Bank of England Governor Shocked To Discover Capitalism In Banking Industry

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, spoke today of his utter amazement at finding that the banking sector - far from being run by Godfearing philanthropists, as his lifetime in banking had previously led him to believe – is in fact an unscrupulous gambling operation operated on a massive scale for the sole benefit of its scruple-free shareholders.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear

“If it is possible to make money out of gullible or unsuspecting customers, particularly institutional customers, why, then - saints preserve us - it appears that is perfectly acceptable!” he said of the City’s most hitherto-respected financial institutions, shaking his head sadly. “How, I ask you in all honesty, can a loving God allow such things to happen?”

“Well, what a stroke of luck that I discovered this before the Bank of England takes over responsibility for regulating the industry,” he sighed in an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph. “And there I was thinking that all I’d have to do would be to occasionally remind the banks’ big-hearted directors to keep a little back for their daughters’ weddings. Oh, my oh my.”

“I do rather feel I should warn any chap who has an account with a bank and takes the Telegraph that he might want to consider taking all his money out and stuffing it into a mattress,” mused Mr King, removing his splendid stovepipe hat to mop his fevered brow with a silk kerchief. “All I can say is, thank heavens that this only affects the very small number of gentlemen who can afford to have bank accounts.”

When the news was gently broken to Mr King that all sorts of lowly clerks, tinkers, ruffians of the lowest sort and even ladies are now in the habit of using banks, his grey hairs turned pure white and he fainted dead away.

When he was brought to his senses with a dose of smelling salts, however, the Bank of England’s governor declared that all was not yet lost.

“How fortunate, then, that the traditional manufacturing industries of Albion have a more moral way of operating,” he stammered as he supped a fortifying draught of brandy from his hip-flask. “God be praised, they at least care deeply about their workforce, about their customers and, above all, are proud of their products. With doughty self-made industrialists of the stern calibre and humility of Milord Sugar and the 1st Baronet Branson stiffening the social backbone of the nation’s economy, I can have no doubt but that the Empire shall yet prevail.”

Nation To Spend World Book Night Glued To BBC2

Britain is today looking forward to a nice relaxing evening in front of the telly, with viewers eagerly watching programmes telling them all they could ever want to know about the joys of literature.

Or you can listen to it while you're washing your pants

BBC2’s helpful contribution to World Book night kicks off with a short film showing the printing and distribution of a million free books which, by staying at home, they will not be receiving. Next, intellectual heavyweight Sue from TV’s Mel and Sue will go to Agatha Christie’s lovely house and visit a racetrack with the son of Dick Francis in a sterling effort to find out whether they preferred word-processing on Macs or PCs.

The next page-turning instalment of a gripping evening will see leading critics asked whether they think the boring old novel has finally had its day. Each will in turn put on their most ironic face when delivering to camera the line, “Er – um - not at all - um - no.”

Finally, in the highlight of the magnificently booky evening, viewers will be spared the effort of dragging a finger through a doorstop full of tedious long words thanks to the mercifully short film adaptation of ‘Brideshead Revisited’, written by somebody or other. They will then go to bed, where they will fall asleep comparing it unfavourably with Downton Abbey.

Clegg: Barnsley Wipeout Shows Lib Dems Remain Committed To Putting Others First

Mr Clegg is now even more eager for May's council elections

A remarkably cheerful Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg told reporters today that his party’s total wipeout at the hands of the Barnsley electorate was a sure sign that the people of Britain were at last beginning to feel the full benefit of his party’s compassionate influence on government policy.

“The message couldn’t be clearer,” insisted the sweating deputy prime minister. “The people of Barnsley Central are so confident that the current number of Liberal MPs is equal to the task of persuading the Conservatives to be nice to everybody that they feel that an extra one would simply have nothing to do all day.”

Asked why even his own party’s candidate had not voted Lib Dem, Mr Clegg clutched his own head for inspiration, biting his lip for several minutes before claiming that this amply demonstrated the selfless humility so typical of his party’s rank-and-file.

