Miliband Suddenly Realises VAT Increase Will Make Stuff Cost More

Those large buttons are a big help to little Miliband fingers

Ed Miliband, a little boy who leads the Labour Party, has just worked out that the VAT increase due to come into effect at midnight will make things cost a bit more.

“I got this brilliant calculator from my brother David for Christmas,” enthused Mr Miliband. “I showed it to my uncle Alan the postman this morning – he’s a shadow chancellor in his spare time – and he explained it all to me. Apparently that ‘%’ button isn’t much help at all! You have to use your head a bit, but if you times the price of something by 0.8510638, then times that by 1.2, that’s how much it’s going to cost tomorrow.”

“And it’s a bigger number!” he exclaimed.

Mr Miliband then went on to explain to a room of hung-over journalists that poor people seem to be poor because they don’t have an awful lot of money, and that buying things that cost more will make them even poorer.

“So my advice to poor people is not to buy things any more, and then they won’t be poor any more,” he concluded brightly.

Posh boy chancellor George Osborne, however, replied that his uncle Vincent - who is a bit barmy and goes dancing every evening - had given him a really good scientific calculator for Christmas, and he had worked out how to do compound interest all by himself, with a bit of help from a nice man from the Treasury.

“Apparently VAT is charged on every transaction, not just the point of sale,” he gushed enthusiastically, “So VAT is added when the manufacturer sells his product to the wholesaler, and again when the wholesaler sells it to the retailer and yet again when the retailer sells it to you. That’s why great-uncle Ted introduced it in the first place, apparently, when I was two. Add in their profits, and prices are jolly well going to go up by a bit more than the measly 2½% the dopey proles are expecting.”

“It ends up more like 10%, actually,” he chortled. “Next time little Ed’s mum takes him to Toys’R’Us to spend his pocket money, he’s going to poo himself.”