Overseas Aid Budget Refocused To Help Those Who Help Themselves

Overseas aid must benefit the people of Britain, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell told the Royal Self-Preservation Society today.

Disease prevention, announced Mr Mitchell, is top of his wish-list of good-value priorities: “It is a stain on the face of humanity that, even in the 21st century, hard-working British taxpayers are still forced to spend money they can ill afford on numerous jabs before they are able to head for the sun-drenched beaches and beguiling ladyboys of Thailand,” he told his selfish audience. “The sooner we eliminate the threat of diphtheria, typhoid, hepatitis and tetanus from this wonderful holiday destination, the more convenient for all concerned.”

Other top targets for redirected aid include mandatory English lessons for the tragically ignorant people of France, generous subsidies to Australia’s bars and restaurants to guarantee full employment to gap-year students, encouraging the gun-toting police forces of Spain to adopt a policy of greater tolerance towards drink-sodden British tourists and a basic literacy scheme for British Airways’ worldwide army of baggage handlers.

Mr Mitchell also acknowledged that there was much work to be done in the field of defeating anti-British prejudice among America’s online community.

“The government will make it a priority to foster a deeper understanding among our redneck allies of the tininess of the fuck that the average British net-surfer gives about losing the War of Independence,” he promised.

“This is a long-term goal, of course,” he cautioned, “But one that will hopefully benefit generations yet unborn.”

Incomprehensible Torrent of Raw Binary Ushers In New Era Of Open Gvernment

Britain awoke this morning to a new era of open government, with the publication of 840 trillion teraquads of utterly indecipherable data by the Treasury.

The mass of apparently unrelated bytes is thought to be in a modified Excel format, but one which can apparently support pages of such size and number that, if printed out, they would occupy a physical space slightly larger than the known universe. Calculator experts also pointed out that, whereas typical Excel spreadsheets occupy three dimensions, the Treasury appears to have discovered a way to extend fields into several thousand entirely new dimensions hitherto known only to habitual drug users and Professor Stephen Hawking.

Freedom of information campaigners hailed the release of the meaningless bitstorm as a new day for democracy, adding that they hoped to ask the Met Office very nicely if they could perhaps borrow its supercomputer for the next century or so.

Queen Visits Plymouth, Admires Floating Lump of Machinery, Buggers Off Again

Her Majesty the Queen and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh yesterday slipped into Devonport Naval Base to see a big grey metal object they last saw 12 years ago when it was first pushed into the sea.

Her Majesty the Queen and HRH the Duke of Edinburgh then slipped out of Plymouth again before any of the inbred mutants infesting the area beyond the dockyard wall found out she was there.

“Phew, that was close,” commented the captain of HMS Ocean afterwards.

The Derrick Bird I Knew: By Everybody In Cumbria

An army of journalists from the daily papers swarmed like locusts over the sleepy backwater county of Cumbria today, interrogating every shocked resident for their impressions of the berserk taxi driver.

Their painstaking efforts were rewarded, as they built up a complete picture of the most evil man the world has known since Tuesday.

Derrick Bird, it emerged, was a taciturn taxi-driver who always kept his thoughts to himself as he drove his passengers around; a devoted family who lived for his annual trips to Thailand; a jocular visitor to the village pub where he often regaled the regulars with his amusing silences; a cheerful outgoing loner who was well-liked by the people from whom he kept his distance.

It is increasingly likely, say the experienced hacks, that Bird’s serial slaughter was triggered by a combination of factors, including: an argument with other taxi drivers; a dispute over a family will; background radiation from Windscale; nitrogen narcosis brought on by years of scuba-diving; one Bettaware catalogue too many on his doorstep; or a hitherto-unsuspected sympathy for moles.

“Each of these motives might, to the inexpert eye, appear somewhat unlikely to unleash the homicidal maniac who lurks within us all,” warned a psychological profiler today. “In combination, however, they form the classic blueprint for mass murder.”

Shooting Innocent Civilians Not A Job For The General Public, Say Police

As a shocked Britain reeled around the North Sea like a punch-drunk boxer in the aftermath of Derrick Bird’s deadly shooting spree, police chiefs urged the public to remember that gunning down harmless people in broad daylight is a job best left to the experts.

“This blood-crazed nutter displayed a shocking lack of consideration for his unfortunate victims,” said Britain’s top female police officer, Cressida Dick. “Gun ownership must be the exclusive preserve of responsible death squads who adhere to strict rules, such as Rule 1 – only shoot people whom nobody in Britain gives a stuff about. Brazilians who have outstayed their visas are a particularly enticing target.”

Don’t Just Stand There, Home Secretary – Do Something

THE NEV FILTER ASKS: how many more lives, Theresa May, must be blown away before the government takes the necessary steps to prevent these horrific mass shootings from ever happening again?

That is why Nev has compiled a list of demands, which he is sending to the spineless Home Secretary - who has never once, in all her weeks in office, said a single word against the powerful vested interests that run Britain’s notorious target-shooting ‘clubs’.