“What’s more,” he added desperately, “With only half as many votes as all the other candidates put together, Labour must be filling their pants knowing that it will take a decade at least before anybody forgets how awful things were under Brown and Blair.”

Meanwhile, displaying the same facility with numbers that it applies to immigration, second-placed UKIP told reporters that polling a fifth of the number of votes given to Labour’s candidate proved that, in fact, it was the real winner of the election and would shortly begin gathering a mighty invasion fleet at Barnsley’s Complete Koi and Aquatic Centre to liberate Continental Europe from the goose-stepping jackboot of Hitler.

May Bank Holiday To Be Replaced By Grim Wind-and-Rainfest

Saint experts now believe it was only a tiny dragon, or possibly a duck

The government today announced plans to formally abolish the generally rather pleasant May Day bank holiday, and replace it with either a religious holiday in rainswept April or an utterly meaningless – but equally howling and wet – day in October.

“The May Day bank holiday – a Stalinist ode to the global march of communism, ha ha – is now utterly irrelevant to the lives of the English and Welsh peoples,” said David Cameron. “It is typical of that tyrannical mass-murderer that he cynically chose a date frequently marked in the British Isles by the early appearance of sunshine. How much more appropriate, in the 21st century, to ditch this day of hate and replace it either with holy, damp and cold contemplation of the supposed victory of a soldier of the Ottoman Empire over an unfeasibly large fire-breathing iguana with wings – or, in Wales, of a geologically-active monk with a shoulder covered in pigeon droppings - or with a completely random but undoubtedly miserable day in October?”

“Not that it matters in the slightest,” he added, “Because either you’ll be forced to work through it, or you won’t notice it at all because you’re on the dole and your days blur into an never-ending vista of despair.”

Motorists Inexplicably Happy About Scarcely Relevant 1p Fuel Duty Rethink

We're saved

Britain’s long-suffering but easily-pleased drivers were ecstatic today over the news that prime minister David Cameron may reconsider the planned 1p rise in fuel duty due next month.

“Given that every 10p rise in the cost of a litre results in an extra 4½p for the government, and prices have already soared by 8p since this time last month – and remember, that’s on the back of the additional 2½% VAT windfall – well, let’s just say I’m feeling generous for once and leave that thought floating in the air for a few weeks, shall we?” beamed Mr Cameron as he aired his thoughts.

FairFuel UK campaign leader and former Clarkson straight-man Quentin Wilson - who was not allowed a calculator at school and therefore holds no truck with the confounded things - instantly pronounced himself delighted with the prime minister’s potential largesse.

“According to my trusty slide rule, this huge saving means that every single household in the UK will be £19,500 a year better off,” he explained breathlessly. “Well, give or take a bob either way. In everyday language, that means the difference between a barrel-scraping BMW 318i ES and an altogether more satisfactory 535i M-Sport.”

Meanwhile, proud oil industry executives have almost finished recruiting two complete armies of battle-hardened mercenaries, and will soon be ready to parachute them into Libya to assist both sides in the looming civil war that threatens to send global oil prices skyrocketing.

Times Readers Unshakeable In Belief That Eastern Europeans Covet Our Insanely Generous Benefits

The scene outside every single Jobcentre tomorrow, probably

The British public absolutely refuses to accept the idea that Eastern Europe will not empty overnight as the entire population west of Vienna makes a beeline for Folkestone’s Jobcentre, following the announcement that migrants from the so-called A8 countries - the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - which joined the EU in 2004 would be able to claim the full, lavish range of UK benefits from May.

This morning’s Times painted a horrifying picture of legions of workaholic Slavs greedily draining every last drop of glorious British benefits from our dole offices, then racing round to the nearest estate agents in their new Bentleys to buy up every single property in Mayfair thanks to the open-handed naïveté of the British taxpayer.

A timorous lackey of the Department for Work and Pensions vainly tried to suggest that if there really were any such thing as ‘benefit tourism’, all of Britain’s jobless would be in Germany - but his quavering voice was drowned out by an ugly crowd marching towards the nation’s ports and air terminals, armed with blunt instruments and chanting, “They took our British jobs, now they’re coming for our British benefits.”

