Upon This Rock

Christian churches do not live by faith alone, but by every penny that can be squeezed out of their dupes and by holding good and tight to some very fancy real estate. Alas, the Church of England's relationship with Mammon is under renewed strain as the authorities have permitted a metal band to hold a concert at York Minster, and some among the congregation have decided not to turn the other cheek. Apparently one of the guitarists used to be in a different band wherein he wore a shirt proclaiming that Jesus was something potentially fertile and and pleasant to explore: a self-evident insult to the faith, its real estate and its magnificent organ.

Never Again, Unless Decidedly Expedient

You can say what you like about Hitler, provided you don't compare his salute to the Sieg Silicon Valley; but whatever his little foibles he did profit many people of the moderate and sensible classes and he did have relatively few squillionaires rounded up and thrown into concentration camps. Now that the Holocaust is on its way out of living memory and reduced, in polite circles, to little more than a clip-on excuse for the activities of the Righteous State, the moderate and sensible classes are starting to see the left-wing extremist perils of learning the wrong lessons from history. Germany's major conservative parties celebrated the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by conniving with the neo-Nazis to push an immigrant-bashing motion in the Bundestag, and it appears that not everyone is grown-up enough to rejoice at this moral progress. At least one Holocaust survivor, a recipient of Germany's highest honour for raising awareness of the Holocaust in schools, has reacted in a most intemperate fashion, threatening to hand back his Bundesverdienstorden and join the migrant hordes himself. The nation that gave rise to Mr Churchill will thank its own moderational sensibles for their continuing refusal to countenance the freedom of movement which might have enabled him to invade.

His Majesty's Most Humble and Devoted Servant

The greatest men are those, I find,
Who do not scorn to change their mind;
And I, who have new eyes to see,
Must now let greatness fall on me.

In former days, in flush of youth,
I did not know His holy truth;
Though He was nice and fair of mind,
I slandered Him in speech unkind.

I called Him bully, I confess;
A danger to the world, no less.
His dynamism did not move me,
Nor worshipped I His energy.

My words were ill-judged, wrong, and loose,
And I have only this excuse:
That my perspective could not boast
The plummy perks of this my post.

Mine eyes now see in purer light
That turns all gaudy orange white;
And when He holds me close - well, well!
So clean, so fresh, so rich the smell!

Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring

Made in China

With typical treacherous insidiousness, and against all the rules of fair play and competition that made the West what it is today, the Heathen Chinee are blatantly competing with the techno-manbabies, who thus far have spat eleven trillion dollars' worth of dummy about it. Comparisons are being drawn with the darkest days of the Cold War, when the first man in space was a commie and the first man on the moon, assuming the whole thing wasn't faked, was put there by Big Guvmint. Experts have issued oracular warnings that the Heathen Chinee are not to be trusted, and that any personal information shared using their platform could end up in hands far less lily-white and libertarian than Musk's or Meta's. Shockingly, there now exists even the possibility of misinformation, which is doubtless what motivated the Trumpster and his head-tribble to hint that somebody ought to do something about it.

Even Now, Some Things Are Still Beyond Us

Team Starmer's projected transformation of the country into a pioneering AI powerdise, where tech-bro manbabies may plagiarise as they please via massive, water-guzzling monuments to misinformation, seems to be suffering a touch of Britishness. Like all benign and universally advantageous policies, AI must necessarily be tested on the poor before being inflicted on the nation as a whole; and the Department of Workfare and Poverty is a natural place to start given that so few of its personnel can pass the Turing test even when encountered face to interface. So little has the Government to hide about its plans for making the welfare bureaucracy less human that it took only a single Freedomm of Information request to discover that at least half a dozen shirker processing systems have already been shut down or rejected. Such failures can be accounted for only by excessive machine generosity or by a mulish disinclination to harm human beings or, through inaction, allow human beings to come to harm; since not even a Britishness thoroughly penetrated by tech-bro manbabies could breed a system that was too inefficient for the DWP.

Betty Battenberg Belize Banknote Betrayal

Once more a spectre is haunting the Americas: the spectre of ingratitude. Following the subversive activities of beastly Barbados and treasonous Trinidad, the nation of Belize has removed the civilising image of the Old Queen from its banknotes and replaced it with merely local icons. The peddlers of the mutinous money have even had the gall to use the pretext of increased security features without so much as a nod to His Majesty's Government's pioneering innovationism in universalising that endlessly convenient excuse. How many of those vocal British patriots who use Belize to dodge British taxes will be transferring their fiscal blessings to less uppity havens remains as yet unclear.

