Through Good Times And Bad

Rah rah; it's two thousand and five!
The Conservative Party's alive!
I'm the nice chap from Sales
Who'll keep us on the rails,
And stop us from taking a dive!

Whoopee; it's two thousand and ten!
Our snouts in the trough once again!
As a salesman I'm sold,
And now into the cold
Will go Cleggy and his little men!

It's twenty-thirteen; such a bore,
With the proles coming back to the fore.
Why do you blame me?
Why can you not see?
I'm a salesman, that's all, nothing more!

Davey Fitztony

No Taxation With Our Representation

Some representatives of Britain's most harassed and disadvantaged citizens have informed Daveybloke that enough is enough. The president of the Confabulation of Business Interests, Roger Carr, flanked by some of the country's most down-at-heel kleptocrats, has dropped in for a bit of a chat about why Daveybloke needs to stop urging them to mend their ways. "It is only in recent times that tax has become an issue on the public agenda," whined Carr earlier in the day at the Oxford Business School. As a result of that nonsense about all being in it together, we suffer "businesses that the general public know and believe they understand; businesses with a brand that become a perfect political football, the facts difficult to digest; public passions easy to inflame" and, it would appear, CBI presidents who can't string a proper sentence together. It is all very bad, no doubt; Carr even complained that the issue of tax avoidance "cannot be about morality", which shows a remarkable lack of appreciation for Daveybloke's continuing and strenuous efforts to ensure that it remains a matter of little else. Carr and his chums really ought to be grateful that Daveybloke has kept at bay such inconveniences as legislation, bailiffs, fines, the public interest and so forth; but gratitude has no place in today's market. "There are no absolutes," proclaimed Carr, quoting one of James Herbert's better novels; so if anyone would care to shoplift at Tesco or defraud the Prudential, now you know it makes sense.

Men of Honour

Egad! Referendum eftsoons,
And yet, through the next many moons,
My Eton-white arse
Will roast in this farce
Cooked up by some swivel-eyed loons!

O how can my Party be free
To buck up and follow poor me?
I must be incisive
And quick and decisive -
I'll shove Jerry Hunt on TV!

Poor Jerry's not such a bright lad,
But he is no back-stabbing cad.
And he's been through it all
And he knows how to stall,
And waffle, and sack the right spad!

Davey Fitztony

Pale Green

The greenest government ever has provided yet another eloquent demonstration of how much it cares about all that husky-hugging nonsense. Over the next few years we can expect increasingly severe and unpredictable effects, including floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and, if the likes of Cuadrilla continue to get their way, earthquakes, explosions and mass water poisonings. None of these little inconveniences is likely to interfere with the Osborne economic miracle or the profits of the Bullingdon Club's oily little chums; so the Chancellor has refused to adopt any environmental targets beyond 2020, when it will all be someone else's problem.

The response of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has also been more or less what one would expect: it has cut by eighty-four per cent the team of officials charged with working out how to cope with climate change. As usual, the slashing and burning is purely a matter of restructuring: a Defra spokesbeing droned out the standard communiqué that the cuts have taken place because Defra has overfulfilled its three-year plan and embedded the team's expertise in every aspect of its being. Hence, another and larger team will be necessary to dig Defra out of whatever hole it has got itself into by 2017; fortunately, this will be after the next general election and therefore quite possibly the fault of the next Labour administration.

The Scrotum At Bay

Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain's new official opposition by grace of the journalistic classes, has received a tumultuous welcome from some fascist scum north of the border. As with so many other issues, Scottish fascism appears to be a rather anaemic and half-hearted affair: the unfortunate statesman was shouted at and pointed at, for all the world like a wog out of place, and was eventually booted out of a taxi in which he sought political asylum. The fascist scum were apparently under the impression that Farage is a racist and a homophobe, just because racists and homophobes keep popping up in his party's membership. The fascist scum apparently wished to make known their traditional fascist dislike of racism and homophobia; so Farage himself diagnosed the fracas as "a kind of anti-English thing", on the grounds that the fascist scum also registered a dislike of the Union Jack, which is of course the English flag. Farage has called on the fiend Salmond to distance himself from the fascist scum, and at Westminster it is believed that a cross-party agreement is being drafted on the back of various envelopes for emergency legislation defining the act of shouting at Nigel Farage as a hate crime.

