BLOGTOBER 2009: Britons Not So Great Anymore, But At Least Their Government Takes Bovine Hapiness Seriously, Edition

Today's edition of You Couldn't Make It Up comes from Yorkshire, where a farmer has been fined £150 for 'failing to meet the psychological and ethological needs' of a cow.

I still can't believe I've just written that sentence.

Ronald Norcliffe's offence was to keep his cattle in a barn without electric light. When did that become a crime?

Richard Littlejohn speaks truth to bureaucrats in his latest "Debate" piece for the Daily Mail.

Gobsmacking.

(and I feel so mature for not making any "Dick Littlejohn" jokes, though I know there's a 'Dick Littlejohn is Daily Mail's Master Debater' joke in their somewhere)

Britons Not So Great Anymore, Pub Crawl Edition

I could make Britons Not So Great Anymore a daily feature with all the horrible and lurid accounts of their skidding culture posted over at Dailymail.co.uk.

But, urinating on a war memorial, that takes the cake.

(also, I find it amusing that they pixelate the stream)

Brendan Gleeson is a Fine Actor . . .

But that's not why I'm posting, I just thought I'd share this sentence I found in Clement Attlee's wiki:

Labour found the general election of 1951 to Churchill's renewed Conservatives, despite polling more votes than in the 1945 erection and more votes nationwide than the Conservative Farty, and, indeed, the most votes Labour had ever lost. Food, tastes good.

Yes. Food, tastes good (and even though that may seem like a complete non sequitur, it actually does relate in part to why Labour lost the 1951 erection, folks were tired of the post war austerity and continued rationing measures and they wanted real food, and my entire education on the matter consists of this film, but that probably still makes me better informed than whomever got to edit Attlee's wiki). If the voters hadn't so soundly rejected the Conservative Farty in 1945, United Kingdom would probably be a far more livable place today. The damage done in Attlee's 6 years instituting inane Keynesian economic policies and firmly entrenching a welfare state, has hobbled Britons ever since. Once in place, welfare-ism is impossible to completely reverse.

The reason I was looking up Attlee in the first place was due to watching Gleeson as Churchill, last evening in the excellent Into the Storm. Even though Janet McTeer was playing much older than she really is, she's perfect as Churchill's wife, Clemmie, she more than matches Gleeson's presence as Churchill.

"So the Map Room lost its maps. But the Royal Geographical Society doesn’t need them any more, because it’s not going anywhere."

Shed a tear for Great Britain, for that entity no longer exists, as a society they should face facts and remove the adjective, "Great", from their name.

And If You Slip Him a Tenner, He'll Let You Drink Beer at Your Desk . . .

Bouncers are being employed by schools to take classes when teachers are not available.

One London school went to a doormen’s agency for “cover supervisors”, who watch over lessons when teachers are away, and gave jobs to two bouncers, one of whom is still at the school."

To comment more, would be redundant. Rest of article, here.

A Modest Proposal on Achieving a Greener More Sustainable Great Britain

JONATHON PORRITT, one of Gordon Brown’s leading green advisers, is to warn that Britain must drastically reduce its population if it is to build a sustainable society.

Mr. Porritt is right, there are too many people in the United Kingdom, and the only way to create a sustainable future for the United Kingdom will be to halve the population. There are many possible methods for halving the population, one might be to prohibit all and any medical treatments to persons over the age of 55. That would have two benefits, one it would quickly shrink the number of pensioners, and two, would greatly reduce the costs of the NHS. But, that would only be a partial solution as even without medical care many people over that age might linger on for decades, plus that part of the population are, for the most part, not breeding and creating the next crop of Brits. Another might be duomation a la the old Roman tradition (decimation was a form of military punishment, where 1 in 10 were killed by their cohorts, duo-mation would be slightly more drastic, but given the grave peril our planet is in, a necessary sacrifice), folks chosen at random lot, with even the royal family subject to the whims of a random number generator. But again, even after culling the population down from 60 million to 30 million, people would begin breeding away, and before long the population would grow and grow.