Absolutely Fantastic

As always when policies fail to produce the desired results, the blame lies not with the judgement of policy-makers but with the pessimism of everyone else. On a purely theoretical level, it's difficult to combine optimism of the will with pessimism of the intellect when the intellect happens to be that of the British political class; but there are also pragmatic concerns about the continuing lack of growth in the economy despite Team Starmer's commitment to the welfare of the tax-dodging community abroad and dedication to maintaining deprivation levels at home. According to Rachel Reeves, fourteen years of Conservative rule have left us with four of the best universities in the world and unbelievable (sic) strengths in all the best areas; the trouble is apparently that the Conservatives were too apologetic and too polite, while the rest of us are too resistant to Change™ to have modified with due promptitude this unfortunate posture. As always, the answer is more rah-rah and less doing Britain down, and in the Trumpster and his head-tribble the CTRL-C CTRL-V Chancellor has made the inevitable choice as to our proper and fitting models.

The Only Good Democrat is a Dead Democrat

Following the Yellow Peril and the Red Scare, and preceding the use of aircraft condensation trails to dispense mind-controlling drugs, the mainstream Murcan conspiracy industry became heavily invested in the shooting of an ordinary dynastic thug who was subsequently transfigured into perhaps the most over-rated political figure this side of Winston Churchill. As a gesture of magnanimity towards the Kennedy brainworm, the Trumpster's head-tribble has authorised its host to permit the release of classified government records relating to the assassination, which Baby Jesus was unfortunately unable to prevent as He was conserving His energies to foil the assassination of the Trumpster. Murcans have been warned not to expect any spectacular revelations, especially as some records have been destroyed during the intervening decades; almost certainly including those which placed beyond all reasonable doubt the involvement of the CIA, the mafia, the Roswell immigrant community and the late President Carter.

What They Really Meant

Just like Baby Jesus, the Founding Fathers were the Trumpster's kind of people; though his affinity with the latter is presumably less supernatural and more to do with their being white male slave-holders who also held forthright views on paying tax. Just like Baby Jesus, however, the Founding Fathers and their successors seem on occasion to have said the opposite of what they meant. Baby Jesus threatened fire and brimstone for all but a few of us and called it mercy and forgiveness, and He also said some very wrong-headed things about giving to the poor; but He has been fortunate in having two millennia's worth of Christians to set Him straight. The Trumpster, his head-tribble and the now charmingly misnamed US justice department have attempted a similar service on behalf of the Constitution, whose fourteenth amendment grants the right of citizenship to people born or naturalised in the USA even if they are born to un-Americans. Thanks to the woke mind virus, this amendment has been interpreted as granting, of all things, the right of citizenship to people born or naturalised in the USA even if they are born to un-Americans. Now that the Trumpster and his head-tribble have declared war on such crude literalism, lawsuits are already brewing in rebel states and a federal judge has issued a restraining order to prevent 150,000 junior Americans being prematurely turned into illegal immigrants. It remains as yet unclear whether the Trumpster considers his brand of interpretive praxis legitimately applicable to the laws prohibiting presidential assassination.

Roman Holiday

Team Starmer's sister in pragmatism, Giorgia Meloni, has sent another African back where he belongs; but the response from certain quarters has been less enthusiastic than was presumably hoped. The deportee is a Libyan general and prison warder whose régime has been accused of arbitrary imprisonment, torture and all those other little treats that are too good for migrants and troublemakers. There is an ICC warrant for his detention, but the heirs of Mussolini were disinclined to sanction his arrest and the Italian security services flew him home to a hero's welcome: something Team Starmer's sister in anti-communism, the sainted Thatcher, wasn't quite able to achieve for her Chilean chum Augusto Pinochet. For its own part, Libya has reacted in a manner worthy of a state which Britain helped to wog-bomb into democracy and civilisation.

If It Works, Why Fix It?

