Tech Manufacturers Braced For Unimaginable Suffering

A disaster of unimaginable proportions is engulfing many of the world’s leading technology brands, as Thailand inexorably disappears under raging floodwaters.

Oh, the humanity

A distraught Sony is already weeping inconsolably over the tragic loss of its baby NEX-7 and Reflex Alpha 65 cameras, while Western Digital, Toshiba and Seagate watched helplessly as this year’s desperately-needed crop of hard drives was washed away by the raging torrents.

“Whenever natural disasters strike in South East Asia, it’s always the poor businessman who bears the brunt of the human cost,” said a spokesman for the Disasters Emergency Committee, which is launching a major fundraising appeal. “Millions of suffering salarymen’s miserable lives have already been blighted by the Japanese earthquake earlier this year - and now this devastating flood threatens to wipe out their meagre Q3 profits as well.”

“A £2 donation will buy a snorkel tube and facemask - each one enabling a brown worker in Thailand to go back to work, albeit with deductions for leaving the production line to come up for air every three minutes,” he explained, “While every £200 we raise will provide him with a desperately-needed aqualung, enabling him to stay down in the factory almost without interruption.”

“Please, please, make a difference,” he implored. “With your generous help, poor Sony could return to profit one day.”

Backlog Of Lessons To Be Learned Now Expected To Require 1000 Years Of Study

This is just the lesson to be learned from eating too many pickled onions

As the Health & Safety Executive predictably added the lessons to be learned from the Welsh coal mine tragedy to Britain’s enormous backlog of unlearned lessons, education experts warn that it will take generations of scholars 1000 years to absorb, understand and act upon the vast pile of terrible mistakes.

“As the government has, predictably, handed the initial inquiry into the flooding which caused the deaths of four miners to the South Wales Police, rather than to anybody who might reasonably be expected to have any sort of clue about mine safety, I think it’s safe to say we probably won’t be gaining any life-saving knowledge from this unfortunate incident within our lifetimes,” observed Professor Myfanwy Strangelove, curator of Britain’s ever-growing lesson mountain.

“Let’s face it, successive governments still haven’t really got to grips with picking out any tips on best practice from Harold Godwinson’s futile attempt to fight battles on two fronts, and that was way back in 1066. With a bit of luck, we should get around to safer mines just in time for the next millennium.”

“Right after we come up with a viable alternative to unrestrained global corporatism, in fact,” she added cheerfully.

Employers Urge Government To Drag Britain Faster Into 19th Century

Strike? How dare you? Be off with you, and damn your impudence

Captains of industry at the Chartered Institute of Hirelings and Firings have lately taken time out from being fitted for top hats and frock coats, to issue a sternly-worded demand that the government ought to prevaricate no longer, but discharge forthwith its ordained duty of ridding the empire once and for all of the stalking spectre of ‘workers’ rights’.

“We of property and means have - as the popular saying would have it - ‘placed our ears to the ground’; and by such means have we been able to discern incontestable evidence that, as I yet speak, godless trade union agitators are conspiring secretly to compel every honest labourer in this great country to down tools and cease their toils in the month of September; this leading to the swift collapse of corpses; unburied rubbish; and law and order piled high in the streets – ‘pon my soul, I knew I ought not to have partaken of that one last sherry for luck before I rose to speak,” a Mr. Horace Winterbottom, gentleman, told representatives of the third estate. “Mark my words, sirs - and mark them well; their base treachery will lay our fair shores wide open to the rapacious French.”

“Heed this warning, O Albion!” he cried, “Unless Her Britannic Majesty’s loyal statesmen in the Palace of Westminster act decisively, and with all speed, to outlaw strikes; to round up the ringleaders forthwith; and, without further ado, to transport the villainous miscreants to the Antipodes in fetters; why, then I fear we must, with heavy hearts, be forced to close up and dismantle our manufactories and mills, upon which the nation’s acknowledged superiority is founded; and ship our magnificent machinery to a new home in the distant lands of Cathay. God save the Queen!”

The Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon.Mr. Cameron, solemnly agreed that the anarchist threat posed by sinister agitators mingling with patriotic, industrious workers was indeed a most disagreeable vexation; not only to himself and his ministers of state, but also to his honourable Whig counterpart, Mr. Clegg.

The tiny, disreputable cabal of elected Fabianists sat scowling all the while; but words came there none.

Baker Who Burned Down Warburtons Factory ‘Thought Thermostat Was Timer’

A new member of staff at the Warburton’s bread factory in Bolton which is currently burning to a crisp has contacted the Nev Filter - under condition that she remains anonymous - admitting responsibility for the conflagration which ten fire crews are battling to extinguish.

