Ignorance is Growth

Theoreticians and practitioners of Oligarchical Collectivism will recall that Eastasia, with which Oceania has always been at war, is protected from annihilation thanks to the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants. Tragically, at least one of these advantages appears to be in danger of serious decline. South Korea's right-wing government is worried about running out of South Koreans; while Japan's right-wing government has similar concerns about the declining replacement rate for its own economically active human resources. Breeders are becoming more and more cautious, despite financial incentives and incessant moral blackmail; and all because of gross materialistic issues such as falling wages, rising costs and a certain lack of time-management skills on the part of working mothers. Since cutting living costs and raising wages are as far out of the question there as they are among the master race, it remains to be seen whether the authorities will have the courage to adopt such democratising measures as curbing rights and crumbling schools.

Don't Send Them Back

Once more the ghastly forces of woke internationalism are seeking to rewrite British history and warp the sacred course of market forces. The government of Ethiopia, wilfully oblivious of the fact that were it not for Mr Churchill they would all be speaking Italian, has sought to prevent the privatisation of a shield which was incorporated into the assets of the British Empire following the Battle of Maqdala in 1868. A famous instance of British fair play, the battle involved thirteen thousand British troops against one-third that number of Ethiopians, and resulted in nearly two thousand casualties among the aggressors against one-tenth that number from the master race. Various native artefacts were involuntarily exported for educative purposes, some of which the Victoria and Albert Museum has generously condescended to loan back to the Ethiopians. Whether such decencies will be observed when a commercial transaction is at stake remains to be seen.

New Block on the Kids

A bill awarding civil rights to Florida foetuses has suffered a postponement after the supreme court in the Christian state of Alabama went and muddied the moral waters. The Alabama court ruled that embryos created via IVF are "extra-uterine children," whereupon a number of clinics promptly stopped providing services for fear of wrongful-death lawsuits in the event of divinely-ordained termination. Of course, the recognition of foetuses as persons is not intended to hinder the process of pro-actively manufacturing more Murcans, but only to enable murder charges against abortionists and uppity females; so adjustments will have to be made in order to protect the profits of healthcare entrepreneurs, and the chances are against the Christian state of Florida birthing its legislative bulge during the present session. Doubtless the Great American Man-baby in the Sky will respond as wrathfully as He sees fit.

The Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer 2023

Like Jonathan Glazer's previous works - the mediocre Sexy Beast (2000), the intriguing Birth (2004), and the occasionally striking but largely risible Under the Skin (2013) - his latest leaves little doubt as to its sense of its own importance. If the extended black screens which follow the opening title and precede the end credits were not enough, the gravity proper to the proceedings emphatically weighs in via the discordant score (sparingly used and quite effective) and the largely static camera à la Haneke; though even at his finger-wagging worst Haneke is a good deal more businesslike than Glazer has ever deigned to be. There are monochrome segments as well, conflating the Holocaust's victims with the protagonists of the fairy-tales Rudolf reads to his children, which fairly scream forth the profundity of the enterprise.

The premise of The Zone of Interest, an apparently loose adaptation of a Martin Amis novel, is well known by now: Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their five children carry on a commonplace bourgeois existence next door to the slave labour and extermination camp at Auschwitz, where Rudolf is commandant. Business meetings and birthday celebrations are held; work-related domestic complications arise and are negotiated; dogs and children frolic and annoy and are disciplined and paraded; all with the Final Solution no more than a wall's breadth away, and well within earshot.

