying to get their wages increased.

Pragmatism Before Planet

As so often in its relentless quest for the centre ground, Team Starmer is apparently preparing to pander yet further to the climate-denying far right. Labour's environmental policy has already progressed from "we'll spend twenty-eight billion!" to "actually, we might not!" and thence to "we'll need a couple of parliaments to think it over;" and now the great man's sometime publishers in the Murdoch scumbag press have reported that the whole ghastly affair is about to be abandoned altogether. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly evident that retaining any shred of commitment to the plans would create an unacceptable degree of divergence between Team Starmer and the Conservative Party; and since it is clearly a vital function of His Majesty's Acquiescent Opposition to corroborate the globberings of the scumbag press, Team Starmer has convened an urgent blah-blah to discuss how best to keep on board those voters who take their legitimate and understandable concerns from the Murdoch tabloids and the Rothermere Daily Stürmer. Meanwhile the Leader himself has reiterated his commitment to the plans, which of course constitutes the clearest possible signal that they are not far from the incinerator.

Gesture Politics

Italy's highest court has ruled that the Fascist salute may legally be performed in public, provided that it does not cause disorder or entail a resurrection of Mussolini's party. Italian law already bans apology for Fascism and re-organising the party, and apparently the Roman salute constitutes neither; presumably in much the same sense as genuflections by Mussolini's heirs in the Vatican still symbolise no very close acquaintance with poverty or celibacy. The intervention by the court of cassation makes for a telling contrast with the will of the people on the mainland, where the attitudes and policies of the Farage Falange have thoroughly coloured the mainstream without anyone feeling the need to pronounce on the legality of its imperial purple, whether in the corporate logo or in the complexion of its cadres.

The Vermin in the Ermine

Even in the slightly less elected house of our Mother of Parliaments; even at an institution whose inmates include, among others, all the beneficiaries of the Johnson and Truss honours lists, besides the glistening pink Minister for Lesser Breeds and his ex-hairdresser; even there, it seems that some vestiges of pride still remain. Responding with due disdain to Fishy Rishi's peremptory order to hurry along with the Wog Disposal (Transportation) by the People's Will bill, their Lordships obliged him by taking mere hours to agree a timetable which could drag on the ghastly business for another three months or so before the legal challenges begin. Patriots will doubtless rejoice that at least some fraction of a part of the British establishment has managed to retain a degree of dignity and self-respect that might almost be considered worthy of the president of Rwanda, even at risk of the Government suddenly noticing that slightly fewer Britons voted for the Lords than used to vote for the EU parliament.

Bad Etymology

Economics, n. the art and science of market forces; from Greek eikṓn image and Latin nūmen divine will.

Protestant, adj. from Latin pro in favour and testa burned clay: a work ethic founded on human combustion.

Legal Correctness Gone Mad

Plans, if that is the word I want, to draft in a phalanx of judges for the purpose of facilitating the people's will in the matter of wog disposal by transportation to Central Africa have been criticised by the most unelected judge of all. The lady chief justice responded to Fishy Rishi's petty contribution to a decade and a half of Conservative and Lib-Dem trampling of the courts by stating that the deployment of judicial resources was exclusively a matter for the judiciary - for all the world as if His Majesty's Government were not above the law. Even Fishy Rishi's proposed stunt of exonerating, with a wave of his grubby little hand, the victims of Fujitsu and a long and crooked line of ministers from Sir Edward Davey onwards looks set to net somewhat fewer postal votes than might have been hoped. For His Majesty's Amenable Opposition, the shadow Minister for Being Related to Nobody Much noted that Team Starmer opposes the Rwanda transportation policy because it is unaffordable, unworkable and unlawful, presumably in that order; and that Team Starmer agrees absolutely with the supreme court of the land to the extent that Rwanda is an unsafe country and for as long as Team Starmer remains on the opposition benches.

Moderate Proportionality, Sensible Reasonability

Britain stands ready and willing to engage in further wog-bombing unless Johnny Arab learns to behave himself; and apparently this is news. Fishy Rishi rejected the Houthis' malign imputation that their attacks in the Red Sea had anything to do with the Righteous State's assault on the Palestinians, so presumably we have not long to wait before Fishy Rishi exults that the Allied airstrikes are preventing another Holocaust. Though not sought in advance, Parliamentary approval was his to demand, albeit with some small regret from the Bullingdon Club's accomplice in the Post Office scandal, and a belated Christmas cracker motto from the leader of His Majesty's Agreeable Opposition: "scrutiny is not the enemy of strategy" so long as it's the Right's kind of scrutiny. With his usual impeccable timing, Fishy Rishi proclaimed the necessity "to strike at speed … to protect the security of these operations" just as the Houthis disobligingly demonstrated that operations remain as insecure as before. Fortunately, in an election year for both the major Allied powers we can safely dismiss the likelihood that any genuine concern for international security enters into the matter. The Reverend Sir Anthony of the Most Servile Confabulation of the Stocking-Top did a good bit of wog-bombing in his time, and it may still occasionally be possible to find a Team Starmer apparatchik willing to hint at how many elections he won.

