Fine Chaps Doing Jolly Good Things

Readers of a certain age may recall the Spycatcher affair, wherein the memoir of a retired MI5 officer received some welcome worldwide publicity thanks to the Thatcher government's attempt to suppress it. The author's barrister, Malcolm Turnbull, who went on to become prime minister of Australia, has expressed staggeration and bogglement of mind at the lies and perjury of the old bag and her henchbeing, some of which were finally thought safe to reveal last year. Thirty-two files still remain classified, and it must warm all democratic British cockles that we are permitted to know exactly how many files there are whose contents our masters will not permit us to see. Turnbull nevertheless professes to consider the hypocrisy extraordinary, which given its country of origin seems remarkably naïve. Anyone finding anything extraordinary in British hypocrisy, of any magnitude whatever, must have spent their life virtually on the other side of the planet.

Divine Family Values

Despite a decade of Hindu nationalist government under the pious Narendra Modi, it seems that the gods remain unsatisfied. A season of maternal fasting and cleansing for the good fortune of offspring has been rewarded with the drowning of at least thirty-seven children and seven mothers: a substantial increase on the twenty-two drowned during the same festival last year. Evidently the deities of the Hindu pantheon are about as diligent as most gods in protecting their devotees from climate change and organisational inefficiency; hence those of an ecumenical bent will doubtless welcome the casualties as an encouraging sign of common ground between religions.

What You Would Expect

In accordance with the best British values, to say nothing of the God of Exodus and some other well-known comedies, Israel has launched airstrikes into Lebanon, killing the leader of Hezbollah along with some collateral damage. Britain's Minister for Wog-Bombing acknowledged the risk of escalation into something a bit more serious than forty-odd thousand Palestinians, while also taking care to note that any such escalation is "a matter for the Israelis." He also rather antisemitically observed that the "conflict serves no one," which is surely a blatant instance of Bibi-denial and therefore an insult to the Righteous State, the Six Million and the Jewish Chronicle. The Netanyahoo knows perfectly well that no restraints will be exerted upon him at this stage of the US electoral cycle, even in the unlikely eventuality of restraint being considered necessary in principle. Accordingly, His Majesty's Government is "making the preparations you'd expect," namely arranging to get British nationals out of Lebanon so as to minimise the number of real people cleansed alongside the ethnics. Levels of arms sales and hand-wringing will doubtless continue to be adjusted as circumstances develop.

Cleanup Act

Contrary to all expectation, it appears that certain fossil fuel companies have been saying the thing that is not about their transition to renewable energy. By "transition," of course, I mean non-transition, and by "certain companies" I mean a minimum of eighty-five out of the eighty-seven operating in the UK. Eighty of the eighty-seven are spending nothing at all on renewable energy projects, and five of the remainder have no plans to ensure that most of their investments will be in renewables by the end of the decade. Since the entire industry has been squealing for years about the need to continue exactly as they are in order to facilitate their world-beating greenification projects, certain unmoderate and antisensibilic elements might well wonder where all the money has been going. Fortunately, Team Starmer is now on hand with its ex-twenty-nine billion, heroically banning companies from exploiting empty fields and all gung-ho for the Petroleum Finance Initiative, which will ensure that all is rah-rah from now on by having Great British in the name of its taxpayer-sponsored front company.

Sensible Solutions for Moderate Moisture

Patriots will rejoice to find Britishness as rampant as ever in the moisture profiteering industry, one of whose largest members is celebrating the arrival of the rainy season in a manner befitting the country that thought it could save the NHS by cutting itself off from its biggest trading partner, kicking out its immigrant workers, and putting Boris Johnson in charge of the Government. Southern Water, whose chief executive has just received a £183,000 bonus for getting consumers to pay for non-existent improvements, is considering a scheme to import moisture from Norway in the event that the coming winter's floods prove inadequate to prevent hosepipe bans next summer. Naturally the plan, if plan is the word I'm groping for, is intended as a "last-resort contingency measure" or, in Standard English, something to be done as often as can be got away with. Since properly maintained reservoirs and infrastructure are against the national religion, and since the costs would be borne entirely by moisture provision consumers and the environment, there seems little reason for anything to dam its progress.

