Passport Blues

People who are very nearly British are being compelled to become foreign thanks to the indiscriminate racial policy of the Dublin separatists. While Her Majesty's Government has always striven to keep Britishness a privilege that must be earned with patriotic zeal, or else purchased with appropriately targeted consideration, the attitude of the traitor Republic towards those seeking entry is promiscuously lax. Such easy virtue is anathema to the strait-sphinctered Protestants of the Democratic Unionist Party, one of whose elders has been told he has to apply for British citizenship despite having spent his life in Northern Ireland. With the regrettable dearth of political subtlety so typical of the colonial mindset, Britannia's offended suitor complained that present Imperial policy "goes against the grain" of the Good Friday agreement, which the Conservative and Unionist Party blithely abrogated simply ages ago in the interests of conserving party unity. It is remarkable that the privilege of citizenship should be taken so much for granted by someone with so crude and rudimentary a grasp of the British language.

You Just Can't Get the Gays These Days

Mere days have elapsed since Her Majesty's Government suffered the sting of ingratitude from all those contributors to the Sewell report whose racial prejudices were so patriotically corrected in the final draft; yet still there seems a certain lack of trust among the kind of people the Bullingdon Club likes to snigger at. The Ministry for Women, Wogs and Tokenism has had to disband its LGBT advisory panel after even the self-confessed gay evangelical Christians realised they were being duped. The panel was established by Tumbledown Tessie, doubtless to her own regret when the members started agitating for the abolition of "conversion therapy" (brainwashing, in Standard English), a process likely held in high regard among pious Conservatives and their Democratic Unionist chums as a civilised alternative to castration and burning. Her Majesty's Government has made noises about making the practice illegal, but the echt-Trumpster ethos of the Stratton-Symonds administration and its silly blond front-muppet is probably more suited to Christians of the gay-baiting variety than to those of a less Biblical cast of instinct.

Venial Venality

To the usual incalculable credit of British justice and Her Majesty's Government, the present leading lout of the Bullingdon Club has appointed someone called Nigel to arrange a smooth acquittal for the previous leading lout of the Bullingdon Club, with errors laid blamelessly bare and lessons painlessly learned. The nation's former Head Boy, who seems to have toddled into business with much the same results as when he simpered into Downing Street, is to face some rather civil questions about his lobbying of Little Rishi and the ever-hapless Matt Hancock for the price of a garden shed or two. Doubtless his hobnobbing with the head-chopping House of Saud, followed by the usual highly detectable augmentations of human rights in the world's second greatest monarchy, will count as a mitigating circumstance against whatever unfortunate irregularities may have been allowed to occur thanks to the awesome purity of his noble intentions.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: I Pulp xciii-cxii

It was almost certainly not around this time, however, that a serious young man approached the Father of Teeth and prevailed upon his attention. He waited three days in the pouring rain with hardly a muscle moving except when the chill caused his molars to chatter. Meanwhile the Father of Teeth sat ensconced in hideous meditation with his seventh most serene rictus glistening like compromised tar.

On the fourth day his eyes opened, transfixing the serious young man like a pair of bloodshot toothpicks. "What do you want?" asked the Father of Teeth.
"I seek knowledge," pronounced the serious young man.
"I am not a library," said the Father of Teeth.
"I seek to become your apprentice," proclaimed the serious young man.
"I am not a tradesperson," said the Father of Teeth.
"I seek to learn and improve," propounded the serious young man.
"I am not a schoolmaster," said the Father of Teeth, "nor yet a mistress, if you should happen to bend that way."
"This catechism is for novices," said the serious young man; "ultimately, of course I seek wisdom and insight."
"You wouldn't know what to do with them," said the Father of Teeth.
"Your mask of pedagogic flippancy is most instructive," said the serious young man; "surely wisdom and insight are ends in themselves."
"Ultimately, there is no such thing as an end in itself," said the Father of Teeth; "everything that is mortal and attainable leads on to something else, usually unexpected and frequently undesirable. As for what is immortal and unattainable, that would be the Creator of the universe Himself, and you only have to look at the universe to see what the consequences are."
"Then," said the serious young man with determination, "I seek wisdom and insight and whatever lies beyond."
"Very good," said the Father of Teeth; "now when you have worked out what wisdom you require and what you wish to see into, you may possibly find yourself able to discover on your own account whatever is lying beyond."

By this point the serious young man had become seriously annoyed; but just as his breath caught and his fists tightened and his glandular endowments began pumping with adrenal ferocity, the Father of Teeth wagged an admonishing digit, whose warning was no less salutary for the stalagmitic boles about its joints and the serrated deviations of its manicure. "Before you do anything hasty," said the Father of Teeth, "remember that one step on the path to the delusion of wisdom is knowing how to exercise the delusion of choice. For example, there are now at least two potential universes which are contingent upon a point not far removed from the present moment: a universe in which you are badly chewed up, and a universe in which you depart the scene intact. Regrettably, such are the limitations of the present universe, that only one of these potentials can possibly come to fruition."

This insight so intrigued the serious young man that he became frozen to the spot with contemplative indecision. After a month or two it became necessary to prop him up with sticks, and later it was thought wise to seal him into a transparent case and apply the techniques of preliminary mummification. For the Father of Teeth had omitted to mention a third contingent universe, in which the serious young man was unable to decide between the other two and thereby became an improving public spectacle, the admission fees to which were insightfully collected and wisely administered by the Father of Teeth.