Some little time ago I submitted that from our present moral heights the Holocaust might most honestly be viewed from the perspective of its perpetrators; and Glazer has justified The Zone of Interest on much the same grounds: "It's trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims." If that really is what The Zone of Interest is trying to be, then it isn't trying terribly hard. From his SS undershirt and criminally insane haircut to her disciplining a house-slave with the threat of cremation and scattering, the film's treatment of Rudolf and Hedwig adopts the crudest devices to distance and dissociate itself and its audience from the couple. At one point Hedwig takes her mother on a tour of the large, perfect garden, chatting about how she manages it all and swiftly deflecting any reference to those people next door; this effectively uneasy scene is followed by increasingly close shots of the flowers, which culminate at last in the ENTIRE SCREEN turning BLOOD RED. Like the later sequence in the present-day Auschwitz museum, this exhibits a subtlety and a respect for the audience's intelligence well worthy of Martin Amis, whose strenuously postmodernistic echt-Nabokonovel London Fields includes a charitable name-check (Transparent Things, if memory speaks true) for the benefit of anyone not au fait with the heights at which he was aiming.

One or two interesting touches do emerge to hint at zones a little less cosily self-complacent. Scenes such as the distribution of recycled clothing to the servants ("only one each") seamlessly blend the wartime virtues of domestic thrift with the material wages of genocide. The repeated nightly extinguishing of the lights chez Höss makes a telling contrast with the perpetually sunlit exteriors and the antiseptic brightness in the halls of officialdom; although I couldn't help recalling that Kubrick's Dr Strangelove managed a related if more subtly wrought effect with the closing of a few blinds.

In Joachim Fest's The Face of the Third Reich, the chapter on Höss is titled "The Man from the Crowd." The real Höss prided himself on his obedience and self-sacrifice: he sincerely deplored the brutalities of the Auschwitz guards, and willingly co-operated with his own jailers both before and after the war. Had he existed in a civilised and humane society, he would undoubtedly have been a willing executor of civilised and humane policies. Late images of Rudolf retching over the Reich's marble stairways hint at a sublimated loathing for hard work, duty and family values; significantly, his sickness follows immediately upon his latest promotion and the promise that his domestic life will soon be resumed, and is also one of the very few times when Rudolf is seen alone. However, the film makes nothing of this beyond the standard moral condemnation implied by subsequent shots of the Auschwitz museum.

Fans and cheerleaders of the current carnage in [insert as applicable] will find little reason here to question their own motives; any more, presumably, than would the author of the source novel and The Second Plane, who proclaimed in the wake of 9/11 that Muslims should be made to "experience painful discrimination until they get tough with their children." Whatever it tries to be, The Zone of Interest is itself just one more from the crowd: one more solemn study in the evil of the banal Other, one more pompous parable of unrepentant publicans for the moral consolation of liberal Pharisees.

This Is Not Who We Are

Proper Conservatives, in the estimation of the brilliant Robert Buckland, stand for "bringing the country together and seeking to unify, challenging criminality and hate and extremism absolutely square on, and being honest and truthful about it – but bringing the country together, not dividing it" - as can be seen by the state of the country after a decade and a half of Conservative government. Accordingly Buckland, whose attachment to unity, tolerance and non-criminality is such that he served the National Johnson as Minister for Profitable Incarceration, did some huffing and puffing about the Muslim-bashing eructations of Fishy Rishi's chosen party chair, Lee Anderson, and the compromising appearance of Liz Truss in an interview alongside some Trumpster-trash. Buckland emphatically proclaimed the unconservative status of La Truss, whose brief yet eventful premiership was facilitaed in part by one Robert Buckland.

In a similar spirit, if spirit is a word one can apply to proper Conservatives, the almost equally brilliant Oliver Dowden burbled that Anderson had not intended any Islamophobia by reviving Zac Goldsmith's mayoral campaign propaganda equating Sadiq Khan with Islamists. Earlier a spokesbeing had interpreted Anderson's grunts as relating solely to Khan's disinclination for giving Islamist marchers (anti-genocide protesters, in Oldspeak) a whiff of grapeshot; and Dowden stated that Anderson might retain or regain the whip if he trotted out the usual apology for having been strategically misunderstood by a few non-native English speakers. Dowden also absolved Suella Braverman of moral equivalence to Anderson on the grounds that Braverman's comments were not aimed at any particular individual. In Dowden's estimation, apparently, it's fine to claim that the damned Jews have taken over, provided only that one does not apply the label of damned Jew to any potential libel plaintiff. It's easy to see why true carriers of the torch for the party of Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell, Norman Tebbit, Theresa May, Zac Goldsmith and Boris Johnson might be shocked, shocked, shocked at hints of racism.

