Graduates Worth More To Economy, Insist Graduates

Each and every graduate - even the thick ones with degrees in Sport History or Art Management - adds squillions to the wealth of the UK, according to a report published today by people with degrees in Data Entry.

“The raw statistics speak for themselves,” said Jim Spreadsheet of the Institute For Public Policy Research. “Graduates earn £180,000 extra over their lifetimes, for a cost to the state of just £18,800 per degree. It stands to reason, therefore, that the more people with degrees, the better for the entire country. Look, here’s a simple sum which proves it.”

Excel can do this! Who knew?

When asked for the graph showing the actual distribution of graduate earnings, however, Mr Spreadsheet angrily accused the Nev Filter of sneering at the miraculous achievements of billions of hardworking young people, all of whom have successfully risen from underprivileged backgrounds to lead the world in their chosen fields, such as surfboard care and management.

“If everyone in Britain had a degree,” he insisted, to cheers from the lecturers’ union which commissioned the PR, “This would be the richest country in the world. Stands to reason.”

Tesco Boss Defends ’20,000 Jobs For The Price Of 8’ Promotion

This is what 100 jobs look like to Mr Brasher

Retail megalomaniac Tesco is being uncharacteristically defensive today, in the light of widespread scepticism which greeted its boastful prediction that 20,000 glorious jobs would somehow be magically created by the opening of two wardrobe-sized Tesco Express convenience stores in Peebles and Renfrewshire.

“No, really, these are 100% genuine jobs on offer,” insisted a sweating CEO Richard Brasher. “We’ll need two till operatives, an assistant manager and a shelf-stacking apprentice in each shop. That’s four jobs across two stores, making a total of 8 - and they’re full-time-equivalent, so that’s actually 400 part-time jobs. Across two stores, remember, so that’s 800. Factor in the turnover as students come and go in September, and you’ve got 1600, i.e. 3200 beteween the two. Then there’s replacing all the staff who retire, die in harness or get the sack for not licking the floor clean enough - that’s easily another 3200 per store, which I’m sure you’ll agree makes a subtotal of 6400. Obviously, these in-store jobs also require support staff at head office – another 6400 – not forgetting, of course, the same number of warehouse employees.”

“So, er, I make that 19,200,” coughed Mr Brasher, as he hailed a passing taxi and jumped in through a window before it stopped moving. “That’s near as dammit, surely? The other 800 posts probably involve existing staff going on some noddy training course for an afternoon or something, which I’m sure you all agree is a job in itself.”

“Every little lie helps,” he called shamelessly, as he sped off to steal forty-seven fucking pence off you for a loaf of medium-sliced chipboard and call that ‘Value’.

Shock Stats Prove Majority Of August’s Looters Were Little Toerags

All across the UK, households are struggling to take in the astounding statistical analysis which shows that almost everyone involved in August’s orgy of looting and arson was in fact a little toerag.

“Excel cannot lie,” declared senior Ministry of Justice analyst Michael Spreadsheet. “Astonishing as it may seem, many of these young criminals appear to be criminals.”

The data shows an inevitable trend in the toerag lifecycle, which begins with being spawned in mass poverty, struggling energetically towards exclusion from school and a series of police cautions, before the toerag larva finally catches its first community sentence. From there, it is but a short step to rioting, looting, arson and ultimately mass murder for the few hatchlings that reach adulthood.

Beautiful photography, Sir David

Contrary to what biologists previously believed, however, it appears that the toerag is not much given to roaming in packs.

“These are not social animals,” commented TV’s Sir David Attenborough. “Co-operation requires a certain amount of intelligence. If you want to know more about these fascinating but little-understood creatures, don’t miss my forthcoming series, Shitty Planet.”

NASA: Plummeting Six-Ton Satellite Will Only Kill 2,250,000

Considerably fewer than 3m people will be crushed to pulp by fragments of the tumbling ARSE satellite when it crashes to earth later today, according to reassuring calculations issued by top NASA gamblers.

It's fairly possible that this might not happen

“Yes, folks, there’s just one chance in 3,200 that you will be flattened by a red-hot, refrigerator-sized chunk of ARSE!” beamed Dr Randy von Braun from a bunker deep under Texas. “With seven billion potential targets out there, our new supercalculators confidently predict that 6.9775 billion of you have absolutely nothing to fear.”

Dr von Braun helpfully explained that the actual toll might be affected by a small degree of statistical variance, according to whether the larger chunks of flaming wreckage hurtled into the sparsely-populated Southern Ocean or a nuclear reactor close to a major metropolis.