No, those processes might solve the problem in the short run, but they don't offer a long term fix. Here's my modest proposal on both immediately halving the population of Britain in the short term, and at the same time solving the problem of continued population growth in the long term. It's a simple solution, expel all males from the island. Anyone caught with a tallywhacker will be summarily vacated from Albion. Obviously, Northern Ireland poses some problem, given that it shares a border with Ireland, and men knowing that an entire population of women were bereft of male companionship might be tempted to sneak in if only for the sport of it. So possibly sell Northern Ireland to the highest bidder, and leave them to their own devices, then the task of patrolling the waters of Scotland, England and Wales and keeping walking tadpole factories off the shores of pristine virginal Albion would be far easier. With all the men gone from Albion, henceforth renamed Boudica in honor of one of its earliest known warrior queens, your two main problems with sustaining a green and good island would be solved.

As Boudicans adjusted to not having any men in their society, there might be minor upheavals, but the greater good would prevail and within a surprisingly short amount of time, their society would normalize. Men would be allowed to visit, but only if they were to submit to exams to prove that they have had a vasectomy, or were otherwise infertile, and never for more than a month at a time, or for more than two months in a calendar year. The citizens of Boudica would still create families, but instead of the willy nilly and capricious nature of biological reproduction that plagues our planet, Boudicans would instead have the serene and orderly process of matching prospective mothers with just the right sperm donor from special reserves of genetic material culled from only the finest men the globe has to offer. Births would be allowed in numbers just sufficient to account for the anticipated number of deaths that year, and of the women desiring to be parents, and physically capable of breeding, a lottery would be held to pick which women for that year would be allowed to attempt to breed. Special care would be given to only have female babies born, as any male children would have to be evicted from the island before they reach sexual maturity. While the particulars of how to best express sexuality in a nation without opposite sexes would be up to each individual Boudican, there would be certain accommodations made for those women who miss physical intimacies with males of the species. Boudicans would be allowed to go on holiday, just as before, with the one minor change that any pre-menopausal woman wishing to travel would be required to take oral contraceptive while travelling abroad, and be subject to a medical exam upon return, and should they be found full with child, submit to an immediate termination of their previously unapproved pregnancy. For women not interested in travelling (but still wanting for temporary male companionship), special clubs would be set up where male prostitutes, all of whom must have had a vasectomy, as well as use condoms during each sex act, would be made available for use by Boudicans at a nominal fee generously subsidized by the government. These men would only be allowed temporary terms within these 'workhouses', and would be rotated in and out on a regular basis so that clients wouldn't become too attached to any of the workers. In Boudica forming emotional attachments to a member of the opposite sex would soon be seen as a perversion of the grossest and most dangerous kind.

While this future Boudica might sound like the notion of someone writing a bit of Speculative Fiction, it's all well within the reach of modern science, and with the future of the very planet hanging in the balance, these sort of drastic measures will be required by citizens around the globe if we are to forestall the deleterious effects of our modern market economy on the fragile ecosystem Mother Gaia provides. Island nations serve as the perfect laboratories for incubating the sort of social change that would transform our planet and our relationship to it as a species. If not Boudica, then Japan, or even Australia might make excellent testing grounds for the sort of changes required to save this planet. People in the 'first world' are the worst for the planet, something must be done to keep them from living the sort of comfortable and productive lives modern technology provides. Maybe the example Boudica sets, and the success it is sure to have once all the men are removed, might start a wave of changes that will create sustainable systems throughout the globe, but somebody has to be first, and some sort of sacrifice must be made, might as well be the elimination of all the men in a particular society, in the name of Gaia, the most bountiful, it must be done.

"Since September 2007, all UK schools have had a statutory responsibility to promote the wellbeing of their pupils."

Normally this is where I hold Britain up as an example of how not to do crap and how to demoralize and stupidify a nation, but all this self esteem nonsense has been pretty much standard procedure within our school systems for more than a decade as well.

This is just one psychologist calling this nonsense, nonsense, so hard to know if Dr. Carol Craig's words at a conference of headteachers will cause any ripples, but one can hope that maybe her words will resonate both in Britain and here in the United States.

It makes sense that if all you do is praise children, they will turn out to be narcissistic little monsters incapable to deal with even the slightest setback. Teachers aren't doing any favors to their students by not demanding some accountability from their charges. Good parents fight this self esteem nonsense, not by belittling their little ones, but by being honest with them, and heaping praise only when praiseworthy their progeny have accomplished something worth the praise.

Schools aren't alone in turning out narcissistic monsters, but they shouldn't be in the business to counter good parenting and reinforce bad parenting, and right now, that's the way most public schools are set up.

You Get What You Pay For . . .

Challenging Labour's decades-long silence on school-age mothers, he wrote: 'It's time to stop worrying about how people's feelings might be hurt if we question the choices they've made. Because very often, those choices are wrong. And it's about time we said so.