Cricket bat-wielding Alvin Sweetman, 82, spoke for Britain when he snarled, “Mark my words: £64.30 a week is a king’s ransom to an unreconstructed ex-KGB communist living in a tin shed in Bratislava. He might get fistfuls of monopoly money anywhere else in Northern Europe, I grant you, but what your Ivan really craves above all else is the everlasting value of the trusty British pound in his pocket, and maybe even two.”

Generous Onanist Offers Copious Supply Of Special Man-Cream

Wee Billy Bampot, 37, a solitary pornoholic from Glasgow, has selflessly offered his bodily emissions to Icecreamists, the fashionable Covent Garden restaurant whose stocks of ice-cream made from breast milk [the rest of this story has been seized by health officials on the grounds of questionable taste]

Murdoch Offers To Sell Sky News And Bring In Fox News Channel

Rupert Murdoch, the ruler of the world, has told hunt secretary Jeremy Culture that he would be more than happy to offload the loss-making Sky News onto some jumped-up little media nobody like Richard Desmond, if that will help him decide to allow the megalomaniac tycoon to take over satellite broadcaster BSkyB entirely.

“Sky News is shit, we all know that,” said the plain-speaking former Australian, who cannot simply change his nationality to overcome tiresome foreign-ownership regulations - as he did in America - for obvious reasons. “For a couple of days last year, Kay Burley and Adam Boulton did their best to turn the election coverage into a slapstick sideshow - but for all their clowning, there’s still this deep-rooted culture of bloody journalism among the staff which will take abso-sodding-lutely years to wipe out.”

Because real news is just all depressing and shit

Under Mr Murdoch’s proposals, Sky News would be fobbed off as some kind of going concern to some gullible sucker with delusions of importance. Mr Murdoch would then be given carte blanche to buy up the rest of BSkyB’s shares, drop Sky News from its roster of channels as soon as the ink is dry and replace it with a UK version of Fox News Channel.

“Poker-faced horseshit about alien abductions, sightings of Christ in various packaged foodstuffs and the daily highlight of an interviewee with a brain being shouted down by the mindfarts of a botox-filled tailor’s dummy who’s thicker than concentrated whale juice are a much better fit with the typical Sky viewer profile anyway,” smiled the billionaire who controls what half the world thinks. “We can pack the ad breaks with all kinds of half-arsed shit. Let’s be honest, the kind of target audience that reckons the Big Society is some kind of slimming club probably won’t have too much trouble believing that they’re going to retire on the profits they make from popping a load of gold-coloured tat they bought off QVC into an envelope, are they?”

“Before I go, anybody got David Icke’s phone number? He’s got just the sort of gravitas I’m looking for,” he added. “And he can probably bring his own mic, too.”

Exeter University Hoping £9000 Fees Will Keep Out The Plymouth Riff-Raff

The University of Exeter today announced that it would be charging the full £9000-a-year tuition fees, and reassured its present and future students that although it would naturally be taking steps to encourage wider participation from less wealthy backgrounds, it would not be advertising this fact in Plymouth, obviously.

Exeter prides itself on its rigorous selection procedures

“Exeter has, over the years, acquired a bit of a reputation for being little more than a playground for rather wealthy young socialites who were too thick to get into Oxford, Cambridge or even Durham, and were too cack-handed to wangle their way in with their sporting prowess either,” said Professor Steve Smith, the university’s vice-chancellor and CEO. “Well, it’s nice that people say such kind things about us, but until now we’ve never really had anything really concrete to back it up with.”

“I think it goes without saying, of course, that our neighbour, Plymouth Remedial College And Petting Zoo – to give it its proper name – wouldn’t dare to charge its simian exhibits anything like the full whack,” he added. “If they did, the ghastly place would be empty in seconds and their fat frump headmistress knows it.”

“That in itself ought to keep the scum from travelling up here every day on the Shoplifter’s Special bus,” he explained with a grimace of disdain. “But just in case, rest assured that when I say we shall be meeting the government’s token target of offering bursaries to the underprivileged, I’m talking about the rather better sort for whom ‘making ends meet’ means hanging onto the Range Rover for three years instead of two.”