Even after a dozen years of the hostile environment policy, whether delivered by blustering bully-boys or by the more mealy-mouthed and meanly managerial incarnations of British patriotism, there are still some people who haven't got the message. Do-gooders, bleeding hearts and those who favour protest over policy are pestering the poor Ministry for Wog Disposal to implement, of all things, safeguarding measures for the protection of elements which the Ministry has repeatedly and consistently made clear would do better to drown in the Channel. In accordance with the Team Starmer motto of Change™, the present Minister for Wog Disposal has proclaimed any number of times that her objections to the policy of transportation to Rwanda were on grounds of excess cost and insufficient deportations, rather than on any point of principle that might alienate the all-important Farage Falange floaters. If asylum seekers are attacking each other with knives, from the ministerial point of view that is the very definition of a self-solving problem.

Peterborough Denied

As somebody or other once said, you cannot serve both God and Mammon; and while the Church of England has served God well enough to amass about ten and a half billion in investments, it does not seem that Mammon is sufficiently concerned with serving the Almighty's real estate. The Church pays about fifteen per cent of the running costs of Peterborough Cathedral, whose historical, cultural and architectural heritage is valued by His Majesty's Government at precisely nil; and any contributions made by the Church's fellow squillionaire and titular owner of His Majesty's Government are no doubt purely moral. Consequently there are threats afoot to turn Peterborough's pious pile into a part-time cathedral, which of course would only make sense in the unlikely event that enough Anglicans happened to be part-time Christians. Since there is apparently little possibility of the cathedral staff labouring in return for no more than the privilege of doing their Father's will, another measure under consideration is to cut back on community work such as support for refugees: what the Farage Falange might credit as Reform Christianity.

Blaze of Glory

A Moral Tale

Having been told from earliest rolling that its ultimate purpose was to be transformed through the inspiration of holy fire, a Cigarette waited eagerly for this fulfilment of its existence. All through the long cramped darkness when it was packed in a box with very little personal space, the Cigarette held fast to its faith, despite the mutterings of sceptics who perpetrated evil rumours about ashtrays and pavements.

At last the box was opened, and all its occupants thrilled to feel their filters touched with the air of the outside world; and one by one each of them was chosen and ascended to its destiny. Exulting, the Cigarette found itself lifted and lit with the sacred flame; but its transfiguration into carcinogenic resin was prematurely curtailed when it found itself stubbed out on the eyeball of a political undesirable.

Unity of Style

Provided that no-one has perpetrated a Konny Kujau on the Rothermere Daily Stürmer, it appears that Unity Mitford, despite being a member of the very same aristocracy that gave us Lord Rah-for-the-Blackshirts Rothermere, was possessed of a canine attachment to Adolf Hitler and also more than a touch antisemitic. Having been generally available for a mere eighty-five years or so, these facts may represent a scoop to rival the nation's perpetual rediscovery of who won the war and who the baddies were; but the sensation is immeasurably enhanced by the discovery of Mitford's diaries, which reveal her as an English prose stylist decades ahead of her time. The account of her day-to-day devotions is written in the Caps-Lock-happy multi-orgasmic idiom of a social-media sycophant live-squeaking their precious moments near the Trumpster; although Mitford does consistently refer to Hitler as "the Führer," which demonstrates both a relationship with facts and a courtesy towards foreigns that would nowadays be barely acceptable either on social media or at the Rothermere Daily Stürmer.

Relative Family Values

Since there are no more important issues facing the country, let alone the Conservative Party, a private member's bill has been introduced to place a legal ban on marriage between first cousins. The private member in question, Richard Holden MP, is the kind of third cousin to the human species who runs an anti-litter campaign one year and gets fined for litter-dropping the next, and the matter has been thought through with expectable scientific precision. As children can only be born in wedlock, and as about six per cent of children from cousin marriages suffer congenital health problems, such unions patently pose an unacceptable risk to the quality of the nation's breeding stock. Outside the aristocracy, who would no doubt receive an appropriate dispensation, the majority of cousin marriages in the UK happen to be Islamic ones; but that's just a coincidence.