Vegetable-Based Solutions

Manufacturers of plant-based substitutes for dairy products may soon be ordered to remove from their brand names such consumer-harming factors as "homophones, asterisked characters or other wordplay." In a move worthy of those alleged by the National Johnson and his ilk against the bureaucrats of Strasbrussels, His Majesty's Government is considering a ban on the misleading information contained in I Can't Believe it's Not Butter and This is Not M*lk. Since His Majesty's Government is self-evidently not susceptible to lobbying by non-vegan profiteers, it follows that the great British onsumer is self-evidently too stupid to avoid confusing products labelled and advertised as Not A Dairy Product with actual dairy products. Not that the proposed guidelines will be entirely negative: for soya yoghurt and vegan mozzarella the free, independent and British trading standards officials have provided gratis the appetising alternatives of "soya dessert fermented with live cultures" and "vegan soft-white balls with a light cheese flavour." In what was apparently intended as reassurance, a spokesbeing for the Department for Enraging Farmers, Retailers and All stated that "there are no plans to change existing legislation in this area," as if the lack of a plan had ever made much difference.

Three-Dimensional Peacekeeping

To mark the second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the World Cop by the grace of God will be imposing further sanctions upon the aggressor, reducing the availability of goods that Russia wants, since Russia no more has needs than it has legitimate security concerns. The World Cop and its allies are indignant that Russia's actions have killed tens of thousands and destroyed cities, which are self-evidently Bad Things compared with (to take a random example) Israeli actions which accomplish similar results in a fraction of the time. Meanwhile it seems that sanctions thus far have done little to dent the Russian economy, which has suffered slightly less damage than that inflicted on the British economy by the Westminster cadres of the Farage Falange. Accordingly the World Cop is preparing a $95,000 million bung to be shared between Ukraine, Israel and plucky little Taiwan, just to make clear the moral equivalence between what is being done to Ukraine, what the Righteous State is doing, and what one day will have to be done with those insidious Heathen Chinee.

Sovereignty With Benefits

Leading, as ever, from behind a substantial chunk of the EU, the master race has finally decided to withdraw from the Energy Charter Treaty, which was set up to protect fossil fuel profiteers in the former USSR and which still permits lawsuits against states whose actions affect profits, whether through overly effective climate policies or, as in Britain's case, through undermining such policies without appropriate care and attention. Accordingly, in another year, or perhaps in twenty or so (there is a sunset clause), His Majesty's Government and its chums will be free to pollute for Britain without fear of greedy foreigners trying to look after their nasty little investments. Almost as fortunately, provisions in other treaties will remain in force to continue those vital traditions of bias, conflicts of interest and abuse of power so vital to both the world-beating wings of Britain's party of business.

Our Values Defended

Britain's capacity to assist in global genocide, even with the permission of the World Cop, has been called into question by a second failure of the Trident wog correction system. On the previous occasion, in accordance with the general efficiency of Tumbledown Tessie's administration, a missile was aimed at Africa but headed towards the USA instead; this time, in accordance with the triumphant achievements of Fishy Rishi's administration, the rampant symbol of British potency suffered an embarrassing deflation and flopped immediately into the sea. Prompted to openness and accountability by a report in the Murdoch scumbag press, the Ministry for Wog-Bombing blamed the specifics of the event; apparently these amounted to the presence of Michael Green and some associates, which is indeed an eminently reliable forerunner of fiasco. Naturally, mere experts were quick to interpose their usual ivory-tower anti-patriotism: one even went so far as to proclaim that the point of spending hundreds of billions on a programme is, of all things, that the said programme should function. Where's the Britishness in that?

