Ursa in Suburbia

British sporting values have received short shrift in the Baltic, where Lithuania's association of hunters and fishers has protested the government's termination order against a brown bear which wandered into Vilnius. Despite being only two years old the animal was apparently unable to orient itself by smartphone and lumbered harmlessly about the suburbs for a couple of days, whereupon the government issued a permit for it to be shot. This was far too distasteful a prospect for the squeamish shikari of Lithuania; on the animal-loving mainland, by contrast, where personal attendance at the demise of wild animals is considered unsporting, the sentence would obviously have been gassing or else dismemberment by a pack of hounds.

Before a Fall

Health and safety zealotry appears to have resulted in the removal of a Pride flag from a Derbyshire high street. A Christian bookshop had complained about it, in the usual Christian spirit of welcoming everyone without necessarily respecting their rights, and amid globs of unctuous piety about freedom of conscience; but the town council denied that the flag's removal owed anything to the exercise of these great British liberties. Even the county authority's recent take-over by the flag-purging cadres of the Farage Falange was apparently not altogether a factor. Rather, the town council took down the Pride flag "due to a strong belief someone would put themselves in danger by removing it themselves" and thereby render the council at risk of paying damages with money that would be better spent filling potholes, arming the police, and processing denunciations. What the town council's plans may be concerning statues that someone might injure themselves vandalising, or bookshops that someone might singe themselves martyring, your correspondent would not presume to guess.

Imperfect Integration

Even as Team Starmer assists the Trumpster and his head-tribble in shaping the new world order, NATO values appear conspicuously absent among the ghastly leftists who have seized control of Spain. Not only has the government turned to mere experts for an explanation of the recent peninsular power outage; it has slavishly parroted those same experts in ruling out the possibility of a North Korea-facilitated antisemitic Russo-Iranian cyber-attack. There seems also a distinct disinclination to view the blackout as an opportunity to row back on the green crap, despite Team Starmer's clear example in going all-out for a national grid of blanched radioactive pachyderms powered by sustainable uranium. It is to be hoped that the recent progress on the Gibraltar Question may do something to mitigate the Continent's cultural determination to cut itself off from the mainland.

Fetch, Boy

Readers of a certain age will recall the characterisation of the Reverend Blair, at the outset of a previous Middle East massacre, as the poodle of chimpanzee chief executive George W Bush; and the CEO of Team Starmer has scampered eagerly to ensure his own pride of place in the White House kennels. When the head-tribble temporarily lost control of the Trumpster's tiny hands and let some documents fall to the ground, there could never be any question of the emperor, in the ongoing prime of his vigour, picking up after himself. At the same time, anyone else attempting to grovel at the tangerine feet ("not that any of you rushed to," sneered the favourite) might have undergone protective disassembly by heavily armed security staff; hence the CEO of Team Starmer was once more saving innocent lives, actually. Just as he is only facilitating genocide abroad to make the world safe for democracy; and just as he is only kicking cripples at home to make Britain fit for working people to learn financial self-reliance; so he scrambled to scoop up the Trumpster's droppings purely for the protection of others.

Wailing at the Wall

Representatives of the Righteous State and the rightists among the nations are huffing and puffing with moral indignation because, even with all that has gone on over the past fifty-eight years, some people still seem to think that rules apply to Israel. A security agency at a Paris airshow told four Israeli companies to remove some weapons from their stands; the companies refused to comply, so the stands were walled off behind a partition. In a further treacherous effort to divide the master race against itself, four Israeli stands which complied with the rules, including one belonging to the Ministry of Cleansing itself, were allowed to remain open. The sinister historical parallels will be apparent to anyone among the virtuous minority not yet controlled by Hamas: we all know what use Hitler made of office furniture.

A Well-Regulated Militia

Despite the Trumpster and his cohorts loudly and repeatedly denouncing political opponents as traitors and abortionists as murderers, and even despite the ready availability of firearms across the Land of the Free, it appears that someone in Minnesota may have suffered some slight loss of perspective on the situation. Two Democratic politicians and their spouses have been shot, with one couple killed and the other seriously injured; and the suspect allegedly had a list of targets including reproductive health clinics and coathanger-unfriendly politicians. Perhaps because the Democratic trumping of the birthday emperor's famous bleeding earlobe has provoked a measure of genuine chagrin, the White House has managed thus far to refrain from any overt gloating.