Tehran Tangerine Tribble Terror Trouble

Despite the personal intervention of Baby Jesus in saving the Trumpster and his head-tribble from the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, it appears that faith may still be lacking among certain elements. On the off-chance that the Trumpster campaign is to be believed, there are real and specific Iranian plots to defy the manifest will of the Deity with continuing and co-ordinated attempts against the free world's great orange hope. Supposedly, the Great Satan of the Middle East believes that removing the Trumpster and his head-tribble from US politics may lead to an increase in chaos and instability. In the present rarefied state of reality such matters are of course difficult to judge; but is it plausible that even the mad mullahs could be so lacking in knowledge as to the workings of democracy? Evidently there are very few things that the great American intelligence can afford to put past a government which enforces the veil, supports Hezbollah, and tries to restrict the use of automatic weapons in high school.

Financial Discretion

There are few more reliable indications of an urge towards political change than sticking to the policies of the predecessor one claims to be a change from. The fresh-faced troops of Team Starmer have long touted their mastery of this forensic subtlety, and the Minister for State-Subsidised Gambling clearly has no intention of being purged just yet. Responding to the Financial Conduct Authority's plans to name and shame corporations if it judges that the public interest would be served, the minister expressed agreement with the ludicrous Jeremy Hunt, whose concern for protecting corporate crooks extended to undermining the FCA's independence. In the FCA's defence, its executive director of enforcement and market oversight wielded the magic word deterrent, apparently unaware that deterrence is moderate and sensible only when used on those who are unlikely in the foreseeable future to be capable of buying a minister.

Righteous Among the Nations

First
they went for Gaza,
and I did not stop arming them
because they always went for Gaza.

Then
they went for the West Bank,
and I did not stop arming them
because there isn't much profit in de-escalation.

Then
they went for the refugee camps,
and I did not stop arming them
because you can't smash terrorism without breaching human shields.

Then
they went for the pagers,
and I did not stop arming them
because I have more expensive devices for phoning-in my ethics.

Then
they went for Lebanon,
and I did not stop arming them
because Lebanon must be used to it by now.

Then
they went for Syria and Iran and the whole damn region,
and I had about as much reason to stop arming them
as I'd ever had before.

Pastor Martial Neumörder

Coming Soon

The Cold Away: A Winter's Tale

An extract

Once upon a time a learned man sat in his study, surrounded on all sides by leathery books and yellowed papers, while the fire cackled and sniggered in the grate, and his shadow shifted on the wall. Outside the study window hung icicles like silver needles, and every so often one of them would crack impatiently to itself, wondering when it would be allowed to leap free of the clinging gutter and make a merry descent from this seat of learning to fall on the head of someone passing below.

The learned man was tall and thin, with a stooped back and a nose like a stork's beak. His eyes were like small black pebbles, and his legs were so long that his knees creaked continually, because they were right in the middle and thus, as it seemed to them, neither here nor there. At the moment only one knee was creaking, because the learned man had thrown it over the other and was swinging his foot back and forth beneath the desk. Back and forth swung the foot, and this way and that, and the knee creaked with annoyance at every change in direction, while the learned man took no notice whatever.

On the polished desk-top rested papers and books of every age and size, every page covered with writing or with print. Much of the writing was the learned man's own: a black scrawl like a burned picket-fence, made to keep his private thoughts from those who had no business with them. Some of the papers marked places in the books; others lay about on their own, or else in untidy piles weighted down with fossil crustaceans.