Blocked Passage

Brazilian democracy has demonstrated its immaturity in comparison to the sometime British colony of New Trumpsterdom by refusing permission for a far-right chancer to attend the inauguration of a far-right chancer. Like the tangerine dreamblob and his head-tribble, Jair Bolsonaro stands accused of involvement in an attempted coup to prevent the accession of a legitimately elected successor; however, while Murcan demoxey has exercised its powers of Christian forgiveness in hopes that the Trumpster may refrain from jailing everyone who doesn't worship him, the Brazilian judiciary has taken a less charitable view. Bolsonaro has even been forbidden to seek re-election until 2030, apparently for spreading electoral misinformation rather than allowing friendly fellow-manbabies to spread it on his behalf. Then again, Bolsonaro has proclaimed himself so excited at the idea of viewing the Trumpster's alien zest that he has cut out Viagra; so perhaps the head-tribble will feel a certain sneaking relief that its virtue is still safe.

Clean British Blue

As long as we're putting Orwell on the postage stamps, it's appropriate that the spirit of Ingsoc should sweep forth in commemoration of all that the nation has striven to eliminate from its collective life and consciousness. A blue plaque is to be put up in the name of a youth opportunities beneficiary whose lack of encumbrance by Health and Safety bureaucracy led to his presumably ungrateful demise in 1875. Since the boy was gainfully employed and not an immigrant, his case was publicised by a sentimental Tory aristocrat who thought that children should be made to work no more than ten hours a day and eight on Saturdays, and was even in favour of their spending some of their copious free time at school. These unfortunate and un-British eccentricities, which today would see the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury banished to the most naïvely ideological margins of the Labour Party, were redeemed in part by his dismissal of the Syro-Palestinian Untermenschen as a non-existent nation and his fervent advocacy of the Zionist Great Replacement.

Wellcome Windfall

In keeping with Wideboy Wesley Streeting's hopes for Britain's world-beating position in the business of profitable healthcare, a health research charity has resoundingly done its part for the fiscal wellbeing of its investment executives. The Wellcome Trust enjoyed a rise in returns from its portfolio last year, and naturally celebrated by reducing its charitable spending and splurging eleven million on the nice people who advise its comparatively modestly-paid governors on how to reduce health inequalities. Almost half of the eleven million went to the chief investment officer, aptly named Nick, who is leaving in a couple of months having apparently made the shrewd decision that even the rudest fiscal health might not suffer by a tactful exit.

Apolitical Correctness

Those in charge of the Auschwitz museum have made the laudable decision to keep the politicians from speechifying at the commemoration for the eightieth anniversary of the liberation. The taint of politics has been expunged yet further thanks to the Polish government's pledge not to arrest the Netanyahoo or his cohorts over their little indiscretions against the Arab Untermenschen, and the director of the museum has held forth in fine apolitical fashion about the difference between Russia's dirty war in Ukraine and the Righteous State's cleansing of Palestine, Syria and Lebanon. Although the Red Army liberated the camp, no Russian delegation has been invited to the commemoration, on the grounds that Putin's Russia does not understand the value of liberty; presumably Stalin possessed some spark of freedomising instinct through being allied, however temporarily and mistrustfully, with Mr Churchill and his American chums. Survivors of Auschwitz will be permitted to speak, so it is to be hoped that they remember to keep their contributions sufficiently apolitical for the occasion.

Barry N Malzberg

Most likely the first I knew of Barry (middle N optional but usually present) Malzberg, who died on 19 December, was his novelisation of Saul Bass's outstanding mutant-insect film Phase IV. In those dear dinosaurid days before media streaming and before the reissue of formerly real books as Kindle content, the only alternative to waiting for a film to show up again on one of the four available TV channels was to get hold of the cash-in paperback, which if the film was science fiction would have an odds-on chance of having been written by Alan Dean Foster. Censorship meant that certain films had no chance of turning up on TV at all, so it is to paperback cash-ins that I owe my first acquaintance with Cronenberg's The Brood and Videodrome. Being prose transliterations of the screenplays, novelisations often included details that didn't appear in the film as released; Dennis Etchison's versions of Videodrome and of Carpenter's The Fog are both interesting in this regard.

The prose in such works was generally workmanlike, professional and anonymous; among the exceptions are Videodrome, Ramsey Campbell's versions of Universal's 1930s monster movies, and Malzberg's Phase IV, all of which can be read on their own merits. Malzberg's novel de-mystifies the enigmatic happenings in space at the beginning of the film; in a verbal as opposed to a visual medium this is perhaps unavoidable to some extent, but the ending is characteristically Malzbergian. The theatrical cut of Phase IV ends with an ambiguously transcendental merging of the human characters into the newly-evolved insect hive mind; Malzberg finishes with a disembodied voice saying "please clear all channels" and the start of an unspecified Phase Five.