“Er… whoops, that should be 6.99775 billion,” he added sheepishly. “Hey, you’d think I’d have picked up something from that Math 101 refresher they sent me on after the Mars Orbiter went AWOL because I forgot you guys in Europe are metric, wouldn’t you? Live and learn – well, unless you die tonight, but it probably won’t happen. Trust me. No, really. I’m hardly ever wrong.”

Low Food Prices Send Inflation Tumbling, and other stories

The ONS has created a fantasy world where this is affordable

The Office for National Statistics made its literary debut today, with the publication of a welcome collection of short works of fiction which takes its name from the first story, ‘Low Food Prices Send Inflation Tumbling’.

The eponymous tale focuses on an anonymous junior civil servant’s increasingly desperate and comical attempts to discover the location of the fabled supermarket where a loaf of bread doesn’t go up a penny a day, whilst being pursued by an ever-growing Kafkaesque horde of newspaper editors, government ministers and Bank of England officials.

Expert storyteller Nick Clegg has already hailed the collection as a masterpiece.

“The extraordinary achievement of this first-time author is that it all seems so plausible that you almost - almost - end up believing that the Consumer Price Index really has fallen from 4.4% to 4%,” he acknowledged, “Even though, of course, we all know it can’t possibly be true.”

Other acclaimed tales in the collection are as fantastically imaginative as the first, including such bizarrely tempting titles as ‘Enterprise Zones End The Misery Of Unemployment’, ‘Mr Osborne Helps The Low-Paid’ and ‘How To Get By After An Atos Medical On £0 A Day’.

15p Minimum Wage Rise Will Make Us All Kings

The national minimum wage will soar to £6.08 an hour in October, boasted government ministers, implementing the insanely generous 2.5% increase recommended by the Low Pay Commission.

Ministers were quick to compare the huge rise to yesterday’s decision by the Bank of England to keep interest rates at 0.5% for the 25th consecutive month, while David Frost of the British Chambers of Commerce wept openly as he predicted mass suicides among employers and called for the reintroduction of slavery as the best way to lead the nation out of recession.

What the raise will buy in October - yes, all three of them!

Ministers were, however, unaccountably less keen to invite comparison with the rate of consumer price inflation, which rose again to 4.4% in February - suggesting that, in the absence of an economic miracle, the cost of everything will have risen by over 40% by the time the 2.5% minimum wage increase comes into effect.

“Yes, well if you play with a calculator for long enough you can prove anything,” scoffed work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith. “But the important thing is to concentrate on the word ‘increase’, because it’s a very splendid word indeed and makes everybody feel good.”

“Especially all the thickies who are on the minimum wage, because their numeracy is so dismal they can’t even work out how to vote for more than one candidate,” he added with a disarming smile. “To them I say: Do you believe the word of some smart-arse statistician? Of course you don’t. Bugger them - you’re getting a raise!”

Government Embarks On Fruitless Search For Nation’s Happiness

NASA will be asked if it can point this at Britain for a week or two

The Office of National Statistics is to be sent on a fool’s errand to seek out any remaining traces of the nation’s happiness - fulfilling a meaningless pledge, made when the Tories were in opposition, to base government policies on more than just economic indicators.

“Obviously the economic indicators are now totally shot to buggery,” pointed out NAO spokesman Phil Field. “So the government is hoping to use the nation’s hypothetical sense of wellbeing as a spurious excuse to justify its impending slew of punitive legislation.”

“Unfortunately, our preliminary investigations suggest that it simply doesn’t exist,” he added. “So we’re asking for a bigger microscope.”

“It seems that the only things which mercifully divert half the country from contemplating the soul-destroying wretchedness of the rest of their blighted lives – Ann Widdecombe wobbling about in a tutu, heavily-accented meerkats and starry-eyed nobodies prostituting themselves in front of Simon Cowell – are also the very things which make the other half morosely wonder about taking out a shotgun licence,” he observed sadly. “The result so far is just a big, fat zero.”

It’s Grim Down South

This wasn't ugly enough for Plymouth, so it's been replaced with something worse

Some craphole called Plymouth which is about as far south as you can get will be hit harder than most of the north, according to research commissioned by the BBC, but it doesn’t matter because nobody knows where it is, or cares.

“The really important thing is to pander to age-old stereotypes involving whippets and cloth caps,” said Tim Casio, an SQL manipulator at Experian who conducted the research. “Everybody knows it’s grim up north, it’s full of matchstick men and Manchester has so much to answer for. It’s a great excuse for the BBC’s news editors to rerun all that quaint old Pathé footage of back-to-back terraces and factory gates. But what scenes of grinding poverty can you pull up for Plymouth? They’ve got some pillock walking round in costume thinking he actually is Sir Francis Drake, for fuck’s sake.”