- An IMMEDIATE BAN on all firearms except those which unfurl a flag bearing the word ‘BANG’;
- Next, an ALMOST AS IMMEDIATE BAN on so-called ‘games’ consoles, so that NEVER AGAIN can impressionable 52-year-old minds be BRAINWASHED by the SICK writers of Grand Theft Auto in the ways of EXECUTING innocent bystanders;
- The SWIFT IMPRISONMENT for life of ALL middle-aged men living ON THEIR OWN;
- An URGENT INQUIRY to establish the level of GUILT directly apportionable to the cynical SIR BOB GELDOF for his utterly SICKENING murder anthem, ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’.

If you agree with these COMMON-SENSE demands, make your feelings clear to our irresponsibly complacent government TODAY. Print them out now, write OR ELSE on the back in lipstick and pin them to the door of 10 Downing Street with a carving knife.

THE TIME HAS COME to finally legislate once and for all against random nutters. They will say it can’t be done; but I’m a random nutter and I say IT CAN.

What I Saw From 2000 Miles Away: Melanie Phillips’ Eyewitness Account of Israeli Raid

Respected British journalist Melanie Phillips has braved world opinion by releasing her startling eyewitness account of what really happened on the Marmara, the aid-carrying ship ambushed by Israeli commandos yesterday.

Writing on the Spectator’s website, Ms Phillips tells how she witnessed the assault at first hand from her desk two thousand miles away in London.

“What the lazy, ignorant and bigoted BBC aren’t telling you is that these so-called ‘peace activists’ planned the attack from the outset,” she explained. “The Marmite was in fact loaded to the gunwales with wire-guided knives, heat-seeking cricket bats and pipes made of depleted uranium - deadly weapons in the arsenal of six hundred trained jihadists hell-bent on martyrdom. They deliberately steered their warship straight into the midst of a small group of off-duty Israeli reservists - who were harmlessly playing a friendly game of sea paintball in their rowing boats and towed gyro-kites - with nothing but bloody massacre in mind.”

The frightened Israelis desperately tried to escape, swore Ms Phillips, but evil strongmen trained in a secret al-Qaeda circus grasped the gyro-kites’ whirling rotors and dragged them down onto the decks, while the ship’s bows opened to swallow up the fleeing rowers. The terrified captives feebly fired their paint pellets – all of which, owing to shortages caused by cruelly-misguided UN sanctions, happened to be red - at the seething army of chanting terrorists, who only retreated after their weapons had all been broken over the heads of the hapless Israelis.

Ms Phillips stoutly maintains that it was then that the masked death squads brought out their deadliest weapons: BB slings, each one capable of unleashing a lethal marble that can easily kill if fired at point-blank range into an unprotected brain.

It was only at this point that one of the beleaguered Israelis remembered he still had the flare pistol with which he had started his innocent paintball game, and with one lucky shot managed to subdue the six hundred trained killers.

“It is clear that the entire world has got the wrong end of the stick, as usual,” said the omniscient Ms Phillips, as the woefully ill-informed UN Security Council issued a tragically wrong-headed condemnation of Israel. “The Israeli government has only got itself to blame for not getting its honest, unbiased version of events across to anyone but me.”

“It’s a good job I happened to be close by in London to witness the truth of these shocking events at the far end of the Mediterranean,” she added, before returning to her fearless exposé of the communist threat facing us all.

Elderly Lady Launches Scathing Attack On The State Of Things Nowadays

The morality of the times is today withering under a hail of blistering criticism from a little old lady who is telling everybody she meets that “it’s all sex, sex, sex.”

Doughty Mrs Joan Bakewell suddenly launched her tirade at a surprised care assistant who had just brought her breakfast tray, saying that everything “started going wrong in the sixties, when all those drug-crazed hippies started calling for free love, with their long hair and what have you.” She added that she was “seventy-seven!” before adding, “Seventy-seven!”

Warming to her theme, Mrs Bakewell harangued her dozing fellow-residents of the Sunset Home For Retired Broadcasters with a devastating critique of the pill, the legalisation of abortion, bra-burning lesbian suffragettes and the horrors of the Woodstock Festival.

“Them and their sexual revolution!” she raged, drowning out the familiar drone of Breakfast Television X in the residents’ lounge. “They even said sex was pleasurable and wholesome, when we all know perfectly well that it’s dirty and wicked and only to be tolerated when the husband instructs his lady wife that he’s very much afraid to say the time has come to create an heir to carry on the family name.”

“Now it’s sex, sex, sex everywhere you look,” she thundered, spilling tea everywhere. “We tried to tell them that women are pretty little fools who couldn’t make a sensible decision if our lives depended on it, but would they listen? Oh no! So now we’re in a pretty pass where single mums, without the reassuring authority of a man in the household, dress their poor little bastards – and I’m sorry, but that’s the only proper word - dress their little bastards in push-up bras and crotchless nappies before cheerfully delivering them into the clutches of perverts in raincoats outside the school gates!”

