Ever Leaner, Ever Meaner

Britain's liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke has of course brought many benefits, even if most of them are too numerous to mention. Even so, and appropriately for a patriotic nostalgia project, the sunlit uplands also bask in a warm glow of national continuity, exemplified in the venerable religious dogma that the best way to solve an economic problem is generally to sack people. Having implemented divide-and-rule trade deals with so many Euro-wog countries, and with such famous success, His Majesty's Government has been trying the same tactic with the United States, and the Department of Fuck Business has helped the process along by subjecting some thirteen per cent of the relevant civil servants to involuntary liberation. Many of them had apparently been guilty of accumulating decades of experience and of working on trade pacts with several different states, and were thereby rendered susceptible to the expertise heresy. The decision to purge them was taken about two weeks before the general election was called; so one must doubt that it was intended as a scorched-earth tactic to make things more difficult for the next administration, if for no other reason than the respect due His Majesty's Government's capacity for forward planning.

Vexatious Legalisms

Levels of diplomatic Britishness continue as healthy as ever with His Majesty's Government attempting to use international law as a pretext for undermining the process of international law. The Ministry for Wogs, Frogs, Huns and Hottentots has proclaimed that the International Criminal Court's jurisdiction in Palestine, which lesser breeds thought settled three years ago, is open to question because of the Oslo accords which were signed three decades ago and which, like every other international agreement to which Israel is a party, apply to the Righteous State only at its own convenience. The manoeuvre is unlikely to have much effect at the ICC, which is notoriously insensitive to British values by virtue of being an international criminal court; but it may delay the decision as to whether an arrest warrant can be put out on the Netanyahoo and his chief henchman without Belsen re-opening for business or America bombing the Hague. Meanwhile, in their unhelpful way, mere experts have quibbled that His Majesty's Government may have allowed its cultural sympathy with the Righteous State's belief that laws are for little people to override Britain's almost-existent legal and humanitarian concerns over the Gaza indiscretion.

It Couldn't Happen Here

Sinister machinations and a chronic and continuing lack of British values are afoot among the Heathen Chinee, where two former defence ministers have been purged for, of all things, corruption. The men allegedly engaged in entrepreneurial strivings and looked after their chums, which of course is no more than the way things are done in the civilised world. In accordance with the repressive and authoritarian nature of the bureaucratic state, the accused have been removed from public visibility, and their chances of appearing on the US lecture circuit or hosting their own current affairs show seem thus far to be minimal.

Noble Savages

Archaeological research has demonstrated that the accomplishments of Homo neanderthalensis ranked a good deal closer to those of our own species than had previously been believed. The Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought and a degree of social organisation; which in a world shaped and dominated by Homo sapiens ipsedixit does remarkably little to mitigate the preponderance of journalistic moral saccharine. In fact, the discovery of fossil evidence that a severely disabled Neanderthal child could survive to the age of six demonstrates nothing whatever about the compassion or the altruism of the society to which the child belonged, because the motives of that society's members are not detectably imprinted on the fossil record. Perhaps the child was the offspring of a dominant individual who insisted purely as a matter of prestige that it be kept alive. Perhaps its handicaps gave it a totemic value, like the deliberately blinded and crippled "kings" among the Yahoos in Borges' "Brodie's Report." Perhaps, since every tribe needs a doormat, the child was a figure of harmless family fun and morale-boosting persecution, whose care made a useful punishment duty for those who fell out of favour. We do not know what the child's existence meant to those who cared for it; and given the Neanderthals' aforementioned kinship with evolution's conquering heroes, there seems little reason to assert that their motives were any purer than our own.

The Law and the Prophets

Religious fervour is not necessarily incompatible with participating in genocide, according to the Israeli supreme court. The ruling, which specifies that would-be experts in Bronze Age textual criticism have no legal or constitutional exemption from the sacred duty of Arab-bagging, may portend further difficulties for the Netanyahoo, whose retention of office depends on the support of far-right Orthodox lunatics. Oddly enough for someone professing obedience to the Inspirer of Genesis, Exodus and Leviticus, at least one true believer has already made clear that his faction may respond to attempts at conscription by picking up what marbles they have and flouncing out of the coalition. Even at current Gazan odds of fifty-eight Palestinian Untermenschen to each defender of the Righteous State, it would certainly be deplorable if the godly should have to endure the risk of meeting their Maker prematurely.