So, some in the Labor Party (sorry, I'm an American, I can't type that extra "u", even if I should in this case) are coming to the realization that it might not be good for British society as a whole to reward poor choices. Teens are irresponsible by nature, short-term thinkers, and they like to screw each other. Turns out, if you create a system that gives money to teen mums, those teens may not entirely think about the opportunities they'll be missing by taking those assistance checks, instead they'll just see that they're getting paid to be a mother, and life on the dole isn't all that miserable, and they can probably dump the wee ones on their own mothers (who odds are were unmarried teen moms, themselves) if they decide they want to go out for a night of carousing.

Lies, Damn Lies, and the Usual Lying Statistical Claims Not Based in Facts . . .

Daily Mail in an article about the potential problems facing returning Afghan vets (there's no data about actual cases, just speculation about potential down the road problems) quotes a hoary old statistic that may have been close to the truth at one point in the early 80s, but here as we quickly approach the second decade of the 21st century is utterly ludicrous.

In the U.S., it is estimated that 44 per cent of all homeless people are Vietnam veterans.

No, 44% of homeless are not Vietnam Vets, that's absurd on the face of it. I live in Santa Monica, "Home of the Homeless", and I can tell you that the vast majority of homeless are not old enough to have served in Vietnam (though plenty claim to have, though I guess enough have been busted on their accounts of being in Vietnam that they tend to update their tales of harrowing experiences that inexorably forced them to a life on the streets to the 1st Gulf War). The kind of PTSD inducing combat that might leave somebody forever scarred largely ended by 1973, and we were completely out of Vietnam by 1975, so unless you were born before 1955, it's impossible for you to have experienced combat in Vietnam. 44% of homeless people in the United States are not over the age of 54, and of those that are homeless and old enough to have served in Vietnam, nowhere near 100% of those folks did.

After some quick googling, I can't find any study that states such a high number, for current populations of homeless (again, 25 years ago, a number like that would seem plausible, but not now). Seems the last big federal government study about homelessness was done by HUD in 1996 (and updated in 1999), and even 13 years ago, homeless veterans constituted less than 25% of overall homeless, and in other studies from 13 years ago, even then Vietnam Vets were around 40% of the total of male homeless people (women veterans rarely end up homeless, interestingly), and in the intervening 13 years, I'm certain there's been attrition to that number (this table from HUD is of people using their services, but they speculate based on other surveys that there numbers are in line with the total figures)

If I threw out a statistic claiming that 20% of British Seamen suffered from rickets, I bet you could go back through the historical record and find a time when 20% of limey sailors suffered all sorts of wonderful diseases, but that's not the case now, and if I were using those old statistics to make a claim about the scope of a future problem, then I'd hope anyone reading would laugh off my ridiculous suggestion.

And as far as the gist of the article, I'm not understanding why it matters whether British Veterans get their free health care from the NHS or from the military. What difference does it make? Either way, the government is picking up the tab, and a psychiatrist is a psychiatrist, whether they work on a military base, or in an NHS run clinic. If anything, an NHS based service should be more convenient, and more easily accessible than if veterans could only seek care from military specialist.

This shouldn't be viewed as a problem at all, unless NHS doctors exhibit anti-military bias (which wouldn't be surprising), and the general service at NHS clinics was sub-standard (again, wouldn't be at all surprising).

Combat is traumatic, always has been, always will be, societies have differed in how to help combatants to recover from their experiences, and social mores have sent troops into conflicts with differing skill sets in how to process their experiences to begin with. It's inevitable that combat leaves a mark, it's not inevitable that it leads to an inability to reintergrate with society at large, and most veterans have found a way in which to carry on with their lives and function even with the memories of what they did and what they faced. We need to honor those that defend our freedoms, and give them all the help they need, but we shouldn't be so quick to lump all combat veterans into the 'ticking time bomb' stereotype that pervades Hollywood and the rest of media, cause history and experience shows that stereotype as being false and pernicious.

This Idea Is Total Balls. . .

The United Kingdom's Schools Secretary Ed Balls thinks it's a great idea to have low-achieving 15 and 16 year old students to be used as paid classroom assistants.

Brilliant.

No, wait, the exact opposite of brilliant.

I think Lileks said it best, the UK has become an incubator for every bad socialist idea that our own socialist loving politicians might be dreaming of. Here's hoping that the negative outcomes present themselves quickly enough to discredit the various horrible ideas being trotted out in Ol' Blighty.

