Marine martyrisée

In the course of a dark day for French democracy, the leader of the Racaille naziesque has incurred a five-year ban on running for public office despite a court of law having determined her to be a crook. Marine Le Pen and a score of her goons were found guilty of embezzling EU funds to aid their own party, causing the mainstream right to huff and puff that the sentence was rather severe for what may merely have been an unfortunate and unintended consequence of schoolgirlish high spirits. Although various far-right régimes responded with expressions of solidarity, the moderate and sensible ones seem to be refraining from comment, at least during the few years until the appeals process is exhausted. From the realm of the Trumpster and his head-tribble has emanated a contemplative silence with brief manbaby squeal, as those yearning to be made great again imagine what might have occurred if felons in the USA were prohibited from using political office for partisan advantage. All in all, the affair serves only to point up the unfussy effectiveness of the British system, wherein Le Pen's derelictions would be considered little more than a breach of good manners, even in the unlikely event of their coming to light less than fifty years after her death as a peer of the realm and a valued consultant to various thriving centres of fiscal creativity.

Affordable Losses

Astoundingly enough, during the last half-decade of Conservative rule the number of prosecutions for enabling tax evasion fell from tiny to minuscule. The tax authorities are reluctant to provide exact figures in case the perpetrators should be identified and treated as criminals rather than wealth creators, which might well cause difficulty in accessing their services even for the people who are paid not to prosecute them. Team Starmer has made some noises about tightening up the régime, which will no doubt fade discreetly away when potential providers of post-government consultancies start squealing. In the meantime, it is all the more fortunate that the youth, pensioner and disabled sectors are sufficiently wealthy to tide the Government over.

Lady Caversham

The House of Donors, Catamites and Sycophants in Britain's mother of parliaments is to be graced with the presence of Amada Spielman, whose management of the school inspections régime contributed to the suicide of at least one head teacher. Readers of a certain vintage may be reminded of Cressida Dick, the Metropolitan Police officer in charge of another fatal incident involving a victim from another despised subspecies of humanity (viz. dusky working-class immigrants), whose subsequent career was simply one promotion after another. In a post-mortem fuck-you to the teaching profession, the remains of the Conservative Party have nominated Spielman for a peerage, presumably thinking her due some measure of recognition both for her fostering of teacher-killing standards and for her eloquence in conveying exactly how apologetic real people need to be towards little people who don't measure up.

Still One of the Big Boys

As befits a steadfast ally of the United States and a sincere admirer of the Trumpster and his head-tribble, the mainland's Ministry for Wog-Bombing has done its plucky little best to emulate the White House's interesting new security policy, though necessarily utlising a less technologically advanced format. Rather than employing new-fangled electronical methods, the British military has economised its confidentiality via the tried and true tradition of scattering hard copies in the streets; and rather than giving details of current operational planning the papers merely included information on personnel and equipment somewehere in the ever-expendable north of England. Nevertheless, however modest and inexpensive the result, surely even the most exacting head-tribble could hardly begrudge acknowledging the gallantry of the effort.

Big Britbot is Watching You

Nowhere is Team Starmer's programme of stability within change more apparent than in its ambitions to transform the country into a world-beating auto-plagiarism hub without paying anyone, training anyone or improving anything. Water and energy costs will doubtless magically transform into things the government can subsidise, if not altogether annul, provided that the subsidies benefit squillionaire tech manbabies and not domestic consumers who ought to be out working. Equally, the Government's customary happy relationship with the Babbage computifying engines looks set to continue along the same rosy lines as its similarly cordial co-existence with experts, civil servants, and other bureaucratic inconveniences. A parliamentary committee has found that Team Starmer's efficiency drive is likely to be hindered by obsolete technology, bad data and a shortage of competent staff; which may prove difficult for the Government to remedy given its unswerving faith in the great British tradition of getting things done by sacking or driving away the people best qualified to do them. Confirming the stability of the changes to come, a spokesbeing shrugged that the Government already knew it all anyway and that it had a plan to let the plebs' interactions with the state be handled by apprentices and robots.

