Work! Consume! Die!

by Frankie Boyle

  Of course, we might ask ourselves what kind of God it is. A God that thinks you shouldn’t receive medical treatment unless you can afford it; that tells us patent profits in the developing world are more important than affordable medicines. Go to your nearest scheme, look at the lives of the kids there, and tell me that it doesn’t demand child sacrifices.

  It will be interesting to see how it fares against the Chinese pantheon. The Soviet Union was bought off with promises of jeans and cars and cheap stereos. It’ll be difficult to sell the same mirage to China, because they make all that shit.

  The amazing achievement by the coalition government is to have laid the blame for the financial collapse on people claiming benefits for invalidity, local councils and single-parent families. As spins go, it’s amazingly bold, like blaming 9/11 on Duffy.

  Recently, I saw the headline, ‘Bankers threaten to leave Britain’. And thought, what’s the rest of that sentence? ‘Poorer than Somalia’? We gave billions to the banks to try to get credit flowing and they just stuck it in their balance sheets. For a while, the only available source of credit was Dragons’ Den. Of course, the government should have given it all back to the taxpayers. It was their money anyway, and they’d have got things moving, the economy buoyed by a sudden spike in sales of plasma TVs, decking and nachos. We’d have spent every penny and had the satisfaction of seeing the Ten O’Clock News reporting on Sony being taken over by Primark.

  Life is, in a way, pretty difficult for rich people. Money alienates you from your community and commodifies your relationships. The rich never correlate being cut off from other people (often physically behind gates and security cameras, in case somebody tries to take their money!) with their lack of affection for them. Also, rich people tend to be cunts.

  The Sunday Times Rich List could sell a lot more copies if it called itself The Kidnapper’s Bible. Comedy is represented on the Rich List, with Ricky Gervais doing well. How galling is that if you’re a temp? You work in an office and get six quid an hour. Gervais pretends to work in an office and gets £32 million. The obvious response is, next time you go to the office just pretend you work there. Will it get you £32 million? Probably not. But if your employer is a council, there’s a good chance that you’ll get a promotion.

  There are fears that Britain could be facing a double-dip recession, or worse still, a double-dip with misery sprinkles and fuck-where’s-my-job-sauce. We’re teetering on the edge of recession, just like the small-business owners teetering on the edge of Beachy Head. Let’s hope the recession catches a patch of daisies out of the corner of his tear-reddened eyes as well, or we’re in the shit.

  GDP is growing, but that doesn’t mean we’re out of recession. It just means you’ll be eating dog food along with your dog, rather than selling your dog to pay for it. The economy has grown by 0.8 per cent, which has the depressing joy to it of a 13-year-old boy who measures his cock every day.

  George Osborne revealed his emergency budget. The word ‘emergency’ makes it sound a lot more dramatic than it actually was. At the very least, Osborne could have run into the chamber in flames, while screaming, ‘Head for the lifeboats, we’re doomed, we’re all doomed.’ And exited while being chased by a rhino. But, sadly, that was all in the subtext.

  If your children ask you what a budget is, you should explain that what happens is that every year an evil millionaire tells the poor people how much they need to pay for a pint of beer. And it’s always a lot more than the poor people want to pay, so they get sad and angry. And you’re probably wondering how this evil man gets his power? We vote him in. And when we do that we get sad and angry, so every four years we choose a different millionaire, who likes a different colour to the one we already have. It goes red, blue, red, blue. And we do that every five years until we get so sad and so angry that we die. And what little money we might have left isn’t even given to our relatives. The evil millionaire takes some, and then it all starts again.

  Air-travel duty didn’t go up as expected. So, good news. You will still pay the same to sit in an airport lounge being filmed by Sky News.

  The education budget was cut by a quarter. At least classrooms are now so overcrowded the kids can keep warm. Families with three children have lost £1,700 a year. Though I doubt they’ll notice it through the blind hatred they have for each other. There are complaints over a proposed 20 per cent cut to the armed services. After all, if we’re cutting education by 25 per cent, the army will soon find itself overwhelmed by applicants.

