There’s been a lot of talk about dangerous dogs. I saw one just this morning playing with one of those things that squeaks when they chew it. What’s it called? A toddler. OK, so micro-chipping won’t stop them biting. But it might lead to an app to help you get through the park. People do buy dogs without thinking. I got one as I’d heard it was a good way of picking up women. It actually worked, but unfortunately I ended up with a girl who likes having sex with dogs.
Surely the solution is to ban all breeds except poodles. Then you can just get out the clippers and trim it into the shape of your desired breed. If you get hassle from some cretin with a pit bull the trick is to stare into the middle distance while making a low hum. Then slowly move your hand from side to side and this will mesmerise the beast. As for the dog, fuck knows.
A man was left to walk six miles home after he wasn’t allowed to take his pet sheep on public transport. He should have worn dark glasses – if anyone had questioned him he could have said it was his guide dog. Then when it was pointed out that it was a sheep he could start crying and say that meant he must have eaten his dog.
There’s a drug being launched to help depressed dogs. Well, when you keep bringing that stick back just for it to disappear again, you probably start to wonder what the point of life is . . .
9
ECONOMY
The government gives all of your money to the banks so you have to get food from a food bank. No wonder the people of Britain are angry at banks. Sorry, I mean mosques. Bankers are looting the world. You’re not in the middle of a recession; you’re in the middle of a robbery. It’s a robbery and the whole culture is just Stockholm syndrome. When you’re actually standing in the City of London it radiates a kind of 1970s sci-fi wrongness. If the country were a person the City would be classified as a disease centre, a wound or a tumour, and al-Qaeda would look suspiciously like chemotherapy.
The reason rich people are so unhappy is that luxury is only designed to be aspired to. It’s part of the sales pitch of capitalism – the advert. You’re not supposed to actually have it, any more than you’re supposed to eat the picture of a hamburger off a menu. Take that holiday brochure in which a waiter serves you a romantic meal on a beach. In reality, your chair leg would sort of sink into the sand at some odd kind of angle and you’d have to shift your weight in the other direction to try to counter it. The table would sink into the sand, too, altering its angle every time you pressed your fork down on to the plate. You would be dimly aware of being annoyed that you could see your waiter smoking under a palm tree between courses. Later, he would startle you by laughing explosively with a passing member of staff and you would vaguely wonder if they were talking about you. There would be little flies everywhere but they wouldn’t spoil the food, because all the food would taste of sand.
It’s an illness really, the pursuit of wealth. Beyond a certain point money is fucking useless. A pair of diamond-encrusted high-heels costing £276,000 are the most expensive shoes in the world. If you encrust anything with enough diamonds it can be the world’s most expensive. Stick a £50 note in dog shit and you’ve got a world record.
Only the very rich and the very poor can boast about the sheer act of having bought a thing. For the middle classes it’s all about connoisseurship. You can’t boast about your spending power, so instead it’s about your taste, as you burrow deeper and deeper into the marketed life. Connoisseurship is what used to be boasted of by merchants – ‘Look at all the lovely stuff I’ve gathered to sell.’ We’re still merchants but now we’re selling the idea of ourselves. And, of course, our personal taste is largely meaningless, but it’s all we’ve got, so we give it the force of moral judgement.
I’m studying for the economics of the future, trying to find out as much as possible about the currency potential of gold teeth, homemade antibiotics and monkey slaves. Soon, the days when our lives were dominated by the confidence people felt in the relative values of fictions that we watched through electronic screens will seem to our embattled children like we worshiped river spirits and forest dryads.
We could be in the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. That’s judging by the three main measures: GDP, employment and the size of coin most people would be prepared to pick out of a urinal. And to this day my gran still uses Bisto instead of stockings. Can’t say I approve; seems to me to be a pretty racist way of robbing a post office. But don’t despair, there are lots of ways to make a bit of extra cash. My tip is to go along to your local shopping centre dressed as a fountain.