Unhenged

Unelected bureaucrats at UNESCO are plotting to compromise Britain's national heritage by placing Stonehenge on a list of endangered world heritage sites. The planned road tunnel, if planned is the word I want, is opposed by "archaeologists, environmentalists, historians, transport experts, countryside campaigners and druids," but has been given the rah-rah by the Conservatives and National Highways, which should be enough for anyone. The CEO of Team Starmer has at least not promised not to continue with the tunnel, although he has made some noises about traffic problems at the site; which, since better public transport and a proper national infrastructure would be against the national religion, must present quite the little dilemma. By contrast with this nuanced moderation, and once more in perfect accord with the Conservatives, the same CEO of Team Starmer performed some very definite huffing and puffing over Just Stop Oil's stunt with some eminently removable orange powder. Clearly UNESCO, which seems obsessed with preventing vandalism that is merely permanent and irreversible, doesn't know what danger is.

Friendly Fire

Among the more effective tactics of Mr Churchill's great contemporary in undermining the hated Weimar democracy was the use of a small foundation of truth (Germany was unfairly saddled with sole blame for the Great War and subjected to unduly harsh peace terms) on which to construct a sprawling Luftschloß of paranoid patriotic self-pity (Germany had been undefeated in the Great War but the Jews and the Communists had stabbed the country in the back). While still Hitler's electoral inferior by some few parliamentary seats, the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange has adopted much the same form of argument, if argument is the word I want, with his assertion that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was provoked. Not content with telling the truth for once and thereby eliciting shrieks of indignation from Team Starmer, the National Johnson and the Rothermere Stürmer on Sunday, the strutting Caudillo went on to blather about a Molotov-Ribbentrop conspiracy between the Kremlin and his fellow far-rightists to protect Fishy Rishi's Conservative Party from the Falange's anticipated take-over. The Caudillo even protested that the Rothermere Stürmer on Sunday had said the thing which was not, and it is to be hoped that Reform UK plc will be able to afford the latest bill for re-glazing the glass-house and clearing up the pebbles. The Caudillo's major error, of course, was to misdirect the patriotic self-pity by suggesting that a hostile foreign might have some sort of legitimate grievance: a tactical gaffe which even the loser of Stalingrad somehow managed to avoid.

The Guilty Men

We are all aware, because the Farage Falange has decreed it and Team Starmer does not disagree, that cutting ourselves off from our primary international trading partner was in principle the shrewdest and most pragmatic act of national policy since Mr Churchill personally won the Great Philosemitic War. Nevertheless, few (aside perhaps from Team Starmer in its Rothermere Daily Stürmer formation) would deny that the results have been a little unsatisfactory, especially if one is so ill-mannered as to invoke the real world. Hence the need for someone to blame, since choosing solutions over scapegoats would be un-British in the extreme; and the Department for Egregious Fuckups and Rampant Arsery has settled upon British business as the latest candidate. Since independence from the Strasbrussels dictatorship was sold as reducing bureaucracy and helping the economy, the fact that it has increased bureaucracy and screwed the economy can only be explained as the result of deliberate and criminal malice; especially as the latest changes to the border rules, in a supremely patriotic effort at user-friendliness, were introduced on the anniversary of Hitler's death.

Good Intentions Gone Astray

A nice American lady has lost all future chances of working in a managerial capacity at a British museum, and probably need not apply for the less exalted positions either. Having purchased a Mexican vase at a thrift store, she discovered that it was an ancient Mayan artifact dating back at least twelve hundred years, and subsequently compounded her indiscretion of buying rather than stealing by returning the object to Mexico. The weekend editor of the US arm of Britain's leading liberal newspaper points out that the vase dates from the peak of Mayan civilisation, and notes the civilisation's subsequent decline owing to climate change, in-fighting and white Christian genocide. Fortunately, these were merely "among other factors," so any lessons to be learned are no doubt as convenient as ever.

