We Apologise for This Temporary Breakdown in our Breakdown

Various sets of initials have come together in a meaningful internal pushback process as regards hurricane warnings. In the spirit of their climate change policy of expunging the term from public discourse, the POTUS and his head-tribble had given a week's notice that relevant satellite data would no longer be made available to forecasters, who might have subjected it to a pessimistic and un-great interpretation; but at the last minute they replayed the trade-war shtick that went over so well a while ago and postponed the cut-off by a month. The excuse of a cybersecurity risk was retrospectively thrown in, though whether some silly SoD has been group-chatting about the weather remains as yet unleaked. The postponement means that NOAA will still receive data from the DoD's DMSP via FNMOC thanks to a request from NASA to CNMOC; but only until the end of July which, once the season gets going, will leave hurricane-prone states securely at the mercy of the USA's BFF, YHVH.

Why Has Nobody Thought of it Before?

If only everything in life were as simple as solving the National Health Service. After mere decades of budget cuts, pay cuts, staff deportations, bureaucratic metastasis, open contempt from ministers, and electorates who applaud with their hands and vote with their jingo, it transpires that the whole problem is rooted in the NHS simply not being populist enough. Accordingly Team Starmer's chief sales executive in waiting has a plan, if plan is the word I want, to link hospital funding to the approval ratings bestowed by patients. This of course means that (a) the fate of hospitals and their staff will depend on people who don't know anything about managing either; and (b) presumably those hospitals too under-funded to provide a satisfactory service will end up being more under-funded still. Hence, as with many another Team Starmer policy, the Change™ from previous maladministrations may not be quite so radical as it first appeared.

Soap from the Dead

Victim statements at the sentencing of a funeral fraudster in the Christian state of Colorado have received justice and more from an ever-tactful Press. The entrepreneur in question exploited grieving people and the taxpayer by taking money for cremations which were not carried out, the bodies instead being left in a derelict building. To an inferior sense of justice this deception of the bereaved and health hazard to the general public might be considered bad enough; but the Christian state of Colorado felt it necessary to provide an epilogue to the trial in the form of testimony from a child whose grief has been compounded by tales that his grandmother still exists but nevertheless remains lost to him, as well as from people who believe that a person's dead body is a person. One such flew several thousand miles to testify about the pulp-horror indignities supposedly inflicted on his mother, who in fact was deceased and therefore presumably absent from the ugly proceedings. The Press reported that the building where the bodies were stored was squat; apparently a less dimensionally challenged rotting-place could have mitigated the offence perceptibly.

Environmentally Inappropriate

Not even the most vigilant and forensic of human leaders can hope to maintain unblinking vigilantism and infallible forensicitude, and even the CEO of Team Starmer is not entirely immune to the fallibility of the anthropoid. For example, neither he nor his speech-writers were aware for a moment that their anti-immigrant rhetoric last month parroted one of the most notorious bits of race-baiting in the history of British tolerance; and they were all shocked and horrified to discover that usage of similar words in a similar context to the original might somehow be interpreted by non-native speakers as expressing a similar sentiment. The CEO of Team Starmer now concedes some regrettable problems with the language, and has offered the excuse that, in the absence of any plan for substantive improvements to the lives of the great unwashed, it would be irresponsible to risk alienating the racists; especially given the current environment where His Majesty's Government is shifting its emphasis away from immigrant-bashing and towards the moderate and sensible pleasures of wog-bombing and cripple-kicking.

Brigadier General Synod

The party that gave us the crusades in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq has proclaimed that Britain must be prepared for a "wartime scenario" on its own soil even if the military get all the new toys they want. Such warnings have certainly almost never been heard in recent years, perhaps because the party of Mr Churchill has been too busy fighting against our citizens and trading partners. Still, the present oracle seems to have spoken from the most moderate and sensible of motives; so naturally the Church of England is all of a tizzy about how to jaw-jaw its way into the coming war-war. As a measure of the seriousness with which it takes the situation, the General Synod will next month take time off from worrying about money and sexual hanky-panky in order to hear from an expert on loving enemies and turning cheeks. Naturally, the Synod will not fail to consider how the Church can do its part for victory; expected proposals include working with schools on issues of duty, obedience and service, making the holy places hospitable and welcoming to unrepentant hired killers, and liberating army chaplains from the bureaucratic restraints that have hitherto prevented them from doing what they need to do by way of executing the will of the Omnipotent.