Quantitative easing and low interest rates are just ways to make money for speculators by taking it almost directly from savers. There’s no point in saving any more. I’ve less interest in my bank account than I have in the Blue reunion. William Hague’s said there’s only one true growth strategy for the UK. Work harder. Advice that really paid off for that horse in Animal Farm. But he’s right. Unless we can at least look industrious, in a few years’ time the Chinese might overlook us and buy Spain or Ireland instead.
New disability proposals will affect me directly as I’m the owner of a prosthetic rubber fist that has resulted in my girlfriend being on disability benefits. Can she still claim? Iain Duncan Smith said he could live on £53 a week and a petition is challenging him to give it a go. Of course Iain could live on £53 a week. He makes more than that a day trawling ponds in children’s hospitals for loose change. He calls it ‘fishing for dreams’.
There was a petition to try to make him give it a go. That just focuses things on personalities. Campaigns focusing on the victims of policy now seem unthinkable. The real purpose of housing-benefit changes is to force the poor out of city centres so they can be defended during the 2018 X Factor sex riots. Water cannon used to disperse the sex riots will destroy a branch of Lush, turning the protest into a seething, anarchist Manumission. All the beefs of the UK grime scene will be forgotten as I pilot a hover-platform of top MCs over the sex riots, frothing it to our pulsing beats.
Surely far better than him living on £53 would be for Iain to live with a family on a council estate while living the exact same lifestyle that he does at present. Would it not be a more chilling reminder of class difference if he’s sitting in front of the TV, while two kids eat fish fingers complaining that they can’t see their cartoons because they’re being blocked by Iain’s cheese trolley?
Let’s not forget that being a minister is a precarious existence. If Iain loses his job at the next election he’ll be just like the rest of us, forced to accept some directorship for a meagre six-figure salary, in exchange for spending two days a week helping them add the maximum mark-up when flogging stuff to the next government. Will any coalition ministers take up the challenge of trying to live on benefits? Well, after 2015 I suspect plenty of Lib Dems will.
Of course, George Osborne is right and the only way to teach those bankers a lesson is to cut benefits. Just as the only way to fix the NHS is to leave a jar of beetroot outside the Stafford branch of WH Smith. The government says the shake-up in the benefits system is to make people less dependent on state handouts (and presumably a lot more dependent on drugs and alcohol). It wouldn’t surprise me if the Tories’ next big scheme was to create a network of tunnels that connected all the wishing wells across the country together, so all the pennies thrown in to grant children’s wishes could be collected in a central government vault that was then used to purchase MPs’ bed linen.
I can’t believe that woman who was swindling £42,000 a year in benefits by claiming to have imaginary kids. It’s immoral. Call me old-fashioned but that line should only be used to make it easier to offload new partners you’ve lost interest in. Seriously, if you know someone cheating the benefit system you really must act without delay. A simple bit of blackmail and you could be getting half their claim.
George Osborne exploited the anger and grief over the deaths of six children to further his case for welfare cuts. Bear in mind that if the welfare state were adequately funded social
services might have had a chance to save these children. Mick Philpott and the Chancellor have more in common than you might imagine. They both live in houses with a snooker room paid for by taxpayers; both are hated by the public and if they were left unguarded on B Wing they’d both be stripped to the bone like an aromatic crispy duck at a late-night casino buffet.
George Osborne has vowed to guide Britain through the looming threat of a double-dip recession. Straight into a triple-dip recession. Of course, a recession means more charities hassling us in the streets. I’d never make out a standing order for starving Africans. Donate the same amount on the same day each month and they’ll just get complacent. Far better to make sporadic visits and dance through their dusty village with a silver-topped cane throwing out coins and sherbet fountains. Or turn up on a random day being wheeled through their huts on a cart so they can suckle nutritional syrup from my giant, translucent prosthetic abdomen with cries of ‘Señor Abeja! Señor Abeja está aquí!’ (‘Mr Bee! Mr Bee is here!’).