“They gave me 5000 loaves to bake, and told me they wanted them quite well browned,” the teenage work-trial employee said. “There was just this big dial with no numbers on it like. ‘Cos I was bursting for a pee, I thought ten minutes would give me plenty of time to get to the loo and back, so I turned it up full, obviously. I was just making a quick detour to the vending machine in the canteen for some chocolate on my way back, when all these alarms started going off everywhere.”

“I mean, how was I to know I’d set it to like 10,000 degrees fahrenheit?” she added. “It’s not like it’s marked or nothing. So it’s like totally not my fault, is it? Even if it is, sort of.”

“This is the worst disaster to hit Warburtons since the factory had to be reconstructed back in the thirties, after the builders accidentally dropped it upside down,” said a spokesman for the 140-year-old company, adding that “any bloody fool” should have realised what the dial was for. However, when pressed, he finally admitted that although the factory – the third largest bakery in Britain - originally came with a small instruction leaflet, nobody could remember where they’d put it.

He went on to say that, as the firefighters have now almost got the flames under control, the 3300 staff employed at the site might be able to salvage some of the factory by scraping off the charred bits.

“We’ll be claiming off the council for this,” he added. “We’ve been asking them to put a giant smoke alarm in some sort of airship circling high above Bolton for years, but would they listen?”

Mandelson Invents Socialism

The business secretary, Lord Mandelson, is said by Labour Party insiders to be eagerly fleshing out the details of a radical new political theory he has just thought up, which he is calling 'socialism'.

The former European Commissioner for Trade tentatively announced the first of his theories today - suggesting, in a speech to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders which was received in hostile silence, that an industry which relentlessly churns out thousands of new cars every day, simply to create an artificial demand for vehicles which people cannot afford and do not need, might not actually be the smartest thing that mankind has ever dreamed up.

"If that evil commie pervert isn't stopped - and fast - pretty soon he won't just be suggesting that replacing your car every two years simply because you're bored with it might not be the best use of the planet's dwindling resources. There's a very real danger that he might dare to question the whole principle of rampant consumerism," growled a Ford executive. "And from there, it's only a short step to entertaining wholesale doubts about the necessity of the artificial monetary system which underpins this unrestricted capitalist system which we all take absolutely for granted."

"Mammon help us all if that happens," he added.

"Kill him," screamed a senior BMW director. "Kill him now, before he infects anyone else with this vile disease."

Meanwhile, staff at a London graveyard report that the body of Herbert Morrison, one of the stalwarts of the Labour movement and Baron Mandelson's grandfather, is revolving more slowly than at any time in the last 12 years.

Santa Poised To Join Postal Workers' Strike

Angry postal workers have responded angrily to the news that Royal Mail bosses are seeking to break their impending strike with a Jobcentre-supplied army of 30,000 unemployed graduates, by persuading Father Christmas to join their planned industrial action.

"Santa is, as we all know, in the same line of work as our threatened members," explained Communication Workers' Union general secretary Billy Hayes. "I have been to the North Pole to put our position to him, and the venerable old gentleman has kindly agreed not to deliver any Christmas presents to the nation's kiddies unless this intransigent management starts taking our demands seriously."

"Then he sat me on his knee and asked me what I wanted for Christmas, so of course I said 'Mandelson's head on a spike'," he added. "He laughed and said if I was a bad boy he'd see what he could do."

As anti-sleigh missile launchers moved into position above the COBRA bunker deep under Central London, Lord Mandelson smilingly dismissed the dangers of decapitation by Santa - adding that, as the grandson of Labour Party legend Herbert Morrison, his own festive wish was to see the last of the hated union dinosaurs ground into the dust, finally laying to rest the awful spectre of an empowered workforce once and for all.

"It is entirely within my powers as business secretary to use the blessed Lady Thatcher's wise and just anti-union laws to sequestrate Santa's assets if he takes secondary strike action over a dispute in which he is not personally involved," he warned. "I shall not hesitate to send in a force of press-ganged doleys to seize all the toys, then task DHL and FedEx with the responsibility for delivering them all to Britain's children - or at least to a depot within fifty miles of their homes, if mummy and daddy aren't around during the daytime to sign for them."

Meanwhile, back at Santa's polar factory, the toy-making machinery stood silent as the workers downed their tools and walked out in sympathy with their postie comrades.

"Ho ho ho!" chortled the jolly bearded striker, in a rousing speech to his elves. "Mandy Mandy Mandy! Out out out!

1,100 British Jobs At Risk At Opel Re-Badging Plants

Britain's premier chavmobile outlet may soon shed 1,100 British jobs, it was claimed today, in the wake of Magna's buyout of a majority shareholding in Opel and its small regional badge-engineering subsidiary, Vauxhall.

