Europe On Alert For Insane Insect Swarms

This could be you

So far, there have been no reports from anywhere in Europe of huge clouds of deranged locusts or barmy bees attacking families in their homes or offices, in spite of the dire threat issued by Colonel Gadaffi today.

TV’s Kate Humble commented: “I urge Britain’s nature lovers to report any sightings of locusts, no matter how small, to the authorities immediately. Even a single locust could be a scout, probing our defences ahead of the main assault force. But please don’t work yourselves into a lather about grasshoppers, though. They’re on our side.”

Libyan suicide bees may be more problematical, however, as it is possible that they could mingle unnoticed among the native bee population, awaiting a word of command from the crazed Libyan dictator to spread havoc by disrupting Europe’s jam supplies.

After an emergency COBRA meeting this morning, prime minister David Cameron emerged wearing a beekeeper’s hat, rubber gloves and heavy nylon clothing to reassure a concerned public that the RAF had adequate supplies of insect repellent to deal with mass insect assault from any quarter.

“Our message to Colonel Gadaffi is unequivocal,” he declared defiantly. “You will not destroy the British picnic.”

Albarn, Björk Unveil Exciting Alternatives To Songs You Can Hum

The world of popular music aimed at people with a mental age of more than five continues to disappear up its own arse, as 90s has-beens Damon Albarn and Björk launched their latest vanity projects in Manchester.

Albarn has fallen victim to the urge - tragically common to ageing egotists from the pop industry - to insist that he is a serious modern composer, rather than the bloke who taught your dad to shout “You should cut down on your pork life mate, get some exercise”, by staging what he insists is a proper opera. In an innovative twist which never occurred to pedestrian dullards like Wagner and Rossini, however, Albarn’s ‘Dr Diddly Dee’ masterpiece features the composer spanking his plank on a godlike perch above the stage.

Everybody sing along now: Plunk, bzzz, parp

Meanwhile, puffin-botherer Björk launched the Manchester International Festival by filling a stage with various plunking, fizzing, wheezing and farting mechanical toys, after David Attenborough’s disembodied voice solemnly warned the audience of the horrors awaiting them. Stamping around Doc Brown’s laboratory from ‘Back To The Future’ and dressed as an orange lollipop, Iceland’s most irritating pixie terrified her long-suffering fans with detailed descriptions of parasites eating snails’ brains and exhorted them to download iPhone apps expressly designed to randomly mangle her back catalogue.

“Is this what Rihanna will be doing in 20 years’ time?” said a five-year-old from Salford. “Mummy, I’m scared. I don’t want to grow up.”

Duncan Smith Invites Businesses To Break Law

Patriotic work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith today urged Britain’s bosses to lay themselves wide open to legal action, by openly discriminating in favour of British job applicants.

QED, say employers

“Now look here, chaps, for the last year I’ve been going round telling everyone that there are plenty of jobs out there for the taking,” he complained peevishly. “Now it’s come to my attention that you’re handing them all to a bunch of foreign devils, simply because they happen to have skills and work hard – and I have to say this won’t look good in the papers. Come on, now, play the game and give those jobs to British school leavers. You’re making us Conservatives look a bit foolish, and it simply won’t do.”

When the news was gently broken to him that employers adopting a strict nationalistic discrimination policy would be breaking the law, Mr Duncan Smith frowned for a minute, then beamed and pointed out that, once the government’s legal aid cuts come into effect, no unsuccessful applicant will be able to afford to take an employer to court.

Employers are not persuaded by Mr Duncan Smith’s jingoism, however. A spokesman for the Federation of Small Businesses retorted: “Dream on, baldy. Tell you what - if it’s all the same to you, we’ll just carry on employing EU nationals who can actually read and write, and take the trouble to say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to customers instead of yawning and grunting ‘orright mate’ at them.”

“Meanwhile, perhaps you could come up with an education policy that works,” he added.

Royal Family Still Doing Slightly Better Than The Economy

London’s homeless expressed surprise at the non-appearance of the Queen at any of the capital’s soup kitchens today, after chancellor George Osborne promised that the royals would “do as well as the economy is doing”.

Take it, bitch

Mr Osborne made his unlikely claim as he unveiled plans to repackage the taxpayers’ millions he hands over to the monarchy into something fatuously called a Sovereign Grant.

