Michael Gove Suggests Buying The Queen A New Yacht.

Michael Gove, the Minister For Destroying Teacher's Morale pictured above, has suggested that, to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, we should all chip in to buy her a new boat. We asked Mr.Gove, an enthusiastic monarchist and well known creep, for his comments; "I believe that, in this time of great austerity when people are finding it hard to make ends meet and millions are being thrown out of work, we need to cheer people up by spending £60 million of their taxes to get the Queen a new yacht. Its obvious when you think about it and is almost certain to get me a gong or a knighthood or something. I also believe it will be good value for money since it will cut at least half an hour off the time it takes Her Maj to get to Australia. The Ministry of Defence is all for it since it will almost double the size of the Royal Navy overnight and we have the support of the Transport Ministry because it will fit in with their plans for a high speed train service reserved for the rich and important. The money won't be a problem - we can always find some more from defenceless cripples, poor children or widows. With the Olympics and the Jubilee this year its the perfect time to showcase the best of Britain and disguise the depressing truth."

The Longest Gentleman's Club In The World.

While Cheryl Gillan, the welsh Secretary, sold her house in Amersham, which is 500 metres from the proposed route of the High Speed railway line, two months before the project was approved (by sheer coincidence), an engineering company has produced a report that shows conclusively that improving present services would be more cost effective. We asked a Coalition spokesman why the proposed HS2 line will be going ahead; "It's simple mathematics. There are 650 MP's most of whom have constituencies in the Midlands and the north or will find it easier to get to Birmingham rather than travelling directly to London. HS2 is a fantastic solution to this problem. Having made his or her way to Birmingham an MP will be able to relax in the VIP's lounge before boarding a luxury train which will whisk him of her to London in no time - all at taxpayer's expense and without rubbing shoulders with the rather grubby public who won't be able to afford a ticket. The equation is simple; MP's + Unlimited Access to Tax Payer's Money = An Exclusive Luxury Club With A Free Bar. Of course the bar won't actually be free for wealthy passengers who don't happen to be MP's, but for us it is since taxpayers pay for our G&T's, champagne and whatnot. The country will benefit because important people like us will be able to go about our business half sozzled without having the inconvenience of mixing with the lower classes. MP's will able to think great thoughts without being constantly distracted by the concerns of little people."

Where Is The Sympathy For The Greedy?

The Daily Mail ran a story yesterday about the Cole family, pictured above, who were once very wealthy and are now virtually destitute. The story itself is depressing enough. Mr Cole inherited what he calls a modest property that he sold for £600,000 and then used the money to fund an investment portfolio that included 84 buy-to-let properties in Huddersfield generating £150,000 per year in income. With that he bought his country mansion, valued at £2.5 million and paid for his four children's private education, leaving him with "only" £35,000 to live on. His problems arose when he invested in Romanian land that, he was assured, would get planning permission to expand his property empire. The land was going for a song and the seller appeared to be both stupid and desperate to get rid of it. In fact the seller was in such a hurry to sell the land and was so stupid that Mr.Cole moved quickly to take advantage of this person without making the necessary checks. But he had been caught in a fraud known in Romania as "the beautiful flower" - a deal too good to be true and entirely dependent on the greed and arrogance of the buyer. The land cannot and never will be developed - it is set aside for agricultural purposes and nothing else. Mr.Cole has now lost all his money, is about to have the rest of his properties repossesed and his children have had to leave their private schools. Oh well, you might think, they'll just have to get jobs. Unfortunately it turns out that every member of the family is incapable of real work and are trained only to use money as a means to take advantage of those less fortunate than themselves. Now the money is gone and they find that they are the "less fortunate" and their only effective response is to bemoan their fate and hope for sympathy from the rest of us. Unfortunately, that sympathy seems to be in rather short supply, as a look at the comments from readers of this story demonstrates. Why is this? Because Mr.Cole and his ilk have had the free run of this country for 30 years now and, during that time, they have never shown any sympathy for anyone else. They have taken advantage of a system that allowed them to use their money to further enrich themselves at the expense of others and has driven up house prices to levels that are now beyond the reach of most people. The "News In Shorts" cannot imagine that Mr.Cole and his wife have ever voted anything other than Tory and have probably spent many a cosy evening in front of their inglenook fireplace discussing the "feckless unemployed" and moaning that their taxes are being wasted on "benefit scroungers." Why no sympathy? Because prey animals rarely have sympathy when they come across a dead predator - they are merely thankful that it won't be hunting them and their offspring anymore.