Glories Told and Untold

More than eighty per cent of Britons are unaware of the extent and consequences of colonialism and the slave trade, although the woke mind virus has established itself sufficiently for most to be in favour of a formal apology from the Government and for a substantial and growing minority to be in favour of formal reparations. Doubtless the causes and morality of such widespread ignorance will prove a mystery fit for decades of pained liberal wonderment; certainly school history during my own education began with the Normans and broke off with the Tudors, to resume in the late nineteenth century with the build-up to Mr Churchill's saving of the world for democracy. For his own part Mr Churchill, who famously opined that forced labour for brown people could be called slavery only at some risk of terminological inexactitude, and who sniggered heartily at the idea of one Hottentot one vote, remains safely ensconced along with various other white people upon a grateful nation's banknotes.

Enterprise Unharnessed

His Majesty's Government's favourite Islamic fundamentalist head-choppers have marked an auspicious moment in the preparations for hosting the next-but-two FIFA World Cup: the first beneficiary of the head-chopping House of Saud's no-nonsense approach to the righs of migrant workers has fallen to his death during the construction of one among the herd of white elephants required for the event. So little have the contractors to hide, and so significant are the strides that have been made in protecting workers' rights, that those still surviving have allegedly been ordered not to discuss the incident or retain any video recordings that might give the wrong impression.

I Feel Safer Already

Whatever the Trumpster, his head-tribble and their henchbeings may believe or disbelieve regarding the climate catastrophe, their interest in annexing large parts of the rapidly unfreezing north demonstrates a healthy appreciation of the mineral and real-estate profits that could be unleashed by melting permafrost. Accordingly, the US national security adviser and energy secretary will this week accompany the Vice-Trumpster's wife to Greenland in what the country's likely next prime minister has called "pure charm offensive." Although the emphasis was doubtless almost entirely on the first two words, the Danish government has expressed some annoyance at the apparent lack of general enthusiasm for rights of self-defence that don't happen to be Ukrainian or Zionist; and this with its British ally going all-out to act as a transatlantic bridge. Meanwhile, since it remains as yet unclear whether the Vice-Trumpsterette shares her owner's diplomatic skills, the menfolk will be taking care of business at Greenland's US military base.

Selective Learning

Unconstrained as always by the need for tough decisions and economic growth, mere scientists have commemorated the fifth anniversary of the National Johnson's first grudging attempt to protect the plebs from Covid by complaining that lessons have not been learned. Yet they themselves admit that the hated NHS is likely to be in a better position to let the bodies pile high when the next pandemic strikes, and that no more interest has been taken in the psychological and social consequences of lockdown than is routinely taken of the psychological and social consequences of such bipartisan policy stalwarts as poverty, educational attrition, wog-baiting and cripple-kicking. There are even people who seem to think that the death rate among expendables during the plague provides some sort of justification for watering down Team Starmer's current assault on the disabled; which demonstrates once more that those who derive the wrong lessons from the past are doomed to be surprised at the inevitable refresher course.

Everyone's a Winner

In addition to its moral and economic virtues, Team Starmer's assault on the disabled will have the political virtue of putting extra pressure on local services. Being notoriously un-entrepreneurial in their attitudes, the disabled and chronically unwell may be disinclined to greet the withdrawal of their pittance with appropriate British get-up-and-go, despite the likelihood that many unpaid carers will be empowered to get on their bikes and find a real job. Worsening health conditions will lead to increased dependence on the hated local authorities, whose care budgets are already subject to invigorating competition from pot-holes and bin collections. A poorer quality of council service, delivered with increasing delays, will be just the thing to incentivise and opportunify further cleansing involvement by Team Starmer's chums in the private sector; yet still there are some whose perceptions are so disabled and whose morals are so unenlightened as to see some sort of disadvantage in all this. Doubtless it is for the improvement of such as these that Team Starmer intends turning the idle into fodder for the next wog-bombing exercise and to promote the advantages of assisted expiry for the militarily unviable.