Cleansing Tides

Enthusiasts for traditional methods of population control will rejoice that an encouraging degree of Britishness in global healthcare has yielded simultaneously a shortage of vaccines for cholera and a substantial increase in the supply of dirty water. So far it's mostly the lesser breeds who have reaped the benefits, with major outbreaks in Malawi, Haiti and Zambia. However, at least thirty other countries reported cases this year; and thanks to the state of Britain's water and flood defences, to say nothing of recent efficiencies in public health, it surely cannot be long before our famously maritime nation assumes its merited position of global leadership in this as in so much else.

Small Change

Even the best-laid plans of Team Starmer are not so costed that they can't be watered down yet further in the interests of real people. Plans to mitigate the convenience of wealthy tax-dodgers are set to join the plans to spend twenty-eight billion on green modernisation, as well as one or two others, in the long grass of sensible moderation. This latest dilution of the diluted has been roundly condemned both by left-wingers and by the Conservatives, which constitutes the sole and inarguable necessary certification of its irreproachable centralism. Of course it will leave the exchequer short of a billion or so; but that can be recouped more or less painlessly through a programme of welfare cuts, efficiency savings in the NHS, crumblier school buildings, on-the-spot fines for antisemitic tropes, and other major improvements.

Freedom of the Seas

With profits stagnant, polls in slump,
The realm a sewage-sodden dump,
The Party in vindictive mood,
The plebs flush with ingratitude,
Statesmen of stature, staunch and true,
Must see the situation through:
The country's going to the dogs?
Let's up our game and bomb some wogs!

Our government the worthy heir
Of Eden, Major and Saint Blair,
Yemen today, and then the mad
Malignant Mullahs shall be had;
Next, once Afghanistan is free,
We'll civilise those damned Chinee.
It's always worked so well before:
Time for a Middle Eastern war!

Victor Jingo

Bad Etymology

Ignoramus, n. from Latin ignis fire and French ramasser to pick up or collect: someone prone to witch-hunts and easily carried away.

Reliable, adj. from re- again, lie a deliberate falsehood and -able: the kind of untruth and/or purveyor of untruths which can be profitably utilised more than once.

Left Without Official Absence

Although George Osborne's British Museum remains the most notorious example of Bullingdon book-keeping at work, it appears that several other treasure-houses of the national heritage have manifested a similar degree of Britishness in caring for their collections. Forty-five items belonging to the National Portrait Gallery are "not located," although they are also neither missing nor stolen; it remains as yet unclear whether one of them is an image of Schrödinger. The Victoria and Albert Museum is unable to account for a hundred and eighty artefacts, and does not know whether they are lost or stolen. The National History Museum has lost a hundred and eighty fish, besides sundry saurian segments; but said that most of the bits and pieces were quite small really. In a tribute to British military prowess, the Imperial War Museum has lost more than five hundred and fifty items, with the excuse that they "date from many years or even decades ago." It certainly seems well beyond the bounds of reasonable expectability for a museum to be capable of looking after anything old.

Good Home for Used Gove, No Time Wasters Please

Although Team Starmer cannot promise to repair crumbling schools, let alone pay teachers properly or raise the living standards of excess working people, its spokesbeing for education has promised that at least no British child shall be without a number. Ostensibly a means of ensuring that children receive whatever services can be expediently afforded, the scheme's real purpose will doubtless be to create a data farm for private companies to use in targeting their salesmanship, as is patently the prognosis for what remains of the hated NHS. In the same speech, appropriately enough, the spokesbeing went out of her way to praise the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove, who spent a happy four years during the coalition spreading chaos and despondency through the sector. He had, you see, a sense of energy and drive and determination, which always look better on the hard right than on the left; and a sense of education being central to national life which is entirely absent in all those teachers and head-teachers who seem to consider it so central as to merit a little less ministerial contempt. Subsequent education ministers are a poor lot by comparison, and during the pandemic even failed to ensure that schools were "last to close and first to open." Should Team Starmer face a similar crisis while in power, Team Starmer evidently hopes that the toll of expendable juveniles may rival that of Fishy Rishi's diner mortality programme.

Orange is the New Red

Several worthies of the Murca party's batshit wing have caused consternation in the Democratic state of Illinois by failing to sign a "voluntary" loyalty oath. Deriving from the days of Team Starmer's spiritual godfather, the greasy junior witch-finder from Wisconsin, the oath is part of the state's traditional election paperwork and requires signatories to swear that they are not Communists and that they will refrain from employing unlawful means to overthrown the government. Three high fliers of the Grand Ordure Pipistrellorum, including the Trumpster under the compulsion of his hydrophobic tangerine head-tribble, have not signed the document this year, despite presumably knowing at least as much as the average Murcan about what being a Communist means, and caring nearly as much as the average Republican about breaking the law. A petition has already been filed to remove the Trumpster from the Illinois primary ballot, though whether because the head-tribble is a Communist or a law-breaker remains as yet unclear.

Are There No Gentlemen in Minsk?