  Of course, the biggest industry that lost out with VAT going from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent is calculator manufacturers. If people aren’t shopping, raising VAT is about as useful as Adrian Chiles washing his cock.

  There are some great bargains to be had on the high street right now, particularly if you want to buy a shop. HMV are going bankrupt. If you look closely, you’ll see that little dog has chewed off his own foot. Primark warned that high-street sales are dropping. Customers realised they can save a fiver or two by going through the cardboard box of forgotten clothes down the launderette. One exec actually said, ‘It’s ugly out there.’ He just needs to get out of the shop more. I blame their latest refit, which included more reflective surfaces. Primark – I don’t know who to feel most sorry for: the girls squeezing into something that makes them look like James Corden at a fetish club, or the kids in the Far East knocking the stuff up for less than the price of the pasty crumbs in their average customer’s cleavage.

  800,000 low-paid workers will no longer pay income tax, which will be a great comfort to them when their brothers are killed by a mental patient whose social worker was busy doing some photocopying. Everyone’s pleased that the low paid won’t pay tax on their earnings, as soon the only money they’ll earn will be thrown into a paper cup in a doorway. There were some further tax breaks for the poor, or there would have been if any of them still had a job and weren’t trying to claim benefits that no longer existed.

  Maybe one solution to unemployment’s not just to give redundancy money. Offer a hibernation option, as well. Then, when things pick up, the boss can open your straw-filled box, wipe your eyes clean with damp cotton wool, and it’s back to five days a week of Facebooking with a hangover.

  The government plans to boost the confidence of the long-term unemployed by making them do community jobs. I shouldn’t knock the idea. There’s nothing like trudging round a park picking up dog shit for a quid an hour to restore your self-esteem. There’s a performance-related element too. The harder they work, the more re-smokeable fag butts they get.

  Job hunters can have ugly tattoos removed at the tax payer’s expense. Fair enough. I mean, who’s going to employ someone with a spider’s web on their face? They’re much more likely to want someone with raw pink scarring in the shape of a spider’s web.

  Thousands of us face new bills for outstanding tax. There’s no point complaining; the government needs our money. Those Afghan weddings won’t accidentally bomb themselves. There are worries that fraudsters might start sending out fake demands. My tip – if it says, ‘Make it out to Terry’, don’t.

  The government’s been told its benefits changes could leave 40,000 more people homeless. It’s easy to underestimate the homeless. There’s a guy who’s always curled up in his sleeping bag in a doorway near me. Then, when I passed the other evening, he suddenly burst out with the most beautiful pair of powder blue wings. Sad to see him knocked down trying to reach that streetlight.

  Watching the coalition front bench, you can’t help but feel that if someone chucked a stake through Cameron’s heart all the Lib Dems’ shackles would magically melt away and they could be mermaids again.

  Cameron condemned the North-East for being overly reliant on the public sector. It’s almost as if, when you shut down all the industries in a particular area, 20 years on, those families seem quite keen to use social services. The area least affected by the cuts was Cheshire, where George Osborne has his constituency. The messa
ge is, stop voting Labour, or by the end of this government the only public service your areas will have is the weekly cart to carry away your dead.

  The public were consulted by the government regarding the forthcoming planned cuts. And, overwhelmingly, they said, ‘I vote for the dancing dog. Or the old woman.’ The public? Does London have a mosque big enough for a Ministry of Racism? Did you contribute? No? Well, our country is now run by the same nutters who email newspapers to ask how long you can keep tea in the fridge. Expect VAT to rise on everything except cat food and night-vision goggles.

  This wasn’t George Osborne’s first plan. Plan A was to spread the debt across his wife’s credit cards. Plan B was to feign mental illness. He went with Plan B. Luckily, he was helped out by Danny Alexander, who looks like the Honey Monster’s shaved to get gay sex on the internet. You can’t ask the general public to cut the public sector. Most of us aren’t even sure what the public sector is. ‘OK, general public. Let’s go … What is too expensive and needs cutting? What’s that? Phone voting for ITV shows, multipack crisps and having to put a pound coin in a shopping trolley even though you get it back? There we go, deficit sorted. Now, on to crime and justice – death penalty for cyclists, anyone?’