Among them, in the very centre of the desk-top, between the learned man's sharp elbows and beneath the black gaze of his eyes, lay some papers with nothing written on them at all, except for a few words at the top of the uppermost page. The learned man's eyes glared down at these papers, and blinked as if their whiteness blinded him. His long, knobbly fingers grasped the pen, dipped it in the ink-well and brought the metal nib within an inch of the page; then stopped. The pen hung, pregnant with ink; the paper waited, itching to be scratched just after the last word written; the ink, losing patience, began silently to collect itself into a droplet, which in the fullness of time would fall and spread itself into a magnificent blot. Of course that would not help matters in the slightest, but it would at least be something.

But the learned man's hand moved away, forcing the ink to drop back into the ink-well, while his shadow jumped on the wall and his eyes glared down at the too-white page, and the other, still whiter pages lurking underneath.

He uncrossed his legs and then, with a protest of knees, crossed them again. He had written, in the careful flowing hand meant for readers to see:

Whenever a good child dies, an angel comes down from heaven, takes the child in its arms and, spreading its large white wings

He had written that two days ago, and nothing since. Such a thing had never happened to the learned man before; nor to his pen, nor to his ink, nor to any white paper that showed itself in his study. All his life the learned man had been noted for his ability to bring forth words onto paper, so that no pen which came into his hand need fear that it would never touch a page, and almost no sentence which he wrote need worry that there would be no more to follow. But now he had begun this sentence, which to all appearances was a thoroughly deserving one, and after two days he was unable even to complete it. The situation was most embarrassing, for the learned man had been poor once, and had worked hard for his education, and the thought of being poor again did not excite his interest in the slightest.

He pushed back his seat and stood up, but not all the way because he did not wish to strike his head on the slope of the ceiling. His study was right beneath the roof, and the ceiling lowered itself precipitately in several places; and in the springtime the birds would land themselves noisily just outside the window and stare in with their blank reptile eyes. The learned man strode up and down the study, away from the desk and past the window and its icicles, as far as the opposite wall, where paper cut-outs of devils and pelicans were pinned for the landlady's disapproval. As the learned man approached the wall, a draught stirred the air, ruffling the paper pelicans and rattling the glittering scarlet devils. The learned man was cheered by this; but then he reached the wall and had to turn around, which meant he could again see his desk with the white paper gleaming and reproaching. He looked through the window at the icicles, but they had nothing to tell him; he stared into the fire, but the flames only sniggered as before. Once more he turned away from the desk, and the devils and pelicans fidgeted conspiratorially. This time the learned man scowled at them; he had created them all himself with nail-scissors and felt that they might show him more respect, although their creation had not been much trouble.

At last he threw up his hands, which collided with the sloping ceiling with a sound like knocking on a great door – a door far too haughty to let in the mere sound of someone rapping on the wood. If one wishes to be heard through such a door one must use the metal knocker, or a stout stick; but the learned man's stick was downstairs, and his ceiling had no knocker because there was nothing on the other side of it but snow and sky, neither of which was prepared to accept his visiting-card.

"Enough!" the learned man exclaimed, rubbing his fingers and glaring at the ceiling which had interrupted his gesture. "Enough! Out upon stories, and children, and angels, and paper and pens, and all the rest of it," and he rubbed his fingers some more, although the agony was very slight.

"Two days," the learned man continued; "two miserable days of imprisonment and toil, and what have I to show for it? An aching back, an aching head, bent nibs, bruised fingers and precisely twenty-three words written. Did ever anyone labour so hard in return for so little at the end? It will not do; indeed it will not," and he thought of all he had written before, with such remembered ease and fluency that it seemed the words had danced out of his pen and arranged themselves, as if rehearsed a dozen times, into their elegant tableaux. Of course they had danced more slowly on some days than others, but only because of interruptions or disturbances, or because the profundity of certain passages had required a more considered and leisurely development. But even the learned man had not thought his present work so profound as to require half an hour for each single word to emerge.