Strong at Home

Doubtless owing to the intervention of some malignant, antisemitic, Czech Communist djinn, at least one pledge by the fiend Corbyn appears to have slithered past the vigilance of the Starmeite censors. The 2017 Labour manifesto promised an inquiry into the Battle of Orgreave, in which mounted police assaulted the kind of working people the current administration would, where at all possible, rather not be seen as the party of; and the Ministry for Keeping the Rabble in Line is working at pace to determine how best to exonerate everyone who matters and avoid compensating anyone who doesn't. Three weeks before last year's general election was called, the relevant police force enhanced the pace of work by destroying two boxfuls of the relevant records, thereby ensuring that the progress of any inquiry will not be excessively prolonged with a lot of tedious evidence. All connoisseurs of British decency will rejoice that His Majesty's Domestic Enforcers have so little to hide, and trust that their helpfulness may soon be appropriately rewarded.

Devilishly Durable

It is a truth universally recognised if not widely acknowledged, that official enemies are, like franchise supervillains, most convenient when continually and serially defeated without being actually destroyed. A certain balance is necessary: the threat to civilisation must be credible enough for a mainstream journalist to portend with a straight face, and this can be a good deal more difficult than it sounds. Those who remember the collapse of the USSR may recall Washington's increasingly hilarious search for a plausible existential threat in the form of Nicaragua, Panama and Libya; but for the present Iran looks set to retain its long-held place as the go-to Great Satan. Before the assault by the Righteous State and the wannabe Nobel peace-tribble, the mad mullahs were, as usual, just short of producing uranium suitable for manufacturing an independent nuclear deterrent; now, after the stunning success by the Righteous State and the wannabe Nobel peace-tribble, it seems the mad mullahs are, as usual, just short of producing uranium suitable for manufacturing an independent nuclear deterrent. Those same greasy Middle Eastern proclivities that cause the Islamic Republic to have proxies where nice people have allies apparently led the government to move or conceal its stockpiles instead of letting them be bombed; which at the very least should make a workable excuse for some pacifying Fourth of July fireworks.

You Made Your Stirrups, Now Lie In Them

A Florida politician of the coathanger persuasion suffered an uncomfortable bout of poetic justice last spring when the fruit of her wedlock, presumably in an excess of pioneer spirit, attached itself to an inconvenient region of her uterus. Medical staff hesitated to administer the drugs necessary to relieve her condition because the local pro-coathanger law does not include a definition of ectopic pregnancy, thereby putting them at risk of prosecution, loss of licence or imprisonment should the Christian state of Florida decide that they had committed abortion. Only when it had been made clear that terminating a pregnancy isn't abortion when a right-winger screams for it did the doctors agree to provide the drugs. Naturally it was all the fault of leftist fearmongers seeking to terrify health professionals into denying reproductive care to the great American brood-mare; and in valorous defiance of such malignant machinations, the lady is already incubating another little soldier for Team Trumpster. Let's hope nothing goes wrong.

Napoleon is Always Right

Activists sneaked onto an RAF base three days ago and spray-painted a couple of aircraft which they presumed were being used in abetting the Palestinian genocide; Team Starmer has chosen to consider this a matter of national security rather than airbase security, and intends blacklisting the group as a terrorist organisation. Just as there are few worse antisemites than those who happen to be non-fascist, woke or Jewish, so there are few more deadly terrorists than those who object to blowing up civilians. Since the Palestinian genocide is au fond a commercial enterprise, it was the trade secretary who proclaimed that the protestors were Very Bad People Indeed; while a purged Corbynite stated, in the teeth of all available evidence, that harassing anyone who disagrees with the Government was "not what the counter-terrorism laws were introduced for." It fell to the Reverend Blair's post-Iraq Minister for Incarceration and Snoopery to put the moderate and sensible case that, while a single incident might not be sufficient grounds for proscription, the Government was considering prosecription so there must be sufficient grounds for it somewhere or other.

Clot Peacemaker

Acid political humour is not a quality one immediately associates with the current government of Pakistan, but Islamabad has displayed a pleasing strain of sarcasm in nominating the Trumpster for the Nobel Peace Prize. Previous American winners include Henry Kissinger, for not ending the Vietnam War, and Barack Obama, for not having done anything much beyond not being George W Bush; the Trumpster's nomination is supposedly by way of payment for his alleged role in defusing the recent military exchanges between Pakistan and India, which the two countries' respective independent nuclear deterrents inexplicably failed to forestall. Doubtless the nomination has nothing whatever to do with detoxifying the head-tribble's defecations during this week's lunch date between the Trumpster and the Pakistani army's chief of staff; nevertheless, the Indian government, along with at least one humourless Pakistani TV host, has taken an uncharitable view of the matter. It remains as yet unclear whether His Majesty's Government, with its chancellor from the CTRL-C CTRL-V school of literary achievement by delegation, has any plans towards a Literature nomination for the author of The Art of the Deal.

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.