"An Opel Astra with a plastic Vauxhall badge on the boot is the conveyance of choice for the discerning chav," said a government spokesman, as talks continued in a last-ditch effort to persuade the Canadian car-parts manufacturer to sack a lot of Germans instead. "But the problem, from a manufacturing point of view, is that the little shits only buy clapped-out old bangers that are at least ten years old. Then they spend the rest of their hard-thieved cash on essential accessories like a big blue light under the floorpan, a satnav to remind them where their latest 14-year-old girlfriend lives, and of course the big rear wing which is so essential to prevent the vehicle from launching itself into orbit as it burns away from traffic lights and pursuing police cars."

"And that was before the bank cancelled all their cards, forcing them to send all their bling off in the post in the forlorn hope of recovering maybe a tenth of what they paid for it," he added.

A spares manufacturer was seen as the perfect partner to take over the running of ailing General Motors' European operations, he explained, as bits were always falling off the chavmobiles due to their owners' habit of clipping kerbs, walls, other vehicles, pedestrians and lamp-posts as they race around urban streets in circles every evening, in an instinctive ritual which - according to anthropologists - may serve to stimulate hormone production in underage females, making them more amenable to a brief, grunting poke on the stained rear seats of their boyfriends' shonky passion-wagons.

"Of course, there will still be work at our Ellesmere Port and Luton plants for the foreseeable future," promised Siegfried Wolf, Magna's co-chief executive. "As your chavscum revert to their natural state of poverty, they will no longer be able to afford our current range of parts. We are already busy gathering up all the unsold new and second-hand right-hand-drive Opels - sorry, Vauxhalls, you're touchy about that aren't you? - from the dealers' showrooms, prior to breaking them down at our former factories, to be sold to your bankrupt chav army as 'fully-reconditioned spares'."

"Of course, this means they will have nothing to buy in ten years' time," he continued. "But by then we'll have long since disappeared over the horizon, and the government of the day will be spending your nation's last remaining pennies on yet another futile, hand-wringing inquiry into whether it was really such an economic master-stroke to sit contentedly on their fat asses and do nothing to stop the final remnants of your once-mighty industrial base from falling in the grasping hands of a bunch of asset-stripping chancers."

'What's That About Vauxhall?' Say Slightly Preoccupied Ministers

After being repeatedly prodded with sticks, Government ministers reluctantly put down their magnifying glasses and turned away from examining their expense claims for thirty seconds to express their full support for whatever deal the German government had done with Canadian car spares firm Magna over the future of General Motors' Europe division.

5,000 Vauxhall and Bedford workers have expressed some concern that the German government's £1.3bn loan to Magna may have strings attached in favour of the 25,000 Germans who work for the stricken US manufacturer's Opel subsidiary.

"I'm sure the German government's number one priority was to safeguard the jobs of British car workers at Ford," said Prime Minister Gordon Brown. "Sorry, Vauxhall. Whatever."

"Anyone know the rules on Capital Gains Tax exemptions?" he added.

Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, went on the BBC's Politics Show yesterday to reassure worried British workers that, as an unelected member of the cabinet and the House of Lords, he is immune from threats of deselection when it is his turn to be caught fiddling his expenses.

"Let me just say - and I think it's very important to remember the essential facts - that my past record speaks for itself," he said. "I am not worried - not worried in the slightest - about being exposed as a shameless, greedy, self-serving swine. What you must remember is that I'm already well-known for being a shameless, greedy, self-serving swine. But that's not the issue here. What you have to remember is that I'm not an MP, I'm a Lord. You can't get rid of old Mandy so easily, you know."

When asked what the future might hold for the beleaguered British car industry, Lord Mandelson said: "I should imagine that the chavs will just have to get used to burning around the streets in Opels."

US Auto Industry Sends This Week's Extortion Demand To Washington

Two of America's car giants, General Motors and Chrysler, have asked the US government for another $21bn, on top of the $17bn already given to them in recent weeks.

The firms have also announced that, handout or no handout, they will also be sacking 50,000 workers.

"There's no point in making automobiles, not even the tinfoil junk that we churn out," said GM's chief executive officer Rick Wagoner. "It's far easier just to go to Washington with a stonking great sack every day and order the President to fill it with cash. That's what we're aiming for, and we sure as hell don't need 47,000 skilled employees to do that."

GM also announced that it is to sell Saab, and is demanding that the Swedish government hand it large sums of money to cover its expenses in dismembering half of the country's motor industry.