"Why, at this rate," he thought, "the whole story could take weeks to complete, and if I should start a book it would be years, decades even, before I could finish a chapter. I'd have to leave it to my heirs for completion, and who knows what kind of mess they would make?"

Most annoying of all was that he knew the story was ready to be written. It was complete in his head from sensitive beginning to moving conclusion, with angel and children and flowers all in their proper places and ready to fly and converse and remember everything they needed to remember, all in a most touching and improving fashion. It was neither a long story nor a complicated one, and the learned man strode across the study, sat down again at his desk, grasped his pen and dipped the nib in the ink-well. The paper glowed white, for surely this time it would be scratched to its full content; the ink sat wobbling and counting in the nib, one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three-one-thousand, go; but the go never came, the paper was untouched, the pen returned to its holder, and the learned man's long fingers clenched into a fist, while the fire sniggered and his shadow palpitated with mirth.

"Hell fire! Hell fire and damnation!" exclaimed the learned man, and he started up from his chair once more, unfolding his legs so quickly that his knees had no time to protest. The learned man strode back across the study, past the window towards the wall covered in pelicans and leering devils; but when he reached the wall this time he did not turn back towards his desk, with its obnoxious, angelic white paper. Instead, the learned man went to the door, which was next to the wall so that the devils could leer at the landlady whenever she walked in without knocking. The learned man opened the door and stalked out, and closed the door behind him quite firmly, leaving pen and pelicans, fire and flowers, angels and devils all in the room together. The light in the hallway was brighter, and he was far too agitated to notice that he had also left behind his shadow.

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I Hate Cheerleaders

An American Tale

Forty miles from the next town it happened again, and this time even Busby felt the extra weight. He swore and hit the steering wheel with his blistered fist. "Another one? Here?"
"Seems that way," said Blasio.
"That's three since we hit the desert," Busby said. "Three in a hundred miles."
"A hundred and twenty," said Blasio. "Next one should be in town."
"Not with my luck," Busby said. "Three in a hundred and twenty miles is one every forty miles. There'll probably be another one before we get out. Most likely there'll be twins."

"Stop the car," Blasio said. Busby stopped the car and stared morbidly into the mirror. A hundred and twenty miles of empty road stretched out behind. Busby shifted his stare morbidly to the windscreen. Thirty-nine and a half miles of empty road stretched out in front.

"The next one'll be in town," Blasio told him. "It won't be sand next time. It'll be somebody's garden or something."
"In broad daylight?"
"It'll be dark by then." Blunt complacent fingers stroked Blasio's glistening dewlap.
"Not with my luck," Busby said, and punished the steering wheel again.
"Don't damage it," said Blasio. "If the steering goes the way of the air conditioner, as soon as we hit a bend in the road we'll have to stop. You'll have to carry them on your shoulders, forty more miles each time." He yawned. "Plus fifty paces, of course."
"And what will you be doing?
"Looking out. And if you're good I'll carry the shovel so you don't have to dig with your bare hands. Speaking of which."

The shovel was on the back seat because when it was in the trunk it kept ending up underneath the cheerleaders, and Busby disliked moving the cheerleaders in order to get at the shovel. Blasio had pointed out, scratching under his porkpie hat as he always did when being profound, that the cheerleaders would have to be moved anyway, so what was the difference; and Busby had replied that it still meant the shovel had been lain on by a cheerleader, and he didn't enjoy using a contaminated shovel.
"Throw it on the back seat, then," Blasio had said.
"What if someone looks in?"
"Just say we dig having it there."

Busby had not laughed because there had still been a cheerleader to move, and one of the heavier ones. Even the bulimics were no small weight, and he was morally sure that some of the damn things were pregnant.

"Speaking of which," said Blasio, and leaned back and closed his eyes. He couldn't even be bothered to pull his hat down over his face.