Multinational Energy Company's Plans To Turn Sussex Into A Polluted Desert.

Cuadrilla, a multinational oil and energy company, have unveiled their plans to turn Sussex into a polluted wasteland amid howls of protest from local communities. The company proposes to extract gas from beneath the county using a controversial method, known as "fracking," that pumps chemicals under great pressure into the water table. Similar operations in the United States have led to high levels of pollution, poisoned drinking water and even earthquakes. Similar effects have been felt in Lancashire, where another "fracking" operation has already seen Blackpool shaken by a series of earthquakes. It is no coincidence that at least three television series from the United States, "Battlestar Galactica," "Caprica" and "Terra Nova" use the work "fracking" as a substitute for a well known swear word. We asked a spokesperson from Cuadrilla for their view; "The adverse side effects from "fracking" have been greatly exagerrated and, in our experience, can be safely ignored without any threat to our profits. There have been a few cases of people being poisoned and dying horrible deaths and one or two people have been crushed to death by falling masonry during earthquakes, but we feel that's a price worth paying for progress - especially in the progress of our company's profits. We have consulted widely with experts who agree with us and have successfully fought off all opposition by ignoring it. We have found some difficulty in rolling out our plans in Sussex because of the number of Tory voters there - something that was less of a problem in Lancashire - but are confident that we've bribed the Tory party with enough money to overcome this. We are considerably more confident now that David Cameron has made it clear that his party's motto - "Greasing palms is next to Godliness" - will be upheld."

Tories Show Their Caring Side.

In the wake of their underhand tactics to keep their Welfare Reform Bill on track and punish the undeserving poor and disabled, David Cameron has decided to show his caring side by signaling a change of position on Child Benefit for higher earners. Saddened by the idea that families with only one parent earning more than £43,000 per year might lose out and that they might have to cancel their membership of the Champagne Drinker's Club, he has indicated that he's willing to consider a "tapering" of the benefit rater than a sudden cut off point. "I've received several letters," he told our reporter, "from at least three people threatening to cancel their donations to the Tory party and to vote for UKIP next time around if I don't do something for these rightly distressed gentlefolk. Moved by their tales of having to possibly cut down on their consumption of Marks and Spencer's wines and on the number of times they can afford to eat out I think its vital that we do something about it. We can now afford to do it because of the cuts were making to the money we give to the crippled children of the poor who don't vote Tory and are, therefore, safer targets. Since the vast majority of people in this country appear to be as selfish and stupid as we always thought they were, we'll probably get away with it. We feel that bribing the wealthy to continue voting for us is a vital ingredient in our reputation as the new caring Tory party."

Tories Reverse Lords Defeat By Trickery.

In one of the most disgraceful abuses of Parliament last night Lord Freud waited until most peers had left the chamber for the night and then tabled an ammendment that reversed the earlier defeats inflicted on the Welfare Reform Bill. Then, having undermined Parliamentary proceadures, Chris Grayling, Minister For Attacking The Helpless, calmly announced that the government would continue with its policy of punishing the disabled and sick on behalf of protecting the rich. We asked Lord Freud, pictured above, for his view; "Wizard wheeze wasn't it? Now we can get on with being as nasty as we always wanted to be. As a Tory I've never believed that we should allow irrelevant things like opposition in the Lords to get in our way. Disabled and sick people will just have to accept that, as the weakest members of our society, we can treat them with the contempt they deserve. We believe that the British people are behind us on this because, if they weren't, they wouldn't vote for selfish swine like us would they?"

MI5 And MI6 Accused Of Abuses.