Clouded Out

Since our lords and masters have decided that the climate catastrophe will prove most profitable if allowed to run its course, they are naturally concerned, after their moderate and sensible fashion, to protect themselves from the worst of its consequences. In this regard, spraying clouds with reflective substances has several advantages. It can reduce temperatures in a particular locality, thereby reducing the risk of spreading the benefits to people who haven't paid for them; and fortunately for a civilisation powered by built-in obsolescence, the benefits are short-lived and the technique will lose its effectiveness the more global weather patterns are relegated to the status of a price worth paying. By mid-century, the use of the technique may even have the "unintended" (sic) result of heating up yet further those parts of the globe occupied by one's rivals for said globe's ever more rapidly diminishing resources. Mere scientists seem to regard this entrepreneurial incentive with trepidation, and even suggest regulating the process, thereby demonstrating yet again the ivory-tower ingenuousness of the breed.

Sparrows are Cheap

No sparrow can fall to earth without the knowledge of God; yet still the Plan dictates that they must fall, or in certain cases be made to fall. One such was an infanticide victim during the early eighties, whose body was discovered in a carrier bag by the local vicar and his wife. So profoundly moved was the community that the child's grave was isolated from the rest on economic grounds; and with similarly British spiritual poignancy, the case is receiving attention again because someone, a teenager when God's will was done, has now been arrested. To prevent the grave becoming completely overgrown with symptoms of common humanity, it was recently found necessary to provide a charity-handout headstone; and although the inscription could be considered unduly sarcastic, it does at least serve as a reminder, for those with eyes to see, of Who ordained the murder from the beginning of time and lifted not a single omnipotent finger to prevent it.

Civilisation Re-Imperilled

Supporters of security and defenders of deterrence have reacted with horror to the mutual defence pact between Russia and North Korea, two of the many nations for which legitimate security concerns are by definition oxymoronic. Like Iran's nuclear programme, North Korea's is self-evidently not a deterrent, by virtue of its enemies' eminently rational refusal to be deterred; and the fiend Putin's citing of North Korea's fictitious right to defend itself is self-evidently a crude parody of the more virtuous claims currently being shrieked from the rooftops of democracy with regard to the Righteous State. Putin's remarks are all the more irresponsible given the Righteous State's purely moral assaults against the Lebanese and Palestinian Untermenschen, in contrast to North Korea's seventy-year history of unprovoked and genocidal attacks upon the hapless and cowering allies of NATO.

Fiscal Subversion

British values are under attack in Austria, the rump of that unfortunate European empire which produced Mr Churchill's great contemporary. Like Adolf Hitler, who took the British Empire's moderate and sensible racism and violence to an unpalatable extreme by inflicting them on white people, an Austro-German heiress has disastrously misunderstood a fundamental tenet of liberal democracy: in this case, the moral imperative of donating to good causes as a tax dodge. She started badly by co-founding a pressure group campaigning for higher taxes, and has now taken the precipitately un-British action of putting most of her inherited wealth where her mouth is, relinquishing its control to a council of citizens. As a result, the money will be spent on non-profit issues such as homelessness, health and the environment, rather than on wealth creation as in the civilised world. Whether a Team Starmer government would be inclined to send a gunboat remains as yet unclear, but presumably the prospect has not been altogether ruled out.

Authoritative Moderativity for Sensible Electorability

As the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange seeks to establish a bridgehead - or, to use a less D-Day metaphor, seeks to implant his nasty little larvae for parasitic maturing inside a paralysed institution - various representatives of moderate sensibility have been extruded to wag the finger and remind the great British public of its responsibilities. The incumbent Conservative in the strutting Caudillo's target seat blamed the pandemic and the beastly Russians, whose recent atrocities were evidently having a substantial retrospective impact when the semi-melted waxwork Douglas Carswell won the seat for a prior incarnation of the Falange in 2015. The jabbering homunculus Michael Gove globbered that the great British public always elects "authoritative, sensible managers," rather than purple-faced lightweights like David Cameron, race-baiting cranks like Tumbledown Tessie, or blithering crooks like the National Johnson. One of Grant Shapps proclaimed itself a realist. Evidently, among the many blessings of belonging to a Team Britannia that elects only authoritative, sensible CEOs is the lack of any need to rewrite history.