I should add, there’s not a single Third World village where people enjoy students turning up for a gap year. Just send them your airfare, you fucking grief tourists.
The Chancellor has predicted six more years of pain. It’ll be more painful for some than others. Especially George Osborne. He won’t ever get an injection from a nurse that doesn’t hit a nerve. He’ll never again be able to pass through border control without getting a thorough cavity search. For the rest of his life even something as simple as wandering around a museum is going to be filled with misery, when he returns to the cloakroom to find someone has shat in his coat pocket. Why’s George so insistent that he stick to plan A? It’s like a bomb-disposal expert deciding on day one of his career that he’s only ever going to cut the black wire. I’m not going to question the expertise of a man who was a millionaire by the age of thirty (his age, coincidentally, when his trust fund paid out).
He’s promised us free childcare and faster broadband – an ideal combination. If you’re at home in a tear-stained nest of job-rejection letters the last thing you need is a toddler walking in on you during a mood-boosting wank. Motorists won a victory when it was announced that the 3p rise in fuel duty has been scrapped. So no doubt people all over the country will be delighted that it’s now going to be slightly less expensive than they first thought to gas themselves this Christmas.
I love the Budget. It’s great that we’ve set aside a time of year when a multi-millionaire tells us how much we should pay for fags and a pint. Everyone is agreed that Osborne’s Budget was far worse than we could have hoped for. I was hoping he was going to have an uncontrollable nose bleed that led to his death, slipping around on the floor of the House desperately trying to regain his footing like a dying cow, so I’ve got to say it was hugely disappointing. To be fair, the government has created loads more small businesses. Mainly by shrinking large ones.
All around Britain families always have no idea if the Budget has made them better or worse off, but there’s a simple way of working it out – it’s worse. Last year Osborne got rid of the 50p tax rate for top earners, meaning they’re now only dodging a 45p tax rate. I’m not sure the poor would mind paying extra taxes. The trick would be to have Osborne and Cameron crank out a few Adele numbers, then nick it off them in a text vote.
Osborne has employed what have been described as ‘stealth’ taxes on the elderly. Why the stealth? Remember these are old people; they have their televisions on so loud you could creep up on them in a Formula 1 car.
A report has warned of a crisis in funding for our rapidly ageing population. The government says it’s patronising to think that pensioners aren’t capable of still contributing to the economy. So, in a decade expect to see your grandparents tottering knock-kneed to and from the airport giving piggybacks to Chinese businessmen. More people will have to move back in with their kids. It worked for my granddad. Dad loved taking him out for drives in the country. Right up till he heard shouting through the cat flap and knew he’d found his way home again. When I pass seventy I’m planning to have myself surgically Siamese-twinned with my lad – I thought my arse to his shoulder, then he can pass me off as a guardian angel. I’m looking forward to a contented old age of shitting down his back like a pirate’s parrot.
We now have automatic workplace pensions. Ignore those who say £2 a week won’t lead to a good payout from the Post Office. Come retirement it should provide just enough for some tights and a shotgun. Extra pensions could have been done through National Insurance, but the Tories thought the safest thing was to utilise the evident skills of the financial sector. Is it such a bad thing we have to work in old age? If Nana’s rounding up trolleys at ASDA it could be a great way to get the weekly shop and the grandparent visit done in one go. Besides, the increasing shortage of NHS dentists means plenty of us will have removable falsies, a real asset if to make ends meet you have to go on the game.
People always say that no matter what the Chancellor does he’ll never make everybody happy. I beg to differ, as throwing himself from the viewing deck of the Shard would be guaranteed to raise public morale. Osborne joined Twitter and got abused – what did he expect? Someone who innocently got retweeted by Justin Bieber received death threats, let alone a prick who actually deserves it. This year the economy will grow by 0.6 per cent. To put that into perspective, we could make the economy grow by 5 per cent if everyone who reads this book went straight out afterwards and bought a bag of crisps. I haven’t seen figures this grim since I judged the Miss Dundee pageant.
Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester handed back his £1 million bonus. Iain Duncan Smith said Hester should give up his bonus but that the government couldn’t make him do so. That’s right, the government is totally powerless to tell people what to do – hence the fact we’re all allowed to smoke marijuana and keep chimps as pets. Hester says he gave it back because he didn’t want to become a pariah – that’s good, I was worried he’d done it because it was the right thing to do.
Barclays were fined for ‘manipulating the Libor’. I’m so disgusted with them I plan to take my custom elsewhere. From now on I’ll be nicking my pens from Argos. The fine of £240 million has taught Barclays a valuable lesson. That fixing rates is worth it. Why is Bob Diamond always referred to as ‘one of Britain’s top bankers’? He lost Barclays £290 million. My son still has the fiver his granny gave him for Christmas, which makes him a more successful banker than Bob Diamond. Fuck it, on the figures alone my couch is a better banker than Bob Diamond.
Hundreds of bankers might be prosecuted for fraud, following the rate-rigging scandal. They’d better have good lawyers or they could end up in jail. Unfortunately, they do and they won’t. Allowing MPs to investigate the banks is like getting Premier League football teams to investigate the sex industry.
Disgraced former HBOS banker Sir James Crosby asked for his own knighthood to be removed. Of course, it’s better to hand it back yourself rather than sit and wait for the Queen to come and take it off you by force. This is terrible news for Crosby – without his knighthood he won’t be allowed free access to museums, exhibitions and English Heritage buildings. I don’t think giving the knighthood back is enough – I think he should have his shoulders cut off so he can never receive one again. Perhaps it’s even time for an award that’s the opposite of a knighthood. Just so we can fully show our gratitude to bankers and the like, the Queen could tap their shoulders with a dirty mop and blow a raspberry, before they wriggle out the room on their stomachs while Prince Philip flicks them with a wet towel.
Boris Johnson’s warned the government that new bank regulations could risk ‘killing the goose’. I’m guessing that’s from the expression ‘Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs made from all that money we’ve all already fed the goose anyway.’ The deadline for the banks to make the changes is 2019, giving us the structure that’s needed to avoid a second banking crisis, just after a second banking crisis has already taken place. I�
��m not worried about the banking problems as I keep all my money in Jersey. Not in a bank but buried in the garden of a children’s care home. They won’t look there.
The recession has led to an increase in lending and there are new laws to clamp down on loan sharks. The industry still insists they receive few complaints, then again it can be hard to type an email in a plaster cast, especially when your laptop’s in Cash Converters . . . and it’s surprising how important teeth turn out to be in forming coherent speech.
Payday loan firms have been told to sort out their dodgy practices. Some have hit back, pointing out that without them as a safety net many people could fall dangerously behind on their online bingo commitments. The move was prompted by news of an imminent cash loans advertising push, started by rumours that Carol Vorderman was to have her eyes surgically replaced with slowly rotating spiral discs. The loans are supposed to be just till the next payday. But the way the economy’s going for a lot of people that’s not expected to be till 2018.
• • •
A study claims people in the most deprived parts of the country are spending a fortune on fruit machines. The government is genuinely concerned, as all the cash it’s diverting from the lottery could bring an end to subsidised opera. I used to have a gambling problem with the horses. I’d always want to play poker, but they’d insist on snap.
The government should at least bring back the one-armed bandits. Otherwise in a decade’s time the urban poor won’t even have the strength and dexterity to open their door for the monthly visit of the man who liposucks out their fat reserves to be rendered down for biodiesel.
The cost of lottery tickets is to double. Or put another way, the UK has announced a 100 per cent increase in tax on the poor. A risky move by lottery bosses Camelot, it could threaten Tory hopes to appoint them to run the NHS. The prize for five numbers will be halved, meaning people will soon have virtually no chance of winning £50,000 rather than virtually no chance of winning £100,000. It’s part of a bigger rebranding of the lottery, including changing the logo to just a single raised middle finger.
Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian Page 11