ASBO or ASBEE?

Good bloody God, is there no end to the onward march of this repellent police state?! I refer, of course, to the terrifying news that the government is now tagging bumblebees:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7258822.stm

Government ‘scientists’ attach tiny little electronic tags to these innocent, flighty little beasts, and use cowardly computerised devices to spy on the little chaps as they go about their daily activities. Can there possibly be a more flagrant abuse of our bees’ freedoms? A more intrusive intrusion into the lives of our fellow Britons?

Man’s Best Friend, the humble bumblebee, is reduced to the status of a common criminal, bracketed with the hooded young scum who infest our streets like a pimply plague. The gallant bee, defender of this sceptered isle since time immemorial, betrayed by neo-Labour gauleiters not fit to dust the pollen from their fragile little wings...

What child has not delighted at the wonderful food made possible by the modest bee, the sweet and tasty morsels conjured into existence by that monarch of insects? Who, after all, but a bee could have invented the strawberry cheesecake? Or the creme caramel, or the spotted dick? All of them, and more, harvested from the luxurious hives on our greatest country estates.

Or the contributions to medical science made possible by bees. It was, as every schoolboy knows, a bee who discovered penicillin.

And the glorious bee has made this island fastness of ours safe from the filthy, greasy, foreign sneaks who have long coveted our English freedoms. Who has never been moved by the story of King Canute (or, more properly, the stupid Cnut), that slovenly Scandiwegian usurper who, upon trying to turn back a swarm of Anglo-Saxon bees, was stung to death on a beach?

Or The Tale of St Bedevere and the Bee? It is to that inestimable holy personage that we owe our Christian heritage, and it is to that anonymous bee that we owe St Bedevere’s victory over the pagan Visigoths at the Battle of Spindle-on-the-Wold.

It is to an English, or possibly Belgian, bee that we owe our country’s eternal gratitude after the heroic arthropod stung the ghastly Corsican in his haemorrhoidal nether regions at the Battle of Waterloo, distracting him at a crucial moment. Was it not the Iron Duke himself who, upon sighting a regiment of bees, said, “I don’t know what they'll do to the enemy but, by God, they scare seven shades of shit out of me”?

And if the awful Austrian Herr Hitler had not had a mortal phobia of bees, the good Lord alone knows what would have happened at Dunkirk...

As I have said before, but it can never be said too often (especially to Blinkers 'Blinky' Blenkinsop, late of The Queen's Own Hooligans, due to encroaching senility), I didn’t fight and die in two world wars to make this sceptered isle safe for a craven crowd of neo-stalinist, backsliding, spineless, control freaks to start spying on bees!