“We are deeply concerned about the vice-chancellor’s statement,” said Exeter Guild Of Union-Loathing Students’ hereditary president, the Hon. Annabelle Thykke. “And if he doesn’t extend his prohibition to Torquay forthwith, we shall simply have no option but to pelt him with scones until he relents.”

“Rah! Rah! Rah!” she added. “We’re going to smash the oiks!”

Hospitals Unable To Cope With Exploding Brains Crisis As Britain Tries To Work Out Moral Dilemma

Britain’s Accident and Emergency units are at breaking point today, swamped by a tsunami of pulled brain muscles as ordinary members of the public try to navigate the moral reefs of a pair of Christian fundamentalists barred from fostering purely because a child may grow up to be a wicked abomination unto the Lord.

Ian Wright was an early victim, live on Channel 5

“Mind where you step, there’s bits of fused brain all over reception,” warned a hollow-eyed junior doctor. “I haven’t had a five-minute break since eight last night, and they’re piling up in the corridors.”

“At first I thought, ‘Well, if any son of mine came home one day and told me he’d had a cock right up him and loved it, I’d remonstrate with him quite severely myself’,” said a woman with smoke streaming steadily from her left ear, who had just brought her husband in with the top of his head blown clean off. “But on the other hand, this couple probably think the world was created in 4004BC and ask for Jesus to guide them with the washing up, which is a bit barmy in my book.”

“And, of course, it’s even more complicated because they’re black,” she added. And then her head exploded.

“A legal point of view was sought in this case, and of course a court of law can only decide strictly on the basis of available evidence,” explained a legal expert. “Homosexuality has a genetic origin, and has been observed in dozens of species, and thus we know it is both real and natural. Whereas theology is, by its own admission, utterly unprovable. Can you smell burning? Of course, this begs the question: what if a homosexual couple were to foster a child, who then came home one day and told them that his new best friend Jesus was going to throw them into the fiery pit to burn in agony for all eternity unless they forsook their unspeakable sins there and then? Well, now, that’s a – Eject! Eject! Eject!”

At this point, the top of his head suddenly flew open and his brain splattered itself on the ceiling.

Meanwhile, neither David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Pope nor anybody else in a position of authority has so far touched this one with a bargepole.

Old Lady Makes Disparaging Remark About Young People Today

Joanna can't understand a word of their jungle music, either

A little old lady made headlines today by explaining, at some length, exactly what was wrong with the young generation.

“Children today have no morals and they’d thieve your pants clean off in a second if they thought you weren’t looking,” moaned doddering old Joanna Lumley, 64 in an afternoon phone-in to her local Radio Times. “They bunk off school all the time with their sick notes, and they only go in to hand in somebody else’s computer and claim they made it themselves.”

“When I was at school, a girl in my class was caned to death just for using too much blotting paper,” she sniffed.

“Back in the days of empire when I was a little girl, why, I used to clap my hands in delight to see charming piccaninny children barely two years old marching a hundred head of goats up and down, up and down all by themselves from dawn to sundown, with naught but a dry pellet of dung for their tiffin,” she reminisced, as dozens of cats weed all over the furniture. “If you asked a youngster to drill livestock now, they’d cut you with a knife. They would. I’ve seen it.”

“And I’d ban all these personal calculators from school,” she added, somewhat randomly. “And I wouldn’t let the little buggers leave until they could recite their times tables from memory up to 99 and chalk in all of Britain’s colonial possessions on the blackboard.”

“Nobody values education any more, that’s the problem,” snapped old Joanna, who used to amuse folks on the old goggle box before her tits went saggy. “If we’re not careful, johnny chinaman will catch up and in ten years’ time we’ll all be speaking Mandarin.”

As her forgotten tea went cold on the tray, the little old dear offered her solution to Britain’s youth problem.

“What they need is discipline,” she snapped. “Send them all off to build work camps, work on the farms – blood and soil, that’s the stuff - build up their mental strength as well as their muscles. Then, when that’s done, conscript the lot of ‘em and we shall at last be ready to invade Poland.”