Grown-up Diplomacy

Among the primary motivations of Team Starmer, preserving the unity of the Party ranks nearly as high as factional hatred and pleasing the Rothermere Daily Stürmer; hence the latest revision of the official line on the Righteous State's rampage in Gaza. Having admitted that Israel's right to inflict collective punishment in defence of its illegal occupation is perhaps not altogether absolute, Team Starmer moved rapidly to support a sustainable ceasefire, viz. one in which the Palestinians had no right of resistance against the illegal occupation. Now, faced with another possible rebellion in the House of Expenses Claimants over a motion proposed by the hated SNP, Team Starmer has proposed an amendment in favour of a humanitarian ceasefire, namely one in which the Palestinians have no right of resistance against the illegal occupation. In addition, Team Starmer has conceded that such a ceasefire should be immediate, which had proved something of a sticking-point until the butchery reached its present moral heights; and also politely requests the Righteous State not to assault Rafah just yet and for illegal settlements to be carried out in a less noisy fashion than hitherto. It would be a depraved and antisemitic sensibility indeed which could respond with ingratitude to that.

The Naming of Cats is a Difficult Matter

Religious sensibles in the Indian state of West Bengal have petitioned to forestall the horrid risk of syncretism among the larger Felidae. A zoo lion named after the Hindu deity Rama was moved from the neighbouring state and renamed after the Mughal emperor Akbar; worse yet, there is now the perilous possibility that a lioness who retains her own Hindu name may be forced to share an enclosure with this polluted creature. Besides proclaiming its concern that permitting such impropriety would amount to blasphemy and a direct assault on the beliefs of all Hindus, the nationalist organisation Vishwa Hindu Parishad has called for a precautionary ban on naming animals after religious figures, because the sensibilities of people who regard leonine nomenclaturial miscegenation as a direct assault must clearly be very sensible indeed.

Imagine a Boot Stamping on Human Taste Forever

In a cultural move whose impact looks set to rival the Freedom Fries of the Bush chimpanzee administration, the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble have launched Never Surrender High-Tops: a shiny gold shoe complete with Murcan flag on the back. The brand was sneaked out at the Greatest Sneaker Show on Earth in Philadelphia, where apparently boos and intoxicating substances served to remind the nation that the swamp still needs some draining; and the objects themselves are being marketed through a website which also hawks the bottled odour of Victory47, forty-seven being the number of the projected second tribble/Trumpster presidency. The website disclaims all connection to the tangerine team's campaign, having presumably been set up from motives of pure and disinterested entrepreneurialism. Whether the proceeds will be sufficient to keep the Trumpster clan in gold-plated elevators through the present legal difficulties remains to be seen.

Our Civilising Influence

However lukewarm its recent comments about the master race's wog transportation initiative, the Rwandan government has provided an admirable demonstration of respect for British values by kicking out an ungrateful foreigner. A Congolese footballer in Kigali celebrated a goal with a gesture in solidarity with victims of the ongoing if comfortingly under-reported mess in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; evidently he intended some primitive emulation of the depraved American practice of taking the knee to condone Caucasian genocide. Within a week, and with an efficiency before which the Home Office of His Majesty's Government can only whimper and ooze bodily fluids, the miscreant received a six-month suspension, the severance of his contract and a deportation order. Further moral progress is apparent in Rwanda's arming and training of one of the more enterprising militias now spreading safety in the Democratic Republic itself.

