Flexible Transparency

O rah for the deal we have done
Securing our place in the sun,
Regaining control
Of our national soul,
Defying the wog, Frog and Hun!

O rah for this frabjous new day!
This is the real deal, I must say,
And just slightly worse
For the common folks' purse
Than that of poor mad Tessie May!

O rah for this wonderful deal
In all its tax-haven appeal!
We'll soon buccaneer
With nothing to fear
And certainly not to conceal!

Uncle Tom Pliant

Cliffs of Dover to Gain Matching Sepulchre

Pragmatic parliamentary charity towards the homeless is not limited to hand-wringing expenses claimants like Heidi "The Waterworks" Allen. The Speaker's chaplain, who next month will take up the ascetic burdens of the Dover bishopric, has exercised the Commons' brand of Christian charity towards a group of rough sleepers who were using the tunnel between the Houses of Parliament and Westminster tube station. While claiming to be devastated by the deaths of homeless people at the station, the bishop-in-waiting was indignant at the standards of hygiene in the tunnel, which the rough sleepers blame on late-night drunks relieving themselves after closing time. She also worried that the piles of bedding might be a security risk; the number of MPs recently assassinated with homeless people's bedding escapes me for the moment, but presumably God has the information to hand. The bishop-in-waiting acknowledged that simply moving the people on would solve nothing, but as regards the minor matter of finding a more humane alternative she seems to have left things to the mercy of Providence and the vagrancy laws. The police moved the rough sleepers on, with the result that they now have to sleep outside the tunnel rather than inside, and with the winter coming on there is every chance that some of them will meet God face to face before too long.

Labour Fail to Cost What Might Have Been

That paragon of economic sanity and fiscal stability, the Confabulation of Business Interests, has pronounced that Labour has questions to answer about the costs of its rail nationalisation policy. A recent bit of CBI headline-whoring squealed that the cost would be a hundred and ninety-six billion, a figure which was based on Labour policy in an alternate universe. Of course, there are other, devastatingly accurate aspects to the CBI's figures, but the CBI doesn't wish to disclose them as it would hurt the members' itsy-bitsy feelings. It is certainly fortunate that the Labour party is the one which has questions to answer, and that this fact has been determined by so reliable a source as the CBI.

Are You Doing Your Part, Too?

We are all aware, because the Conservative Party and its New Labour soul-mates have wagged their admonitory fingers at us often enough, that the proper democratic way to get things done in a democracy is for everyone to fall in line behind the Government. This is most democratically and emphatically the case when the Government has gone to several years' worth of trouble to monosyllabificate matters for the plebeian understanding and to ensure that all the country's ills can be summed up in a single four-letter word: wogs. Hence it should come as no surprise that, along with teachers, the police and the National Health Service, charities are now subject to the new, optimistic order to pull together by authority of the Ministry for Wog Control. The Ministry is dispatching its special squads to charities, religious and community centres, with the assurance that they wish only to help vulnerable human resources in the regularisation of their status. If the special squads actually use language like that, it is to be hoped that the vulnerable persons in question speak English badly enough to understand them. Naturally, once the cockroaches take the bait, the Ministry makes them an offer it hopes they will not refuse; and in the event of further non-cooperativity the boot-boys may come calling with a plane ticket back to the jolly old war-zone. The Ministry's web-page, which of course the more entrepreneurial vulnerables will have accessed as a matter of course, gives fair warning that "the service was not designed to undertake enforcement action but it may be considered on a case-by-case basis." As with the appointments of Theresa May, Sajid Javid and Priti Patel to a nominally great office of state, it is certainly reassuring to know that the Ministry's process of Gleichschaltung operates in the buccaneering British tradition of putting things to purposes for which they were not designed.

Due Solemnity

O rah for the Queen and her Speech!
Gawblesser old Madge! What a peach!
There's naught so unique
As an hour's plummy squeak
From nonagenarian leech!

O rah for the Speech of the Queen!
The finest our nation has seen!
Our programme all picked,
In tushery tricked,
With promises not worth a bean!

We'll fight Euro-wogs on the beach,
We'll starve those who nurse and who teach,
Make jail more improving
And stop you from moving -
Rah rah for the Queen and her Speech!