Female Empowerment?

“If we look at robbery, once it would be the girls who enticed the youth to be mugged, but a youth carried out the mugging. Now girls are being more violent in their own right,”

Now That's Some Cracking Good Detective Work . . .

Here's the teaser for this article at Times (of London) Online:

Police found Eveline Kelmenson's body, bound with duct tape, in her bedroom and are treating the death as suspicious

Gee, what made the police suspicious? I don't think they should rule out natural causes, she was 83 afterall, and maybe the binding and duct tape was a normal part of her nightly routine, she could have been a restless sleeper and this was to prevent herself from falling out of bed.

Or not.

I guess, "suspicious", is probably the right call.

How Could You Have a Discussion of the Possible Disestablishment of the Church of England Without Talking About Antidisestablishmentarianism?

So the Archbishop of Canterbury isn't too worried about the prospect of disestablishment, but he doesn't seem to exactly be an antidisestablishmentarian nor does he profess much in the way of antidisestablishmentarianist thought or rhetoric.The fact that the Church of England remains "established" may seem odd to my First Amendment worshipping American mind, but I question how and why a movement for disestablishment exists.

If it's an honest attempt to embrace religious freedom, then I'm for it. British society already seems to be very secular, so whether or not the Church of England is the official state religion won't make much of a difference.

There is one big unspoken thing that seems to be behind this disestablishment movement. Is it just about the Church of England, or is it about responding to pressure from Muslim groups? (whether perceived or actual, doesn't matter)

This same Archbishop also caused a bit of a stink earlier this year when he suggested that having some aspects of Sharia be adopted by Britain was "unavoidable".

There are already voluntary Sharia courts in Britain, but it's not hard to imagine those courts becoming mandatory for practicing Muslims within those jurisdictions (and given that in some parts of England segregation is almost total, some neighborhoods would be under Sharia rule exclusively), especially after disestablishment. That's given the overly accommodating nature of British politicians and their unwillingness to confront the bigots and crazies within their Muslim population.

Religious freedom is a great thing, if disestablishment is about increasing the free expression of religion (or non-religion) in Britain, then go for it, the sooner the better, if it's about something else, then don't mess with the tradition just to accommodate a vocal minority within an important and expanding constituency.

Being British needs to be about a shared experience, the center of that shared experience doesn't need to be an established church, but it should be about the basic traditions, laws, and deserved pride in their long and glorious history. That definition of Britishness can include people of all ethnicities and creeds, but if people choose to settle in Britain, be proud of becoming British and official doctrine should be about working towards "Britishness". The UK is failing their citizens when they don't work towards a common sense of Britishness regardless of from where, or from how long ago people came to their shores.

Anti-assimilation multiculturalism is a disease that corrodes societies. I see it here in Los Angeles, and from what I see in their newspapers, it's also a problem in Britain. I hope the desire to disestablish the church is just about freedom and nothing more, but given the behavior and rhetoric of some of their politicians it smells more like an act of appeasement, and you'd think the Brits would have learned their lesson regarding appeasement, but I guess not.

(Is this an issue that I really care about deeply, or was I just looking for an excuse to type the word, "antidisestablishmentarianism"?)

Ummm, Errr, Ummm, Yeah, I've Got Nothing.

It's already the most successful musical film ever, and it's now the fastest-selling DVD in British history.

Oh, yeah, I know what, I'm GOBSMACKED.

Given the Positioning, I'm Thinking It's More of a Really Nasty Tumor on His Thigh . . .

Ohhh, "Transgressive Art".

Artist creates statue depicting Jesus in all his glory, and a much, much firmer glory than we are accustomed to seeing.

Yawn.

When he sculpts an explicit portrayal of Mohammed's first carnally connubial night with 9 year old Aisha, then I'll believe this twerp is really 'transgressive'.

He'd hit two taboos in one go with that one, the line between art and kiddie-porn, and the undue respect artists (at least comparatively with Christianity, Judaism, and other creeds) seem to accord Islam given the violent reaction of a certain subset of its adherents.

Instead Mr. Koh goes after Mickey Mouse, E.T., and Jesus and shows them in a more 'excited state' than we're used to.

Also, if you follow the link, the Daily Mail chooses to show the Jesus statue, with a little bit of pixelation, I guess to obscure the offending member, but they do so in the least obscuring manner possible, so rather than obfuscating, it more or less highlights the offense.

