Rentiers' Rights

Those who maintain that there are no significant differences between Team Starmer and Britain's four or five other right-wing parties will once more be confounded by the latest announcement on housing policy. While the Conservatives and their Liberal Democrat accomplices were entirely uninterested in ensuring that homes were fit for human habitation, Team Starmer intends giving slum landlords barely a decade to clean up their act. The benefits of these new and robust standards will be palpable for working people who rent their housing, provided they have sufficient pluck and gumption to rent it to others. Team Starmer's in-house estate agent proclaimed that leaving tenants to rot a bit longer would mean more time and certainty for the real people; presumably because the new standards are so replete with British robustitude that not even a Farage Falange government would have much inclination to lower them.

Selektion

Let our forgetfulness and mists
Of history elide
The Roma, gays and Communists
And other chaff who died.

Where due expediency exists,
Let memory abide;
Let all remembrance that resists
Be Holocaust denied.

Rabbi Benjamin of Gaza

Sane Enough For Some

The latest and least auspicious defection to the Farage Falange from its malformed and retarded parliamentary twin seems to have caused a brief moral lapse by the latter, which chose to snigger at Suella Braverman not on racial or sexual grounds, but on those of mental illness. Self-evidently, Braverman is neither poor enough nor Muslim enough to be considered Just Plain Evil; but the implication that the Conservative Party had been looking after her mental health was dangerous enough to bring about a rapid retraction. A show of concern for mental health in the workplace is about as likely to lure back the Farage Falange demographic as a facility for foreign languages or a preference for history over rah-rah.

Meanwhile, the nation's other main purveyors of Conservative policy frowned and tutted their disapproval. Something at Team Starmer's Ministry for Wog Control huffed and puffed about British values as if addressing a school assembly; while a spokesbeing for the Farage Falange proclaimed that it went without saying that Braverman could never have been diagnosed with a mental health condition: she is, for goodness' sake, a barrister with a Cambridge education. So self-evident was this reasoning that any assertion to the contrary was a gross affront to those patriotic millions whose robust common sense and unerring contact with reality have got the master race and the Farage Falange where they are today.

Support For Our Boys

Despite Team Starmer's repeated proclamations that Britain has no need to choose between European partnership and American vassalage, it seems the beastly Euro-wogs remain ungrateful for the nuance. The freedom of movement of some plucky little patriots has been curtailed by the French authorities, despite the incursion being named after Mr Churchill's personal victory over Charles de Gaulle. The cadres in question are led by a disciple of the Reverend Tommyrot Yaxleyson, whose recent endorsement of Team Starmer's assault on asylum has done so much for the Government's approval ratings. Nevertheless, the Ministry for Wog Disposal has yet to comment on the matter; presumably because Team Starmer's policy-makers at the Farage Falange are too busy making flags and knitting socks to issue the appropriate guidance.

Pacific Intentions

Unlike Iran, the United Kingdom, or even the Palestinian Free State, North Korea possesses an independent nuclear deterrent; hence the War Department in the kingdom of the Trumpster and his head-tribble has elected to treat the Democratic Republic with an appropriate lack of casual contempt. Under the pretext of protecting the homeland from the looming threats of Canada, Denmark and the enemy within, the Pentagon predicts a more limited role for the World Cop in deterring the poorer, less populous and less industrialised half of the Korean peninsula from unauthorised re-unification with the other half. Rather, the Pentagon's Asia-Pacific concern will concentrate on protecting Taiwan from the Heathen Chinee, whose history of military aggression over the past half-century has been practically the equal of North Korea's own.

Yet Another Irish Question

Even in the midst of being starved, massacred and partitioned, Ireland has rarely been among the more grateful beneficiaries of British imperialism; and the possibility of a board game based on the Troubles has elicited an expectably dour response. Though not yet ready for sale, the game has been advertised on the website of its US-based manufacturer, whose company president defended it on educational grounds: nobody under thirty in America can be bothered to watch a documentary, let alone pick up a book, so history must be told in more engaging ways, such as a game involving two hundred and fifty-nine "rich narrative cards" and two hundred pages of instructions. Nevertheless, a victims' rights organisation in Northern Ireland has protested that the game oversimplifies the issue, and that its existence could re-traumatise any survivors who see it marketed. Happily, assuming that the game's educational ambitions survive its developmental rigors, it seems unlikely to become much more engaging without also, perish the thought, becoming rather less historical; so those who live long enough to be re-traumatised may well end up relatively few.

Schrödinger's Cuts

Another Farage Falange local authority has been sorting things out and getting things done with near-Starmerite straightforwardness and efficiency. Having previously published a timetable for the closure of five care homes, the Lancashire county cadre is now squealing that it never actually intended to close the care homes actually, and also that the care homes will receive investment, and also that no decision about the care homes has yet been made. Five day-care centres are also subject to "review," and the obvious course of action would be for the council to save money for the upkeep of one or two of the cheaper old folks' homes by closing all those facilities for over-diagnosed shirkers who ought to be out stacking shelves or joining the army. It remains to be seen whether the Farage Falange intends quite so moderate and sensible a solution as that.

Escape to Alcatraz

It's always the way. No sooner had the deal-detecting gaze of the Trumpster and his head-tribble been fleetingly diverted from the security of the homeland than some dirty, mangy dog took unfair advantage, becoming apparently the first coyote to swim to Alcatraz. Besides being made without the blessing of ICE, the journey seems also to have been accomplished without the aid of ACME, whose technological innovation and mastery of the laws of physics so elegantly resemble the Trumpster's own. This no doubt accounts for the fact that the coyote arrived cold and wet, but not squashed, scorched, macerated, pulverised, or about to undergo an involuntary rockward descent from an unsafe altitude. The animal is assumed to have come from a nearby island or else from San Francisco, perhaps in the belief that a former prison is better than a future one.

Global Trends May Affect Britain, Claims Shock Report

Officers of Britain's national security agencies have apparently duped so many ecological activists into sleeping with them that even our more military intelligences have begun to suspect that climate breakdown might perhaps be a Bad Thing. A hard-hitting report, cautiously submitted by MI5 and MI6 bigwigs via some protective sock-puppets at the Department for Enduring Floods and Renovating Airports, notes that the collapse of global ecosystems could harm British national security even though it is British. The report charitably verifies what mere experts have been saying for decades, and radically recommends that somebody ought to do something about it. Specifically, it advocates fostering resilience and preparedness, presumably via the expedient of increased funding for the right sort of people at Britain's national security agencies. Those of us who have not the lonely privilege of service can only stand and marvel at the perspicacity.

Signs in the Sky

Geomagnetic storms of an intensity not seen since the Bush chimpanzee was in the White House may cause the aurora borealis to become visible in some of the more excitable provinces of the kingdom of the Trumpster and his head-tribble. A couple of months ago the aurora was visible in Texas, and powerful geomagnetic storms can disrupt satellite communications and other infrastructure commonly supposed to be the work of God or government conspiracy. It is to be hoped that local witch-doctors will remember their responsibility to interpret the phenomena in an appropriate manner, as a sign of divine approval for traditional family values and shooting dissenters in the face.