It's time to panic!

Disaster! The recession has finally hit home in Britain and the nation is united in its sympathy for the greatest victims of them all – the billionaires. The Sunday Times have revealed that those poor people have lost £155 billion between them, so you can see why they are so annoyed at having to pay higher income tax. I'm told that one, Peter Hargraves, who made his money and, no doubt, his own personal contribution to the bankrupting of the British economy, as a fund manager in the City during the boom, has threatened to go and live in the Isle of Man to avoid his new tax bill. Protesters are reported to be rioting on the streets of Douglass as I write. There is no truth in the rumour that a disabled former soldier has been running the London Marathon to raise the money to buy him his ticket.

On a lighter note, the Budget! I have discovered why Alistair Darlings growth projections and GDP forecasts were so far off what everyone else said. It seems that he has been using the wrong type of tea – when one is trying to predict the future, one should use darjeeling and not tetley.

The Budget Explained

That nice young chap Alistair Darling has delivered his Budget, managing to do so while keeping a straight face which was quite impressive. Well, drawing on my own extensive experience of such announcements, I offer my translation of what he had to say....

“We will introduce a new 50% top rate of tax for people who earn £150,000 a year”......this is a clever move to get gullible journalists to write headlines like this, this and this which say that only the rich will pay for the ghastly amount of borrowing that we're announcing. No one will notice that it will only raise a teensy fraction of the money needed and that the poor will pay all the rest...at least not until after the election. I personally am not worried about this, incidentally. Anyone who is stupid enough not to take their money in stocks so that they don't have to pay any income tax at all doesn't deserve 150 grand a year!

“All under 25s who have been out of work for a year will be offered a job or training”.....We'll bung them on a course where they'll get a worthless NVQ. Hopefully this will be so unattractive that they'll claim disability and that'll get them off the jobless statistics.

“You can't cut your way out of a recession!”....We're going to try to scare everyone into thinking that the Tories will close their local hospital to save money. We'll cut spending to ribbons but only after the election.

“Alcohol duty will rise by 2%”....Drunks won't notice

“Duty on tobacco will rise by 2%”....Smokers won't be able to help themselves.

“Fuel Duty will rise by 2%”.....if you say it quickly no-one will notice that this will actually raise as is supposed to be raised by that new tax on the rich.

“The annual ISA limit will increase from £7,200 to £10,200”.....no-one has that much money in the bank anymore anyway

“The economy will grow at 1.5% in 2010 and over 3% per year after that”.....It won't

“The Budget deficit will be £175billion this year”.....You're f***ed, we're f***ed, everyone is f***ing f***ed.

I also notice that the Treasury have had a great new idea for how to keep bankers off the dole queue. They will now be modestly remunerated for selling all the extra government debt which is necessary to bale out those selfsame bankers. And so the circle of life is complete.

Gordon Saves the Day...Again!

It has been a reassuring week. The G20 summit didn't actually achieve anything, of course, but it's nice to know that a big show with enormously rich and important people slapping each other on the back and annoying the Queen is still enough to distract everyone from the important matters of the day! The Security operation surrounding the Summit cost £7million – about enough to pay Jackie Smith's expenses for almost three months – and amounts to a valuable fiscal stimulus for the red carpet industry.

The circus then decamped to Strasbourg for the NATO summit, which welcomed the military giants of Albania to the alliance and at which Barak Obama demonstrated the American's new secret weapon which is based on the Vulcan death-grip – you can see the demonstration in the picture above. The Albanians were, I hear, very impressed.

And there was exciting news from the European Space programme in its continuing efforts to catch up with the North Koreans. They will be attempting to find new planets using the European Extremely Large Telescope – I hear that they were up all night trying to think of a name. The telescope will feature a mirror the size of five buses. British scientists are, as always, keen to participate, and have offered to provide the buses so that the others can measure the device!

