Buccaneering Buoyancy

Plucky little P&O Ferries entrepreneur Peter Hebblethwaite, who summarily sacked hundreds of workers from the master race and replaced them with cheap foreigns, received a pay rise of at least fifty-five per cent that same year despite his obvious contempt for the little people. Hebblethwaite informed a parliamentary huff-and-puff that he accepted the bonus after due reflection despite having committed the Truss-and-Trumpster error of doing the quiet part out loud and despite having suffered a similar dearth of adverse personal consequences. He also, despite being asked whether he was robbing his staff blind, bragged that some of his workers were so sustainable as to be paid less than the legal minimum wage: a claim which the company had denied. At present P&O's accounts are coming in nine months late, after a major accountancy firm resigned the job of auditing them despite the self-evident probity on show.

Larva Labour's Lost

Even in the realm of the Trumpster and his tribe, it seems that parasitic flesh-eating maggots are not universally welcome. A government scheme is afoot to flood the dating market of the New World screw-worm fly with artificially sterilised males: a family planning initiative which might profitably be applied to the Trump and Musk breeds if some means could be found of extending their sterility from the intellectual to the reproductive. The romantic method of pest control is more effective and less pollutive than using chemical insecticides, and is therefore being tolerated by the US government only because it helps the planet-eating parasite that is the beef industry.

Outside the Bounds of Humanity

Contrary to all recent precedent and the interests of the Righteous State, a judge has ruled that it is unlawful and unconstitutional for police to arrest, detain, handcuff, photograph, fingerprint, DNA-sample and threaten a person with strip-search even when that person is accused of antisemitism. Nottingham police arrested and processed a not altogether uncoloured protester five years ago on suspicion of racially or religiously aggravated offence against public order, and a judge has imposed punitive damages even though the arrest was made on the basis of a single denunciation and on no other evidence. Nottingham police have indicated their intention to appeal the verdict, presumably on the grounds that the protester in question has placed themselves outside the epoch-defining he/she lavatorial dichotomy and is also not a fascist, and is therefore beyond the protection of the law.

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.