Expectably Unmanageable

Surprisingly, Global Britain is not about to save the world; remarkably, some nations will not be inspired by Alok Sharma's urging to push curves downwards in order to keep paths alive; astoundingly, a rah-and-blah boosted by Boris Johnson is not about to achieve what was claimed for it. Not even the National Haystack's solemn and statesmanlike Muppet speech at the UN will induce the world's biggest polluters to pledge, let alone take, effective action against the climate disaster. There is some doubt as to whether the Heathen Chinee will even bother to send anyone important, given that Global Britain and its most favouritest ally have just signalled the need for international co-operation by signing an anti-Chinese military pact. None of this is likely to deflate the nation's premier Johnson, whose entire domestic and foreign policy consists of promising everything to everyone and then finding someone to blame for the mess that follows. Still, even he may be a little nonplussed at the fiendish foreign subtlety involved in telling a truth even after that truth has been recognised as such by almost everyone who isn't a journalist.

The Father of Teeth

Text for today: Roots dclxxix-dccxiv

When the first carnivore chomped the first herbivore, said the Father of Teeth unreliably, of course I was there. But I was also there when the first herbivore plucked its first leaves, and when the first worm parted its sideways gnashers and took its fill of some innocent root; and each of those evolutionary progressions was equally something to chew on. For it is the will of the Creator of the universe, said the Father of Teeth, that whatever moves must eat, and that whatever eats in order temporarily and contingently to confound its own entropy must work to enhance, often rather more permanently, the entropy of something else. Having created life that could draw its energies directly from the sun, causing pain and death to nobody, the Creator was quick, relatively speaking, to ensure that other life must prey upon it. For having created finitude out of His own infinity and inferiority out of His own perfection, said the Father of Teeth, the Creator wished to observe the lengths to which His deliberately limited creatures would go in attempting to cope with the limitations He had imposed upon them, given that the only other choice He allowed them was downing teeth and giving up. Having created famine, He demanded sacrifice; having created lust, He demanded chastity; and having carelessly allowed the bare rudiments of reason to arise in one of His more ludicrous experiments, He denied the resulting creature any reliable co-operative instincts beyond those of the tribe, the choir and the lynch mob. There are those who say that the present devours the future and excretes progress, and others who say that the great worm of time bites its own tail and then comes back to haunt itself; but what I say, said the Father of Teeth, and I have said it before and will say it again, is that time is relative and teeth are an absolute, more or less.

Deserving and Undeserving

Despite a decade of strong and stable economic prudence by the Conservatives and their little orange fags, Britain's care industry (and what a fine, entrepreneurial piece of pragmatic Britishness that phrase is: care industry) is apparently not considered a good bet by leading professional gamblers. The sector whose benefit claims the National Haystack takes pride in defending is unwilling to invest in care homes, thanks apparently to the Bullingdon Club's no-nonsense attitude towards long-term viability. A spokesbeing pointed out that the poor have already been ordered to pay up what the bankers will not; while the former Deputy Conservatives have been swotting up in the Commons library, and been shocked to discover that their former Cabinet colleagues are still in office and still kicking social care to pieces, and that, even less excusably, the former Deputy Conservatives are no longer in office helping them to do so.

Ethical Chickenfeed

Since the great British public has no particular interest in whether those on low incomes can survive another benefits cut, some enterprising journalists have asked the National Haystack whether he could manage on £118 a week. The Haystack responded that wages had been falling throughout his party's time in office, but were now about to rise thanks to his government's National Insurance hike. Besides, the pandemic had cost a good deal, and somebody would have to pay for it; and of course, with the prospect of so many empty shelves in the supermarkets it will be all the easier for the little people to cut back on luxuries. Meanwhile, in the Labour leadership's absence no less an elder statesman than Gordon Brown has proclaimed the Universal Credit cut less morally defensible than bankrolling the Iraq crusade or selling out the NHS with the PFI boondoggle, and more socially divisive than pandering to the migrant-bashers. No doubt as a result of this flinging of the moral compass, the Treasury is considering some stuff that Johnson would never bother to understand, in order to prevent hard-working families becoming poor enough to be undeserving.

So Great a Day as This is Cheaply Bought

Much as the pandemic has been linked to the deaths of a few hundred people, and the British Home Office to a witch-hunt or two, and our free, fearless and cantankerous Press to an occasional untruth, so it appears that, in the process of losing that last unfortunate round of the Great Game, the British armed forces may have detrimented a few collaterals. Altogether the Ministry for Wog-Bombing is prepared to admit to compensating the families of two hundred and eighty-nine security indiscretions, including payments to "calm local atmospherics" after Britain's brave boys in the SAS did a bit too much civilising. Other cases include a payment of £104.17 for a killing and some property damage, although the precise division of the total remains unclear; and one family received a munificent £4,233.60 for the fatal shootings of four children. The .17 and the .60 are a particularly charming touch, showing pragmatic British parsimony at its most righteously accountable.