Busby opened the door. Immediately the car, which had been unbearable, became worse. The desert shimmered at him, and Busby unstuck his dry lips to grimace back. He got out and pushed the seat forward and reached into the rear for the shovel. "Fifty paces," Blasio mumbled.
"Sir yes sir," said Busby sulkily. He pushed the seat back and closed the door and executed a theatrical about-turn which wobbled a bit at the end. He trudged over the sand and pebbles and lumps of hostile vegetation, counting off the paces as he went. Forty-nine would never do, and forty-eight would be worse, and the paces couldn't be too short either. Blasio always knew.

At fifty he hauled the gloves over his blisters and commenced digging. There was no point looking at the cheerleader until he absolutely had to. They all fitted into the trunk, so he always dug a hole the length and breadth of the trunk and then a bit deeper. As he dug, he tried to work up some enthusiasm by imagining that the sand and the stones were cheerleaders beneath the blade of his shovel, blonde and brunette and redhead and raven, though mercifully without pompoms; but the resemblance wasn't strong enough to keep his vision sustained.

Eventually he walked back to the car and stood beside the trunk. After a long, considered moment Blasio lurched forward to push the button and the trunk cracked open. At least that meant Blasio was satisfied with the hole and the fifty paces, which was something. Then again, it also meant Busby now had to deal with the cheerleader. He opened the trunk and glared down at her.

She wasn't one of the rotted ones, so that was another small mercy. She was neatly packed in with her legs drawn up and her arms crossed over her chest. Her head was thrown back and her mouth was slightly open as though snoring. It was all right for some, thought Busby.

He leaned in and hauled her out. If the shovel had been underneath her instead of on the back seat, he would still have the hole to dig and all that work in front of him. Almost any situation could be endured if you tried, thought Busby as he hefted the cheerleader over his shoulder and started his cheerleader-weighted fifty-pace desert march with more spadework at the end. You just had to discipline yourself to take an optimistic view of things.

When he finished, dusk was creeping up and the air was beginning to chill. Blasio had turned on the car radio and was listening to golden oldies. Busby pushed the seat forward and tossed the shovel in the rear, then pushed the seat back and got in. "I'm thirsty," he said.
"Must be the heat," said Blasio unsympathetically. "Start the car." Busby started the car. "I hope there's not another one before we get to town."
"Next one'll be somebody's garden," Blasio said. "Clay loam at night. Easiest digging in the world. Let's go."

Half a mile from town, with the dark in full descent and his sweat-stains beginning to ice over, the air conditioner came back on and the radio fizzled out, just as Busby was beginning to find it tolerable.

All On His Owensome

Just when British independence from the Strasbrussels yoke was going so well, at least one crusader for taking back control has suffered further martyrdom at the hands of the beastly Euro-wogs. Of course the European Court of Human Rights has nothing to do with the EU, but Owen Paterson is far too much the intellectual firebucket to bother himself with such quibbles. Predictably, the ECHR has thrown out his superbly hypocritical appeal against the Parliamentary report that found his lobbying to exceed even the standards tolerated by the House of Expenses Claimants; and this despite extensive whining about not being able to get into any good coronations and having to live as a pensioner and a parasite rather than as a bumbling little crook. It is to be hoped that Team Starmer's removal of the Winter Fuel Payment will not unduly improve matters.

Dirty Money

Immoderate and unsensible persons have calculated that taxing toy ocean liners and private jets would bring in more revenue than letting pensioners freeze or perpetuating child poverty. Naturally, Team Starmer does not recognise the figures, whose implementation would have the most appalling consequences. Besides exposing Team Starmer's green agenda to plausible accusations of non-tokenism, it would reduce the amount of spare cash which patriotic squillionaires would have on hand for bungs to the Dear Leader and his retinue; which would not only be unpragmatic and ideological, but might well verge upon the antisemitic.

