Shelves Cleared of Chinese Products in Quality Control Scare

Britain’s high streets closed down indefinitely today amid fears over the standards of manufacturing quality control in China, prompted by over 53,000 cases of children poisoned by melamine-tainted milk products.

 

The latest scandal involving China’s legendary devil-may-care attitude to safety follows years of product warnings involving dangerous items ranging from children’s toys to pharmaceuticals and pet food.

 

“The safety of our customers is our primary concern, as research shows that dead ones tend not to make repeat purchases,” said a spokesman for the retail industry. “In the wake of this latest incidence of adverse publicity, our members have decided to remove all Chinese products from their shelves until further notice. Unfortunately, this means that they have removed everything from their shelves until further notice. Oh well, at least now we know why all that Chinese stuff was so cheap.”

 

Industry experts are unsure how long it will take to get British manufacturing back in business, as most of the construction industry’s plant has been mothballed for health and safety reasons as it was made in China. There is also a severe lack of skilled labour to fill the factories - if and when they are built - after a generation of industrial decline in which Britain was supposed to become a world leader in the service sector, before all the jobs went to India.

 

“We’re probably going to have to wind the clock back about 250 years and restart the industrial revolution,” admitted a spokesman for the Confederation of British Industry. “My advice to people is to start on a small scale, perhaps sewing buttons on shirts for an enterprising local tailor, until we can work out how to put a loom or a steam engine together. Perhaps one day we can look forward to becoming a booming industrial power again, with belching factory chimneys in every town. Obviously, they won’t be burning Chinese coal, though - it’s probably full of uranium or agent orange or something. Perhaps we ought to start pumping 20 years of flood-water out of our coal mines.”

 

“Our leading scientists tell me that Britain should have home-built treadmill technology in about a fortnight,” said industry minister John Hutton. “At least that’ll bring the unemployment figures down.”