A Sacred Mystery

Despite its promulgation of a belief system that values doctrine over curiosity and faith over fact; despite its adherence to a blood-cult with a long and squalid record of misogyny, antisemitism, witch-hunting, slave-holding, child abuse and blatant fraud; despite its adoring devotion to the fanatically vindictive Son of a genocidally violent god; despite two millennia of demonstrable affinity with tyrants and empires from the Emperor Constantine to the Trumpster and his hierophantic head-tribble, it appears that a certain Christian crowd-funding website has enabled the raising of donations for right-wing terrorists of the kind who perpetrated the Epiphany on the Capitol in January. What can be the connection?

Our Great Loss

It would be naïve as well as churlish to deny that Britain has suffered a significant loss today, which we can only hope will occasion a suitable period of national self-reflection: Much to the grief of all decent and right-thinking people, Greta Thunberg has declined to attend the Glasgow climate summit in November. With exemplary diplomatic tact, she gave as her reason the unevenness of Covid-19 vaccine distribution, which will prevent poorer countries from participating on equitable terms. A suitably unsophisticated observer, such as (to take a purely random example) some loutish Regency throwback now weighing up his chances of becoming the next consort to Her Widowed Madge Gawblesser, might almost believe that the risk of a Bozza's Britain Saves the World rah-and-blah had never crossed Thunberg's mind.

Premature Emulation

Although the new government in Burma, or Myanmar as the natives foppishly call it, has conducted itself with admirable Home Office pluck in dealing with protesters, it has also shown itself prone to some unfortunate displays of British bad manners. The ambassador to Empire 2.0 has spent a night in his car after the new brooms locked him out of his own embassy, prompting the dead-eyed yob from the Ministry for Wogs, Beads and Trinkets to deliver a curt dressing-down from the master race. It would certainly be unfortunate if the law-breaking bullies in Burma-or-Whatever were permitted the same degree of sovereignty as the bullying law-breakers in Westminster.

Journal of the Plague Year

continued, by a Gentleman

Much conſtructive and patriotick Diſputation at the Bloater and Blueſtocking Coffee-houſe yeſter Eve, as the Independent League of Maſqueleſs Defiants for National Salvation conſidered its official Reſponſe to the lateſt Rumours, that documentary Proofs ſhall ſhortly be required at all Publick-houſes and other Eſtabliſhments, to certify that the Woo Han Peſtilence hath been granted that noted Hoſpitality, which Her Majeſty's loyal Subjects are wont to accord the Blacks, the Iriſh and the Dogges. My Lord Swygge-Whytewyne waxed moſt indignant at the Idea, that a true Engliſhman ſhould be required to ſhow any Papers in his native Realm, nay even the glorious Blue Paſsport of Her moſt gracious Britannick Majeſty. There were ſeverall Diſsenters from this View, notably Maſter Splytte-Mydwyffe the Saw-bones and unfrocked naval Carpenter, who ſtated that the Paſsport of the Peſtilence would be a mere temporary Meaſure, like the Income-tax and the Suppreſsion of unneceſsarie and ſubverſive Wages. For my owne Part I am inalterably reſolved, that I ſhall not, for the Sake of mere Signalling of my Virtue, compromiſe the Homeleſsneſs of my Politicks, and that I ſhall await the conſidered Deciſion of our noble Prime Miniſter before freely expreſsing the moderate and ſenſible Extent of my robuſt and dutifull Acquieſcence.

Wheeler Dealer

Mere experts have accused Her Majesty's Government of using all sorts of rather sophisticated dodges to understate the environmental impact of its road-building plans by a factor of up to a hundred; and this despite the fact that the Department for Motoring is run by the blithering wideboy Grant Shapps and his colleagues Michael Green and Sebastian Fox. Vexatious do-gooders are seeking a judicial review of the Government's "largest ever investment in English strategic roads" rah rah, which includes the strategic assault against the treacherously pre-English archaeological heritage at Stonehenge. The lefty lawyers claim that the Government has omitted forty-five out of fifty schemes from its calculations, failed to take account of emissions from the construction process, and limited its forecasts to a point when some schemes will still be incomplete; all of which sounds a bit over-elaborate for Shapps and Company, who most likely preferred the straightforward no-nonsensism of having all the numbers totted up and then deleting a couple of digits off the end. There is also no cumulative figure for the damage, probably because Shapps thinks a cumulative is a sort of cloud. The Department for Motoring argues that it has a forthcoming plan thingy which will resolve absolutely everything; which is certainly at least as believable as anything else Shapps and Company have ever said.

Kick Out to Help Out

Those wogs who litter the nation's streets, rather than occupying homes that might be put to better use, now have yet further cause to thank the heirs of Mr Churchill that Britain is not institutionally racist. The Ministry for Wog Control has passed a new vagrancy law which makes homelessness grounds for deportation, thereby discriminating against cultural menaces such as domestic violence victims, whose lachrymose presence upon the sunny uplands might well cause offence among patriotic Britons with legitimate and understandable concerns. An internal impact assessment, apparently sniggered through by the Ministry some months ago, proclaims discrimination in all forms "not automatically unlawful," as befits a society with a clean institutional conscience. It also notes that many among the homeless also have the temerity to be disabled, and that such doubly irresponsible persons may well experience a degree of disadvantage closer to their just deserts if deported to countries with even more rigorous support services than our own.