The President Arrives

People often ask me what Government ministers do when they are not legislating, opening new rubbish dumps and watching pay-per-view pornography. Actually, I think the great scandal of the week – Jacqui Smith's husband's theft of the princely sum of £10.00 of public money for the purposes of entertaining himself while the missus was away – has been a little unfair. My nephew, Harry, who works for the Labour Party as an adviser, explained to me that it had simply been an oversight – Jacqui accidentally claimed for the TV bit of her bill instead of just the internet bit. Harry says that if Richard Timney, or Dick as Jacqui calls him, had got his porn online like everyone else then there wouldn't have been a problem!


As to what Ministers do when they are not doing any of the above, they attend international conferences. This provides numerous opportunities for meeting new people, drinking expensive wine and pretending to be important. This last is more easily achieved if you can convince crowds of protesters to turn up and wave banners at you. One of these events is due to happen this week in London, and Barak Obama will be coming to tell every one else what to do about the financial crisis. We will let him do this because he is not George W Bush. He will fly into Stanstead on the Presidential Aeroplane Air Force One, then on to London in the Presidential Helicopter Marine One, where he will have his lunch of the Presidential Dinner Plate Catering Corps One. Amongst his entourage will be a dedicated medical team and a supply of Presidential blood, in case he should be a victim of an assassination attempt. In the interests of saving money in these straightened times, any innocent bystanders injured in any such incident will be allowed to bleed to death. This is all in stark contrast to Gordon Brown, who has been travelling on his 'pre-G20 world tour' with nothing more than a crack team of eighty three PR men charged with trying to think up stories to distract everyone from his total lack of impact on anybody. He has been doing everything else himself and in he event that anyone thinks he is important enough to try to assassinate he will perform his own life-saving surgery with his home-made needle and thread. I shouldn't think he has too much to worry about, though, as all of the world's nutcases are too busy trying to find Fred Goodwin so they can bring about the end of capitalism and the emancipation of the world's oppressed by smashing his car window.

Incidentally, I understand that there is no truth in the rumour that Obama was initially reluctant to attend the conference and was finally persuaded only when offered the opportunity of a private meeting with Jonathan Ross to discuss ways of offending vulnerable people while broadcasting to the nation.

Following in the footsteps of Lionheart!

I have just returned from a visit to Beaumont Palace in Oxford, which is the birthplace of King Richard I, Coeur de Lion. Richard, you will remember, became embroiled in someone else's war in the Middle East and then bankrupted the country, two old English traditions which our current government proudly upholds to this day!

My American friends have been telling me about how their country has once again been following in the footsteps of the Motherland, which always gives me a warm feeling inside. They have enjoyed watching the public outrage about the massive bonuses that Britain's useless bankers have been awarding themselves and have decided to have a pogrom of their own. America's public enemy number one is AIG and the celebrity chat-show guest, 'Special' ten-pin bowler and occasional President Barak Obama has said that he will use 'all legal means' to get the bonuses paid back. To which all of America replies, 'All legal means?? Why stop there? Where's Dick Cheney when you need him? Cart the bastards off to Morocco for a bit of waterboarding and they'll soon pay it back!' My own advice to Barak would be to study the history books and take comfort from the true lesson of King Richard I. It doesn't matter if you spend your life in an endless round of futile battles, or if you wreck the country's finances and cripple its people with ruinous taxes, because in a few centuries you'll just be a minor character played half-heartedly by Sean Connery in a bad Kevin Costner movie with an awful theme song.