“And I’ll tell you another thing,” she fumed. “Every week in Smith’s I have to fumble through yards of the vilest pornography imaginable to find a copy of the People’s Friend. Where will it all end?”

Eventually Mrs Bakewell’s shrieks woke veteran newshorse Richard Baker from his daydreams, causing him to mumble that back in the sixties the most prominent campaigner for sexual liberation was, in fact, her.

With barely a pause for breath, Mrs Bakewell described Mr Baker’s recollections as the senile ramblings of a silly old twit, maintaining stoutly that “that Mrs Whitehouse had the right idea” and adding that she was seventy-seven before the duty manager finally managed to convince her to take her tablets.

Film Critics Divided Over New Israeli Blockade-Buster Hit

Newly-released movie ‘Pirates of the Mediterranean’ opened around the world this morning to mixed reviews, with an enthusiastic thumbs-up from Israel’s filmgoers tempered by brickbats from critics in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Sweden and Turkey.

The boisterous sea-going romp features an outnumbered band of jolly ne’er-do-wells (the Israeli Commandos, led by stylish, charming heart-throb Johnny Depp) on a madcap mission to intercept deadly humanitarian treasure before it falls into the clutches of evil, moustachio-twirling Palestinian civilians.

“The wobbly camera-work follows the regrettable modern fad of foregoing the use of a Steadicam to generate a spurious feeling of authenticity,” said a Foreign Office reviewer in London. “However, the feisty action sequences - in which a handful of jolly pirates, armed to the teeth and decked out their traditional striped handkerchiefs – cheefully leap into action against literally hundreds of club-wielding passengers are brilliantly choreographed. There’s a lot of killing, needless to say - but concerned parents will be relieved to learn that the blood-letting mostly takes place off-screen.”

The film is set in international waters, against a historical backdrop of Israel’s unilateral blockade of the lawless Gaza Strip. The plot - which some critics say is lost completely - involves a Turkish galleon setting sail to beat the blockade with its fabulous treasure of K-rations and sticking plasters, fiercely guarded by a rag-tag crew of six hundred peace-crazed ruffians scoured from the four corners of the globe. The boarding party of cheeky Israeli pirates sets off in a motley flotilla of leaky helicopters and wormy inflatables, determined to intercept the lumbering galleon and seize the prized aid before it can succour the desperate Palestinian hordes.

“Our happy-go-lucky heroes aren’t afraid of anything,” said enthusiastic fan Binyamin Netunyahu, who is proud of his huge collection of pirate toys. “Least of all what the world thinks of them.”

The world is already looking forward eagerly to a sequel, in which the US leads a huge fleet of heavily-armed men-o-war into the area to prevent any further acts of wanton piracy and bring the dashing cut-throats to justice. However, film buffs are predicting a long and disappointing wait.

Greece Fails In Bid To Be More Unpopular Than UK

Notwithstanding its valiant efforts to single-handedly bring down the entire eurozone and hurl the entire world back into the darkest depths of global recession, Greece failed last night to knock the UK off the top spot of Most Hated Country in the Europe’s Got No Talent song contest.

“Greece’s entry was as hateful as they could possibly make it,” said some tragic cloth-eared gimp who claimed to be an expert at this sort of thing. “The costumes that Georgios Alcoholios and Fuckbuddies wore were straight out of some camp travesty of Saturday Night Fever as it might be reimagined by Baz Luhrmann, just as the rules specify. As for the song itself, its infantile melody sticks in the memory like an evil brain-parasite, and its numbly anodyne lyrics were straight out of the International Business English dictionary.”

“Unfortunately for the Greeks, however, it’s impossible to ignore the unsurpassable loathsomeness of Great Britain in the eyes of the rest of the world,” he added. “Just as the hate factor for compliantly kicking off two unwinnable wars just to please George Dubya Bush was beginning to wear off, the rapacious thieving bastards of your notorious Square Mile ushered in the most devastating global economic meltdown since World War 2. That knocked four contenders right out of the contest before it even began – thanks to you, there isn’t a soul in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Montenegro or Andorra who was able to scrape together the cash for a train ticket to Oslo.”

Not content to rest on those laurels however, 8-year-old Josh Dubovine’s impassioned rending of “Any Old Shit Sounds Good To Me” came to the contest backed with the curse of 80s refugees Pete Waterman and Mike Stock, who are directly responsible for kicking off the irreversible downward spiral in popular taste that has brought the UK to a dark place where millions now sincerely believe that characterless vomit-streams of saccharine notes – which even Jimmy Young in his heyday would have considered too insipid to play on his Prog – are actually valid songs.

Needless to say, then, Greece’s hopes of achieving the coveted bottom spot were cruelly shattered as the British noise comfortably romped home with ten points.

Losers of the contest were Germany, whose 7-year-old representative Lena faces almost certain lynching when she returns home after securing an unwelcome 246 points - ensuring that Germany will be bankrupted back to the stone age by the ruinous cost of staging next year’s pointless extravaganza.