  The Comprehensive Spending Review showed that close to 500,000 jobs will be lost in the public sector. The government expect that, in the main, this number will be achieved by voluntary redundancy and grizzly suicides.

  Vince Cable, a bald eagle with radiation sickness, also cut public-sector pay. Not cutting expenditure on weapons or telling the banks to sod off. No, it’s those greedy council workers with their wretched jobs. Looks like council admin workers are becoming the biggest economic scapegoats since the Jews in Nazi Germany. At least we don’t have to make them wear armbands. We can just start throwing stones at anyone we see with a laminated ID pass on a neckband.

  The head of Suffolk County Council is paid £220,000 a year. Seems high, but she has to deal with the stress of finding bin men willing to deal with rubbish, recycling and the seasonal dead-virgin collection each harvest. If we knew how to run the country ourselves, we wouldn’t bother having a government. The only reason we put up with this charade every five years is we know that, no matter how idiotic the cabinet is, they are still not as stupid as us. To revive the economy we should make a lot of cuts in public spending, reinvest the money in the war on drugs – then change sides.

  A Tory MP said the disabled should be prepared to work for less money! If anything, they should get more money because it’s more difficult for them to get to work. There are quite a few steps down to my sex dungeon.

  By targeting the rich, Osborne has been accused of turning against his own. That’s not true. He’s yet to tax shedding your skin or the construction of Daleks. Osborne introduced measures to help first-time buyers, though. Good. They’ve as much right as anyone to have a house repossessed.

  He announced there would be 21 Enterprise Zones coming to the most deprived parts of England. Those areas are delighted. At least there will be some decent computers to steal soon. The chancellor also announced the creation of a state pension of £140 a week. Which sounds generous, until you realise the state you need to be in to collect it is dead. Osborne laid out plans to change the age of retirement in line with life expectancy. Great news for Scots, who’ll now be collecting their pensions on their 35th birthday. The crisis in pensions means millions of kids face having to support their parents in retirement. We owe it to them to make it easier. I’ve already got mine wiping my bottom for me so it’s less of a shock when it happens.

  Osborne said his budget would create jobs. I certainly see a vacancy coming up for Mad Max. The police force is facing spending cuts of 20 per cent. Such stringent cutbacks mean that from now on they’re legally only allowed to greet members of the public with two ‘Hellos’. And many innocent people will now have to run for their train without getting shot.

  Greater Manchester Police is to shrink by a quarter because of these budget cuts. It’s bad news as it means if you have your house broken into, there might not be anyone to turn up and say, ‘They’ll be miles away now. Nothing we can do really.’

  Three per cent of people think their jobs will now be safer. This consists of non-homosexual cabinet ministers, Amanda Holden’s team of psychiatrists and the staff at Britain’s largest bailiffs. People in the future will look back on this time and wonder why we bankrupted ourselves for a new tumble dryer, then crawl inside a house made of tumble dryers to die of radiation sickness.

  Ed Balls lecturing Osborne on his handling of the economy is like a Catholic priest tutting during a former altar boy’s confession. In fact, Ed Balls blasting Osborne for his handling of the economy is like us bombing Gaddafi for using the weapons we sold him … oh.

  It’s only now the books have been checked that the money wastage has come to light. In retrospect, Labour’s ladder to Mars, the elite Chihuahua military attack squad and Alistair Darling’s street-dance team look expensive. The Queen had to deliver a speech that will outline how the government plans to save £6 billion. If I were her, I’d have been worried that the plan involved wiring up her throne to the mains. It’s a strange world where a woman wearing an ermine cape and a golden crown worth £20 million gives a speech ordering us to turn the lights out when we’re not in the room.

