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.