To a Free Press

Navalny's gone to meet his fate
By process of a gangster state;
And so it might be indiscreet
The name Assange now to repeat.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Net Minus Three

Since His Majesty's Government's recent relaxation of the planning restrictions on windfarms was as grudging, belated and incomplete as a standard expression of regret for any offence caused, the results thus far appear to be emanating a bracing miasma of Britishness. Seven applications were submitted in England during the whole of last year, and none of them were new proposals to generate for public use. This represents a decrease from the number of applications submitted in the previous year, when the glistening pink Head Boy's proto-Starmerite backtracking on the green crap in favour of full-on rah-rah for shale fracking (remember that?) was still in place. The only blight in the Britishness is the fact that almost fifty applications were made in Scotland, causing at least one metropolitan élitist to lump that troubled province in with, of all places, the rest of Europe.

Signature Concerns

It is by no means usual for the Government of the United Kingdom to object to the nation's history being flogged off, or even destroyed altogether. Still, the present age is full of the unprecedented, and Downing Street has intervened to stop the sale at auction of a visitors' book containing the signatures of world leaders and John Major, which a civil servant apparently found among water-damaged boxes from a Whitehall basement. According to the auctioneer, the civil servant had permission to take the boxes, which were marked for incineration, but nevertheless contacted Downing Street twice offering to return the illustrious autographs. Since the first of these contacts took place during the régime of Tumbledown Tessie and the second during that of the National Johnson, the claim that he received no response appears eminently plausible. However, the present administration clearly felt bound to step in when he proposed to sell his find "due to ill health and the cost of living crisis," rather than for patriotic reasons such as tax breaks or personal donations to the Conservative Party.

Moral Leadership Again

With characteristic Bullingdon Club acuity, Britain's glistening pink Minister for Lesser Breeds has been wagging his chubby little finger at Israel's latest plan to breach international law, and has done so practically a whole day after his own government was found to be planning a breach of international law. A mere handful of decades into its illegal occupation, the Righteous State was duly warned against failing to fulfil its obligations; although the nature of the sanctions which would follow any unacceptable levels of collective punishment remains as yet unclear, especially as the continuing exaltation of Britain's moral stature requires that arms sales not be interrupted. Glistening pinkly, the Minister informed his fellow elevatees to the House of Crooks, Catamites and Corpses that he would personally be ordering the Heathen Chinee to pitch in and help free trade in the Red Sea, presumably by doing their bit towards wog-bombing the Houthis. A diplomatic initiative along such lines would at least have the advantage that the Heathen Chinee minister for guizi may be subtle enough not to snigger too loudly in response.

Democratic Disrepute

Certain incautious members of the House of Expenses Claimants are flirting with unelectedness by casting doubt upon the sovereign legitimacy of His Majesty's Government's wog transportation bill. Though voted into Parliament as instruments of the people's will, these rogue elements have inveigled themselves onto a committee which basks in the approval of neither their deserving constituents nor the local cadres of the Farage Falange, and which now has the temerity to proclaim that all the pluck and gumption of the master race cannot make a country legally safe even by enshrining the said safety in a statute of British law. The committee's so-called report takes its unpatriotism so far as to say that the disapplication of foreign laws would jeopardise the United Kingdom's hard-won reputation for the rule of law and human rights, despite that reputation's extending throughout Westminster and the British media and the head-chopping House of Saud.

History Management

Now that Sinn Féin are in government at Stormont, Britain's leading liberal newspaper has discovered, to its horror, that civil war is a brutal business in which deaths and disappearances can sometimes occur. It is admitted that the number of abductions and killings during the Irish war of independence pales beside those committed by the régimes of Franco, Suharto and some good neighbours of the World Cop; and the Irish republicans seem also to have fallen behind these friends of freedom by failing to continue the purges after they attained power. Nevertheless, the Irish state remains in denial over the level of violence used in the war; quite unlike the British state, whose acknowledgement and repentance of the Kenyan concentration camps, the Malayan Emergency and Mr Churchill's Bengal famine are famously commemorated throughout the realm. Comparisons of the timing of this story with vulgar historiography of the Holocaust, in which six million proto-Zionists have been redeemed and sanctified as a certification of perpetual open season on the Palestinians, would of course be antisemitically invidious.