Gambling

I had the pleasure of attending the Carling Cup final at Wembley Stadium last week. Not to watch the football, naturally, but to show my support for the corporate entertainment industry at this difficult time. I did notice that one of the teams, Tottenham Hotspur, is sponsored by Mansion, which is a gambling company. The other team, Manchester Untied is sponsored by AIG, another gambling company and one which is now proudly owned by the American Taxpayer.
Gordon Brown himself made a trip to America to visit his ‘good friend’ Barak Obama and congratulate him on his new acquisition. I thought that Gordon’s speech to Congress went well for him as he had received nineteen standing ovations, and I said so to my nephew Harry, who works for the Labour Party. Harry was less impressed and explained that they had only applauded when Gordon said something nice about America. He says the same thing happens when a rock and roll band plays a concert and says that “insert name here is the best venue we’ve ever played!” This ruse is apparently enough to guarantee a big cheer. So well done to Gordon for being in touch enough to steal a trick from the popular music business!
The meeting with the President didn’t go quite as well with the President finding it difficult to remember who the rime Minister was, or why he was there. Downing Street have denied the rumour that Obama mixed Gordon up with the leader of the Scout Troop who he met on the same day. I must say I am a bit disappointed in the President – I mean, deep down we always knew that he knew and cared about the rest of the world little more than poor old George W. Bush but we thought that at least he would be able to fake an interest. We like phoney sincerity in Britain – that’s why we kept electing Tony Blair.

I was pleased to hear Gordon use the phrase, “Let us build tomorrow, today!” To let you into a little secret , I suggested the phrase to one of my friends in the Labour Party when he approached me for some ideas. Actually, I stole it from an old exhibition I went to on a visit to America back in the fifties. Back then they thought that the world of tomorrow would involve moon bases and Jetson style flying cars rather than a new Depression but there you go.

It wasn’t a very interesting trip, although I do remember visiting a lake called Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg in New England. Apparently, Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, in the language of the Nipmuck People, means Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch.

Business as Usual

It has been a reassuring week. I had been getting a bit worried about all that 'change' stuff in America, so I am relieved to see that when Barak Obama said 'troops out of Iraq in 16 months' he really meant 'troops not really out of Iraq in 19 months, just like John McCain would have done'. Politics is alive and well in the Land of the Free!

There was also good news from Ireland, where robbers managed to find a bank which still had some money which they proceeded to steal. The British government is rushing to organise a fact-finding mission to see what lessons can be learned on behalf of Britain's criminal fraternity who are on their knees after the drugs and prostitution market collapsed along with the banking industry. Not that the bankers are being paid any less, of course. It is just that the few who are still bankers are having to stay in to avoid the angry mobs and the many more who are now employed as government ministers have to worry about the tabloids finding out. Which makes all the fuss about Fred Goodwin's pension all the more unfair. I'd have thought that Gordon Brown would have thought £16 million was a small price to pay to get Fred out of RBS before he did any more damage to the economy – he was, by the estimation of a friend of mine who works for the treasury, costing the country around £3,000 per second, after all. Unfortunately for Fred he has committed the cardinal sin of the New Labour era – he has generated a bad headline for the government.

Amusingly, Tony Blair has set up a consultancy which will allow him to advise those governments who are willing to pay him lots of money as to how they should run their country. I am thinking of going into the market myself. For a mere £3000.00 per day, I will show you how to raise funds for your political party by selling government policy, honours, seats in the House of Lords and so on, how to use spurious evidence to drag your country into pointless wars and how to run your country's economy into the ground then get out before the shit hits the fan.

Drunk in Charge

There was more bad news for Gordon Brown today – Scotland has been named as having the world's eighth highest alcohol consumption. I'm told that Gordon is determined to act and intends to appoint an Alcohol Tsar to address the problem. He believes that with a little bit of hard work and focus will soon restore Scotland to number one! Now all he needs is to find someone in the Labour Party who is capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery.

Earlier in the week I had been appalled to learn of the alleged fraud perpetrated by Sir Allen Stanford, who is accused of running one of those massive pyramid schemes, or Ponzi schemes as we are now obliged to call them as the media have decided that the American term is sexier than the old fashioned British one. Interestingly, the same thing happens with the code names given to military operations. The British version of Operation Iraqi Freedom was the obscure Operation Telic and when the Americans launched Operation Desert Storm, the British part of the liberation of Kuwait was called Operation Granby. I once asked an old military friend of mine who expained that this is because our army has been around for much longer than the American one so has used up all the good code names. The tradition was started by King Harold who named his defence of Hastings, rather unfortunately, 'Operation Keep Your Eyes Open'. The Battle didn't actually take place at Hastings, incidentally, but at the nearby town of Battle. Now what are the chances of that happening?