Why Oh Why Don’t Our Lefty Police Chiefs Declare War On Gun-Toting Darkies? Wails Daily Mail

Ashley Cole receives his orders for the ethnic cleansing of Belgravia

The Daily Mail today bravely broke ranks with the rest of Britain’s politically-correct tabloids, delivering an impassioned plea to the nation’s bleeding-heart liberal police forces to man up and blast tooled-up darkie gangs like Chelsea FC from our bullet-riddled streets once and for all.

“How much longer must the white race cower in fear behind our curtains while Ashley Cole rampages through suburbia with impunity, black as a coalman and potting away at his betters with a tommy gun?” begged editor Paul Dacre.

“Chelsea used to be a decent area,” stammered fearful local resident Harold Jonathan Esmond Vere Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, who only spoke to the Mail under conditions of strict anonymity. “Then these swarthy foreign devils swarmed into the borough, lured by the ill-gotten coin of their swaggering kingpin, Roman Abramovich – a Christ-murdering Jew, by the sound of it, or I’m a Chinaman – and holding their unspeakable cabbalistic voodoo ceremonies right on the doorstep of our dearly departed Imperial forefathers resting in Brompton Cemetery.”

The gangsters brazenly flaunt their hideout, yet the police do nothing

“Time was when one could see those johnnies off by swiftly taking a stick to their dusky hides, whenever one spied them brazenly walking along the same pavement as a precious white memsahib in broad daylight, if you please,” he spluttered indignantly. “But I confess I was somewhat put out when sambo Cole pulled a Mauser on me one day and openly threatened to break a cap in my fundament.”

“Those were his exact words,” he added vehemently.

Richard Littlejohn, the Mail’s foremost wordsmith, threw down a gauntlet to Britain’s loony-left chief constables – and in particular the notoriously gun-shy, homosexualist-loving Commissioner Sir Kim Jong-Stephenson of the Metropolitan force – calling for an immediate artillery barrage upon all those gangsters of the coloured persuasion who now defile the nation’s most sacred football grounds, the grandstands echoing with unintelligible heathen chanting as they gleefully force true-blue labouring-class captives like plucky little Wayne Rooney to dance for his life amid a hail of bullets.

Meanwhile, in an accompanying op-ed article, charming gentleman columnist Peter Hitchens bravely taxed many delicate lady readers’ sensitivities with the unwelcome but necessary revelation that many of Mr Abramovich’s nig-nog hordes were “this long.”

Two-Thirds Of Foreigners Blame It All On The British, Says Poll

The vehicle of choice for white British suicide drivers

A staggering two-thirds of the world’s foreigners blame the native white population of the UK for the state of things today, according to a disturbing poll published today.

“Those white bastards breed like flies, then they have the cheek to automatically expect preferential treatment,” complained Dr. Amina Toumert, a paediatric surgeon in Morocco. “They sit on their backsides claiming every benefit going, and they shout loudly that they and all their ignorant kids have a God-given right to well-paid jobs for life. Their odious beliefs about their unlamented empire and about Islam prove beyond a shadow of doubt that they have no intention of integrating themselves into civilised global society.”

Pritam Deshpande, a Delhi-based accountant, was at pains to point out that some of his best friends were white Britons.

“Of course they’re pleasant enough fellows - but they’re the exceptions that prove the rule,” he explained earnestly. “Wherever the British go, from Afghanistan to Ayia Napa, they leave chaos and destruction in their wake. Who really knows what goes on in their warped, hate-filled white minds? Their marriages are brutal and loveless, their children are indoctrinated from birth with a backward belief in their own superiority, and they won’t be happy until the whole world adopts their primitive customs and beliefs. I tell you, the world wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today if they weren’t always jabbering and wailing a load of twaddle about the heavenly delights of an unregulated financial sector in a language nobody understands.”

“I would cheerfully vote for any extremist party that promises to expel all those troublesome British whites from our beautiful planet,” said Jun Qiu, a Shanghai-based IT consultant. “As long as they don’t apply too much violence when they’re stuffing them into the rockets. I am not cruel.”