Our Sovereignty Does Not Recognise

Will the beastly Euro-wogs never take the hint? The Council of Europe, which has an unelected committee dedicated to preventing enhanced incentivisation of the lesser breeds, last spring sneaked its spies onto sovereign British territory and now presumes so far as to impugn the decency of our great nation's wog disposal policy. Specifically, the informers' report warns that beneficiaries of transportation to Rwanda may be subject to torture or other treatment befitting an asylum seeker, even though His Majesty's Government has stated unequivocally that Rwanda is a safe country. Additional concerns are raised about "inflammatory and derogatory language" when referring to the invaders; and even,if you please, about the practice of indefinite detention for migrants who might otherwise roam freely on the land, leaving hideous trails of stolen jobs, terrorist conspiracies, and ruined British women. In response, spokesbeings for the master race proclaimed that His Majesty's Government "does not recognise much of the content of [the] report," which will surprise no-one acquainted with the Ministry for Wog Warehousing's command of the British language. Nevertheless, the Ministry most magnanimously conceded that, although children can be imprisoned and transported to Central Africa, their needs will be met "where practically possible" in the considered opinion of the kind of people for whom three decades' notice of crumbling public buildings recently proved insufficient.

Holy Fathers, Dancing Dads

Since the latest minuscule concessions to second-order souls don't seem to have turned the trick, the Church of England is striving for yet further relevance by holding disco events in Canterbury Cathedral. Certain elements in the Church have expressed misgivings, fearing that the truth of Christ, the beauty of grovelling and the goodness of gay-baiting will be belittled and profaned to an even greater degree than that so far accomplished by the General Synod. Some even fear that filling the great stone boast with the strains of the Spice Girls might hint unduly that Christians, or anyway Anglicans, don't take their faith or their real estate seriously. In this as in much else, the conservative faction is behind the times; even unto the moral advances perpetrated by their pet Iron Age fundamentalist, who was fairly unequivocal about storing up treasure on earth. If Christians took their faith seriously, they would sell their cathedrals and give the profits to the poor, and then wander the land as beggars doing conjuring tricks.

Personal Growth

More than a third of cancer patients in England have failed to amass the family connections necessary to avoid the risk of fatal delays in treatment. Last December 7,661 cancer patients had to wait more than the recommended maximum of sixty-two days before commencing treatment, and among them 2,227 had to wait ninety days or more. Fortunately for the nation's well-being, neither of those numbers included the patient who matters; which will doubtless be a great comfort to those who lacked the entrepreneurial gumption to secure an appropriate pedigree. Meanwhile, the number of people waiting more than eighteen months for routine treatments rose in December; while last month the number who had to wait more than twelve hours in an accident and emergency department between the decision to admit them and the actual admission was the second-highest on record. Evidently the present level of efficiency savings remains an insufficient deterrent against becoming economically inactive.

Pretty Awesome

Since February is the month when even Conservatives are supposed to make some sort of show at caring about children's mental health, the baby-faced member for Carshalton and Wallington has received applause from all sides of the House of Expenses Claimants for talking about his own suicide attempt. Whether he was encouraged to do so in commemoration of Boost Your Self-Esteem Month (doubtless a parliamentary favourite), or simply as an aid to public perspective on the consequences of his party's relaxed attitude to public health, remains as yet unclear; in the event, Elliot Colburn's pep talk on better days ahead was overshadowed by Fishy Rishi's latest attempt at robust Johnsonian knockabout. This is unfortunate, given that Colburn's voting record has been largely in favour of depriving others of the help which he urged them to seek, and entirely in favour of the policies which may recently have led to the suicide of at least one resident aboard the Bibby Stockholm prison hulk. Evidently one death by suicide need not be one too many, provided that it doesn't happen to be Elliot Colburn's.

