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.

Spawning Malice

Advertisements by a pregnancy advice charity have been terminated by Transport for London on the grounds that they could bring the police into disrepute. The adverts request people to lobby their parliamentary expenses claimants in favour of civilising the country's Christian abortion laws, and feature plain and factual accounts of women investigated or prosecuted over the ending of their pregnancies. Although the charity points out that the campaign is quite devoid of the blood-spattered hysteria which characterises the pro-coathanger congregation, there is undeniably a clear implication that the Metropolitan Police may have been acting in accordance with the law. One can only imagine what seismic levels of culture shock might result if that were to get about.

Vexatious Legalisms

Given that Team Starmer got where it is today by smearing anti-racists as racist, and that it clearly hopes to stay where it is today by letting the Farage Falange set the agenda for the next four years, few will be surprised that it has felt obliged to issue an apology to the strutting Caudillo of the Farage Falange and his non-grown-up wannabes in the Conservative Party. Team Starmer's figuratively gutless attorney general went through the rite of appeasement in response to squeals of indignation at his having implied that a vulgar rabble of law-breaking nationalist race-baiters might somehow be legitimately comparable to a race-baiting rabble of vulgar nationalist law-breakers. In accordance with the patriotic reading of international law, whereby the legality of an action depends not on the action itself but on who performs it (see the case of the fiend Putin's illegal aggression versus the Righteous State's sacred self-defence), it follows that race-baiting, law-breaking, nationalism and even vulgarity are all very different matters when practised by the master race as opposed to a bunch of beastly Euro-wogs.

Wesley Needs You

In accordance with Team Starmer's policy of Change™, the Secretary of State for Profitable Healthcare has urged medical staff to be content with a pittance and some words. Resident doctors, who were previously called junior doctors in order to justify keeping them on minimum wage and Amazon-warehouse working conditions, are considering strike action over Team Starmer's continuity-Conservative pay award, and Wesley the Wideboy would really rather they didn't. In a further demonstration of his in-touchness with the right sort of people, Wesley's plea was published in the Murdoch Times, though doubtless without the least idea of courting support from the First Family when the time comes to defenestrate the Dear Leader in the name of yet further Change™ to more of the same. Had he submitted the piece to the British Medical Journal, after all, it could have been peer-reviewed, with potentially embarrassing results.

Perfidious Persia Put in Her Place

That wily old negotiator Lord Mandelbrot the Infinitely Recurring has exerted his hobnailed powers of persuasion upon the mad mullahs of Iran, who still have the temerity to imagine that their country has some sort of sovereign right to generate its own energy, and may even hold a sneaking belief in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. Whether by way of appeasing the Trumpster and his head-tribble or merely from his own innate suavity, Lord Mandelbrot eructated a long, loud public gloat about the weakness of Iran and its proxies (allies are for the higher cultures) and then proclaimed that he and the Trumpster could not accept a weak nation strengthening itself, because Heaven forfend that British values should verge upon sympathy for the underdog. The mad mullahs, who treacherously responded to the Trumpster's reneging on a previous agreement by acting as if that very same agreement were no longer in force, seem to have greeted Lord Mandelbrot's diplomacy in a similarly unconstructive spirit.

Stab in the Back

Antisemitism is an insidious plague. It can start in the most ostensibly innocuous fashion, with mild disagreement as to whether a particular genocide is or is not being carried out with an alacrity that might arguably be considered indecorous; and then before you know where you are it turns out that you have in fact spent years mentioning noses, rats and octopuses with ever more incriminating innocence. Indeed, so subtly has the pestilence spread that a former prime minister of the Righteous State is now complaining that the Netanyahoo administration's war crimes are unprecedented in their lack of discernible goals, proper planning or realistic chances of success, and that in recent weeks (though evidently not before then) the number of unprofitable casualties among the Palestinian Untermenschen has verged upon the monstrous. It comes to something when even the elders of Likud seem ready to forget their protocols and start poisoning the wells of moral cleanliness.

Throw Away the Key

In yet another sign of our morally destabilised times, the spouse and helpmeat of a recently-ejected Conservative councillor has protested that a legal prison sentence is too harsh; although there is some reassuring residual consistency in the fact that the sentence happens to be her own. Having reacted to the Southport child murders in accordance with civilised Western values (viz. by calling for large numbers of unrelated persons to be deported or burned alive), the unfortunate lady faces incarceration for two years and seven months and has now been refused leave to appeal against the sentence, even though she pledged to play the mental health card that has gained so many genuine criminals their luxury flatscreen not-guilty verdicts.

Of course the sentence is unjustifiable. However legal it may be, a prison term for putting words on social media is ridiculous, and the presence of such a penalty on the statute books almost certainly owes less to His Majesty's Government's urge to protect minorities than to His Majesty's Government's habitual largesse towards human warehousing profiteers. A properly vengeful system would punish incitement to racial hatred with community service at the beck and call of the community incited against; which would lead to the pleasing spectacle of the Conservative Party, the Farage Falange and a sizeable portion of Team Starmer cooking and cleaning for suspected refugees.