Who’d have thought it, eh? All those times we said ‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse’, it turned out that we had been, for years, as it turned out. But hey, I don’t know what people are complaining about – contrary to popular belief, we have a long history of eating horses here in the UK. Yes, really. You can read about in Shakespeare – wasn’t Richard III so hungry when he was having that ruck in the car park in Leicester that he offered to swap his Kingdom for a horse burger? “A horse, a horse, my Kingdom for a horse!” The scandal continues to spread throughout popular culture – poor old Desperate Dan is in therapy: all those years he thought he was eating cow pies, they were really horse pies. It was his own fault, though, he was so bloody thick he didn’t notice that instead of cow horns sticking out of his pie there were horse ears. But we shouldn’t be making light of this latest horse meat scandal – there was an earlier one in 1948 that everyone has forgotten – after all, according to the authorities it is a ‘criminal conspiracy’. Apparently there are gangs of swarthy Eastern Europeans going around slaughtering innocent horses and passing them off as beef.

Except, of course, that there aren’t. Whilst such scenarios might be the wet dream of the likes of the Daily Mail, most of the culprits so far apprehended seem to have come from closer to home than Romania, which the press were originally trying to finger as the centre of the conspiracy. Far from being a ‘criminal conspiracy’, this whole horse meat debacle is actually a typical ‘capitalist conspiracy’. It is all about some people in our much vaunted private sector seeing an opportunity to make a quick buck at the expense of the consumer. In a way, I don’t blame them – this form of rapacious, unbridled capitalism that this government from Hell we’re having to endure champions encourages all those self-styled entrepreneurs and businessmen to behave in this way. Maximising the profit is all that matters. It doesn’t matter what corners have to be cut to do it. But so what if people have eaten horse meat, they’ll undoubtedly say, there’s no harm in it and it isn’t as if anyone could tell the difference. Besides, horse is far safer to eat than beef – no mad cow disease. So, you see, these bastards are actually performing a public service!

But what other cheerful news has there been since the last editorial? Oh yes, one of those completely unaccountable and unelected ratings agencies decided to downgrade the UK’s credit worthiness from AAA to AA1. Devastating, eh? The economy just came crashing down around our ears, didn’t ? Well actually, it already had pretty much collapsed as a result of ‘Gorgeous’ George Osborne’s spectacular economic mismanagement. Quite why the likes of Osborne set such store in the opinions of these ratings agencies is beyond me. Let’s not forget that there were the self same bodies that failed to predict the banking crisis and, worse still, had rated many of the dodgy investment schemes, including sub-prime mortgages, as a good risk. Quite frankly, I think that it is high time that we set up a ratings agency to rate the existing ratings agencies. Then we can downgrade them every time their ratings turn out to be bollocks. It wouldn’t have to employ a complex system of ratings: just ‘crap’, ‘toss’ and ‘utter shite’ Believe me, it wouldn’t take long before people were able to put the arrant nonsense these agencies churn out in its proper perspective.

But horse meat and ratings agencies aren’t the things which are going to bring British society to its knees. Oh no, it’s going to be the legalisation of gay marriage. At least, that’s what a significant number of knee jerk reactionary bastards of right wing Tory MPs seem to think. Yes indeed, this piece of legislation is going to result in the complete collapse of British society. Their own party, they claim, has ‘no mandate’ for such legislation, having not included it in either their election manifesto or the coalition agreement upon which this accursed government was forged. Curiously, though, the fact that neither the Tory party nor the government it leads has ‘no mandate’ for its economic policies, health policy, welfare policy or education policy – all of which actually are destroying British society – doesn’t seem to bother them. Unlike gay marriage, they all gleefully voted for those policies in the Commons. The hypocritical bastards. I hope they choke on their horse meat burgers. Mind you, their hypocrisy sets a dangerous precedent. If it is OK for MPs to oppose policies because they have ‘no mandate’ and are therefore ‘illegitimate’, then surely it is OK for the public to do the same, defying any law whose ‘legitimacy’ they don’t recognise?

Still, it isn’t all bad news at the moment, is it? Pope Adolf is finally stepping down. Not because he is too Nazi, though, but because he is too old. Too old to chase those choir boys, presumably. Obviously that photo of him receiving an Iron Cross from Hitler is about to surface. It amuses me the way so many people leap to the old bastard’ defence when I mention his Hitler Youth past and involvement in covering up various Catholic child abuse scandals. Indeed, I even get them trying to play down the sexual abuse angle, claiming that it isn’t endemic in the Catholic church, just down to the actions of a few rogue priests. Then all the allegations about the UK’s most senior Catholic cleric break. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I certainly won’t miss Pope Benedict. Whilst not religious myself, I found his denunciation of non-believers like myself, made during his visit to the UK, utterly offensive, particularly his claim that atheists were somehow facilitators of the Nazi regime in Germany. A regime, incidentally, which he happily served as a member of the Hitler Youth, manning an anti-aircraft gun and shooting down British and American bomber crews. I can only hope that the Catholic Church chooses a replacement who doesn’t spout this same kind of hateful bile and remembers that Christianity is supposed to be a faith built on love. But it’s time to go already – another editorial done and dusted. We certainly live in interesting times, don’t we? Well, until next time, keep it sleazy! (You know, I think I’m going to complain – I could have sworn that I tasted beef in my horse meat lasagne just now…)

Doc Sleaze