Informational Havering

Plucky little entrepreneurs have submitted plans for a Europe-beating infoslop emporium which will transform a couple of hundred football pitches' worth of green belt into a planet-cooking paragon of tech-bro sustainability. Although the Vice-Caudillo of the Farage Falange has clarified the movement's heatwave policy by instructing the great British public to get out and relish the burn, the Unterfahnenschwenkenführer of the local cadre was noticeably coy about the prospects for approval. Presumably the strutting Caudillo's non-declarable crypto-bung from the company's owners is still to be properly deposited.

British Fair Play is a Beautiful Thing

Readers of a certain vintage will recall a previous Labour government's increasingly desperate efforts, in the wake of the Iraq crusade, to preserve the shores of Albion from any influx of erstwhile darkie assistants. The current protectors of the realm have enhanced the Britishness yet further by continuing to refuse resettlement to Afghanis who aided the occupying forces, even after the Ministry for Wog-Bombing considerately made thousands of their identities available to the Taliban. Britain may be a nation of animal lovers, but that doesn't mean our charity extends to collaborators who helped us lose a war: they will just have to go back to their compounds and try to do better next time. Perhaps fairest and most beautiful of all is the fact that, should the next Anglo-Afghan war end otherwise than with the forces of liberation scurrying off in defeat, those natives who share in our glory will not require resettlement from the paradise they have helped to create.

Pax Americana

A major joint military exercise in South Korea has been abruptly and unilaterally terminated, apparently because the Trumpster is concerned about Kim Jong-un's itsy-bitsy feelings. Given their shared idea of what constitutes a democratic republic and the likely mutual affinity between their respective head-tribbles, such sympathy is natural enough; nevertheless, certain elements in South Korea have so far retained their alien Oriental notions of diplomatic protocol as to be miffed at the now customary lack of consultation, courtesy or other conventional allied behaviour. It is to be hoped that the present South Korean government's wish to take a more conciliatory approach to the North, alongside the concurrent American need for matériel to put another ally in its place, may enable the Trumpster and his head-tribble to add the Korean War to the umpty-three or oodly-nine conflicts they have already brought to an end.

Money to Burn

The company which provided the major fire hazard for Grenfell Tower spent thirty-two million of its insurance money compensating victims and survivors, and fifty-five million compensating shareholders for the inconvenience. Fortunately, all but one and a half of those millions were covered, so the actual losses to the company amounted to little more than a lunchtime's worth of boardroom bonuses. No criminal charges have yet been brought over the disaster, and given prevailing attitudes to health and safety, corporate regulation, and landlord control, it seems unlikely that anyone of any consequence has very much to worry about. Nevertheless, it is apparently newsworthy that a company which concealed the facts about a dangerous product in order to protect its profits also cared forty per cent more about its shareholders than it did about its victims.

Spend Don't Mend

New perils are about to befall the American Way, in the form of proposed bipartisan legislation that will impiously and blasphemously seek to countermand the eternal law of built-in obsolescence. Corporate citizens are squealing with righteous indignation at the threat that they may be required to provide their product consumption resources with the equipment and knowledge necessary to repair cars, phones or wheelchairs at, if you please, fair and reasonable terms and costs. Quite aside from the intellectual theft and loss of business motivation should people start using things for longer instead of consigning them to landfill, the risk to the environment might be so severe as to make corporate America play concerned about the environment. In such extreme territory, it is terrifying to think where the matter might end. Imagine the consequences if they the people took it into their heads to make a sagging quarter-millennial constitution fit for purpose, rather than accepting its de facto abolition in favour of the currently imminent imperium of the infoslop.

