Yet another Corbyn policy stolen by the Conservatives: Jeremy comes up with nuke-free Trident subs, now Hammond has told the MoD to Remember Jutland and get Jolly Jack Tar behind those peashooters once more. None of this nancy-boy Yankie missile nonsense, fine British shells hand-crafted by granny all those years ago. Dig out the old Music while you Work bakelite 78 rpm crackly jobbies….Blighty can take it. Let joy be uncontained.
There’s no knowing where all this cutting will end. But Theresa May’s growing tendency to stab Philip Hammond with faint support suggests the Chancellor might be next. So in the true spirit of self-defence, I think Big Sister should keep Hammers in the job, but restrict his weekly allowance to four shillings and sixpence.
And once she is proclaimed Empress of Britannia on June 9th, she should demonstrate her unflinching commitment to austerity by having a Night of the Short Knives.
I don’t blame the BBC for being in a muddle: one minute it’s accused of being rabidly anti-Brexit, the next it’s in the dock for giving too much airtime to UKIP. But Auntie’s novel approach to hedging bets on the news really isn’t doing them any favours:
One outcome of this is the hasty organisation of a show-trial for Len on the grounds of lackey crypto-capitalist revisionary Blairite negativism, and plotting to stop the historically inevitable dictatorship of the 31% under the benign leadership of Yerimy Korbynov.
The trial will be chaired by Diane Abacus, who this afternoon told Channel Four News, “While we must not in any way prejudge the obvious guilt of comrade Mclacklustre in this matter, I would like to make it clear at the outset that the Shadow Politburo will be merciless in its pursuit of all those fellow-travellers with the running-dog Gang of 173 factionalists currently trying to undermine the Leader. Or at least, it was 173 last week but apparently………………………..I’m not…………………..sure….but we think………….it’s…………………………………about 211 now. Something like that.”
Ken Dodd used to do gags that began with “What a wonderful day for…”. One of his best was “What a wonderful day for walking into a synogogue and shouting ‘bacon!'” Yesterday, Boris Johnson decided it was a wonderful day for addressing the great and good in a Sikh temple, and bragging about how trade with Britain was making booze cheaper in India.
Sikhs don’t drink. Being a classicist, obviously BoJo didn’t know this. He is also hazy on other issues beyond ancient Greek, for example assault and battery, falsifying taxi emissions, the perversion of justice, stuffing away offshore bribes and other privileges known only to the few who are more worldly than he.
One day – we cannot know when – someone will write a movie script called Bringing Up Bojo. It will be the story of a naive classicist eaten by a crocodile, and then regurgitated on the grounds of being thoroughly disgusting. Rather like Nixon: as the gag in 1971 had it, “Dick Nixon tried to have an asshole transplant, but it failed. The asshole rejected him”.
And finally, Labour insiders who worked for the Ed Miller Band, says the FT, insist that the 2015 UK general election was won and lost on Facebook.
Based on the visual evidence to hand, they’re probably right.
Here’s a face, and it’s not in a book. It’s not much to ask that a wannabe future Prime Minister demonstrate his ability to eat something without it attacking him. And while this sort of premeditated tabloid shot is despicable, the need to premedicate Ed before sending him on such a mission was predictable.
The irony here is that Miliband minor went along with these risible “macho man of the People” stunts because he is a man of straw. If he had stuck to sucking McDonalds milk shakes through a straw, things might have turned out better for him. But we on the other hand would still be steerage passengers on the SS Eutanic.
It would be a relief to say “and so in the end, it all turned out well really”. But it didn’t, did it? A bloke on last night’s comment thread here opined, ‘If it’s a choice between numpty or nasty, I’ll vote numpty every time’. Which is, of course, how I got lumbered over here with Macron. And before that, François ‘Le plat écran’ Hollande.
Trump v Clinton, Macron v Le Pen, and May v Corbyn aren’t choices. They are items on the menu of a Soviet restaurant in Minsk circa 1978. This isn’t democracy, or anything like it. If the electorate is distracted, often dumb and – in 7% of cases – pissed when they vote, it isn’t democracy. If one Party is always bankrolled by the globalist 3% and the other by International Sorosocialism, it isn’t democracy. If around 45% of all votes cast in a FPTP system don’t count, it isn’t democracy. And if both digital and mass media can fake almost any “news” (and get away with manipulating the election result on the basis of it) it isn’t democracy.
Roughly 2057 years ago, Plato said that democracy was only possible with a powerful, discerning, informed and undistracted electorate.
In 2017 Cruel Britannia, we have none of these vital elements.
Until tomorrow then, by which time more surreality will have come to pass.
The Slog 