Thinning Out the Hordes

Those incarcerated on Nauru for the de facto crime of seeking asylum in the British Commonwealth are complaining that they cannot afford to eat. The island imports most of its food, and even the generosity of the Australian home affairs department apparently fails to cover the cost of living, at least for the inmates. Moreover, this regrettable situation has occurred despite the Australian government paying squillions to an American profitable incarceration entrepreneur for "facilities, garrison and reception services," which presumably translates into Oldspeak as cells, thugs and turnkeys; but not for feeding the animals. What can possibly have gone wrong?

Strasbrussels in the Sun

Treason has been rampant in the Caribbean for some years now, with various countries committing a range of enormities from deposing the Royal Family and demanding reparations for the slave trade to deliberately and wilfully making themselves un-British. Appeasers and Quislings on the mainland have consistently failed to chastise the culprits, perhaps because all the imperial gunboats are busy hunting down asylum seekers in the Channel. As a result four Caribbean governments, including the beasts of Barbados and the back-stabbers of Belize, are threatening to descend from un-Britishness to outright Euro-woggery, with freedom of movement and threats of cultural and economic integration. One of the stated aims is to reduce the temptation for young Caribbean citizens to emigrate to Europe and North America, but it remains as yet unclear whether His Majesty's Government's policy-makers in the Farage Falange will consider this a sufficiently redeeming feature.

It's Another Winner

Team Starmer's plan, if plan is the word I want, to call back the halcyon days of Blairism by re-adopting his reverence's most popular policy after the Iraq adventure appears to have come a bit of a cropper. Of course, Team Starmer's proposed digital ID cards are more sophisticated than the sainted Tony's, and therefore still more difficult for the plebs to comprehend in their full patriotic glory. Besides opening a rollicking new chapter in the saga of His Majesty's Government's relationship with the Babbage computifying engines, they would enable the deportation of anyone who didn't have a fancy phone, and would wipe out illegal employment as long as all the employers who don't bother with the current checks decided they'd quite like to bother with the new one. Thanks to such relatively simple advantages, the arrangement was apparently jolly popular with the great British public until Team Starmer decided to give it a try, because even the great British public has its limits; and leaving aside the transparent use of authoritarian gimmickry as a look-over-there on behalf of Morgan McSweeney rather than as an end in itself, there can be few more off-putting prospects than being turned into a corporate data farm under the legitimate and understandable pretext of setting up a racist surveillance state.