Operation Chastise

Berlin has rather tactlessly chosen the anniversary of 617 Squadron's famous victory to indicate a certain lack of willingness to join the Daveyblokey-cokey over EU police and counter-terrorism powers. The Government wants to opt out of a hundred and thirty-six laws and then opt back in to the ones that will not interfere unduly with the creation of the neoliberal police state. The opt-out seems to have been the easy part, as Britain now has to renegotiate the opt-ins with the European Commission and the twenty-six lesser nations which compose the Brusso-Strasbourgian evil empire. There are already complaints from senior officials that they have no idea what the mainland wants to renegotiate; which must be one of the few things which the Eurocrats have in common with Daveybloke and his mad old cat lady. The Eurocrats also say that the Home Office has not been in contact with them for more than six months, although it is not entirely clear whether this is viewed as a matter of concern or quiet relief. Presumably, contact with the Foreign Office is out of the question on the grounds that Willem den Haag is too busy name-dropping Angelina Jolie and waiting for Shaker Aamer to die. In any case, no doubt Daveybloke and his famous diplomatic talents will soon be called upon to veto the uppity Euro-wogs and remind certain people exactly who won the war.

Lawgasm

When an embattled and incompetent minister (viz. a minister) wishes to avoid being heckled, kettled and tasered by a hostile audience, the usual course of action nowadays is to make a headline-grabbing, endorphin-squirting policy announcement and then allow lesser mortals to worry about little things like legality and implementation. For her annual comedy turn at the Police Federation, Daveybloke's mad old cat lady has done just that, proclaiming that the lives of police officers are worth more than those of other people and that the police, rather than liberty, law or civilisation, represent the "fundamental basis of our society". Most, if not all, Home Secretaries over the past couple of decades have been police-state enthusiasts of one stripe or another; but it is still comparatively rare for the tendency to be pronounced aloud, although the pleonastic redundancy of the redundant pleonasm has a nostalgic whiff of New Labour. Daveybloke's mad old cat lady wants people who kill police officers to be sentenced in the same way as terrorists, serial murderers and other symptoms of the welfare state; which means they must die in prison assuming the victim's professional colleagues have not exercised their inalienable prerogative and pre-empted the matter on the streets or in police custody before any trial, or indeed any crime, has taken place.

Never Send A Salesman to Do A Statesman's Job

Since it is nominally the prime minister's job to govern in the interests of the whole country, Daveybloke has been all of a tizzy trying to govern in the interests of his own shrinking faction of the Conservative Party. Daveybloke is on a trip to the USA at the moment, whereby he presumably hoped to add a certain statesmanlike glow to his natural maroon-rubber sheen; unfortunately, Daveybloke's heroic abstention from wog jokes in the presence of Barack Obama has been overshadowed by the antics of a few dozen back-bench baboons and a couple of treacherous toadies in the Cabinet. Accordingly, in a fit of near-absolute non-panic Daveybloke has ordered the solicitor general locked in a room with a biro and the back of an envelope, and the solicitor general has scribbled out a 500-word bill to keep the apes on-side, providing for a referendum on British independence from Brussels by December 2017. The government, should there be one by that time, will be under no obligation to leave the EU if a majority vote in favour of doing so; which is certainly in line with the Conservative Party's idea of democracy. The measure has worked about as well as Daveybloke's UKIP-lite measures usually work: the amendment which it was intended to undercut will go ahead anyway, the baboons will do as they please, and it will all be the fault of the Liberal Democrats.

13 May 1787

It was nearly the hour of closing at the Gallows and Glockenspiel. "Thirteenth of May, seventeen eighty-seven. Nearly closing time," announced Hooligan Motts; but the small and noisy gathering of fashionable ladies and gentlemen at the better end of the bar paid little or no attention. They had been there some considerable time, the men in pastel cutaways and luminous knee-socks, the ladies in frilled chemises and pouty drapings. Among the ladies, some had shawls and some had parasols, and some of the men carried walking-sticks; but despite the heat of debate nobody resorted to weapons, though Granny Forbus would happily have told them how.