Naughty Words

In Orwell's last word on English society, Newspeak is an artificial language whose overriding purpose is the enforcement of political orthodoxy, and whose every word is a staccato sound expressing a single rigidly defined concept. It is therefore only natural that the CPS, where the CEO of Team Starmer once found a happy home, should take a dim view of the shades of meaning that can attach to racial epithets. Lesser philosemites than Team Starmer will be aware of the difference between the word Yid as spoken by a Jew and the same word as spoken by a paid-up practitioner of the Muskular Straight-arm Salute; just as lesser Atlanticists than Team Starmer will be aware of the difference between the word boy as applied to a male younger than oneself and the same word as applied by a white person to a black man in the southern United States. All such nuances and vagaries are beyond the perceptions of data monitoring organisations, of the Metropolitan Police and of the Contextual Prejudice Squad, who recently joined forces to prosecute a black student for referring to a black footballer as nigga, and thereby brought about a situation of outstanding natural Britishness in which the laws against racial hatred were mobilised to harass a black woman for speaking in the accepted idiom of her own community. After eighteen months of wrangling, the case has been dropped on the grounds that there is "no longer sufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction." although what evidence was previously available that merited more than dismissal with a snigger remains as yet unclear.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Anti-migrant custodians at a US airport recently expelled a French scientific researcher travelling to a conference in Houston, apparently on the grounds that they searched his phone and discovered private messages likely to hurt the Trumpster's itsy-bitsy feelings or those of his car-salesman manbaby chum. A spokesbeing for the US Department of Walls and Cages, who just happens to be a former spokesbeing for a think-tank that pipes prime intellectual sewage into the head-tribble's cerebro-defecatory system, denied that the action was politically motivated; and of course we disbelieve such people at our peril. It is no doubt the purest coincidence that France is notoriously the source of the hated Statue of Liberty with its un-American motto condoning empathy for refugees; and also the native country of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, who wilfully and traitorously participated in the insurrection that condemned America to almost two and a half centuries without arbitrary rule by a demented autocrat of German extraction.

Every One That Asketh Receiveth

Evangelical Christians who saw the human immunodeficiency virus as a lucrative propaganda opportunity are having their faith proven in the Trumpster's bonfire of USAid. Although they campaigned for the Trumpster and his head-tribble on the grounds of their favourability to the coathanger school of gynaecology, some congregations are wavering because the assault on overseas aid has cut off the supply of anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV. This could lead to a resurgence in cases and, at worst, a great many people in Heaven who ought to be paying tithes and hunting gays on Earth. While some organisations are taking the spiritual view and resigning themselves humbly to the punishment of their inferiors, others are doing their best to make clear that they practise Christian medicine as opposed to mere medicine and should not be forced to rely on thoughts and prayers. God and Baby Jesus, who recently took some little trouble to deflect an assassin's ammunition off the Trumpster's earlobe and into a nearby family man, appear thus far to be refraining from comment.

Some Cultures Are Better Than Others

Yet further subtle and insidious doings are afoot among the Heathen Chinee, who refuse to be chastened by the tariffs of the Trumpster and his head-tribble and have announced an ambitious set of measures to promote economic growth. However, although in their strange foreign fashion they may be groping for the same noble goal as Team Starmer on the mainland, their perverse Oriental slant upon the matter has blinded them to such self-evident solutions as taking pittances away from those most likely to spend them and throwing millions at those most likely to hoard them abroad. Instead, there are threats of treacherous pay increases and sinister subsidies as a means to enhance quality of life, to the incalculable detriment of the dignity of cooliedom and thus of whatever burgeoning Britishness the population may hitherto have achieved. Clearly the Communist Party of the Heathen Chinee has a great deal to learn about being a party of working people.

Wesley Wags the Finger

Presumably because he isn't yet in charge of privatising them, the verdict of the courts is still just about good enough for Wideboy Wesley Streeting. Team Starmer's fresh-faced junior salesman displayed no such deference towards the doctors whose expertise he blithely shrugged off, let alone towards the scroungers and shirkers who are leeching off their naïve diagnostic largesse. Had the verdict in the Letby case been otherwise, one wonders whether Wesley would be so reticent about overruling it: what diagnoses of mental illness have in common with claims that justice has miscarried is their blurring of the distinctions between Innocent and Guilty, Nice and Nasty, and Goodies and Baddies. Such relativistic shenanigans risk calling into question the whole principle of the witch-hunt, and thereby undermining the entire moral foundation of British practical governance in general and Team Starmer in particular.