Meanwhile, Chrysler unveiled plans for a huge underground conveyor belt running directly from the federal gold reserve at Fort Knox to its Detroit headquarters - which it hopes will be built, paid for and fed with bullion by the government as some sort of New Deal-type job-creation scheme.

"We're just too big to be allowed to fail," smirked a Chrysler spokesman. "If we fold - and make no mistake, if we are not given whatever we want, whenever we ask for it, we will fold - all we have to do is yank the chain, and the entire US of A goes down the john with us. "Look into my eyes, America, and tell me I'm bluffing. You know I mean it."

"Here at Chrysler, we don't approve of the term 'protection racket' - it makes us sound like some kind of shabby, old-fashioned criminal organisation," he added with a sinister smile. "But if you prefer it, I guess your people and our people could probably brainstorm a work-around. You know, for a fee, you hear what I'm saying?"

Honda Plant Suspends Car-Spewing Activities

Honda’s car-spewing plant in Swindon is to shut down for four months from today, as the enormous pit at the end of its production line is now overflowing with unsold cars.

“The production line is now completely blocked and, in order to prevent the entire factory from backing up with half-finished cars, we have reluctantly turned off the car tap,” said a spokesman for the Japanese manufacturer, which today announced that its profits had plummeted to a paltry £795m. “It seems that, of late, people have unaccountably become less keen to spend money on our garish, overpriced Tonka toys.”

Honda has traditionally enjoyed an enviable reputation for building ugly cars that work, despite – or perhaps because of – the fact that their cars are inexplicably more expensive than all the other ugly Japanese cars that work.

“Our cars are seen by the Clarkson-addicted British public as the Japanese equivalent of BMWs,” said the spokesman. “Except, of course, that BMW drivers are arrogant, road-hogging wankers who need to be beaten to death with a wheel-jack - whereas Honda drivers are irritatingly smug, but just about tolerable.”

Honda engineers estimate that it will take four months to drill through the earth’s mantle, enabling them to restart production by dumping freshly-built cars straight off the line into a vast lake of seething magma.

“We are currently in talks with Lord Mandelson about getting the taxpayer to stump up the money for this,” added the spokesman.

MEPs Vote To Abolish Slavery In Britain

European parliamentarians - including most Labour MEPs - have voted today to end Britain's jealously-guarded right to treat ordinary working people like slaves, despite stern opposition from Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The move means that the EU directive limiting the working week to 48 hours will finally come into force in Britain - unless the UK government can successfully argue that its citizens are some kind of sub-human race, unworthy of being treated with the basic decency and dignity that most European nationals take for granted.

Taking time out from drawing up redundancy lists, British business leaders were quick to deprecate the decision.

"This is an insult to our great nation," said a spokesman for the Confederation of British Industry. "Way back in 1993, the Conservative government successfully argued that the UK should retain its sovereign right to ruthlessly exploit its workforce. Ever since, the Labour Party has seen fit to maintain the time-honoured position that the average British worker is nothing but a resource on the balance sheet, to be cynically worn out and discarded at our whim."

"It's my traditional British birthright, as a loyal subject of Her Imperial Majesty the Queen, to be driven like a common beast of burden until I am ground down to a burned-out husk by years of relentless, soul-crushing overwork," said one haggard worker as he set fire to a European Union flag, generously given to him in lieu of a day's pay by his bosses. "Who do these jumped-up Eurocrats think they are, putting my physical and mental well-being over the profits of my employers? It's just another victory for Hitler."

"Don't worry," the Prime Minister told the nation. "Before this can be brought into UK law, we will engage in negotiations with the European ministers. I am confident that these talks will outlast me, you and possibly all life on this planet. Until then, it's back to work, scum. Get back up those chimneys."

Unions Urge Brown To Prop Up Woefully Mismanaged Car-Makers

Unions have added their voices to calls for the UK government to throw some more money it hasn't got into the gaping chasm of business finance.

"Since you're giving it away like there's no tomorrow, Gordon, how about a bung to what we in the trade laughingly refer to as the British car industry?" said Tony Woodley, joint leader of Unite. "Otherwise the few remaining workers who serve the mighty robots might lose their jobs. Sod everyone else - if the bastards hadn't stopped buying cars, we wouldn't be in this mess."

Senior figures in the motor industry squealed their agreement and pointed to their gaping beaks.

"Admittedly the continued existence of the UK motor industry is entirely at the mercy and whim of the American, Japanese, Chinese, French and German companies who actually own it," added Mr Woodley, "But I'm sure they wouldn't turn down a couple of billion of taxpayers' cash to cover their embarrassment at making long-term financial plans predicated solely on the somewhat fanciful notion that the economic boom would last forever. Go on, widoncha. It's not like it's your money, is it?"

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.”