"Bit of a barney there," said Melon Head Myrtle to one of the gentlemen, who had detached himself in order to visit the bar for a final tankard of Wobley's Thurrock.
"Barney?" said the gentleman, whose waistcoat and matching complexion resembled a massacre at a beetroot emporium. "I think we left Barney at the docks. He was in a most melancholy state."
"The docks?" said Melon Head Myrtle. "Did he miss his boat, then?"
"Not at all, not at all," said the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat. "We all went there to watch the fleet leave. Rather a stirring sight, though not quite so salutary as a good public hanging. That's what disappointed Barney, I think."
"The fleet?" said Melon Head Myrtle. "Is there a war on?"
"Not at all, not at all," said the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat. "It was the convict fleet, transporting eight hundred felons to New Holland."
"New Holland?" said Melon Head Myrtle.
"A most dreadful business," said one of the ladies, who had approached in time to catch the last few words and clearly did not care for the haul. "Do you know," the lady continued, looking down her nose at Melon Head Myrtle, "it's taken them nearly a whole year to prepare these ships, and not so much as the paltry spectacle of a flogging to offer at the end of it. It makes you wonder what entertainment in this country is coming to."
"You speak of entertainment," said the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat; "what of the country's morals, its society, its fabric of law and order?"
"New Holland?" said Melon Head Myrtle.
"'Tis a land far to the south," said the lady; "so far to the south, apparently, that it is on the other side of the world; which makes it all the more incomprehensible that the British taxpayer should be put to the expense of transporting criminals there."
"To say nothing," said the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat, "of the country's morals, its society, its fabric of law and order. Do you know," he confided to the lady, "methinks that may be the reason why Barney stayed behind. He's always had a thing for law and order, ever since he stabbed that washer-woman."
"Stayed behind?" Pointing her nose elsewhere, the lady rested a lorgnette upon it and scanned the gathering for sign or spoor of Barney. "More likely he was left behind. His litter is so slow, what with his being such a substantial gent these days; it needs a lick of paint and a change of lackeys."
"This lady was asking after him," said the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat, indicating Melon Head Myrtle. "Were you not, madam?"
"Not at all, dearie," said Melon Head Myrtle. "I was just wondering what you were all arguing about."
"We were discussing the country's morals," said the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat, "and its society and its fabric of law and order, and the question as to whether the said fabric has now suffered an irreparable rent."
"I shouldn't think so, myself," Melon Head Myrtle reassured him; "not if you're sending all your criminals off to live on the other side of the world."
"That is precisely the point," said the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat. "What possible deterrent value can there be in a luxury cruise? Time was when a man could be hanged for cutting down a tree or raiding a rabbit warren; now it appears that such derelictions are to be punished by turning the malefactors into immigrants. It is even said that so much food and clothing has been packed onto those ships that the voyage may be survived by almost the entire cargo. Now where, I ask you, is the justice in that? Where is the morality? Where is the all-important punitive element?"
"It sounds to me, dearie," said Melon Head Myrtle, "like it's the natives of New Holland who'll be getting the punitive element, what with all those woodcutters and rabbit-raiders being foisted on them. There won't be a tree or a bunny safe in the place."
"Indeed, the felons will be immigrants, with all the cultural and economic advancement that implies," agreed the lady with the lorgnette; "though why the natives of New Holland should be permitted to benefit from the largesse of the British taxpayer I cannot in conscience imagine."
"Indeed, for the British taxpayer 'tis always a cruel, hard world," agreed the gentleman in the massacre waistcoat.
"Closing time," agreed Hooligan Motts.

It Isn't a Disaster, It's an Opportunity

Well, here's a thing: having blamed the Osborne economic miracle variously upon the last Labour administration, the weather, the Olympics, the Royal Family and some other, slightly less wealthy scroungers, the Government has now been informed that recession is rather a rah-rah thing after all. Lord Young, a blithering hold-over from the Thatcher era who has been kept in bacillus-like isolation in a Downing Street office since a previous gaffe in 2010, has decided that plunging workers into poverty means nothing but good for the dynamic entrepreneur. The TUC has registered a certain discontent at his remarks, so a spokesbeing accused the TUC of taking a Duncan Smith approach to the facts: "Lord Young doesn't say a recession is a good time, he says it can be a good time to start a business." As a matter of fact, Young's 2010 gaffe was precisely to say that the so-called recession meant times had never been better; he resigned on that occasion, but was sneaked back into office after eleven months. "World-renowned firms such as GE, Microsoft and Disney all started during a recession," babbled Young on the present occasion; the poor old duffer probably believes that all three firms are British and owe their existence to Mrs Thatcher. In a year or two he will no doubt start wondering aloud why the old bag receives no credit as co-inventor of Excel and executive producer of Bambi.