Health and Safety

Much to everyone's surprise considering the presence of over a hundred Conservatives, seventy-odd Deputy Conservatives and approximately four hundred Wannabe Conservatives besides the Farage Falange, the Palace of Westminster is apparently riddled with toxic waste. Fires are breaking out every few months and asbestos is widely present, though evidently not in sufficient quantities to quiet the more forthright voices among the nation's elected, appointed, and entitled expenses claimants. Assuming the whole place doesn't burn down before they get a chance, travellers on the Westminster gravy train will eventually get a vote on whether to relocate temporarily and save the taxpayer money, or to spare themselves the inconvenience and keep costs rising for as many or as few of the next seventy years as the polite fiction of British democracy needs to be sustained.

Dead Right

In the good old days before the decline of Judaeo-Christian values, the British armed forces employed chaplains to ensure that soldiers didn't engage in illicit sexual goings-on by way of compensation for loving their enemies to death. A similar moral Britishness is on display from a group of parliamentary expenses claimants, who have nothing more important to do than recommend that the dehumanisation of living persons below a certain income bracket should be balanced by granting human rights to dead flesh. The group proposes the outlawing of the sale of human remains on the grounds that, unlike human resources, "they are not commercial objects," and proposes that bits and pieces of human tissue should be equated with human beings. Since the group is reporting in the wake of African protests at the looting of ancestral remains, and since give back what was stolen is clearly too unwieldy a concept, it's possible that the document is intended as a satirical reducto ad absurdum or a slippery-slope argument: once we start repatriating colonial plunder, how soon will it be before we have to beg the current representatives of the dynasties of ancient Egypt for permission to display the mummified persons of their predecessors?

Lands With People For Unpeople Without Lands

While the master race continues to sag beneath the burden of migrancy, at least two countries in eastern Africa have complacently balked at the prospect of serving as landfill sites for a couple of million displaced Untermenschen. Servants of the Trumpster and his head-tribble have approached Sudan, Somalia and the as yet unrecognised republic of Somaliland with offers of opportunity to participate in the cleansing of the Levant's quality beach-front; but the responses have not been encouraging. The Palestinians are taking the same unconstructive attitude, despite the self-evident and homely similarity between one sandy Islamic war-zone full of brown people and the next. Even when it's right before their eyes, certain problem cultures just can't recognise a final solution.

Unforeseen Complications

Contrary to all moderate and sensible expectations, it appears that putting up barriers to trade with the country's biggest trading partner may have had a detrimental effect on trade with that very same partner. We can only thank our patriotic stars that Team Starmer's plans for closer ties with the beastly bureaucrats extend no further than espionage and wog-bombing, otherwise it might be thought that going all-out for economic growth includes resuming the Strasbrussels yoke even at the risk of incurring disfavour from the Trumpster and his head-tribble. Such an indiscretion could all too easily imperil the expanding transatlantic trade in tea, which would be an unfortunate diplomatic faux pas given the current delicate process of US reversion to the pre-1773 paradise of arbitrary monarchy.

If It Ain't Woke, Don't Fix It

After a mere eight months, the Conservative Party is sufficiently recovered from its little summer setback to have drafted a new policy. Of course it's a wog disposal policy: the Conservative Party did not get where it is today by having much to say on any other subject. The substance of the policy, if substance is the word I want, is that wogs with any criminal convictions would be deported, as would certain wogs with no criminal convictions at all. Under the current lax conditions, criminal wogs can only be expunged if they incur a prison sentence slightly shorter than the standard penalty for mildly incoveniencing a climate vandal; and they can also make use of exemptions granted by the beastly Euro-wogs from their transsexual Strasbrussels bunkers. Additionally, there is a shocking lack of legal provision for deporting wogs who have been charged with, but not convicted of, immigration offences (viz.immigration), and the Conservative policy seeks to close this loophole. Nevertheless, despite being simple enough to obtrude itself upon the understanding of the shadow minister for wog disposal, the policy will require the support of Labour MPs to be adopted; and it remains as yet unclear whether Team Starmer would countenance anything of the kind without knowing if the all-important Farage Falange vote considered it a bit too soft.