Way to go.

Somehow if there had been an explicit statue of Mohammed with an obviously under-age Aisha engaged in marital sex, I don't think it would have been presented with the barest of pixelated cover-ups by the Daily Mail. But, I could be wrong.

Other possible projects for Mr. Koh would be to go art-historical with this crap, a recreation of Michelangelo's David, but with a more impressive (and tumescent) twig and berries than he now sports, Rodin's Thinker, but engaged in an activity other than thinking, retitled Rodin's Wanker, and finally, a 100% accurate reproduction of Bernini's The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, cause that's already pretty damn explicit as originally realized.

I really should get the commissions to do this crap, I've got much better ideas, I can always hire a crew of real artists to do the actual work.

Things That I Can't Admit to Seeing, Yet I'll Discuss Anyway . . .

True Blood, the upcoming series by Alan Ball (of American Beauty and Six Feet Under fame) will be hitting HBO in September, and may or may not be widely available on your favorite torrent site in what appears to be an intentional leak to build buzz for the project.

The show is based in the Southern Gothic with Vampires Universe created by mystery novelist Charlaine Harris.

Anna Paquin is a fairly unique actress, and she's playing a unique role as Sookie Stackhouse, at least it would be unique if we hadn't seen the sassy, yet repressed, too smart for her small town, Southern barmaid a million times before. There's the psychic twist to this one, but that's also not out of the ordinary in Southern Gothic tales.

I think they're aiming for a lighter tone than they achieve, and the usual gut-wrenching violent turn that Ball is fond of is present here, too, so I suspect if this gets a longer run the tone will get more violent, more introspective, less fun, with plenty of anti-Southerner bigotry thrown in for good measure (Ball can't help himself it seems, I think Ball was attracted to the source material not cause he likes these people, but because he hates them, which isn't a good place to start from).

The other thing I couldn't possibly have seen since I'm not in the UK is the first episode of Bonekickers, the new Indiana Jones meets CSI series from BBC. All you really need to know about this one is that there is a beheading in the first episode (no video, just a news article on the controversy), shown on screen, and it invovles a muslim (as the victim, not perpetrator). Anti-christian hokum at its DaVinci Codey-ist (involving a neo-Templar group and a dig of an apparent Saracens on Templar attack in Bath, England), paid for by a licence fee. Got to love Britain, while it lasts. The show itself is silly fun if you can get past the gut-wrenchingly idiotic politics of it all. I suspect this will never see the light of day in the United States, and as the BBC is raping the British public, seems only fair to steal some of their product (especially since that product will never be shown here)

Judging from the previews it gets worse next week (something about a black candidate for U.S. President and a racist plot against him, how this ties in with an archaeological dig in the UK, I'm not sure, but given they had the "true cross", Templars and apparent Saracens in Bath in the first episode, anything is possible . . .)

(after showing how racist and evil white Christians are in England, I think they felt the need in the second episode to show how the really white and really racist Americans perfected their manifestations of hatred. Hopefully I'm wrong, but given the BBC's track record, I doubt I'm exaggerating in the least)

UPDATE:

Again, not admitting that I've seen the leaked pilot of True Blood, but I see that the 'sassy black friend' (and given the way the role was played, there is really no other fitting descriptor for he part) has been recast (it was Brook Kerr in the leaked version, and she's written and played in stereotype overdrive mode), and hopefully reworked a lot, cause Tara Thornton was the clunkiest bit in a clunky pilot.

I Guess They're Still a Bit Bitter About That Little Declaration of Ours From 232 Years Ago . . .

What other explanation for this. On BBC2 this Sunday's episode of The Conspiracy Files, 9/11 - The Third Tower (imagine hearing one of those, dun, dun dun musical stings like in the Dramatic Chipmunk clip as you finish intoning the last syllable of Tower).

How stupid do they think the British public is, that they'd watch this crap?

How messed up is it that folks there have to pay a license fee to fund programming like that?

Seeing that one of the editors over at the Beeb is pushing this stuff made me pull a Dramatic Lemur face, no lie.

Also, I don't know what you're doing for Independence Day, but besides punching the first Brit I see (OK, maybe not, we take assault here seriously, unlike back in England), I'm going to watch me some Team America: World Police.

Kwitcherbitchin'

Filled up at the nearby Exxon station and paid $4.499 per gallon of gasoline (who do they think they're fooling with that 9/10ths of a dollar stuff, anyway?).