“I suppose they could rerun yesterday’s shot of that sodding great leylandii forest in an idiot’s front garden,” he added, “But I’m not sure that really proves anything, except that Plymouth is home to some truly exceptional fuckwits.”

BBC journalists were left scratching their heads for a while when Plymouth came up 319th in their rankings showing how well 325 areas of England were expected to weather the impending fiscal blitzkrieg, until somebody remembered that they have their regional TV studios there.

When asked about the effects of massive funding cuts on the impoverished backwater, Tory council leader Vivien Pengelly sucked on a plantain for a few minutes before declaring, “Oo bugger... oi doan rightly knooww, me ansum.”

A council PR spokesman later explained that what Mrs Pengelly actually said - when translated into English - was that Plymouth is the fairest place on God’s wide earth, according to the things that infest it, and if any late staycationers should feel the urge to spend their money wandering Britain’s foremost hope-crushing example of Stalinist architecture in the pouring rain of the city’s soul-destroying microclimate while polyester-clad ape creatures pester them for spare change, then Plymouth’s empty hotels still have plenty of vacancies.

Meanwhile, a Daily Mail hack dispatched to Portsmouth reported that the place didn’t seem as bad as it was painted at all.

Incredibly Selective Number Continues To Fall

The meaningless number that governments like to pretend has something to do with unemployment has fallen to 2.74m, according to the Office for Misleading Statistics.

“Excluding jobless people who are being forced to sit in a room with a sanctimonous arse who is paid to show them the best way to fold a CV into an envelope, people who are sent to a semi-derelict office block for a couple of hours a week to earn a certificate telling amused would-be employers that they can usually switch on a PC without injuring themselves, people have been cajoled into spending a couple of hours a week as an unpaid slave for some small businessman with an allergy to paying wages, people who live with someone who has some sort of job, people who have come to Britain illegally, people who are clinically depressed by living in Britain, people with an unusual number of limbs, people who are comatose or sectioned, people who have been slung in prison and people with tits who have pre-teen children, that just leaves a mere 2.74m people we can’t find any excuse for,” smiled an official liar.

Work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith promised that the government was working hard on innovative new excuses, and said it was entirely possible that nobody at all would be officially classified as unemployed before the next election.

“For years, frontline Jobcentre staff have been trotting out the platitude that searching for work is a full-time job in itself,” he said. “Well, once we’ve found a way to get round all that communist minimum-wage nonsense I don’t see why we couldn’t make that official.”

Unemployment Down And Up

Government statistics revealed a massive drop or huge rise in unemployment today, according to which paper you read.

Guardian and Mirror readers were glad to hear that the number of joblesses claiming JSA fell by 32,900 in March, while other papers told their target demographics that the total number without work had risen by a staggering 8% to two and a half million.

"What is going on here is very simple," explained a man with a calculator from the Office of National Socialist Statistics. It is possible - indeed increasingly possible, thanks to recent legislation - to be jobless but not technically unemployed.

"For example, anyone who lost their job a year ago isn't unemployed any more if they live in one of the seventeen worst hellholes in the country - or Employment Action Zones, as we like to call them. Anyone who is sick or disabled isn't unemployed - and once they've been squeezed through the Work Fitness mangle they probably aren't getting any benefits either. If they live with a working partner, they're unemployed but not receiving benefits. On the other hand, if they spend a few hours a week at a disused TA centre being shown how to start up a software package they can't afford, they're not unemployed but they're still signing on at the nearest Jobcentredoubleplusgood and still receiving benefits."

"What could possibly be clearer?" he said with a smile, as his calculator exploded. "Vote Labour."

Britain to Get New Burberry Check Flag

Hard on the heels of news that the British now lead Europe in shoplifting, as well as financial irresponsibility, illiteracy, binge-drinking, aggressive behaviour and teenage pregnancy, comes a government announcement that the Union Flag - for many, the enduring emblem of British cultural leadership for over two centuries - is to be replaced with a design that more accurately reflects the nation as it is today.

The winning flag - unveiled by culture secretary Ben Bradshaw - comes from Burberry's top design team, and features a black and white check pattern on a fawn background, with additional red stripes.

"By George offered an interesting concept, with a brightly-coloured logo for a small American business you've never heard of on a thin cotton background; and we were also impressed by Primark's entry, which was all sequins and loose threads," said Mr Bradshaw at the unveiling ceremony. "But the Burberry entry has perfectly encapsulated the spirit of Britain in the 21st century - a once-great name, now reduced a risible travesty of its former self, which angrily flaunts its cherished delusion that it's somehow better than everybody else."