Still Not Getting It

On the eighth anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire, a statement from the survivors' campaign group wonders what it says about the country's values that those who facilitated the disaster are still carrying on profitable careers in the housing sector. Given how many of those responsible for the Iraq débâcle have stood trial at the Hague, and the quantity of sackcloth and ashes that characterised Cressida Dick's career after the assassination and posthumous slander of Jean Charles de Menezes, and the moral fibre and sense of honour which our lords and masters displayed over Aberfan, it is remarkable that the question should need asking. The country's values are for the benefit of the right sort of people; if the lower orders wish to avoid unsafe accommodation, they can render up their humble thanks for Team Starmer's plans to repeal the Vagrancy Act.

Slightly Less Assisted Escalation

So irritated is His Majesty's Government by Israel's excessive self-defence against the Palestinian Untermenschen that Team Starmer has denied providing military assistance in the Righteous State's latest assault on Iran. Nor has the RAF thus far been assigned to pacify the Great Satan's unprovoked and antisemitic retaliation, despite the free world having been forty-five minutes from nuclear doom since approximately the turn of the century. Instead the usual restraint on both sides has been called for, whereby Israel stops short of deploying its nuclear arsenal while Iran stops short of developing a deterrent. Doubtless the effect will be as salutary as ever.

Turncoats Need Not Apply

Ever since the greatest armed services in the world yet again fled Afghanistan with their tails between their legs, a priority of His Majesty's Government has been to prevent those who collaborated with the forces of Western civilisation from getting any strange foreign ideas about a lasting and mutually fulfilling relationship. Like the Conservatives, the present administration will condescend to spare an occasional activist the Taliban's tender mercies provided the activist can get their case into the national press; but Team Starmer's Ministry for Wog Control has radically increased the rate of refusal for asylum seekers from Afghanistan so as to ensure that British jobs remain open to British workers. Fortunately, Team Starmer has displayed no particular inclination to repair the vandalism wrought upon the legal system by the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat accomplices, so there is every chance that this particular example of British fair play will continue unabated into our glorious future.

Careless Talk Costs Little

Although ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, induced starvation and deprivation of aid to the Palestinian Untermenschen remain perfectly acceptable to His Majesty's Government, two far-right ministers in the otherwise moderate and sensible Netanyahoo administration have been indiscreet enough to incite such measures rather than merely having them carried out. Sanctions have therefore been imposed by five countries including the UK, though only upon the ministers as individuals and not by any means in their capacity as actual war criminals. Such daring diplomacy is consistent with Team Starmer's policy towards Britain's domestic far right, which consists of tutting along sympathetically with the general attitude while affecting pearl-clutching moral horror at some of the further reaches of rhetoric; and thus far it does not appear that the Righteous State will be significantly more grateful than the Farage Falange for this demonstration of tolerance and restraint.

Keeping Them Honest

In keeping with British fair play, the Department of Workfare and Privation is debating whether to penalise people who received compensation for the Church of Rome's attempts at moral improvement of fallen women. Recipients who are resident in the UK are liable for yet further moral improvement by being deprived of social security payments until their unearned wealth runs out. Exceptions have been allowed in other cases, notably that of the Windrush persecutions where the compensation process has been made difficult enough to keep pay-outs to a prudent minumum; and a campaign is under way in favour of a similar arrangement in this case. Of course British fair play wouldn't be British without a strong moral component, so there is no hint of a suggestion that recipients of compensation should not as a rule be deprived of social security until they are poor enough to claim the DWP's pittance.

Fox Pass

A corporate greenscape intended to feature acceptable wildlife has suffered an unwarranted incursion of wildlife. The Google garden in King's Cross is designed to allow bees, bats, birds and butterflies a haven in which to observe the destroyers of their species feeding and frolicking between profits; but it seems that London's foxes have also managed to find a way in. There is even a possibility that they are hunting rats, which is something of a faux pas in any corporate environment, let alone one in which the CEO of Team Starmer has been known to drop by for a non-alcoholic Pimm's.

Flailing for the Veiling

Having nothing more significant to worry about, the stop-gap in nominal charge of the other Farage Falange Wannabe Party has made an ungainly lurch for relevance by parroting the Islamophobic wibbles of a Blairite wog-bomber from twenty years ago. As the glories mounted up in Iraq and Afghanistan, the sometime Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary noted his discomfort at talking to women in burqas and squealed about the intolerable trauma he apparently suffered in requesting them to unveil. Now his spiritual successor has proclaimed women's right to wear whatever they like provided it isn't a burqa; apparently on the grounds that no woman would wear a burqa anyway except at the command of her husband or whatever sharia court happens to be terrorising her Christian no-go area of residence. In defence of British democracy, all women in North West Essex who persist in their insidious headgear are liable to be denied access to their parliamentary expenses claimant; although just how many burqa-wearing ladies in that fortunate constituency are queueing up to take their troubles to Kemi Badenoch still remains a matter for speculation.