Later I happened upon Guernica Night, which I found considerably less accessible; but it came with a useful afterword by Jeff Clark (no, neither have I) that pointed out some of his distinguishing traits: notably an intense, present-tense focus upon the consciousness of a single protagonist and a style combining meticulous syntactic precision with liberal use of the vernacular and long sentences with under-use of punctuation to convey the impression of a mind both rigidly controlled and ready at any moment to run haywire. The afterword also named two of Malzberg's best books, The Falling Astronauts and Beyond Apollo, both concerned with the internal affairs of pathologically alienated astronauts; and quoted the narrator of the latter to the effect that "the universe was invented by man in 1976 as a cheap and easy explanation for all his difficulties in conquering it."

Deservedly his most acclaimed novel, Beyond Apollo touches on many of the author's themes. Richly endowed with the Malzbergian astronautical character traits of outer passivity, inner resentment and confusion, and sexual uncertainty, Harry Evans is stuck in an institution where the authorities demand a full account of the recent disastrous Venus expedition, of which he is the sole survivor. He explores a number of scenarios in both the voyage and his private life, including hostile Venusians, the Captain's insanity, and the trauma of being cooped up with another human being in a marriage or a metal box with nothing but space outside. He plans a heroic novel about the expedition, which has the same length and the same number of chapters as the decidedly unheroic document we are reading. He plays with anagrams, whether to achieve new perspectives on the jumble in his mind, or simply to pass the time, or perhaps to remake his life and the universe in more user-friendly models: "Evans and I are the same person ... Each of us has a dissociation reaction, but mine is stronger than his."

Padded-cell humour also enlivens Herovit's World, one of Malzberg's numerous satires on the shortcomings of science fiction, the lunacy of fandom and the generally horrific business of writing for money. Jonathan Herovit churns out sub-literate space opera under the pseudonym Kirk Poland (surname courtesy of "the goddamned Gomulka government" which attained newsworthiness at an opportune moment); when Herovit finally collapses under pressure, the pseudonymous personality steps up only to suffer problems of his own, leading to a terminal fiasco too good to reveal here. Galaxies, a novel in the form of notes towards a science fiction novel, subjects the genre to a more overtly metafictional assault.

When not deconstructing science fiction tropes, Malzberg happily bent them to his own obsessions. The Men Inside is a deranged variation on the Fantastic Voyage premise, wherein young Blount is miniaturised and injected into a rich old man for healthcare purposes; like most Malzberg protagonists, Blount suffers from bureaucratic bullying, existential anxiety and unfair women. In Overlay the mind of Simmons the horseplayer (Malzberg was an enthusiast of the racetrack) is ridden and reined by a minion of an alien Bureau, with unfortunate consequences the only safe bet. Revelations and The Destruction of the Temple both prefigure the horrors of reality TV: the former depicting a talk show and another discontented astronaut, the latter an attempt by a future video creator to reconstruct the assassination of the sainted John F Kennedy.

In the 1990s, when Kathe Koja was producing superb stream-of-consciousness horror novels like The Cipher and Skin, Malzberg collaborated with her on several short stories. Notable among the hundreds of short works that he wrote on his own are the fatalistic love story "Gehenna" and the essays collected in Breakfast in the Ruins. Malzberg had a genius for titles; one fears to attempt anything called The Sodom and Gomorrah Business in case the content fails to measure up.

Malzberg was insanely prolific during the sixties and seventies, producing dozens of short novels (such that they can be collected by threes in volumes the size of a moderately concise Stephen King opus) in various genres, and under various pseudonyms which one must hope proved less fatally assertive than Kirk Poland. Even within the fraction of his output that has come my way, there is inevitably a certain amount of re-tread and repetition; but none of Malzberg's work could be mistaken for anyone else's, and the best of it is among the best there is.

Precautionary Unpatriotism

Despite the Trumpster and his head-tribble having said they will impose prohibitive tariffs on imports, it seems there really are people who believe that the Trumpster and his head-tribble will impose prohibitive tariffs on imports. Rather than giving thanks to Baby Jesus, providing jobs for native-born launderesses, and military-industrialising their way to laptop and white-goods autarky, Guardian-reading Americans are unashamedly hoarding goods and appliances, including those manufactured by racial enemies such as the Heathen Chinee and Canada. With the way that even toilet paper is rolling off the shelves, an un-American might suspect the imminent approach of a shit-storm. Thus it appears that a spectre is haunting New Trumpsterdom: the spectre of planned economy.