They Just Don't Think Like Us

We are aware, because ministers and defenders of the Righteous State have proclaimed it, that the influence of Hamas bestrides the world like the tentacles of a malignant international octopus; and the chief executive of Oxfam GB has duly confirmed her organisation's own part in the conspiracy with the claim that Britain's position regarding the assault on Gaza is, of all things, intellectually and morally incoherent. In fact, of course, Britain is the most intellectually and morally coherent country in the world, as may be seen from the fact that its three main political parties exist in lock-step agreement on virtually every matter of policy and differ only as to the methods by which their common aims might most gloriously be achieved. Nevertheless, the chief executive of Oxfam GB seems to think some sort of doublethink may be at work in the British practice of helping to arm the Righteous State while simultaneously sending humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Untermenschen, even though - strictly in accordance with the dictates of moral and intellectual coherence - the armaments are doubtless contributing significantly to the aid not getting through.

Notional Honour

This day is not his date of birth,
And thus the monarch's listing
Does tribute to the Empire's worth
As something non-existing.

Knights, dames and alphabet-BE:
Our great and modern nation
Gives favoured plebs the pedigree
Of mediaeval station.

Samuel Grimsnipe

Family Planning Goes Wild

Since human activity is changing the ecosystem and altering habitats to the detriment of some species and the advantage of others, inevitably the species that prosper most are those least convenient to human beings: grey squirrels, wild boar, winged rats, feral budgies and Homo sapiens ipsedixit. Since artificial limits on human breeding are a priori out of the question, scientists are considering how best to curb fertility in wild animals. The Americans are already administering contraceptives to feral horses, while the South Africans are injecting them into the local elephants; but expanding the practice to smaller species may involve one or two difficulties. Quite apart from the likely objections by religious groups, many of which are inhabited almost exclusively by voracious little breeders, there could also be trouble from the trans-basher community, who can hardly be expected to support measures that might allow male fish to sneak onto their plates in the guise of femininity.

Where the Old Folks Wash Away

Despite the valiant efforts by its governor, Ronald of the Saints, to defy the Heathen Chinee climate hoaxers, it seems God has no plans as yet to spare the Christian state of Florida from the deluge. Heavy rain and flooding have blocked roads, amphibianised private vehicles, delayed ice-hockey players on their way to a game against a team with a fossil-fuel name, and quite possibly caused a few school shootings to fizzle because of damp ammunition. Whether God is doing all this because He finds the Sunshine State's work ethic insufficiently harsh remains as yet undisputed; but an unusually active hurricane season is predicted, even if only by scientists, so at least there may soon be a bit of a breeze to dry things out.

An Excuse Waiting to be Used

No disaster happens in vain provided it can be used to justify another disaster. Mere weeks after poisoning residents of a Devon town, the forward-looking moisture provision entrepreneurs who own South West Water are consolidating their next excuse with all the efficiency of a minister for rah-rah invoking World War II in aid of World War III. Since climate scientists have warned for a mere few decades about the consequences of global heating, the wealth creators at Pennon Group have suddenly discovered that climate change will bring both increased moisture provision (floods, storms) and increased demand (heat-waves, droughts), besides creating a congenial environment for parasites, pathogens and profiteers. With the co-operation of a government dedicated to rolling back the green crap, the wages of several decades' trading of national infrastructure for boardroom profits can handily be blamed upon the filthy coal-burning habits of the Maldives or the Heathen Chinee, and Pennon will not be hung out to dry.