Cut but This, and All is Mended

A Manchester theatre has cancelled a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, partly because of technical problems but also because of a song offensively shaded with references to Gaza and trans rights. The theatre claims to like working with artists who "address complex issues," so perhaps the issue of ethnic cleansing was felt to be demeaning in its simplicity. The disputed song would have involved audience participation, and the theatre management may also have been worried about whether the Zionists or the trans-bashers would assault the stage first. It is to be hoped that someone will break it to them gently about the pro-Gaza bias of The Merchant of Venice; to say nothing of the Scottish play, wherein "liver of blaspheming Jew" is listed alongside various animal, Muslim and pagan parts in the witches' recipe.

Too Clean for Comfort

Even the most virtuous actions cannot always be carried out to absolute perfection, and it seems that the slaughter of a few tens of thousands of adult and infant Hamas operatives has been accompanied by some unfortunate collateral cleansing. Despite attempts by Hamas to confuse the issue with assertions that three hostages were killed last year in an airstrike by the Righteous State, the IDF has admitted to a high probability that three hostages were killed last year "by a by-product" of an airstrike by the Righteous State. Fortunately for the reputation of the IDF, a Hamas brigade chief was present to serve as a human shield against any suggestion of gratuitous violence.

Stone Fishy

High-school pupils in southern Los Angeles have been privileged to undergo one of God's favourite tests of faith, with the discovery of marine fossil sites underneath their campus. As is well known, the fount of all truth planted the fossil record during that busy week in 4004BCE, in order to sort the believing sheep from the sceptical goats. The implausible sizes and shapes which characterise many of these mythical beasts were doubtless intended as a clue, so that in His infinite mercy and compassion He wouldn't have to consign quite so many souls to damnation. The cache beneath San Pedro high school, for example, includes a species of shark that could grow to nearly seventy feet long, and a sabre-toothed salmon. Among other things, this implies that southern Los Angeles was once deep under the ocean, and that therefore America itself is a changeable and contingent phenomenon. A likely story.

O Canada, We Shiver On Guard For Thee

A bracing breeze of Britishness is blowing through our north-western colonies, where the Canadian army has issued new sleeping bags to its troops without troubling to check how they work. Since Canada is traditionally assumed to be at least partly Arctic in location, soldiers have traditionally been equipped with gear suitable for Arctic conditions. Last year, after the usual "rigorous competitive process," the army spent thirty-five million dollars on sleeping bags whose camouflage is so effective that they blend in seamlessly with the environment, and therefore keep the troops warm provided the weather is warm too.

For Whom the Bells Toll

Notre Dame cathedral is nearing complete restoration, more than half a decade after God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, saw fit to burn much of it down. President Macron had wanted the work finished in time for the Paris Games, when the bells might have provided a suitable distraction from his botched electoral gamble; as it turns out, the opening ceremony will not even take place in time to celebrate his appointment of a right-wing prime minister to protect the Fifth Republic from its own left-wing voters. Any plans for pandering to the forthcoming Le Pen administration by stringing up a Gypsy or two are presumably still at an early stage.

Not Our Sort of People

Soldiers in Sudan's latest civil war are committing the indiscretion of posting video celebrations of torture and ethnic cleansing, thereby appropriating for themselves what the civilised world today considers a privilege exclusive to the IDF. Precedents include atrocities carried out and filmed in Bosnia and Syria by some enemies of civilised values; since the crimes in Sudan are being committed by Africans, there is already speculation that the footage may be used in war crimes trials even though no major US interests are at stake. Such images sometimes circulate among a small coterie, but can also be shared widely so as to send a propaganda message; as distinct from mainstream infotainment footage of NATO peacekeeping activities against the enemies of civilised values and their human shields, which is displayed purely for reasons of journalistic impartiality.