Fag End

There was once a Cigarette which found itself suddenly and unexpectedly stubbed out upon the intimate portions of a political undesirable. Having spent most of its previous existence in a luxurious and elaborately inscribed silver cigarette-case, in sure and certain hope of one day engendering a cancer in the lungs of the Dutiful Soldier who had kept it, the Cigarette became ashen with moral indignation.

Confidence Woman

Even within His Majesty's Government, it seems certain people are still failing to give the Minister for Infantine Profitability Enhancement credit for the fucking good job with which she habitually credits herself. While everyone else continues to sit on their arse doing nothing, Gillian Keegan is "delivering," with ratings of "good" or "outstanding" slapped on exponentially increasing quantities of schools, some of which may not even have fallen down yet. But still nobody ever talks about it, despite the Government's generally favourable opinion of self-marked assignments; hence Keegan rates the Government's performance as a whole "good," a mere two grades above the level that amounts for a call for the Head to commit suicide.

Performative Stupidity

It appears that Team Starmer may have to re-think its strategy of blaming Sadiq Khan whever it loses a by-election. The Government's supposed policy of refusing to allow low-traffic neighbourhoods is not, as it turns out, a heroic effort by Fishy Rishi and his Racist Van Man to protect plucky little drivers from the incursions of élitist quarter-hour metropolises. In fact, those low-traffic neighbourhood schemes which were submitted did not meet the requirements for funding, and the Minister for Pollution and Gridlock was not involved in the decisions to reject them. The fact that His Majesty's Government now feels the need to lie about not basing policy on a conspiracy theory speaks eloquently of its respect for the intelligence of the great British voter; and there seems every possibility that Team Starmer will strive to emulate the Conservatives in this as in so many other regards.

Medal With Bar

His Majesty's Government has intervened to prevent the export of a medal awarded to Ernest Shackleton, the polar explorer whose name remains almost on a par with that of Robert Falcon Scott despite Shackleton's comparative lack of Britishness and heroic fatality. The medal is the last of Shackleton's remaining in the country, so the Minister for Non-Degenerate Art and Ruritanian Rah-rah was forced into a temporary adjustment of market forces which might have allowed it to be expatriated. It is valued at £1.8 million including VAT and may still end up in greasy foreign paws if a buyer from the master race cannot be found. Although the Minister burbled that the medal should be saved to inspire future Lords Parkinson of Whitley Bay, the state religion forbids any thought that the Government might spare some small change from its tax cuts and wog disposal for the sake of mere historical sentiment.

Legitimate Commerce

Astoundingly enough, at least one of Fishy Rishi's new licenses to pollute has been awarded to a major Party donor. Even though the chief executive of EnQuest has given the Conservatives cash and kind to the value of almost half a million over the past decade, the company's subsidiary EnQuest Heather has nevertheless benefited from the Government's largesse, doubtless thanks mainly to the magic of that elven-woodling company name. More astoundingly still, EnQuest was recently fined the cost of several executive luncheons for burning off gas without regard even for the minimal constraints imposed by the British free market. A little less astoundingly, EnQuest is unlikely to have occasion for repenting either its investment in the Conservative Party or its dirty habits, since Team Starmer has no intention of revoking the new licences; a pledge not to grant further new ones remains in place, with only twenty-eight billion reasons against its lasting much longer.

A Government of Wars and Not of Men

In response to a case brought by Palestinian individuals and human rights groups against the elected management of the World Cop, a federal district court in northern California has ruled that the Israeli assault on Gaza may "plausibly" amount to genocide. On the basis of undisputed evidence and expert testimony, the judge concurred with the finding of the ICJ in the case brought by South Africa, but declared the Palestinians' suit against the federal government outside his court's jurisdiction. The Netanyahoo's attempt to declare his régime absolute from the river to the sea may have backfired for the time being, but the principle was evidently sound enough. If the World Cop and its minions are above international law, as is patently the case, they can hardly be considered answerable to mere domestics.