New Chums, Old Scums

There is of course every possible sensible and moderate reason for the CEO of Team Starmer to posture for the scumbag press. Quite aside from their shared relationship with the truth, Team Starmer has made no secret of its preference for courting the kind of people who vote for Natalie Elphicke, and its corresponding contempt for those who might prefer the likes of Faiza Shaheen or Diane Abbott. Nevertheless, the Labour candidate for Liverpool Riverside has volunteered herself for the blacklist by criticising the leadership for buying advertising space in the Murdoch Sun. Much of the constituency has never forgiven the "newspaper" for its fabrications about the Hillsborough disaster; and when Team Starmer was still making some sort of pretence at caring about Labour's base the Dear Leader made one of those gossamer pledges of his, which soon went the usual way of such ephemeral things. In mitigation, a party spokesbeing pointed to the fact that the concerns of Merseyside residents had been casually shrugged off by the grown-ups as early as last year.

The Condition of the Deserving Class in England

[T]he Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism.
Emmanuel Goldstein

Never let it be thought that the great national tradition of hypocrisy is the exclusive preserve of the mealy-mouthed multiculturalists in the capital. The plain-speaking yeomen of the north are no less British in their values, as is evident in the naming of a luxury Manchester penthouse after Friedrich Engels. It's possible that, as one local writer suggested, someone merely found a list of famous residents and decided to take advantage of the fact that a statue of Engels stands nearby; even so, the level of doublethink is impressive. The site of the penthouse is a former slum, and nearby areas are being socially cleansed through rent rises; while the requirements of those not hard-working enough to afford luxury penthouses are receiving about as much attention as British decency can stand.

Controlled Inflation

A Moral Tale

In a country where harvests were fickle and famine a constant danger, it was naturally a matter of honour for rich men to have well-fed wives. A well-populated seraglio demonstrated sufficient substance to satisfy a multitude; a well-fed one demonstrated sufficient wealth to throw away a portion upon the fleshly indulgences of the weaker sex.

There came another and most severe famine, which caused the bellies of the poor to bloat; and many rich husbands observed with interest that with proper dietary regulation their social status could be maintained at far less expense, and that honour need not necessarily be bought at the price of spoiling one's property.

Things Fall Apart, the Centre Is Not Bold

Team Starmer's exchanged Labour is so zealous a party for working people that one of the two biggest trade unions in the country has declined to endorse the manifesto. Unite has reservations over a mere three of the pledges made and dumped along the route to sensible moderation, and is apparently unimpressed with the pledges that remain to be broken once in office. These include better-run bantustans for the Palestinian Untermenschen, some jolly big numbers attached to the health and education sectors, and the creation of GB Energy, a "publicly owned green power company" that won't generate any power and will most likely end up as a boondoggle for funnelling taxpayers' money into private profits. Fortunately, the manifesto did gain the approbation of someone much nicer than Sharon Graham and nearly as nice as Natalie Elphicke, with an entirely non-Stalinist penchant for rewriting history; and was agreed without debate by an utterly non-Stalinist round of clappity-clappity by the as yet unpurged.

War Orphans, Cough Up

Followers of Ken Clarke's transformation from Thatcherite minister into the sensible moderate Baron Clarke of Nottingham will doubtless remember his stint as director and deputy chair of British American Tobacco, whose fetching combination of entrepreneurship and decency is once more on display. The company's Pakistani subsidiary is leaning on the health ministry to relax its restrictions on exporting cigarettes in packs of ten, because thanks to the civil war in Sudan the juvenile market there has nothing better to spend its money on. The need to export to Sudan is particularly urgent at the moment, as the location of BAT's Sudanese subsidiary has been caught up in such heavy fighting as to make the sale of addictive carcinogens to war-zone-resident minors economically unfeasible. Along with several dozen similarly unenlightened nations Pakistan prohibits the manufacture and sale of cigarettes in ten-packs, whereas Sudan takes a more laissez-faire view; and British American Tobacco has pointed out that the money would flow into Pakistan while the cancers would appear, if at all, only at a safe distance.

