The Moonshine Memoranda: They shoot horses, don’t they?

The following is the unedited version of an exposé currently featured in the 31st revised edition of Malleus Maleficus The Moonshine Memorandum. If you wish to report defamation or inaccuracies, please email MalleusMaleficus@aol.com To make a formal complaint under IPSO rules please contact IPSO directly at ipso.co.uk .

Clearly, there’ll soon be nine billion of us on this blue and fragile planet, for the world’s population increases by well over 1 million net, every single week. The population of England and Wales has also undergone its biggest surge since records began, and is projected to rise again by 4.4 million in the next 10 years. For his part Dominic deftly

suggested we “Unbuckle the sacred green belt and the housing crisis is solved.”[1] Indeed, what was once impending has now arrived. Hundreds of England's ancient villages are vanishing - swept away by a surge of housing development that is seeing historic communities engulfed into larger towns and losing their identities forever. In total about 3,000 acres of greenbelt are being lost annually to development, as Philip Hammond pledges 300,000 homes a year, “building new roads to unlock new land for housing.” At least 50,000 homes need to be built every 12 month to keep up with London’s projected population growth alone - one million per decade! But nothing in the semi-rural, gothic outlook of these ‘parched deserts of rock, stone and sand,’ is as grisly as the monochrome grimness of our forthcoming urban environment. For such is the proliferation that our inner cities, where toxic smoke clouds are among the worst in Europe, will soon resemble what Donald Trump called “a warzone. . . knives, knives, knives!” Though his comments provoked a furious reaction the next day in Westminster, the obvious point is that the menace is mounting, mounting, mounting.Knife crimes in London rose by more than 20% last year. Increases in the home counties are steeper. Up in Hertfordshire by 150%; up in Hampshire by 102%, Cambridgeshire up 83%, Warwickshire up 180%, Bedfordshire up 86%, Essex up 86%, Thames Valley up 50% and north Wales up 134%. Norfolk’s knife crime rate has rocketed 274%. 65% of those charged were from ethnic minorities. 80 people were stabbed to death in London alone. And then there is the matter of a 44 % rise in gun crimes in the last three years as gangs of weaponised teenagers with stunted lungs use firearms to settle turf wars. The number of acid attacks between 2012 and 2016 rose by 500%, while gridlocked traffic and vitamin B deficiency compete with every conceivable variation on the theme of human rage and iniquity.

Towering Inferno, Grenfell June 2017

This is life-or-death row, designed for the soon-to-be-entombed. An investigation by The Sunday Times found that children as young as 12 are carrying acid and taking it to school. Corrosive substance attacks increased from 183 in 2012/13 to 504 in 2016/17. If you pause, you’re done. The UK has become the addiction capital of Europe. Drug related deaths are at an all-time high. So is homelessness. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard detectives are seeking to recapture 1,884 dangerous offenders “on the run”- up from 903 in 2014. Nor will Scotland Yard any longer investigate low-level crimes if officers have to look at CCTV for more than 20 minutes. To say nothing of the grim Grenfell tower blocks that ring most urban cities. Every half-baked, ill-planned, systematic sociological idiocy, brimming with asthmatic kids who are made to breathe [2] only what they can find in the urine soaked stairwells of cockroach-infested sink-estates[3], has finally come home to roost. We are now way beyond satire. There are 850,000 people with dementia in the UK, with numbers expected to exceed 1m by 2025. For we must be absolutely clear about the escalating cost of an ageing population. With death being "an essential component of British palliative care," there are no probabilities here. What is going to happen between now and 2030, when “there will be a doubling in the number of Britons aged 85 and a 50% rise in those over 65,” is a purely mathematical conclusion.

After all, they shoot horses, don’t they?

Presently, Minette Marrin came out and did a monologue on the escalating cost of an ageing

population. Rational and self-possessed, the former Sunday Times columnist made her displeasure coldly clear: “There should be fewer old people.” Being a rationalist myself, I wondered whether she was one of those bright and farsighted figures in public life whose doctrines of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are borrowed from Mein Kampf rather than the Declaration of Independence? “The taboo against deliberately shuffling off this mortal coil, as people did in other cultures in the interests of younger people, is wrong,”[4] she declared, her cold white hand frantically stabbing the air. “Most people say they never want to be a burden to others in old age; it would be good if more of us felt able to prove we mean it, by taking a timely and pleasant walk up the snowy mountain.”

The prose style may have been a little oblique, but the sentiment was crystal clear: when you reach the right age and texture you’ll be left out in the cold and quietly encouraged to die. Not the flavour of heaven then, but winter in your heart and an ice-cold disposition to introduce the most convenient method of promoting mass suicide. Which only goes to prove, that if there is a way of killing human beings, then someone, somewhere has cracked it.

But let’s be clear about this: Assisted suicide isn’t a philosophy or an ethical movement – it’s a definite neurosis, and a harbinger of fall and decline. Once the arbiters of nations, the champions of the liberties of the world, now degenerated into the dejected spirit of a race no longer imbued with ideas of conquest and greatness, what you are witnessing is the death of a great civilization, the death of something which once sailed to the ends of the earth. The annihilation of a whole culture, a whole system of thought based on Hellenistic values and Judaeo-Christian ethics. Indeed, no one expressed the central issue more cogently than Habib Sudeki, an immigrant refugee from Kabul: “I carried my 95-year old grandmother across the mountains from Iran”, he said. “What, for this?” Or, to adapt the Gospel of Jeremy Clarkson, “How bad was your life in Afghanistan for this to be better?”[5]