Moazzam Begg, famous for being detained at Guantanomo Bay by the United States, has been crusing the TV studious to register his disgust that no one in either MI5 or MI6 will be prosecuted for his false arrest. On the surface this appears to be a straightforward case of an innocent man being hounded by evil intelligence forces in cahoots with the even more evil CIA. Until, that is, you look into Mr.Begg's rather colourful background. As a youngster Begg was a member of a well-known street gang in Birmingham known as the Lynx gang. In late 1993, by his won admission, he crossed over the Pakistani border into Afghanistan with the leader of the Lynx gang, Syed Butt, and took training in an Taliban run camp. In 1994 he travelled to Bosnia where he briefly joined the Bosnian army and was, as he admits, involved in the fighting there. What brought him to the attention of the British authorities, however, was not his activities abroad, but a benefits fraud amounting to over £100,000 with his friend Syed Butt. Begg was acquited but Butt served 18 months and then went on to be arrested in the Yemen for planning to plant bombs and served five years. In 1998 Begg, now married, moved to the Pakistani/Afghanistan border where, he admits, he visited Al-Qaeda training camps. In 1998 he returned to Birmingham where, despite having no visible means, he opened an Islamic book store and employed an Algerian illegal immigrant wanted in France for terrorist activities. In the year 2000 the British authorities raided Mr.Begg's shop and seized several illegal books with such catchy titles as "The Virtues of Jihad" and "Declaration of War." In 2001 Mr.Begg moved, with his family, to Kabul in Afghanistan where, in late 2001, he retreated into the Tora Bora mountains with Taliban forces. In 2002 he was arrested by the Pakistani authorities in Islamabad after evidence came from a captured Al-Qaeda training camp that he had received money from that organisation along with a list of targets to be bombed in the west. Pakistan handed Begg over to the US who then took him to Guantanomo Bay where, he admits, he was never actually tortured, though he knows lots of people who were. After his release in January 2005 and subsequent return to Britain, Mr.Begg has lectured and written books about his experiences and shared a platform with Amnesty International. However, his reputation has continued to be problematic as he continues to associate with known terrorists and, in 2010, Gita Sahgal, then the head of Amnesty's gender unit, publicly condemned her organization for its collaboration with Begg, saying that it "constitutes a threat to human rights." In a letter to Amnesty's leadership, she warned: "To be appearing on platforms with Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender, is a gross error of judgment." Sahgal argued that by associating itself with Begg "Amnesty is risking its reputation on human rights." In the same vein Salman Rushdie has said: "Amnesty ... has done its reputation incalculable damage by allying itself with Moazzam Begg and his group Cageprisoners, and holding them up as human rights advocates.... Amnesty and Begg have revealed, by their statements and actions, that they deserve our contempt."
Hmmmm.

Implant Scandal Fortells Future Of The NHS.

As private health companies walk away from their responsibilities over the breast implant scandal and demand that the taxpayer should pick up the bill, the future planned by the Tories for the NHS is all too clear. We asked Andrew Lansley, Minister for Flogging Off The NHS, for his view; "They have a point - after all what's good for the banker is good for the quack. Unfortunately we can't afford it so these women will just have to lump it. We realise that its all gone tits up, but that shouldn't divert us from our plan to introduce even more privatisation into healthcare. It seems to us only sensible that medical care should be dependent on three principles; the total ignorance of the patient, the total irresponsibility of the healthcare provider and the profit margin. Any other consideration, such as the well being of the patient, the qualifications of the providers and value for money, must be secondary in a healthy market place. If we have a healthy free market economy in medicine it stands to reason that people's health will also improve. After all look what the free market in the finance industry has achieved. Of course, once the market in healthcare has been established, its continued success is entirely dependent on deregulation which has also proven its effacacy over the last 30 years or so. I hasten to add that our decision to privatise medicine has nothing to do with the shares we've all been buying in the private healthcare companies that have been good enough to donate money to the party of late. Perish the thought."

Greek Children Dumped In The Streets By Destitute Parents.

In a shock revelation today it has been reported that, as Greece runs out of drugs for the sick and infirm, Greek parents are abandoning their children in the streets because they can't afford to feed them. We asked a leading neoliberal economist for an explaination; "Yes, its terrible isn't it? But you have to realise that its better than the alternative - allowing the banks to go bust because of their own criminal ineptitude. Allowing the financial system, which has given us thirty years of successful inequality, to fail would be terrible for rich people - the only ones who count for anything. Free market economics should always be allowed to work its magic -with the obvious exception of the banks - because it will always deliver the right answer to all problems. If that means that innocent poor people have to pay the price, well that's just how it is. I've heard people say that this is unacceptable in 21st century Europe, but I don't really understand what they mean. Poor people are poor people whether they're here in Europe or in some third world country and they're simply not important. So a few Greek kids die? So what?"

A Message For David Cameron.

This is what democracy looks like - scary ain't it!