Starbucks Gives To Charity.

In a move that has accountants lost in admiration the multi-national company Starbucks has offered HMRC a £10 million voluntary donation. We asked a Starbucks executive for his view; "Starbucks have always donated to deserving causes and there are few more deserving causes than HMRC who have been forced to go cap-in-hand to scrape enough money together to pay its own inspectors. It's tragic - on a par with any famine in Africa or any typhoon-struck third world Caribbean country. We genuinely felt sorry for them what with government cuts, creative accountancy practices and political indifference. We've seen cases of very highly-trained inspectors, some of whom actually have GCSE's in Maths, without the requisite number of beads on their abacus and struggling to catch all the plumbers out there avoiding tax. Of course we don't regard our donation as a tax payment. We've actually recorded it as a charity donation which, as you know, we can offset against our actual tax liability. We recognise that we have a responsibility to those communities that we rip off with over-priced coffee and thought it only fair to dip into the petty cash and throw them a bone. We hope that our gesture might usher in a new era where multinationals like ourselves can decide for ourselves what tax, if any, we should pay. To be honest we've been doing exactly that for years, but this is the first time anyone has noticed. Mind you we wouldn't advocate this for everyone - especially the peasants who pay their taxes though PAYE."

Boris Calls For Britain To Be As Unequal As India.

Boris has been in India this week and has been bowled over by its progressive outlook. "I have been asking Indian businessmen what would make London more attractive for them as a place to invest," he told reporters from a picked selection of Tory rags. "To a man they have all said the same thing - we want to pay as little tax as possible and do whatever we like. It was a revelation and one that demands serious consideration. As everyone knows taxing rich people less then poor ones and allowing them to do whatever they like has been a resounding success over the last 30 years in the West, but India has been doing the same thing for thousands of years and look at what they've achieved. If we could do the same in Britain the working class, or untouchables as I now like to call them, would soon learn being grindingly poor is not so bad - in fact it is their patriotic duty to sacrifice themselves so that people like me can get even richer than we are now. Our city offers enormous opportunity for Indian companies to prosper at the expense of British ones and to export even more jobs to Mumbai where sweatshop workers have the opportunity to earn almost £1 per week." A photo opportunity with Boris riding a bicycle around the famous "Gateway of India" was later brought to an abrupt end when several Indian soldiers threatened to beat everyone with sticks because filming in the area was banned. "Marvelous," Boris told reporters. "If only we had soldiers patrolling the streets of London threatening to beat people with sticks at the least provocation we could really get things moving."