Link test

 

UNION JACKAL

 

AUGUST 2022

 

 

 

 

Royal Air Farce

As seasoned military historians will know, many of Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots during World War 2 were Polish. Today, however, those plucky air aces from a chilly land in eastern Europe would be unlikely to get their wings not because of any aerial incapacity, but because they are the wrong color.

The RAF have taken a bit of a break from hiring white men, and the public sector in general is sounding like an eerie echo of the sign often seen in rental properties in Britain’s inner cities in the 1950s and 6os: “No coloureds, no dogs, no Irish”. Only now it’s “No whites”, and it’s the RAF.

 

 

 

 

 

Uncivil Service

You can sense when there is an election in the offing because Conservative politicians who are nothing of the sort start pretending they are. Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak have made it to the penalty shoot-out (with Truss favorite to win), the victor of which becomes party leader and therefore, by default, Prime Minister. There will be much muttering about the new PM being unelected, but only by those who don’t fully grasp the British constitution. The party with the most seats in Parliament is the one whose leader has to stroll round to Buckingham Palace and ask Her Majesty if they can form a government.

It would be a marvelous end to her reign if this time Queen Elizabeth II replied, “no you bloody well can’t. Now bugger orf”. We can all dream. But if the ruling UK party changes leaders between elections, they are quite entitled to do so. British readers will remember Gordon Brown taking the helm from Tony Blair. Or perhaps you would rather not.

But a seasonal gesture from “Tories” to try to shell-game the British electorate into believing they possess even one strand of conservative DNA is par for the course. Truss, for example, has promised to trigger the infamous Article 16 within days of her taking over captaincy of the Titanic, sorry, the UK, and to reform the notoriously Left-leaning civil service, the minions who put into effect whatever fever-dreams are dreamt up in the Cabinet meetings at Downing Street.

So the Civil Service has pre-empted the likelihood of Truss clearing out the woke clutter by going on a hiring spree to safeguard the diversity and inclusion jobs the likely next PM is targeting.

 

 

Black mischief

Marvel comics. Lost in Space. Cocktails. Tom & Jerry. The electric guitar. Sense a connecting thread? All of these are American imports into the UK which lit up my childhood. Okay, the cocktails came marginally later, but America used to glow in the dark for us when we were kids. Sadly, not all imports are as welcome.

Oxford Street is the Fifth Avenue of London, it is where people come to shop. Or, increasingly, shoplift. Footage – can you still call it that? – of a pack of kids openly swarming shops (which is what the British call stores) in Oxford Street went what the young people call viral.

 

 

Go south, young man

To Scotland, and an invasion of England from the highlands. These are not tribes of fierce and blue-painted warriors, however, but homeless people.

 

Ticking the boxes

The National Museum of Wales is, like all good national cultural archives, part art gallery.