Mr Bradshaw then pulled a golden rope to run the new British standard up a flagpole, but was surprised to see nothing but a few torn threads where the flag should have been.

"Oh buggery," he sighed. "Some thieving little toerag's gone and nicked it."

A fuming Mr Bradshaw was chauffeured away at speed in an iridescent purple-green W-registered Astra 1.3 with a huge wing on the back and four cannon-sized exhaust pipes, while a colour sergeant reverently coiled up the ceremonial gold braid, popped it into an envelope and mailed it to Cash4Gold.com in the hope that it might pay off Britain's £768bn national debt.

Unemployment Could Outnumber Population If You Want, Says Think Tank

The actual number of people out of work and claiming benefits could be as high as six million, a think tank has claimed today, based on its analysis of official government figures.

"Or it could be just three blokes in Macclesfield," a spokesman told press hacks. "What do you want us to prove? Cheques payable to Policy Exchange."

Unemployment Returns To Cities After Easter Break in Countryside

Unemployment, which was reported on Saturday to be growing fast in rural Britain, is now rising rapidly in urban areas, according to a report from the Work Foundation.

"What might be happening here is that unemployment may have gone for a short weekend break in the country, possibly on a non-working farm holiday in Cornwall," said puzzled senior researcher Naomi Clayton. "However, Easter is now over, and today we are seeing a huge rise in unemployment in Britain's major cities."

"Apart from in London, that is, which happens to be the home of the Work Foundation, the Commission for Rural Communities and hundreds of similar organisations which work round-the-clock churning out weighty reports full of meaningless statistics to prove whatever we're asked to," she added. "Happy days."

Immigration Minister Warns Of Facts, Damned Facts and Statistics

The Immigration Minister, Phil Dumbas, has hit out at the National Audit Office for releasing figures indicating that one in nine of the UK's population was born overseas.

Branding the publication of facts as "at best naïve or, at worst, sinister", the minister accused the independent auditors of "playing politics" with the statistics.

"By publishing these vicious, misleading facts, the so-called National Audit Office has nailed its political colours firmly to the mast for all to see," screamed Mr Dumbas. "And those colours are blue! And - er - another shade of blue."

"Just because the figure quoted happens to be entirely accurate, there was no justification for drawing attention to it by releasing it to the press," continued the Immigration Minister, in rising tones of hysteria. "Decent British racists need to know that there are good foreigners as well as bad ones. Good foreigners include those children of our brave British squaddies who suffer the indignity of being born overseas, international students who have the decency to bugger off back home, and dodgy Russian billionaires who buy football teams or newspapers. The rest are all bad foreigners, obviously, like Poles and Muslims and whatnot."

"This important distinction was missed by the media," he added, "Because it was deliberately hidden away where no journalist would ever see it - on page 2 of the press release."

Nobody from the NAO was available for comment, as the nation's statisticians were all too busy playing with Excel. Mysteriously prominent on every desk, however, were calculators displaying one of two numbers, 717 or 8008.

Crime Up, Down, Flying Around, Looping the Loop And Defying the Ground, Say Police

Crime may have gone up as the recession bites, or it may have gone down, according to official statistics compiled from police figures. However, since the figures turn out to have been mostly dreamed up by police chiefs randomly cutting a deck of cards, there may actually be no crime at all, or we may all have been murdered by feral terrorist hoodies with knives.

A police spokesman for the 18 forces who submitted false data to the Home Office said: "Evenin', all. Least, I fink it is. 'Ang on, I got the time written down 'ere on a bit of paper wot sarge give me down the station. 'Ere, can you read it to us? Wot, two? Yeah, that's evenin', innit?"

Those crime figures in full:

Murder: UP 10 of Diamonds

Burglary: DOWN Ace of Clubs

Rape: DOWN Jack of Hearts

Knife Crime: Joker

Corporate Fraud: Rules of Bridge

Motoring Offences: Mr Bunn the Baker

Mopery: Snap!

"Make no mistake," commented Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. "If you break the law, your days are numbered."

"Er... bollocks," she added.

GCSE Results Hailed as 'Worst Ever'

Britain’s teenagers are still crying their little eyes out after yesterday’s shock announcement that the GCSE pass rate had fallen dramatically to 0.0%.

Schools minister Andy Adonis explained that, as the pass rate rose inexorably year by year toward 100%, something clearly had to be done or the general public might start to think that the figures might be slightly suspect.