You Can't Get the Staff These Days

Afghan scroungers who think that helping the master race lose at the Great Game is the route to a Britannic paradise of houri and chips are soon to be righteously disabused. The Ministry for Wog Warehousing has assured the great British public that families and unaccompanied minors will be kept in hotels until at least the end of the year, while local authorities dealing with chronic underfunding for housing and public services receive finger-wagging lectures about failing to do their part. Refugees too lazy to arrange their life-threatening emergencies according to the convenience of the Ministry will be prosecuted and thrown into prison once the new Purity of Britishness law comes in. Despite such hygienic efficiencies, average waiting times for "processing" asylum applications now exceed one year, and the Ministry is aiming to take on another thousand caseworkers, although it is as yet unclear how long it will take to instil them with the requisite patriotic values.

The Master Race is Dying Out Again

As the nation's independence from the greasy Euro-wogs reveals itself in all its empty-shelved, unheated glory, so the doughty denizens of the realm's marketplace of ideas are striving to portray the new and magnificent vistas of Britishness that still await us. A centrist (right-wing, in Oldspeak) think-tank, the Social Market Foundation, has detected a continuing decline in the birth-rate despite the exertions of the country's premier Johnson, and has eructated forth an oracular squeal about the perils of quantitative shrinkage in the work-force. Since government-funded child-care is as much against the national religion as letting the wogs back in, we may yet have to rely on good old Vatican morals to keep the pleb-stock breeding and ensure a numerically adequate and racially pure drudge-force. Nevertheless, whatever labour pains lie ahead, it is impossible not to stand in awe at the degree of Britishness involved in spending years and fortunes on a hostile environment for migrants only to end up with a shortage of natives.

Low Cunning

There are, it appears, still some among the beastly Euro-wogs whose image of British planning and pragmatism remains almost as deluded as Britain's own. The National Haystack had a bit of a burble to his fellow journalists that the Dutch prime minister was on our side and in the right and ready to kick Brussels buttock to help the jolly old UK break the withdrawal agreement and get the Fenian rabble back in line. However, according to the beastly Netherwogs their prime minister stuck solidly to the Nazi-Soviet communiqué, and the Carrie Johnson administration is about as likely to divide and rule the EU through Churchillian charm and banter as was the Nick Timothy administration before it. Nevertheless, a few incurable optimists among the Dutch diplomatic corps have expressed surprise that the National Haystack might have said the thing that was not.

Bad Theology

Text for today: II Kings 22 viii-xx; II Chronicles 34 viii-xxviii

God causes the book of the law to be found so that His people may know how far they have strayed from its precepts and how much they deserve His latest round of punishments.

Having become a religious fanatic at the age of sixteen, and spent eighteen happy years persecuting those who do not share his beliefs, King Josiah is disturbed when the book of God's law is discovered during a refurbishment of the temple. The priest's secretary reads him the book, and Josiah is astounded and horrified to discover that the laws of a wandering desert community are not being strictly kept by the people of a settled nation some half-dozen centuries later. Doubtless it was this combination of realism and acumen which caused Josiah to accept the book at face value, and to continue his persecutions even after being informed that they would make no difference to the fate of his realm.

Josiah sends to a prophetess, who promises that God will bring new disasters to the nation because of the people's religious tolerance. In subsequent chapters, He duly sets up these disasters by appointing a sequence of impious kings and then venting His righteous wrath in the accustomed manner. However, in His infinite compassion God takes account of Josiah's grovelling, and graciously promises to have the king killed before any unpleasantness occurs.

Le Chagrin et la Pitié

French resentment at Britain's refusal to surrender to Hitler, de Gaulle or the Nazi-Soviet commissars of Strasbrussels has once again erupted in an unseemly diplomatic row over the behaviour of Britain's most famous penal colony. The new Triple Alliance against the Heathen Chinee was accompanied by the cancellation of an Australian order for French-built submarines and a decision instead to transfer the delaying and cost over-runs to Canberra's new paddling partners in the Pacific play-pool. Certainly Britain's experience in completing the Astute-class vessel should be more than sufficient to qualify it for creating a submarine that can detect Australia, if not the subtler and more enigmatic reaches of the Heathen Chinee homeland. Nevertheless, the perfidious French have contrived to snub Britain by recalling only the American and Australian ambassadors, as if they expected no better where the UK was concerned, and almost as if the doings and undoings of the Carrie Johnson administration simply didn't matter very much.