Anyway back to the point, which is, if memory serves, Sir Allen Stanford. On the day the news broke, I was lunching with an old friend, Anthony, and I expressed my indiganation that this chap had sullied the Knighthood with his actions. Anthony tried to reassure me by explaining that Stanford doesn't have a proper Knighthood but rather one that he got from the government of Antigua and Barbuda in return for bankrolling most of the country. This did not make me any happier. I had to give the bloody Labour Party a fortune for my Knighthood – if I'd known I could have got a cheap one in the Caribbean I could have saved myself thousands, and worked on my tan at the same time! Stanford has not, of course, been convicted of anything illegal in America. We agreed, however, that he has already been found guilty of the worst of all crimes – trying to make cricket entertaining. One doesn't go to the cricket to have fun! No, one goes to spend the morning reading the paper, the afternoon slowly getting drunk and the evening sleeping it off. One doesn't want to be interrupted by the game!

Earlier in the week, I noticed that Gordon Brown paid a visit to the Pope, and he will soon be going to visit Barak Obama to pass on the Papal advice. I have it on good authority that Gordon has been telling everyone that His Holiness spoke about Jesus casting the money-changers from the Temple, and how they were then gainfully employed by Pontius Pilate regulating the Judean financial system as it recovered from the mid-1st century economic downturn.

Britain : Leading the World in Wild Oat Sowing!

The country has been scandalized by the story of a 13 year old boy who has fathered a child with his 15 year old girlfriend. When a reporter asked the young chap how he would manage financially he replied, “What's financially?” Gordon Brown has already sounded him out about taking over the Treasury once Alistair Darling finally gets the sack. The Children's Secretary, a man called Ed Balls (yes that is his real name – I double checked) expressed his concern by publicly vilifying the young couple and the local Social Services Department revealed that they would be providing intensive support – beginning by allowing the story to be plastered all over the papers. They will also be taking responsibility for putting the new father through intensive training for his new career appearing on daytime talk shows.

This is a welcome new departure for the Government's job creation policy. After all, the wheels are starting to come off the plan for getting unemployable former bankers off the dole queue by giving them jobs in government. Sir James Crosby has had to leave his job at the FSA, on the grounds that running the Halifax into the ground didn't really qualify him for a job which involves stopping people from running their banks into the ground. If that wasn't bad enough Glen Moreno, who was overseeing the government's massive new shareholding in the nation's banks had to resign after it turned out that he'd spent most of his professional life helping rich people to dodge tax, Tom Daschele style. I am astonished that this took anyone by surprise – he was a banker, after all, so helping rich people to get richer was his job.

Meanwhile, the government's drugs adviser has said that ecstasy is less dangerous than riding a horse. This is true. My daughter Sally once rode a horse into a rave and banged her head!

A Message from Above

The Pope has got into trouble for de-excommunicating or re-communicating or whatever the right verb is, an English Bishop who is also a Holocaust denier and all round loon. The chap in question is called Richard Williamson and, until this week, was virtually unknown in the UK, this being a country which now gets its religious instruction from the sides of London Buses. For this reason we were always spared from having to share in Tony Blair's religious 'journey' while he was Prime Minister. Now that he no longer has any ambition to do anything other than make money and be seen with famous people, he has been speaking at something called a 'prayer breakfast'. He even invited his good friend Barak Obama, presumably to tell him why invading Iraq was a good idea after all.

The BBC has been having further presenter-related problems. Carol Thatcher, who had somehow got herself a job on a current affairs programme got herself sacked after she called an unidentified tennis player a 'golly-wog' and Jeremy Clarkson called the Prime Minister a 'one-eyed Scottish idiot'. He was forced to apologise after massive protests from the Royal Institute for the Idiotic whose members were deeply offended by the comparison to Gordon Brown.

And, just to prove that some things never change, the England cricket team have been hammered by West Indies. The England and Wales Cricket Board, who are responsible for these things, have set a new precedent for decisive action by sacking the coach before the series even began. Good for them!