“So the Queen will have to scrimp and save on only 91% of what she’s getting now? Big deal,” said Bob, a shambling down-and-out who lost his home along with his livelihood when his business folded last year, after his government-owned bank refused him a loan. “If they seriously want the royal finances to reflect the economy then the government ought to make some sort of truly enormous-cocked hat, into which the Queen, Prince Philip and all their parasitic spawn would be royally fucked on a daily basis.”

“That’ll bring in the tourists,” he reflected.

‘Defy The Strike Bullies’, Urges Self-Hating Journo Whose Boss Calls Him A C*nt

The Daily Mail threatened to implode into a singularity of self-hatred today as dead-eyed political editor James Chapmouse robotically penned a front-page article urging non-union workers to defy striking ‘bullies’, in the forlorn hope that foul-mouthed editor and chief hypocrite Paul Dacre might be moved to merely bare his fangs and hiss at him for once instead of calling him a cunt - along with the Mail’s other section heads - in his regular morning rant.

The unacceptable face of bullying in the workplace

Members of the public walking past the Mail’s Northcliffe House offices were treated to the usual hysterical stream of four-letter-words, however, as Dacre beat the hapless Chapmouse over the head with a copy of the morning’s paper wrapped around a baseball bat and called his senior political reporter a useless fucking cunt for failing to follow up the hard-hitting headline, ‘Defy The Strike Bullies’, with any stirring words of scab encouragement.

“I’m not 100% word perfect, as much of Paul Dacre’s torrent of abuse was masked by the screams of his underlings,” reported one shocked bystander. “But I’m sure he wasn’t entirely happy about the article being mostly padded out with cut-and-pasted union membership figures and various less-than stunning revelations of the ‘strikes at airport immigration desks might lead to queues’ variety.”

“I’m pretty sure the word ‘cunt’ was used once or twice,” he added. “That’s once or twice before each sickening thud, by the way.”

Toyota Confident Of Developing A Working Car By 2020

Excited engineers at leading dud car manufacturer Toyota announced today that they are now probably less than ten years away from developing a car that actually works.

“We have been building prototypes at a rate of approximately eight million a year for some time now,” said head designer Honto Kamikaze. “And each terrifying defect that appears in those testbeds takes us one step closer to our ultimate goal of a reliable car.”

TV's Stewart Lee test drives one of Toyota's comedy vehicles

Toyota has cemented a reputation for road-testing its prototypes under ultra-realistic conditions, with a vast beta-testing program involving millions of drivers all over the world voluntarily testing the experimental vehicles to self-destruction – a process that can take as long as six weeks.

“We’ve just found out that all of our Highlander and Lexus RX400h hybrid prototypes are displaying an interesting tendency to grind to a halt because of a blown fuse,” smiled Mr Kamikaze. “It seems that this fuse thing is notoriously prone to breakage, and therefore we’ve taken the precaution of recalling the 110,000 development vehicles so we can rip out these defective parts.”

“We can botch a quick fix by soldering the bare wire ends together, and I daresay we’ll be deleting fuses altogether from future test models,” he explained. “Statistically, every single vehicle we’ve made in the last 18 months has now been returned to have at least one fundamental design fault patched up – so, with the aid of this unparalleled store of data on how not to build a car, by a simple process of trial and error we must surely get it right one day.”

Unions And Government Deep In Talks To Avert Strike Both Sides Are Spoiling For

Representatives of the government are still locked in desperate last-minute negotiations with union delegates - with both sides expressing optimism that, if they keep praying hard enough, an exasperated Jesus will magically appear, invite them to shut the fuck up and present them with a supernatural miracle which somehow enables both factions to claim victory.

Jesus might pop in later

The fundamental problem facing both sides is that they are all desperately looking forward to tomorrow’s national public-sector strike. The unions are dreaming that the walkout will spark an Arab Spring-style popular revolution leading to the overthrow of the discredited ConDem regime; while the government is trusting the papers to orchestrate citizen outrage at being somewhat inconvenienced for a few hours, in the hope that public-spirited vigilante groups will form spontaneous lynch mobs and string Britain’s remaining union members up from the nearest lamp-post.

“I expect the discussions are taking the form of the unions endlessly repeating, ‘Our members want N or M’ - in this case, protection guarantees for their pay, pensions and early retirement - and the government chanting, ‘Get stuffed, Trotsky’,” said a spokesman for industrial relations consultancy Ebenezer-Skrüge. “Those are the set invocations and responses as laid down in the Service For Deliverance From Industrial Dispute, a little-known appendix of the Alternative Service Book.”