Easily Confused

In a development which may have far-reaching consequences for the sacred rights of capital over common assets, a high court judge has ruled that commonly used disyllables in the English language are not the exclusive property of specific commercial entities. EasyGroup, which runs EasyJet, EasyBus, EasyHotel, EasyLitigation and so forth, sued the charity shopping website Easyfundraising, its founder and its investors, on grounds of trademark violation. EasyGroup claimed that their brand could be conflated in the consumer consciousness with that of Easyfundraising and their reputation sullied by association. The judge took eighty-one pages to point out, presumably in words of as few syllables as possible, that Easyfundraising's poor reputation existed largely if not entirely in the allegations of EasyLitigation, some of whose own fellow EasyGroupies had themselves advertised on the website. Whether EasyLitigation now intend going after Linda Ronstadt, Guns N' Roses or the estates of Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda remains as yet difficult to discern.

Unity, Work, Patriotism

Outside the more literal-minded reaches of the Stupid Party's less intellectual wing, it is debatable what anyone really expected of the Rwanda transportation scheme. Initially dreamed up to bait the weedy liberals and give the sensible moderates something to triangulate about, the idea was eventually co-opted to take the place of Brexit in the patriotic consciousness: a scheme whose full-throated adoption could serve to prevent the defection of useful racists to the Farage Falange, while the fact that it could never work as advertised would provide an eternal magnet for righteous indignation against the enemies of the people. Since nobody cared how or whether all the rah-and-blah would actually be implemented as a policy, the previous administration's willingness to listen to Rwandans on the matter seems eminently explicable. In determining whether Rwanda was a safe country, the Ministry for Wog Disposal relied mainly on officials of the Rwandan government, thereby ensuring a positive attitude; and when Rwandans outside the government were interviewed, officials sat in to prevent any misunderstandings. Obviously, this sort of game-playing was a far more effective provocation than the tediously routine recourse of delegating a British Home Secretary to lie and bluster; so it would be unfair in the extreme to imagine that the previous administration relied on the Rwandan government purely because corruption, authoritarianism and poverty made them feel at home.

They Made Us What We Are

Appropriately enough given the family background of the sainted Thatcher, the vast majority of revenue lost to tax evasion is pocketed by small tradesbeings who exploit the perennial happy relationship between the Government and the Babbage calculatifying engines. As might be expected, this particular dodge was facilitated by a law passed early in the first Bullingdon Club administration, whereby the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat accomplices enabled companies to process payments without declaring them, go bust without settling their debts, and then re-brand without hindrance to start all over again. The Conservatives had better things to do than pester entrepreneurs with the pluck and gumption to arrange their own tax cuts; but Team Starmer has proclaimed itself disposed to crack down on the practice as soon as the Chancellor has some leg-room to spare from kicking the pensioners.

Britishness Diluted

Like many an infantile disorder, the virus of patriotism appears to be adapting to a new generation by taking on new shapes. Britons are now less likely to take pride in the nation's history, in which they did not participate; and more likely to take pride in the nation's cultural and sporting heritage, in which for the most part they also did not participate. It's rather like the Catholicism of crusaders and inquisitors being replaced by the Anglicanism of hypocrites and social workers: the symptoms may be less inconvenient, but the disease remains the same. If one insists upon viewing a geopolitical abstraction as a personality, a less charitable commentator than your correspondent might be tempted to consider the former slaver who takes pride in sponsoring a library; or the doddering ex-rapist whose present impotence has driven him to boast of more refined pursuits.

House of Murdoch

Since you can never be too rich or too rich, the current most favoured scion of Britain's Supreme Leader is diversifying into the housing shortage. It is hoped that proceeds from the take-over of the UK's leading property website will be sufficient to subsidise that significant portion of the nation's scumbag press which the Supreme Leader has accrued beneath his cleansing and enlightening influence. The injection of Murdoch family values will no doubt do much to repair the reputation of estate agents, whose trade is traditionally considered nearly as honourable as those of other Murdoch properties in politics and journalism.