L'art pour l'art

According to Britain's leading liberal newspaper, Samuel Beckett has hitherto been viewed as a "poet of pure pessimism, interested in despair and stasis but unconcerned by real-life politics;" evidently his work for the French resistance against the Nazis and subsequent receipt of the Croix de Guerre are even more forgivable and forgettable than his Hibernian roots and his occasional lapses into literary Gallicism. Beckett's private diaries of a sojourn in Germany between the autumn of 1936 and the spring of 1937 are now about to be published, and it seems they demonstrate a healthy alertness to the patriotic pride and the legitimate and understandable concerns which were then trumpeting forth in the consolidating Nazi state. Given the obvious irrelevance of such matters at a time like this, the planned English-language edition will concentrate less on the politics and history than on the author's literary development, thereby tactfully ignoring Beckett's deplorable lack of interest in the period from September 1939 until June 1941, when all the most important bits of the Second World War actually took place.

Equipped with Marketable Skills

Several people have been wounded at Virginia State University, in a mass shooting apparently involving more than one perpetrator. It seems that nobody has been killed and that none of the injuries are life-threatening; so presumably it's safe to assume that the incident was yet another tribute to the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, rather than yet another ICE cleansing of the melting pot. Patriots will no doubt rejoice that the American higher education curriculum still includes survival skills appropriate to a civil war.

It's All Been a Ghastly Mistake

There can be few unluckier men on Earth than the Netanyahoo. His cleansing of Gaza has brought him the inconvenience of mild rebukes from the western powers; his entrepreneurial acumen has brought charges of corruption from the envious; and judging by his latest performance in a morale-boosting interview for the IDF, he may have missed his true métier altogther. Righteously indignant at the British government's ever more lukewarm condoning of his final solution to the Palestinian problem, Bibi referred to "what is called the Islamic republic of Britain," and when the interviewer searchingly asked whether all of Europe wasn't just as bad, Bibi replied that "someone said the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic republic of Britain." He even cited Winston Churchill's son, whose book The Six-Day War offered an account of the Righteous State's plucky self-defence against the Arab Untermenschen. Of course the Netanyahoo is perfectly well aware that Britain is not an Islamic republic; although like everyone else he may have some difficulty with the nuances attending the nominally Christian, nominally monarchical, nominally parliamentarian, nominally democratic oligarchical coprocracy that constitutes the United Kingdom. Still, his bandying of the Churchill name (and his reference to the loutish scion rather than the superhuman sire), alongside his skill with unverified quotes and anonymous sources, surely demonstrates that his proper place all this time has been the free, fearless and cantankerous British press.

Donaldus Vult

Those notorious hotbeds of anti-American subversion, the Navy Times and the Stars and Stripes, are seeking to undermine the Persian Crusade by insinuating that the crew of an American aircraft carrier might have reason to ask what their country can do for them. The whims of the Trumpster and his head-tribble have kept the USS Abraham Lincoln at sea for nine months, during which the crew has had only two days ashore and living conditions aboard the ship have allegedly deteriorated to levels which most patriots would consider worthy only of ethnic and fiscal inferiors. There are even reports of people attempting suicide, which must be particularly galling for a régime so gallantly battling a country that once conscripted suicidal ideation in its own fight against that great American ally, Saddam Hussein. Fortunately, the greased and tattooed Secretary for Holy War has waved away all such concerns as fake news, and the US Navy has proclaimed itself satisfied that the crew has access to all amenities including the religious; which certainly ought to settle the matter for anyone inclined to believe them.

They're Asking For It

An American oil company and its British sidekick have been denied permission to start drilling in the Arctic because more time is needed to assess, of all things, whatever environmental and social impact may result from the likely levels of corporate responsibility. Having previously scolded hard-working prospectors for importing equipment in too buccaneering and entrepreneurial a spirit, the Greenland authorities have now chosen a rather delicate moment during the Persian Crusade to stab them the back. For its own part, the company seems to have been hastily flung together last year by various obligate parasites of the Trumpster and his head-tribble, and to have been christened Greenland Energy in much the same spirit as the Afrika Korps was named after the great American slave market. Whether there are plans to assassinate Greenland's Supreme Leader in hopes of a spontaneous popular revolt against the Danish occupation remains as yet unclear.