“The hoped-for outcome is the simultaneous fulfilment of both sides’ wishes,” he added, “Which clearly demands divine intervention.”

‘Can We Make Pre-Emptive Strikes?’ Demand Public, As Ken Clarke Green-Lights Knifing Of Burglars

Your target for tonight, gentlemen

As justice secretary Kenneth Clarke unveiled plans to allow householders to escape prosecution if they stab anyone who breaks into their homes, homeowners asked to know if it wouldn’t simply save time if they invaded Britain’s inner-cities and knifed all the residents in advance.

“Anybody who wears a hood or walks around naked to the waist on a warm day, wears their trousers round their knees, or is as black as a coalman is obviously a ne’er-do-well of the worst sort, and we all know they infest the murky depths of our council estates,” said Rob Blind, a Richmond resident who owns some very expensive consumer electronics to which he is utterly devoted. “I’m sure the neighbours would be happy to join with me in forming a cavalry militia, with a view to riding in one morning at the crack of dawn and putting the lot of them to the sabre. Then we’d be able to sleep soundly in our beds for ever more, and it would save a small fortune in burglar alarms. Yes, I do read the Daily Mail, why do you ask?”

“I reckon I could bolt a few blades to the nearside wheels of my Freelander and drive close to the kerb next to the bus stops,” agreed his next-door neighbour Robert Savage, a chief inspector with the Metropolitan Police. “That’ll mow down all the underage drinkers at night, and the wicked pensioners who head these crime families by day.”

“Double win,” he added.

Government Clears Way For Poundstretcher University

Unveiling the long-dreaded White Paper on the reorganisation of higher education, universities minister David Willetts told horrified students that if they didn’t like the prospect of the £9,000-a-year fees being demanded by most of Britain’s established HE providers, they would be welcomed with open arms by dozens of new private-sector universities offering heavily-discounted degrees at prices to suit all pockets.

Every campus is in a central location, with good bus links

“We are talking to several major supermarkets, home-furnishing warehouses and pound shops who are desperately keen to snap up the education retail sector,” he announced brightly. “Tesco are already designing a Value range of degrees, with attractive 3-for-2 deals, and no doubt their rivals will be keen to start a price war.”

Poundstretcher is said to be planning to snap up Britain’s surplus stock of unwanted degrees – such as Media Studies or Art History - and offer them at a rock-bottom price that might tempt cost-conscious consumers who would normally turn their noses up in disdain into picking one up on the off-chance that it might possibly come in useful around the house someday.

Meanwhile, fast almost-food giant McDonalds has already put together a garish range of degree collectibles for young children to amuse themselves with.

“Art, Communication Studies, English Literature, Environmental Science, History, Modern Languages, Music Theory, Politics, Sociology – get the whole set, kids!” urged sinister vice-chancellor Ronald McDonald. “Trade them with your friends! Then come and work for me.”

Greek Citizens Not Entirely Pleased By Prospect Of Lifelong Penury

Calm down now, chaps, it's for your own good you know

The people of Greece are reacting somewhat churlishly to the financial world’s generous offer of pinning a lifetime of crushing poverty on them in return for the noble goal of saving the eurozone from imminent meltdown, warn Europe’s leading economists, as they give vent to an unwarranted level of ingratitude by laying waste the central business district of Athens.

“What these bumptious goatshaggers need to understand is that the euro is the crowning glory of two-and-a-half thousand years of European civilisation, which of course began in their very own back yard,” said a spokesman for the International Monetary Fund. “Even if it has largely left them behind for the last two thousand or so. They should be bloody proud of the euro, and see it as a privilege to abandon their entirely unreasonable pipe-dreams of prosperity to ensure its continued existence.”

Chinese Premier Presses Cameron On Human Rights

Spot the oppressor

Chinese premier Wen Jiabao insisted today that human rights were “not off limits” after holding talks with prime minister David Cameron.

As the two leaders announced a package of trade deals worth £1.4 billion, the Chinese leader said he would always raise difficult questions about political freedom and the justice system alongside seeking closer economic ties. Meanwhile, Mr Wen said Britain and Beijing had to treat each other as "equals" on human rights.