Another Holy Mystery

It is well known that God likes to punish people through their children; but even when He rewards them via the same channel, gratitude is not always fortcoming. The secular arm in Australia has just adjourned its trial of some pious folk over the death of an eight-year-old girl whom the All-Merciful saw fit to afflict with diabetes and a parental dupe. On the instructions of his brethren in Christ, her father withdrew her insulin, causing her to be transported to Heaven after a period of no doubt cleansing physical chastisement; he proclaimed in his closing statement that he believed her "only sleeping," although his lachrymose demeanour at the time might cause the uncharitable to question his faith. Indeed, when it comes to this ultimate matter the sect as a whole appears disturbingly lacking in joyful acquiescence to the divine Will. Their defence is based on the Saviour's assertion that the dead can rise again; from which it follows that charges of murder or manslaughter are meaningless; nevertheless, they also claim religious persecution without apparently rejoicing or being exceeding glad, as the Saviour also enjoined. It is quite the little paradox.

The Way It Has to Be

Rather than take proper precautions to shield the tree of knowledge, let alone raise humanity to His own estate, the Almighty famously chose to create Hell, thereby instituting the infallible moral principle that punishment is better than prevention. Doubtless in the same holy spirit, the Christian state of Georgia has decided to treat a fourteen-year-old as an adult in aid of legal retribition for Murca's latest school shooting. Whatever else the Christian state of Georgia may hope to achieve by this, it is certainly an effective means of conveying the infallible moral principle that the slaughter of unarmed civilians is what makes a boy into a man.

Business as Usual

In the towering spirit of British justice, a public inquiry has taken seven years to discover that landlords, corporate profiteers and laissez-brûler governments all did their bit towards causing the seventy-two avoidable deaths in the Grenfell disaster. Dear me, who would have thought it? Fortunately, a certain stability was apparent in the predictability of the responses. The corporate spokesbeings responded with blanket denials and blame-shifting. The CEO of Team Starmer responded with a pledge to deprive the relevant corporations of Government contracts; it remains to be seen how much or how little difference this will make once they start trading under different names. The Metropolitan Police responded that further patience will be required, since a further year or two will be necessary to go through the report and ensure that legal culpability for the deaths is sufficiently attenuated to make prosecutions appropriately impracticable.

Payback Without the Pain

Fraud in the British payments industry has been sharply on the rise for some years, and a few months ago the regulator issued the standard British boast of world-beating combat, with banks being obliged to reimburse victims up to £415,000. There followed the standard squeals of outrage from the sector whose right to have all its errors paid for by someone else has hitherto gone entirely unquestioned by anyone whose moderation could be considered remotely sensible; and the unauthorised consumer protection now appears likely to undergo the standard British solution of being scaled back by the cost of a few weeks' executive luncheons. Doubtless the fraud levels will take care of themselves, especially as market standards are enhanced by the sudden presence of so many erstwhile Conservative parliamentary expenses claimants.

God's Own Crooks

What degree of incompetence is necessary to allow a rifleman within a frew hundred feet of a US presidential candidate, and then allow that rifleman to kill one person, wound two more, and come within an earlobe's breadth of bullet-creasing the world's most powerful head-tribble? No less a theologian than the very same head-tribble's dangling orange squeaker has preached that such epoch-making ineptitude can be nothing other than divine; and in a rare convergence between expert opinion and the democratic will "a lot of people" have backed him up, as well as his own animal-killing offspring. The hypothesis of a bungling or malignant Deity has of course been advanced more than once before now; but the Trumpster's implied endorsement is certainly an unexpected blessing.

Militant Book-keeping

Although Team Starmer has made abundantly clear that the only problem with private profiteering in the public sector is that there isn't quite enough of it yet, dissent is already brewing over, of all things, keeping track of the money thrown at the private sector on behalf of the grateful taxpayer. The Blair administration's PFI boondoggle was intended for no other purpose than to funnel public cash into private coffers, yet at least one back-bencher seems to believe that some sort of accounting, if not actual accountability, ought to be in place. She does not go quite so far as to blaspheme the national religion by suggesting that cuts should be made to private profits rather than public services, so a suspension for antisemitism appears as yet unlikely.