Lordy Lordy!

We have had an amusing new political scandal this week when several 'Lords' were recorded offering to change legislation for a fee. The criticism struck me as unfair. Now that the last three factories in Britain have closed and nobody wants our 'financial services,' as we still laughingly call our unrivalled expertise in crap money-making schemes, laws are the only thing we've got left to sell!

Meanwhile, the man who did such a good job of reforming our House of 'Lords' and who is now bringing that same expertise to bear on the Middle East peace process with equally impressive results has made a welcome return to the public eye. Yes, Tony Blair is back and he has been explaining how he is just like Barak Obama. The whole of America is praying that he is a wrong about this as he was about everything else. Tony has also been talking about his 'governance projects' in Sierra Leone and Rwanda which, presumably, seek to show the people of those countries why appointing corrupt legislators who will sell policy to the highest bidder is better than relying on boring old democracy to get things done.

The Blame Game

The Government has been coming down hard on the Bankers this week. Gordon Brown has said how angry he is at poor old Freddie Goodwin who has carried the can for the collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland, and 'Lord' Paul Myners, who is minister for the City has been slagging off 'grossly over-rewarded bankers' for mismanaging their banks. Former grossly over-rewarded banker Paul, I am told, came to this view in consultation with his ministerial colleagues, former grossly over-rewarded banker Mervyn Davies and former grossly over-rewarded banker Baroness Vadera, so I think we can trust him. It all comes as the statistics say that we have officially sunk into recession and the pound is approaching parity with the Hungarian Forint on the international currency markets.

But we should not be downhearted, for our great nation still has much to be proud of. We lead the way in developing the New Economy, where the danger of rich bankers taking silly risks in search of massive bonuses is safely negated because the taxpayer covers all the money they lose, and where the terrible spectre of massed ranks of unemployed bankers queuing at the soup kitchen will concern us no more as they will all be employed as Government Ministers. My spies in Downing Street tell me that he has already been on the phone to Barak Obama to tell the new President all about his new model. Let's hope the new President follows the wise old Scotsman's advice, eh?

And that's not all. We have a rapidly growing burglary sector, our Jobcentres and benefit offices can hardly keep up with demand and we lead the world in natural breasts, thanks to the efforts of Kate Winslett and her magnificent hits, Revolutionary Road and The Reader. My wife is a big fan of Kate's. She has followed that fine actress' career ever since she appeared in Sense and Sensibility. Lady Collar has always loved nineteenth century novels. I remember the days after we were married; she liked nothing better than to be tucked up in bed holding a little Hardy and she tells me that before we met she liked nothing better than getting stuck into Nicholas Nickleby or the Mayor of Casterbridge.

Planes, Trains and so on

There has been a bit of fuss about the Government's approval of the expansion of Heathrow Airport in the face of mass protests by concerned citizens. Polls suggest that almost eighty percent of British celebrities who live near London are opposed to the measure. The minister responsible for pushing through the plan is Geoff Hoon, who did such a good job of improving the transport network of Iraq back in 2003 when he was Secretary of State for Defence. In a startling change of policy for the Labour Party, Geoff has attacked the celebrities and suggested that as they probably fly quite a lot they might be being a bit disingenuous. Emma Thompson responded by saying “This is not a campaign against flying - we're trying to stop the expansion of Heathrow in the face of climate change.” (Translation, “i'll still be able to fly, silly, just not all of those nasty poor people with their flights to Ibiza and their air rage. There wasn't any climate change when it was only the rich who could fly, after all.”) I found the exchange most illuminating and I must say that, looking demure but sexy in a green Chanel tweeded muslin suit, Geoff cut a fine figure – surely he is one of the finest Transport Secretaries we have ever had!