Noble Rot

Though often maligned as being divorced from the truth on grounds of persistent adultery, the National Johnson in fact has as intimate a relationship with reality as any other caricature. Like the mainstream British establishment, he believes that laws are for the little people, that the state exists to serve his own interests, and that competence is less valuable than sycophancy. His eventual defenestration came about through inefficiency and bad manners; had there been any genuine divergence of principle, he would not have attained office in the first place. Thus it has come about that, after a mere eighteen months of investigation, a journalist has discovered that the House of Lords is a house of lords and that those appointed there are not always elevated purely on a disinterested assessment of their service to the public good. The National Johnson is so luminous an embodiment of the realm's meritocracy that not even freedom of British information can cover it up for more than a year and a half.

Truss Demands Restraint

Just as the fiend Putin has not personally invaded Ukraine, and the Netanyahoo has not with his own hands driven the Arab Untermenschen from their underground dens, and even the Trumpster and his hydrophobic head-tribble will most likely make use of intermediaries in shredding the Constitution of the United States, so it is no more than literal truth to say that the forty-nine days' wonder which was Prime Minister Mary Elizabeth Surgical-Appliance did not stricto sensu crash the economy. Accordingly, La Truss has taken loud and legalistic exception to the CEO of Team Starmer repeatedly and blatantly proclaiming that she did crash the economy: an allegation all the more outrageous in that La Truss was forced out of office before she had time to achieve the levels of unemployment and GDP collapse that would have put the matter beyond any doubt. Never one to stop and think when looking ridiculous will do, La Truss has dispatched, or caused to be dispatched, a six-page order to Cease and Desist upon the subject; it remains regrettably unclear whether the missive is written in green or purple ink or in block capitals, or even whether it commences You probably won't dare to read any further... Nevertheless, there is as little doubt as ever that if it hadn't been for the Communist cabal running the markets and the hard-left conspiracy on the Conservative back-benches, and if everyone had just listened and done as they were told, the whole unpleasant episode need never have occurred.

Look Over There

The World Cop by the grace of God has condescended to notice a genocide, though not the one there's been so much fuss about over the past year or so. For the second time in a generation, paramilitary forces in Sudan are accused of systematic atrocities, in the course of a war in which tens of thousands have been killed, millions displaced and a famine perpetuated. Doubtless contributing to the moral indignation of the World Cop and its clients is the Arab and Muslim persuasion of the militias involved and the more ethnically virtuous persuasion of the victims. Meanwhile the World Cop has denied that the killings, forced removals and famine in Gaza constitute a genocide, presumably on the grounds that the perpetrators are non-Arabs and therefore ineligible for indictment in any court whose jurisdiction could be considered worthy of recognition by the master race.

Not How Things Are Done

Ominous rumours have begun to circulate among His Majesty's Loyal Opposition concerning the racism of Robert Jenrick. Formerly the Minister for Richard Desmond, Jenrick has fallen from those heights to the undignified position of shadow spokesbeing for Hanging, Flogging and Castration's Too Good For 'Em, and even the psychological acuity of the Conservative Party can fathom that he might now be feeling a little under-promoted. In the wake of his latest pogromade about darkie culture defiling the children of Albion, concerns have emerged that the racism of Robert Jenrick is looking dangerously unlike the normal, reasonable, clean-limbed racism that is favoured by the master race. The racism of Robert Jenrick does not resemble the bluff, honest, straight-talking and amusingly deniable racism of the party's blithering bully-boy wing; neither does the racism of Robert Jenrick match up to the upright, no-nonsense, virtuous and strait-labial racism of the blue-rinsed church-goer faction. The racism of Robert Jenrick is an altogether different and inferior order of racism to the racism that won the war, built the Empire, freed the slaves and kept all those statues upright. In fact there is even some doubt as to whether the racism of Robert Jenrick is anything more than a thin veneer of racism over a dark, greasy, sweaty, culturally inferior core of mere ambition, and intended for no more noble purpose than getting the Conservative Party on his side.

