How to Buy Genuine British Justice

Your British Rights

In line with its remit to streamline immigration by stopping it altogether, the Department of Social Scrutiny has signed off a number of improvements to the complex and convoluted rights and responsibilities of living in Britain.

One over-complex principle is the idea of habeas corpus, which, in layperson’s terms, simply means “having a body” — specifically, the police or other agent of retribution bringing your body before a court so you can be punished for wickedness or unpleasant behaviour.

Behaviour you are almost certainly responsible for, given that you are appearing in a court of law.

The Department felt that this represented an unnecessary duplication of effort and has concluded it is merely necessary for you to “have a body” in order to have the full and withering bifocal glance of justice imposed upon it from afar.

To these ends, the department has produced Habeas Corpus 2024, which crucially updates the age-old presumption of innocence into something more fitting in the Eternal Moment of Danger we find ourselves in. Habeas Corpus 2024 has been enshrined in a new document — one for every UK citizen — which outlines the responsibilities of occupying a British body.

The tear-out document (above) takes the form of a customer guarantee for consumers of the United Kingdom — a non-transferable End-User License Agreement outlining what purposes your Britishness may be used for, what to do if you find your nationality is malfunctioning and how you can purchase additional rights from us.

Magna Carta 2025

In line with the new implementation of Habeus Corpus, the UK Government is also to issue consultation documents on a new iteration of the Magna Carta. Magna Carta 2025 is to be rewritten according to current best practise guidelines as posited in the Bletchley Report on Specialist Lingual Interface Methodology.

This modal reiteration of the document presents a unique facilitation juncture to assess the linguistic possibilities of anglo-phonic text modes in relation to the original Magna Carta.

Copies of this statement are also available in Welsh and in English.

History of the Magna Carta

1215 Magna Carta

Very long document that sought to limit royal power, widely regarded as the first embarrassed murmurings of the otherwise unwritten British constitution.

1216/17 Magna Carta reissued twice

Rewritten by pissed monks.

1225 Magna Carta reissued

With bonus content and new liner notes.

A key segment of the Magna Carta (above), in which one of the meeker of the 25 barons who forced the Charter onto King John, attempts to lighten what had become an awkward situation by adding a conciliatory “smiley” to the document. The very last paragraph, translated from the original Latin, reads “please delete as appropriate” and contains the world’s first instance of an asterisk.

A Quick Constitutional

We’re well aware that arguments on the subject of the British constitution can be as shrill and tiresome as a man from Birmingham criticising different grades of hardboard, so we won’t go all heavy on you. And neither will we start talking about your constitutional rights either (and would urge everyone else to keep their mouths shut as well).

It is widely – and erroneously – reported that Britain does not have a constitution, but this is both erroneous and wrong because, as the cradle of democracy itself, Britain has the constitution of a slightly elderly man. Great things are certainly in our past, but perhaps we should have written some of them down and shouldn’t go banging on about them so often.

As it is, the bits that were written down – the Magna Carta and the writs of habeas corpus, for instance – were done an awfully long time ago. And, like the cloudy and slightly hallucinatory memories of the piss-stained old man that is the United Kingdom, nobody wants to hear about these ancient, handwritten texts any more. A brief description of their indispensability, along with the government’s plans to introduce modern versions that will be clearly typed in Helvetica, follows on the other side of this monitor. We can assure anyone who holds a copy of these documents that they can now be safely thrown away. They won’t be needed again.