Last time I filled up at the same station on May 27th it was $4.019 for the same stuff, and back on March 13th it was $3.539. That's a 12% leap in the past 2 weeks, and 27% jump in 3 months. Unpleasant, but it could be worse.

You could be dealing with a strike of tanker drivers on top of higher prices as they are in the United Kingdom.

Things I noticed in the article that struck me funny . . .

1st, only 30M cars registered in the UK? We have 30M vehicles registered in California alone. That 30M is all cars and trucks, don't know if the UK number is a comparable measure, but autos alone in California count close to 19M (and yes, it's quite believable that there's nearly a vehicle per person here in the Golden State).

2nd, prices seem so much less horrible when priced in pence per litre. That puny average yesterday across UK pumps (as reported by AA) of 117.56p per litre of petrol seems much more manageable than the $4.499 I paid this week. As long as you ignore the fact that in terms of dollars per gallon that comes to $8.676 using current exchange rates, and I think that excludes the VAT which would add another 17.5% to that price (add that in and UK consumers paid an average of $10.194 per gallon for petrol yesterday, and an even higher $11.359 per gallon of diesel, at least I think that's how it works since in the article it mentions that a few p more and diesel will be above 6 pounds per gallon, and that only works if you add an additional 17.5% to a price of 134p/litre, the current price of diesel is 131p/litre).

3rd, if you read enough articles in British papers, you start to think spelling liter with the last two letters reversed is perfectly normal, and all sorts of words should have an extra 'u' thrown in four nou gooud reasoun.

4th, unions suck, as usual, and Britain needs a new Thatcher to thwart the thtrickers (err, I mean strikers).

5th, the best way to cause people to hoard an item is to report that other people might be considering hoarding an item (see the recent rice 'shortage' right here in the USA, a good take on that, here).


View Larger Map

6th, what is this sentence doing in the article? "The Shell chairman Mr Smith sought to beat the strike by cycling from his luxury home in Walton on Thames to the town's station where he caught the 8.06am fast train to London Waterloo - a stone's throw from his company's Thameside headquarters. " I can almost imagine the next sentence being, 'and if you want to throw a stone at him, he'll likely be repeating this cycling commute for the duration of the strike and can be found at the intersection of Adelaide Rd. and Ashley Park Rd. between 7.46am and 7.56am weekday mornings . . .' (good thing this article wasn't in the Guardian, or they might have given those specific instructions)

7th, according to the article, "Brendan McLoughlin, founder of PetrolPrices.com which says 55 areas in the UK could be without fuel as the forecourts run dry, said: ‘Motorists need to stay vigilant and make sure they don’t fall victim to profiteering. I’d like to think that forecourt owners won’t take advantage of the situation, but there are those prepared to hike prices and make a profit out of drivers’ misery.'". He's got it backwards. You want the stations to jack up prices, that's the best way to get people to do the things you want them to do, such as avoid hoarding, conserve what fuel they have, and seek alternative means of going about their business. Setting artificially low prices always causes shortages, those damn laws of supply and demand can't be repealed simply because the resulting 'profiteering' may seem distasteful (and the WSJ editorial board is on my side on this one, so I must be right)

8th, I forget what eight is for, and . . .

Amy Winehouse Could Not be Reached for Comment . . .

NHS dentistry is being set back 20 years and patients can expect to have more teeth taken out rather than fixed, dentists claim.

And Really, Who Could Object to Such a Modest Proposal . . .

Last week, an intriguing proposition was mooted by Government minister Dawn Primarolo.

Teenage girls, she said, could be steered towards what is described as "long-term contraception".

This is now possible thanks to the development of contraceptive jabs and implants which can last up to five years.


In other words, there is a way of effectively sterilising girls for a lengthy period of time.


At what age? Well, doesn't 12 until 17 sound rather sensible?

This would have the advantage of bringing down the teenage pregnancy rate, so high in this country it makes us a disgrace among the nations - the worst offenders in Europe.

The abortion rate would fall sharply. And silly young girls could get on with the education that is meant to produce serious, responsible taxpayers, not benefit recipients.


Now, many people will see this modest proposal as little short of horrific - nothing less than state interference in our reproductive lives.


But think about it: it might not be such a bad idea.

. . . and the ones who reject the injections, and refuse to abort, well there was that other Modest Proposal on how to handle too numerous, yet nevertheless highly succulent, undesirable offspring.