Moral Health

Given an electoral choice between maintaining the National Health Service and kicking some wogs, the great British public tends naturally to vote Conservative. Happily, the spirit of British fair play has ensured that in any case the choice need not be a dilemma. While recruiting foreign health workers to carry the can for substandard services, the UK has also removed from their countries of origin the gross materialistic temptations and the propensity towards idleness that go with receiving financial assistance. As one would expect, this trend was particularly pronounced during the second Bullingdon Club administration; and as one would expect, there is no sign that Team Starmer intends any mitigation beyond the usual rah-rah about the world-beating generosity of the master race. Under the reforming zeal of Wideboy Wesley, qualified personnel will soon doubtless be replaced by remote-working health custodians and AI symptom diagnosticators whose accents and facial pigmentation can be chosen by the individual healthcare consumer, thereby relieving the great British public of all unnecessary patriotic discomfort.

Muscle In, E.

It seems that relations between the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange and the Grand Cosmic Manbaby of New Trumpsterdom may not be quite so cosy as they first appeared. The strutting Caudillo and current owner of Farage Falange Inc. dared to dissent from the Supreme Squillionaire's opinion regarding the merits of the pseudonymous race-baiter Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who is currently a guest of His Majesty under conditions which are doubtless a bit luxurious for his moral welfare. As a result of Farage's insubordination, there is at the very least some doubt as to whether a mooted donation to the Falange is likely to explode into a hostile takeover; while the prospects for the strutting Caudillo himself may soon amount to something rather more humble than the opportunity to bask in reflected glory with an option on invading Abyssinia.

Escorts With Special Skills

Even under the party of working people every blessing has its price, and Team Starmer's rah-rah at having ramped up the repatriations is inevitably tempered with the news of redundancies in the wog disposal custodian sector. Now that His Majesty's Government has ended the Rwanda transportation scheme, the private company which provides what are rather charmingly called "escort services" is laying off some three hundred employees; although thanks to their special training in subduing disruptive foreigns, some of those facing redundancy may yet find useful and fulfilling roles elsewhere within the company. Doubtless it is this humanitarian provision, rather than any reluctance to condemn either migrant-bashing or sacking people, that accounts for the apparent lack of any squeals of indignation from His Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

Bracing Stuff

Britain is bracing, as usual, in the face of winter weather as the recent flooding season gives way to snow and ice. Particularly braced will be Team Starmer and its minister for profitable healthcare, Wideboy Wesley, who is planning a cosy chat with the hard right on how best to marketise adult social care without unduly denting Labour's three-figure overall majority in the House of Expenses Claimants. Possibly even more braced than that will be those pensioners deprived of their winter fuel payments, who are expected to become self-solving burdens in ever more convenient quantities over the next few days, despite Wideboy Wesley's generous permission for them to feed the maw of the energy profiteers to the best of their humble ability.

Better Late Than Payable

In the great circle of time the past is as the future, and the environmental well-being of present and forthcoming generations is subject to scruples befitting the subcontinental asset-strippers of the Honourable East India Company. Mere decades after an industrial disaster that killed some thirty thousand people and continues to poison the local expendables, the Indian government has commenced a token clean-up operation. In December 1984 the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal, which was no doubt lightly regulated and relatively unencumbered by Health and Safety straitjackets, exploded and released forty tonnes of toxic waste into the air; and thanks to the Indian government's cordial relations with the business community the intervening period has yielded neither a proper decontamination of the area nor a non-derisory compensation scheme. Less than one per cent of the contaminants have now been removed, and there is every possibility that their disposal will cause yet further environmental damage; so the enterprise scores Britishness points for effectiveness as well as for promptitude.

Justice Delivered By Second-Class Post

Unlike the lesser breeds, ours is a nation that believes in fair play and the rule of law; which doubtless explains why His Majesty's Government has spent a hundred and thirty-six million on legal fees to ensure that no undeserving or unworthy persons are recompensed over the Horizon scandal. Besides the laudable stimulation of economic growth, the law's delay has meant that a number of potential claimants have died before being able to make themselves a burden on the Post Office. Nevertheless, after only one year's pondering the parliamentary business and trade committee has concluded that criminals should probably not be given control of administering the financial redress for their own derelictions; which will certainly have significant repercussions for the rule of British law in the unlikely event that anyone takes any notice.