Metal to Peddle

Faced with the possibility that the Trumpster and his head-tribble will impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, including those from the mainland, Team Starmer has reacted in typically patriotic fashion. In the first place there will be no retaliation: a spokesbeing proclaimed that the trading reciprocity between the USA and its doddering client state is fair and balanced, thereby evoking Fox News in slogan as well as in veracity. In the second place, the spokesbeing made clear that the UK's national interest will be defended where it's right to do so, by contrast to that unconditional and unequivocal defence which the British national interest would otherwise have the right to expect. Doubtless this very point was made forcefully by the Minister for Transatlantic Bridges when the Trumpster's secretary of commerce phoned him for advice last weekend.

Technically Innocent

No patriot will fail to swell with pride at the unadulterated Britishness which has followed from a couple of tourists denouncing a teenage Sudanese stowaway. Despite doing the legal, moral, compassionate, pragmatic, British thing after discovering the invader in the bike rack on the back of their motor-home, the pair have incurred a £1500 fine from the Ministry of Wog Control for failing to check that no clandestine entrant was concealed in the vehicle: a failure which they apparently had in common with the official defenders of our glorious national borders. Tale-tattling is all very well, but only after you have done the prefects' job for them. However, it's in the couple's grounds for appeal against the fine that the business attains its crowning Britishness: they contend that, far from being concealed in the motor-home, technically the boy was clinging to the outside.

Brutal Consolation

In keeping with the new spirit of intermafiosal détente, Putinite party officials in Murmansk may have attained near-Trumpsterian levels of tact and good taste by presenting meat-grinders to the mothers of soldiers killed in the Ukraine war. In Russian as in English, the term evokes a military tactic much favoured by Douglas Haig at the Somme and Third Ypres and by Mr Churchill's brother-in-arms Stalin during the Great Patriotic War: namely throwing live flesh at the enemy until the latter's ammunition runs out. Responding to online outrage at the apparent faux pas, the party claimed that one of the ladies had asked for the utensil on the inglorious grounds that she could do with it. In its present morally undeveloped state Russia is presumably unable to offer less utilitarian and more civilised rewards, such as an engraved stone phallus in a public place and video footage of their children's butchers making solemn for a couple of minutes a year.

Something Very Wrong

With all that Team Starmer is achieving in the way of rolling back the green crap and courting the all-important Muslim-basher vote, the mayor of London may soon be invited once again to consider his position. The CEO of Team Starmer first suggested that Sadiq Khan might care to purge himself from the ranks of sensiblous moderacy after the loss of a 2023 by-election in which Labour were presented as being in disagreement with the Conservative Party. Unfortunately, it seems the fiend Khan has failed to absorb the lessons of that regrettable affair, and has allowed the very same policy that caused all the trouble to bring about the very results it was intended to bring about. It's a far cry from the glory days of Boris Johnson, whose defiance of the beastly Euro-wogs and their unelected legalisms forged a coalition of climate-deniers and race-baiters the like of which Team Starmer can hope to assemble only through ever more economic decisions and ever more tough growth.

Justice on the Rebound

The Christian state of South Carolina is set to dispense Baby Jesus' justice in no uncertain fashion, by correcting an elderly felon with a firing squad. Given recent difficulties in administering lethal injections and the likely consignment of electric chairs to the realm of atheistic woke sorcery, the state now permits condemned prisoners to choose their means of execution; and the shooting method at least has the virtue that it makes no pretence at being nice, humane or tidy even in cases where the mental health of the condemned is open to question. Nevertheless, in choosing a method generally reserved for the ritual sacrifice of schoolchildren upon the altar of the Second Amendment, the miscreant has let his redeemers in for some small inconvenience. Since so virtuous and vitalising a procedure can hardly be completed out of doors, the correctional personnel will be firing rifles inside a closed chamber, leading to concerns about ricochets which might endanger the killers themselves or any respectable persons who might happen to be watching.

Lowe Tactics

It appears that a dissident element may be forming amid the ironclad cadres of Farage Falange Incorporated. A certain Rupert Lowe, who recently demonstrated his faith in the Falange's accelerated ecocide policy by installing solar panels on his farm, has referred to the strutting Caudillo as a "messianic" figure and has declaimed to the Rothermere Daily Stürmer that the Falange must move on from being a protest party. Pausing only to grovel in his personal Gethsemane and pray to the Trumpster's head-tribble for the cup of Rupert Lowe's kiss to be passed elsewhere, the strutting Caudillo responded that the Farage Falange is not a protest party, actually. This of course is perfectly true: the Falange is not a party at all but a private company, and the strutting Caudillo's veer into the realms of unalloyed verity doubtless indicates the abysmal depths of his current discombobulation. The Falange's quota of Commons expenses claimants is not large, even when the strutting Caudillo can be bothered to put in an appearance; and the difficulties involved in forming a thousand-year shadow cabinet might well be exacerbated should Lowe defect to the Conservatives or Team Starmer, both of whom arguably have almost as many substantive disagreements with the strutting Caudillo as Lowe has himself.