The problem of lack of capacity at our airports is one that taxes the finest minds in Britain. I suggested to an old friend of mine who currently has a reasonably well remunerated consultancy with the Civil Aviation Authority that we look at the latest idea from America, which involves landing in the middle of rivers. Apparently I had misunderstood a news story and the plane that landed in the Hudson River had actually crashed having been struck by geese. My friend told me about a rumour that the Department for Homeland Security had initially swung into action having received intelligence that one of the geese had a suspicious looking beard and that Koranic verses had been discovered in the glove compartment of the car left in long-term parking by three of the geese. Luckily the plan to deport all suspicious water fowl had not yet been announced when it was discovered that the 'Koranic verses' were in fact a menu from the local Bulgarian Kebab shop and the beard was a smudge on the CCTV screen so no harm was done!

The big news of the next week has already been decided, of course. Barak Obama is on his way to Washington, cleverly sending out reassuring signals to right wingers by travelling to the capital to take up office by train, just as Benito Mussolini did in 1922. He will be greeted by an enormous cheering crowd, just like, well, Mussolini. Many things have been written about the President-Elect in the past twelve months but I bet he hasn't been compared to many Italian Fascist dictators. Let's hope he doesn't invade Abysinnia.

1950 here we come!

It's been an interesting start to 1947, I mean 2009. We've had massive nationalization of large sections of the economy, Keynes is back in fashion, governments are printing money, no one can afford to heat their homes and the Israelis are fighting with the previous owners again, following the logic that there would be little point of corralling the entire population of southern Palestine into the tiny space of Gaza if you are just going to let them fire rockets at their former homes whenever they feel like it. The President-Elect of America has promised to sort it all out just as soon as he is inaugurated (translation: he doesn't know what to do and hopes to God that by then the Israelis will have finished so he won't have to decide.) The only aspect of the good old days that has been missing was an antediluvian racist outburst from a member of the Royal Family. Even Prince Philip had lapsed into the occasional unamusing aside about fat children. So thank goodness that Prince Harry is both stupid enough to use racist language about one of his mates and also stupid enough to video it, lose the video and then see it sold to the News of the World.Finally the world is as it is supposed to be!

Amusingly, the news has broken that Barbie was created by a sex-maniac called Jack Ryan. This has come as a surprise, although not to anyone who has ever seen one of them. Apparently Jack particularly enjoyed the fact that the woman who provided the voice of a line of talking Barbies was tall because it meant that he could bury his head in her breasts when he hugged her. I remember buying one of those for my little granddaughter – I always wondered why it kept threatening to sue me for sexual harassment.

Looking into my Crystal Balls - Predictions for 2009

Many people have asked me to provide my predictions for the year ahead. This isn't something I would normally do, the prediction industry being, in my opinion, a load of hokum. This is especially true of astrology - I am very skeptical. Typical Capricorn. However, I have given in to the demands so here you go.

Barak Obama will publish his new book, “The Effrontery of Daydreams”. Hillary Clinton will release her own book, “Why the Secretary of State is more important than the President and other stories”. George Bush will publish his memoirs, “My Head Hurts – Global Leadership in the 21st Century”.

England will win the Ashes. South Africans everywhere will shrug and mutter about two bald men fighting over a comb.

John McCain will inaugurate the Failed Fighter Pilots of America Association and become its first President.

Madonna’s post mid-life crisis will be ended by her shattered pelvis.

Turkey will award Israel null points in the Eurovision Song Contest. Israel will retaliate by bombing the hell out of Ankara. The U.K. will come last in the Eurovision contest. Several people will be a bit upset.

All of the remaining unemployed bankers in Britain and America will be given jobs advising their government s on how to resolve the economic crisis. All of their advice will involve borrowing stacks of money that we can’t afford to pay back.

The Obama Presidency will be derailed by constant questions about whether Hillary Clinton’s effectiveness is being undermined by the revelations about Bill’s relationship with that intern at the State Department, the Washington correspondent of Al Jazeera and the Mexican girl who does the laundry. Hillary will blame a vast right-wing conspiracy even though there will be only 13 conservatives left in America.

The England football team will win a few more games. The press will declare it the greatest football team of all time.