Although it stands with Russia and the master race in rejecting the Strasbrussels Diktat of the European Court of Human Rights, Belarus still has some way to go before attaining full moral Britishness. The president has found it necessary to adopt an unfortunately legalistic course in protecting the independence of elected governments from lawyers, judges and other intefering persons. While the law's provisions, including lifelong legal immunity for the president and prohibition of public office for non-patriots, are eminently moderate and sensible in themselves, of course no genuinely British system would resort to so cumbersome an arrangement. In our Mother of Democracies there has never been a need to dignify with illegality the idea of an opposition that opposes Government policy, let alone the idea of leaders being effectively held to account, because in a truly mature democracy such ideas are almost physically impossible to realise.

Annexed

With political exploitation of the Holocaust entering a dynamic new phase in the cleansing actions of the Righteous State, it would doubtless be remiss to allow commercial exploitation to fall into neglect. Hence the announcement of a prequel to the diary of Anne Frank: a fiction about the two years preceding her family's going into hiding, written by an established author with the connivance of the Anne Frank House. Possibly the result will manage to avoid the Hollywood bad taste of the Schindler's List shower scene, in which a number of Auschwitz victims (including the one we're meant to care about!) are eventually sprayed with H₂O instead of Zyklon-B; but the essential bad taste is the same in both enterprises. The prequel's publishers hope it will show young readers that "contributing to a better world is both necessary and possible," presumably in a more persuasive manner than the diarist can manage on her own. Doubtless those who forced the family into hiding, and those who denounced them to the authorities, were profitably exposed to similar platitudes.

Bad Etymology

Bucolic, adj. from Middle English bugge hobgoblin and Ancient Greek kōlikós suffering in the colon: relating to country folk and their famously cheery temper.

Musket, n. from Sanskrit muska testicle: a device for making conquests by means of shooting balls.

Scents of Freedom

Few tasks are more vital or more fragrant than that of breeding new Britons; hence the sanctity of both Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, especially the latter on account of Motherhood™ having been invented by the United States. Given the ghastly fecundity of the migrant hordes, the moral imperative for British breeding stock has rarely been greater; which doubtless explains the heinous attempt by foreign floriculturalists to sabotage both the day of breeder motivation and the day of breeder reward. Dutch growers are calling for a relaxation in the rigour of British border controls, which have already been delayed five times so that British business can adapt itself to the simplicity of life in the sunlit uplands. The beastly Euro-wogs threaten increased costs and a possible shortage of flowers if their demands are not met, thereby placing British consumers at risk of smelling yet another Brexit rat.

Thoughts That Count

The recent death of an Albanian immigrant aboard the Home Office's prison hulk continues to inspire ever greater heights of Britishness. The Ministry for Wog Warehousing, which will go to any expense to deport people while they are still alive, has developed a hitherto latent streak of parsimony now that the unfortunate man is dead. Although shipping a body to Albania costs the taxpayer somewhat less than transporting live refugees to Rwanda, there is no room in the Ministry's conscience, let alone its budget, for a contribution to the expenses of the bereaved. Instead, the Ministry extruded a spokesbeing to convey some thoughts for those affected to bask in, as a salutary counterpoint to the boorish materialistic urges which led the family to set up a crowdfunder and, worse yet, demand a full inquiry.

What Judgement Shall They Dread?

Although the government of the Righteous State remains manifestly above international law, it has suffered a setback in its attempt to declare itself above Israeli law as well. By a margin of one vote, the supreme court has thrown out the legislation passed six months ago which decreed Likudnik infallibility in matters of government decision-making. The opposition parties refused to take part in that vote and walked out of the Knesset, and mass protests followed. The government evidently hoped that such insubordination would be swept aside by the unprovoked, context-free and not at all convenient Hamas attacks on 7 October, and Likud has predictably invoked the need for everyone to fall into line as long as IDF soldiers are risking friendly fire while bombing Israeli hostages. Condemnation of the supreme court's lurch into the antisemitic trope of unrighteous legalism has not been immediately forthcoming; although Britain's leading liberal newspaper, which purged its leading political commentator over a fictitious reference to The Merchant of Venice, notes delicately that the supreme court is unelected.

Prosperity Through Guardianship

Enemies of the World Cop, the Righteous State and the head-chopping House of Saud have been up to some incredibly serious and outrageous doings in the Red Sea. A spokesbeing for His Majesty's Government deplored the attacks on shipping by Yemeni rebels as unacceptably illegal and destabilising, in contrast to the current wholly acceptable Holocaust memorial in Gaza. The rebels say that their attacks are in response the stabilisation of Palestine, which is itself a response to the unprovoked and context-free attack by Hamas on 7 October. Britain's glistening pink Secretary for Wogs, Frogs and Huns has ordered Iran to do something about it, since Iran supports the rebels and is therefore responsible for their derelictions, in much the same way as the World Cop and the master race share credit for the restraint and responsibility which characterise the Righteous State. Perhaps most reassuringly of all, if gerrymandering, tax cuts and migrant-bashing prove insufficient for a decent show at the forthcoming general election, the prospect of a bit of wog-bombing might well come in handy.