Available Now

For those commemorating Lent by giving up the pleasure of not reading my fiction, the latest is conveniently available as a PDF ebook or as a real book.

This is the one which I started last March and on which I got stuck before being rescued by the crabs. Essentially it's a 22,000-word caption to the cover photograph, which is the work of the inspired and inspiring Giovanna Ceroni. Her pictures have graced several of my previous works in various genres, including The Notified (a nightmare with summons and statues), Ringmaster Grin (a dystopia with jokes and journalists), Crimes Against Reality (penological science fiction), Spider Rider (post-apocalyptic arachnoid workplace comedy), and Providence Fell (a Lovecraftian tale about what happens after the unspeakable cults have become the Established Church). An accidental snapshot provided a suggestive shade for Shadows With Claws (about an artist whose legacy is perhaps not obscure enough for comfort); but this is the first time I've based an entire book on the cover image. The hook was that item on the right, which looked so much like the profile of a grinning yellow-eyed demon that it took some time for me to realise what it actually was. Happily, feathers and fiends are eminently compatible.

Random Kick Bruises Poodle

Various factions of the British Rah-Rah Party have been squealing with righteous indignation over the latest diplomatic intervention by the Trumpster's assassination deterrent. Despite being the sort of statesman who proclaims Team Starmer an Islamist régime, the JD has been tactless enough to suggest that a proposed Anglo-French military force in Ukraine would constitute no more than "20,000 troops from some random country that has not fought a war in 30 or 40 years." A spokesbeing for Team Starmer noted that British forces have so fought wars by assisting in recent imperial adventures; while the Conservatives and Deputy Conservatives erupted in patriotic fury at the JD's lack of reverence for America's most sycophantic client state. The JD in turn accused his accusers of being "absurdly dishonest" in assuming that, by disparaging the prospective military force, he had thereby disparaged the poppy-fodder that would compose it. Self-evidently, the JD's disparagement was directed purely at those many random countries which are volunteering support without possessing the capacity to provide meaningful guardianship for Ukraine's plucky little minerals.

Another Baby-Step Too Far

Shrieks of patriotic indignation are doubtless in store over His Majesty's Government's plans to reform the Feudal System. True, the reforms are intended to benefit genuine working people, namely home-owners as opposed to the rent-paying Lumpenarbeiter; and they are also sufficiently moderate and sensible to have originated with the jabbering homunculus Michael Gove; yet there exists a very palpable risk that certain members of the propertied classes may one day be required to provide services even after taking payment for them, in defiance of all humane and British values. Then again, Team Starmer's less than Herculean attempt at polishing a few gobbets of the Augean ordure at the House of Placepersons, Parasites and Porkers is already stalled, apparently on the grounds that the Conservative Party wouldn't like it; so there seems every chance that the Feudal System will emerge from the current Parliament with little more than a few changes in departmental nomenclature.

Baghdad on the Azov

In keeping with the mainland's ambition to bestride the Atlantic as a bridge between helping Ukraine and not helping Ukraine, the CEO of Team Starmer has pledged to work towards a settlement that will satisfy the United States, even if it involves the appearance of collaborating with the beastly French. A clue to Britain's likely role may perhaps be found in the great man's use of the term "coalition of the willing" - the sobriquet of those plucky little powers who joined the Bush chimpanzee in freedomising the Middle East from the scourge of Islamic fundamentalist violence. The beastly French opted to sit out that particular crusade, while the heirs of Mr Churchill waded in with gusto under the spiritual guidance of Team Starmer's patron saint, the blessings of whose success are on all our heads to this day. It remains to be seen whether the Reverend Blair's godson-in-truth will be able to induce the wavering Euro-wogs towards making a similar triumph of Ukraine.

Coming Soon