Adapt or Die

It is of course well known that if a face causes inconvenience one can always cut off the nose; and the principle can be as happily applied to wildlife conservation as to personal relationships or international politics. Mindful that the global religion prohibits any effective restoration of habitats and populations, a team of researchers has determined that rhinocerous poaching can be effectively reduced by amputating that part of the animal from which the poachers derive their profit. Besides being less attractive to poachers, dehorned rhinos are also less aggressive and less mobile, thus leaving all the more scope for a more economically sustainable approach to their territorial rights. Whether the same researchers advocate defeating the ivory trade by sawing the tusks off all the wild elephants, or reducing human sex-crimes via universal and compulsory genital mutilation, remains as yet unclear.

Britain Beats the Care Glut

Squillions of foreign care workers who invaded during the pandemic, and who received the kind of treatment one would expect from the government of the National Johnson, have cunningly omitted to inform Team Starmer exactly how swimmingly their lives have gone since then. Owing to this malign taciturnity, His Majesty's Government has been tragically denied a true picture of its doubtless spectacular success in matching the said workers with bona fide employers; although Team Starmer does take due pride in the fact that in the intervening four years some three and a half per cent of eligible beneficiaries may have learned how to prepare a CV. Meanwhile the care market has a shortfall of over a hundred and thirty thousand useful idiots, which Team Starmer is determined to resolve, along with virtually everything else, by cracking down on immigration.

The Moon is a Harsh Market

Another attempt at a lunar landing by a commercial company has failed, despite a quirky payload and the universally acknowledged superiority in all things of private enterprise over Big Guvmint waste and inefficiency. Amid grandiose talk of colonising the moon within a decade or two, the unfortunately named Resilience robot appears to have succumbed to one or more present-day inconveniences. The setback comes mere months after two Texan settlers fell over on arrival, presumably for lack of space nigrahs on which to support themselves; and only two years after Resilience's own corporate predecessor came to archetypal capitalistic grief by believing itself on solid ground when it was actually in free-fall.

Hot Take

Ten years ago the first Bullingdon Club administration and its Liberal Democrat enablers decided that fire services could spare a billion pounds or thereabouts. With all those immigrants running around, subsequent administrations have seen little reason to douse the flames of thrift; so equally naturally, in the seven years since the first anniversary of the Grenfell Tower disaster, the number of firefighters in England has been efficientised by some twenty-five per cent. Since the climate is heating up and the workload of fire departments has increased by some twenty per cent, it is only British that fire departments should have undergone the standard public-sector process of slashing, burning and being left to rot; it only remains to be seen how the Team Starmer plan for Change™ will redistribute resources between keeping things as they are and increasing the combustion-related profits of the private sector.

Diplomatic Gas

British environmental values continue robust in Oceania, where Australia is campaigning to host a major climate summit next year while expanding fossil fuel profiteering over the next four and a half decades. Disappointment has been expressed by representatives of several island nations which are expected to enjoy enhanced aquatic facilities thanks to the climate catastrophe; and the climate minister of Vanuatu expressed actual bewilderment, despite his country having been run by Britain and France for a century before independence. Apparently the source of the misunderstanding was a visit by Australia's foreign minister the week before her government approved the six billion tonnes of greenhouse emissions, when she remarked that Australia's "emission-intensive economy" had to be turned around. The climate minister of Vanuatu appears not to have realised that her words were intended as more British than pacific.

Where Their Heart Is

Astoundingly enough, it appears that at least one of Team Starmer's pledges is on course to remain unfulfilled, despite the possibility that its fulfillment might aid someone other than landlords, capitalists or the Farage Falange, and despite the pledge itself having been made by Team Starmer. A report commissioned by the National Housing Federation indicates that the Government's targets for affordable housing will require greater investment than the Conservatives put in; which is a little awkward when the Government is only really interested in deregulation, rowing back on the green crap, and constructing Fortress Britannia against the day when the fiend Putin's tanks roll into Calais. At least we can hope that Team Starmer's policy of removing social security benefits from the vulnerable may lead to some useful attrition among those who seek to distort the property market with lower prices.

Decently Reduced

Worshippers of the Righteous State's sacred right to self-defence will rejoice that Gaza has been cleansed of a tenth member of the twelve-member family which was largely wiped out in Khan Younis a week ago. Nine of the ten children were precautionarily eliminated in the bombing, and the father has now also been deactivated by his injuries. Whether the attack was primarily intended to free hostages or liberate Lebensraum remains as yet unclear, but the two remaining members of the family have been noticed by the international community and offered evacuation to Giorgia Meloni's Italy. Being less ideological and more moderate and sensible than the heirs of Mussolini, Team Starmer will presumably continue facilitating the removal of those not deserving enough to be fit for individual media attention.