“The Chinese people are appalled by the enthusiastic beatings meted out by your thuggish Metropolitan Police against unarmed protesters, and their deplorable mass detention tactics,” he told an inscrutably smiling Mr Cameron, “Not to mention your denial of legal redress for millions of ordinary British peasants, who are monitored constantly by the most comprehensive surveillance camera network in the world. And how can you have the bare-faced cheek to call yourselves civilised when your so-called free press routinely publishes government-sanctioned propaganda demonising the sick and the disabled, and your state denies them the treatment they need while your super-rich friends are cosseted in exclusive private hospitals?”

“No offence, mate,” he added, as Mr Cameron resolutely maintained a fixed grin for the world’s cameras.

Conservatives Still Struggling To Grasp Fundamental Requirement Of Consumerism

As yet another high street retailer, fashion retailer Jane Norman, went into administration due to the ongoing impoverishment of the general population, senior Conservatives are still showing no signs of recognising that the consumerist model of capitalism which operates in Britain depends entirely on consumers having any money to spend.

Think of it as a sort of V&A for this year's tat

With even the consumerist cathedrals of Tesco reporting a fall in UK sales figures, retail industry leaders are said to be struggling to come up with a diagram so simple that even chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne can understand it.

“We drew a picture with a woman holding her purse, and a shop, and her little house and family,” said CBI head Sir Roger Carr. “We simplified it so that the shop is also her workplace - which is how we like it - and drew two arrows marked ‘money’ going to and from it, and another arrow marked ‘stuff’ going from the shop to her house."

"For the sake of clarity, we left out added complications such as energy providers,” sighed Sir Roger, who also happens to be the chairman of Centrica. “But George just giggled and drew a big pair of tits on her, then asked why stuff didn’t go back from her house back to the shop.”

“OK, so he seems to have a pretty shrewd picture of the low-grade rubbish our shops are stocking nowadays,” he grumbled. “Unfortunately, though, he still doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea about money.”

An Inspector Calls At Glastonbury

(Scene: A luxuriously-appointed VIP area, set amidst the verdant swamps of the Glastonbury Festival. In a corner, tragically oblivious to the heated arguments taking place at centre stage, inside a blue portable lavatory and with his trousers and a newspaper at his ankles, slump the mortal remains of Sir Reginald Smith-Smythe-Smith. The doleful wailing of that well-known practitioner of funerary dirges, Mr Christopher Martin, can be heard in the background.)

Lord Bono (for it is he): Well, oi’ll wager dem feckin’ anarchist hooligans from UK Uncut’re at de bottom o’ dis, so it is. Sure an’ me gardener will back me up on dis.

The Edge: Oi wooden’ know anytin’ ‘bout dat, sorr.

Lord Bono: Dammit all, De Edge, an’ will ye not take yer hat off out o’ respect fer de departed, man!

(Enter Inspector Savage of the Avon and Somerset CID, accompanied by PC49, a yokel.)

PC49: Bloimy, zum bugger’s knocked orf Doctor ‘Oo! (Peers inside cubicle.) ‘Ere, oi fancy ‘ee do look a lot older’n wot ‘ee do on telly, zurr.

Inspector: Thank you, constable, that will do for now. Does anybody know the deceased?

Lady Rooney: Ai believe the praime minister was well acquainted with the dead geezer, being as he was the party chairman of his constituency innit, like, doncha know?

Inspector: Madam! Are you seriously insinuating that the Prime Minister of Great Britain is to be implicated in a possible murder?

Lady Rooney: I int nevah incinerated nuffink, you nasty little git! You’ll be hearing from mai repro… repper… mate Max Clifford in tomorrow’s soaraway Sun. Wayne, remonstrewate with this cunt immediately!

Lord Rooney: I demand that you take back that slur this instant, sir, you wanker, or you can fuck right off!

Inspector: Well, really! I’m afraid, Lord and Lady Rooney, that I shall have to take you both into custody immediately for verbally abusing an officer of Her Majesty’s constabulary in the course of his lawful duties. Now, where did I put my truncheon?

PC49: ‘Ere, zurr! Take a look at the ‘eadline in this ‘ere Mail on Zunday wot the stiff were readin’ when ‘ee croaked!

Inspector (reads): “'There's No Reason To Join The Tories. We've Come Over As Voracious, Crass, Always On The Take' - Who Says So? Dave's Own Constituency Chairman.” Hmm… I fail to see how this tittle-tattle can possibly have any bearing on the case, constable.

PC49: No, zurr - the front page!

Inspector: “It Is Not Offence to Abuse Police”? Bollocks.

(Curtain.)