Lackbod de Pfiffel

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Enamel clxiii-clix

Once upon a time, said the Father of Teeth unreliably, the Creator of the universe was so annoyed by the behaviour of certain people that He smote two entire cities with fire and brimstone and killed every single inhabitant. Cinders poured from the sky, which blackened and thundered; the earth shook and cracked open in great chasms that swallowed alive those sinners not already incinerated.

It was, said the Father of Teeth, a rather show-offy spectacle indeed, and not at all suitable for those of a sensitive or impressionable temperament. Such a one was a minor wife of a man who escaped, having been forewarned that the Creator's mercy was about to make one of its more assertive manifestations. She looked back to where her friends and cousins and the gossips at the market were all being scalded and broiled and crushed and suffocated, and she was so traumatised by the sight that from that moment forth she was paralysed and rooted to the spot, unable to move or speak, her face white as salt. After a while, of course, those who had fled began to drift back, and they took out their knives and their trowels and cut bits out of her to chew on because the ground was so scorched that food was hard to come by. She never objected or cried out, so they told each other as they chewed that she was nothing more than a pillar and it served her right for looking where she shouldn't.

In the end, said the Father of Teeth, there was nothing left of her but white bones and terrified white eyeballs, which still faced towards the scene of devastation because no-one, least of all her husband or her family, had thought to cover her eyes or close them or point them away; and at last I ground them to dust in my seventeen-carat diamond molars and scattered them grain by grain on the Creator's hurricanes over the next five thousand years. Eventually a few of the grains will find their way into people's eyes, and in this way, said the Father of Teeth, a few people may gain some small homeopathic insight at last into the nature of the Creator's mercy.

Britain Fights Back

More and more Britons are taking back control to aggressively incentivise those shirkers and scroungers who also have the impudence to be freaks. Inspired by the healthy playground rhetoric of Her Majesty's Government, have-a-go heroes across the country are doing their part to ensure that even our most amusing citizens have no doubt as to their place on the social scale and its attendant obligations. With the effects of the Osbornomic miracle on the police and of the May-Graybeing reforms on the legal system, a substantial hint has been dropped that the beneficiaries of these life-lessons could start to man up and refrain from complaining quite so much. Nevertheless, reports of abuse have continued to increase: a development which the Home Office has welcomed, presumably on the grounds that further re-education is needed and therefore the fun can continue.

Not Very Well Brought Up

Dear Mater, for all of our sakes,
Do please keep in mind that it makes
Such trouble for us
When you cause a fuss
Because a few plebs have the shakes.

We know there's no profit or perk
In letting an invalid shirk.
The ones who can pay
Will do as they may;
The others can get out and work.

I've trouble enough and to spare
With bearding the wogs in their lair.
Now dash it, old stick,
When it comes to the sick,
You silly old bag, we don't care!

Trouble with Gas

Elderly voters for British independence will almost certainly survive at least the first winter outside the EU, according to a refreshingly optimistic statement by the electricity system operator, National Grid. However, depending on how clean a break is achieved, the Continent's self-imposed isolation from the mainland may induce a certain buoyancy where prices are concerned. Spooked by the possibility that the Recrudescent Imperium may be forced to compete for gas with "energy-hungry Asian countries" whose corporate and other coolies lack Britannia's buccaneering thrift, the Stakhanovite extremists at the CBI persist in urging that Her Majesty's Government interfere in the free market to provide, of all things, infrastructure. Meanwhile, those of us with the temerity to wish for continued lighting, heating and other luxuries must certainly be grateful for the foresight displayed by the Conservatives and their little yellow fags, who have spent the last decade slashing funds for sustainable power and subsidising the shale-frackers whose major contribution to the country's energy efficiency comprises a few rather small earthquakes.

You Only Lie Twice

Has the depth of the national rot no limits at all? In accordance with its established policy of rehashing past policy at 72rpm instead of 33, the Cummings-Johnson administration has let fly a hob-nailed reboot of Tumbledown Tessie's fatuous threat to stop co-operating with the Euro-wogs' notoriously foreign intelligence agents if Brussels persisted in refusing to do as it was told. The Cummings-Johnson version is a turbo-charged, cocaine-fuelled squeal of righteous indignation proclaiming that a failure to drop over the cliff on 31 October will result in Britain summarily dividing the EU into nice countries and nasty countries and leaving the latter to the terrorists. Despite this, even a former head of MI6, the international benevolent organisation whose most famous operative shared 2012 Olympic opening prominence with Her Madge Gawblesser, is apparently not entirely immune from non-plucky thoughts.