  The protests against the public spending cuts were around a third of the size of the massive Stop the War march. Still, if it’s just a third as effective as that, then … well, never mind. The protestors felt that we should never have elected these people. And that we didn’t. Not to worry, several Arab countries have offered to back the protesters in toppling this corrupt regime. The crowds in Trafalgar Square were so raucous with all the jostling and hitting, at one point they actually started the Olympic clock. Fortnum & Mason was occupied – I salute that, having often felt that the proletariat was being held back by gourmet jams. Protestors smashed up an Ann Summers shop. Police beat protestors back with rubber batons. I think they were rubber batons, but I could have sworn that one of then had a fist on the end. Theresa May, the home secretary, wants to give the police powers to remove balaclavas from protesters. An easy way round this would be to have your face painted. Can you imagine the PR nightmare if the police started clubbing a group of people wearing clown make-up? Or when there was a YouTube clip of the moment a rubber bullet brain-damaged Spiderman? David Cameron was shaken by the protests and was working hard behind the scenes to have The X Factor brought forward.

  The true extent of public debt was revealed as £7.9 trillion. If that worries you, just think of it as, £7.9 oooooooooooo! I doubt this country could have got itself into more of a mess if our PM and chancellor were a cardboard cut-out of Fireman Sam and an ironing board. Or what about something like a hostess trolley? Prime Minister Hostess Trolley. You can imagine it being wheeled out to meet Obama and him getting his photo taken, smiling and tasting some roast potatoes. Everyone would love Britain again. Until after two terms in office that damned hostess trolley is jaded, tired and corrupt and, instead of its compartments being filled with delicious roast chickens and gravy, it’s just full of oil, shepherds’ heads and foreign blood. But, give it it’s due, warm foreign blood.

  It looks like customers are to pay for new bank reforms with higher charges. Before you say, ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ remember most cashpoints will happily swallow at least three After Eight mints. Some banks have already modified their customer-service lines to suit: press 1 for mortgages, 2 for current accounts and 3 for an impotent saliva-spitting rant at a minimum wager in Bangalore, who has to get clearance from a supervisor to even go for a piss.

  Many Lloyds banks are being closed. I wonder if they will use the branches to house the homeless? It would be cool to get your Big Issue pushed at you through a cashpoint. Just as banks were told they could keep ripping people off with overdraft charges, it was revealed that the government made secret £62 billion loans to HBOS and RBS. I kne
w that RBS was close to collapse when I went to the cashpoint to withdraw a tenner and out popped a scratch card.

  £62 million is twice Britain’s defence budget. Think about that for a second. The RBS and HBOS could have joined forces, raised an army and defeated Britain. Twice. Or, alternatively, they could have used the money to win the war in Afghanistan by the year 2346. All banks are now required to reveal how many staff earn over a £1 million. It’s basically a staff list with the janitor’s name covered in Tippex.

  The government lent £62 billion and there are approximately 62 million people in Britain. See what I’m saying? No, not that we should all get £1,000 each. I mean, the government should have used the money to cull at least 30 million British people. Suddenly, there would be prosperity and jobs for all. Admittedly, on the job front it would involve us all becoming grave diggers for the next 40 generations, but work is work.

  Councils have cranked up burial costs as a way of pulling in a few extra quid. Tell me about it. When my granddad passed away I had to pay not just a burial fee, but a fine for putting him in the wrong coloured bin. A bloke round my way’s offering a cut-price alternative. For 50 quid he’ll respectfully douse your late loved one in unleaded, then an hour or so later snort him up using a Henry Hoover with the face of Christ drawn on in marker pen.

  Andrew Lansley is reforming the NHS, in a similar sense to when they re-form beef to make it into dog food. They’re desperate to introduce much more patient choice. Presumably along the lines of, ‘So what’s it to be? C. difficile or MRSA?’ A report claims that the NHS is offering worse value than ever. Because of my regular volunteer work as a visitor, I feel I’m in a position to disagree. I’ve not paid for a loo roll in six years.

  GPs are going to get control of their own budgets, leaving them free to do what they do best: playing golf and molesting patients under anaesthetic. Sacking managers, that’s the key, apparently. Though I seem to remember when I worked at McDonald’s as a student and the manager didn’t turn up, me and the other plebs just ended up playing Russian roulette with a bucket of McNuggets, one of which was actually half a deep-fried tampon in breadcrumbs. Half of GPs think it’s acceptable to have a sexual relationship with a patient. I really think it depends on certain factors, such as how long the queue is in the waiting room.