“We therefore took the decision to reset the benchmark to zero this year,” he explained. “At the current rate of increase we wouldn’t get back into the high 90s for about 300 years or so, giving us plenty of scope for dramatic improvements in the pass rate over the next couple of years. It’s tough on this year’s students, of course - but let’s face it, they’re so thick half of them couldn’t identify a percentage even if it bit a chunk out of them.”

A red-eyed Stacey Hobbs of King Edward the Potato School took time out from her non-stop bawling fit to wail: “I worked everso, everso hard for my GCSEs - harder than anyone else ever in history, which I sort of dropped last year and took Drama Studies instead. My teachers predicted me eighteen A* grades, and instead I got a piece of paper in the post this morning saying. ‘Ha ha! You suck. Signed, the Joint Council for Qualifications.’”

Mr Adonis said that next year’s results may well show an amazing 50% improvement - which would be the best ever recorded - just in time for a general election. When somebody with an ‘O’ level pointed out to him that 50% of zero was still zero, the minister launched into a shocking tirade of foul-mouthed abuse against the old, discredited system of rote learning and abstract mathematical formulae that had nothing to do with ordinary people’s aspirations in the 21st century. He then offered to write a brief paragraph, or draw a picture, explaining how he felt.

GCSE < O

Maths exam standards have declined significantly since GCSEs were introduced, says a report by the think tank Reform.

Analysis of exam papers from 1951-2006 – a period of more than a decade, but less than a century, probably – shows the tests becoming shallower and less demanding after 1990. Pupils leave school ill-prepared for the workplace, says the report, adding that a generation of mathematicians has been lost to the nation’s economy.

According to Elizabeth Truss, a deputy director of Reform, “In today’s Britain it is acceptable to say that you can’t do maths, whereas people would be ashamed to admit they couldn’t read. What? Oh. OK, scratch that last bit.”

Schools Minister Jim Knight, however, responded by saying that an independent watchdog monitored exam standards closely. “We’ve trained this dog to bark if it detects any falling standards, and every year when we’ve shown it the papers it’s just yawned and weed on the carpet,” he said. “So that’s all right then.”

Shadow Children’s Secretary Michael Gove underlined the need for mathematics as a driver of economic growth, saying: “India and China are producing four million graduates every year. The single largest area of graduate growth is mathematics, science and engineering. Sorry, that’s three areas, isn’t it?”

Lib Dem education spokesman David Laws called the report “a damning critique of maths education in this country. Still, if people could do the maths they’d figure out that our chances of ever getting elected are nil. So it’s not all bad.”

Meanwhile, Mr Knight pointed to a 350% growth in news statistics in recent years –an increase of at least 50 numbers in real terms, allowing for seasonal adjustment and other factors - saying that there was a 5-4 chance that, of 9 out of 10 people, over one in three was on average three times more fluent than ever before in understanding numerical datas. He was docked marks, however, for failing to show his workings in the margin.

Warning - Contains Maths

Business Secretary John Hutton has delivered a speech saying that people in Britain should “celebrate the fact that people can be enormously rich in this country.”

Affirming Labour’s “fundamental” commitment to business, he said that “Aspiration and ambition are natural human emotions. The same applies to the natural human emotional need of the haves to step on the faces of the have-nots and rub their noses in the dirt. This is what the founders of trade unionism and the Labour movement struggled for a century ago, although perhaps they may not have thought so at the time.”

The Business Secretary, who said that “more millionaires” were needed, also claimed that defeating poverty – which would be achieved by shifting taxation from corporations onto ordinary wage-earners – would lead to “a society where no child lives in a family whose income is below the poverty line - 60% of median average income - but where there are also people at the top who are very wealthy,” adding that: “In fact, not only is it statistically possible - it is positively a good thing.”

A statistician armed with an outdated ‘O’ level and a calculator, however, pointed out that, since the media average income was defined as the middle one if every income in the country were ranked in order, adding more wealthy people at the top actually had the effect of shifting the median – and the poverty line - significantly upwards. Therefore, if more people were wealthy, more people would be defined as poor.

“Try it with two sets of sample data,” said our business editor. “If two people are on £100 a day and three receive £10, then the median is £10, the poverty line is £6 and nobody is impoverished - that’s Mr Hutton’s so-called statistical possibility. But if we follow his argument, and say that now three people get £100 and two get £10, the median is now £100, the poverty line is £60 and therefore 60% of the population are now living in poverty - proving that John Hutton is either incapable of simple arithmetic, or just a bare-faced liar who cynically assumes the public and the press can’t count.”

However, by this point all our readers had either fallen asleep through boredom, or logged out in search of something more interesting.