Oh, the Ingratitude

Not to be outdone by the fatal Spitfire crash and subsequent grounding of Britain's rah-rah flypast fleet, the beastly French have done their part with a vengeance in marking the eightieth anniversary of Britain's last successful entry into Europe. Four hundred paratroopers dropped into the aptly-named Saneville in Normandy and were immediately subjected to the bureaucratic horrors of unelected officialdom. The forces from the mainland were accompanied by troops from the USA, who had already done the paperwork; and troops from Belgium, which incorporates within its territory the festering pustule of totalitarian oppression that is Brussels itself. In a further tactless trampling of British values, the passport checks were quick and apparently efficient.

Right Solutions

One of the many legitimate and understandable reasons why sensible and moderate people prefer the likes of the Farage Falange to the spectre of social democracy is the characteristic pragmatism and prudence which preclude such fripperies as colonial reparations. As befits a leader of uncivilised tribes in a country only the beastly Portuguese have heard of, the president of Cape Verde contrived to miss the point, claiming that the present ascendancy of the far right should not prevent secret talks on reparations by those governments which pander to the far right so as to ensure that such talks need never take place. The issue is especially fraught in the case of Portugal, which participated extensively in the Atlantic slave trade for over four hundred years; in contrast to the British Empire, whose only notable contribution to the slave trade was its abolition.

Cold Comfort

Alongside such comparatively trivial consequences as artificially enhanced natural disasters, mass extinction events and the end of human civilisation, it appears that climate change may also cause serious disruption to winter sports. The snowfall season is becoming noticeably shorter in Australia's imaginatively-named Snowy Mountains, and the curtailment is set to continue even in the unlikely event that effective action is taken to cut greenhouse emissions. Some fifteen paragraphs into a twenty-five-paragraph story, Britain's leading liberal newspaper gets around to mentioning the effects on the non-tourist ecology, thereby showing handily how current measures to cut emissions attained their present effectiveness.

The Emperor's New Favourite

Aside from the possibility that cutting ourselves off from our biggest international market might not be the best way to make the country prosper, perhaps the most unpredictable effect of British liberation from the Strasbrussels yoke is the master race's loss of its cherished status as the Pentagon's representative in Europe. The mantle of "special relationship" has now passed to the Righteous State, whose current leader has been deemed sufficiently corrupt and thuggish to address a joint session of Congress for the fourth time. This represents one more audience than was granted to Mr Churchill, who addressed Congress twice to update his favourite allies on the progress of his personal efforts to win the Second World War, and once to congratulate the Truman administration on its genocidal campaign in Korea: President Truman was so honoured that he sent his wife along to listen. It still remains to be seen whether the master race will regard the Netanyahoo's upstaging of the greatest Briton ever as a diplomatic gaffe on a par with the eviction of Mr Churchill's bust by the Kenyan upstart Obama; or whether Tumbledown Tessie's holding of the Trumpster's little hand may be considered an adequate compensation.

Rifle Butt

Diplomatic Britishness has reached robust new levels this year, with the ambassador to Mexico pointing an assault rifle at an embassy employee. Remarkably enough in view of its promising combination of Johnsonian urbanity and Trumpsterian tact, for some reason the ambassador's delightful jest did not go down well even in London, and although the gun wasn't fired the ambassador was. Relations between Mexico and the master race are usually free of controversy, thanks presumably to shared attitudes about the role of organised crime in government and commerce; and as the second largest economy in Latin America, Mexico is a natural trading partner for a post-Brexit Britain whose instinct for second-best is bested only by its urge for worse.

Change

Some people are never satisfied. Invaders of our lily-white shores, who had previously threatened legal action over being transported to Rwanda, are now threatening legal action over not being transported to Rwanda. Although the Government's flagship wog disposal scheme is in abeyance until after the election, the beneficiaries of the recent round-up are still being detained and the Home Office continues to plan, if plan is the word I want, for implementation of the policy, to the extent of relocating staff to Rwanda at the end of this month. Lawyers for the invaders accuse His Majesty's Government of acting as if the policy will not be scrapped, despite Team Starmer having pledged to scrap it. Certainly, it would be a poetic triumph of legal Britishness for the present administration to go out while being sued over excess realism.