Baggage handlers at Stansted airport have announced strike action to take place on Good Friday, plunging many travel plans into chaos.
The situation wasn't helped by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude suggesting that if people are near an airport, then they should "drop their luggage off now" to avoid shortages of baggage operatives on the strike date.
Queues immediately began to form outside Samsonite stores up and down the country. Antler were forced to close certain outlets as crowds formed on the streets disrupting the flow of the high street. "It's madness", said one punter. "I heard someone say there was looting at Louis Vuitton".
Mr Maude sought to clarify his comments, telling reporters "I merely said that there is plenty of capacity at airports now and that if one was in the area that it would be an idea to drop bags off now. I can't be held responsible for mass panic."
This is not the news
Thursday, 29 March 2012
Assad will "spare no effort" to implement UN plan
Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad today vowed to "spare no effort" to implement the peace plan drawn up by the UN and Arab League.
Talking to reporters in Beijing after leaving the Baghdad summit, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said "I have received a response [to the plan] from the Syrian government and it is positive".
Mr Assad said at a press conference "I would do anything to end the bloodshed. I'd run right into hell and back. I would do anything to end the bloodshed. I'd never lie to you and that's a fact. But I'll never foget the way you feel right now, woah-oh, oh no. And I would do anything to end the bloodshed, but I won't do that".
Pressed on the inherent ambiguity of 'that', Assad clarified by saying the thing that he wouldn't do was stop turning state forces and weapons of war on his own people.
Talking to reporters in Beijing after leaving the Baghdad summit, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said "I have received a response [to the plan] from the Syrian government and it is positive".
Mr Assad said at a press conference "I would do anything to end the bloodshed. I'd run right into hell and back. I would do anything to end the bloodshed. I'd never lie to you and that's a fact. But I'll never foget the way you feel right now, woah-oh, oh no. And I would do anything to end the bloodshed, but I won't do that".
Pressed on the inherent ambiguity of 'that', Assad clarified by saying the thing that he wouldn't do was stop turning state forces and weapons of war on his own people.
Minister tells people to jump off cliff - thousands dead
Cabinet Office minister and serial fuck-up Francis Maude was caught up in a row today after saying that people should "go and jump off a cliff".
Panic engulfed the country as thousands found cliffs, steep ridges, high walls and any other raised precipice to leap from. The death toll is already in the thousands with police in Dorset calling for all cliff-edges to be closed to prevent further carnage in the county.
Mr Maude was unrepentent saying his words were taken out of context. "All I said was that if people were near a cliff and hadn't quite jumped off it", he told this website, "that they should maybe think about actually jumping off it before the cliff maintenance operators announce dates for any industrial action".
A spokesman for the cliff maintenance operators union said that their strike threat was about changing pay and conditions. "The panic jumping has highlighted the need for proper cliff-side safety protocols which our main employers are driving a coach-and-four through. The minister's comments definitely haven't helped, but some people would probably go and queue for hours at a filling station if he told them to".
Panic engulfed the country as thousands found cliffs, steep ridges, high walls and any other raised precipice to leap from. The death toll is already in the thousands with police in Dorset calling for all cliff-edges to be closed to prevent further carnage in the county.
Mr Maude was unrepentent saying his words were taken out of context. "All I said was that if people were near a cliff and hadn't quite jumped off it", he told this website, "that they should maybe think about actually jumping off it before the cliff maintenance operators announce dates for any industrial action".
A spokesman for the cliff maintenance operators union said that their strike threat was about changing pay and conditions. "The panic jumping has highlighted the need for proper cliff-side safety protocols which our main employers are driving a coach-and-four through. The minister's comments definitely haven't helped, but some people would probably go and queue for hours at a filling station if he told them to".
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Robin Hood to sue Osborne for defamation
Legendary redistributionary economist Robin Hood today threatened to sue the Conservative Party and the Chancellor George Osborne for defamation as Osborne's Budget was described as a 'Robin Hood budget' in some quarters.
"They've taken my theory of redistributative policy and turned it on it's head" Hood told our reporter "and are using the Robin Hood brand in a way that damages my reputation". He continued, saying "robbing old folk of their pensions carefully salted away over the years would have played very badly with my key Merrie Men demographic, let alone then handing that over to the already wealthy. My theory of redistibution very definitely went in the other direction and that's the issue here".
On the wider economy, Hood also had words for the Chancellor. "He seems wedded to the idea of a trickle-down economy, but this has been shown time and again to be a complete fallacy - an illusion at best, a downright lie at worst. Indeed, I only entered the economic arena in order to help it trickle down a bloody sight faster than it would otherwise have done".
Hoodian economics has proved controversial in the past, with critics in the office of the Sheriff of Nottingham claiming it is 'the politics of envy'. "It's nothing to do with jealousy", countered Hood, "more a sense of fairness that's been sadly lacking since King John's infamous 'no such thing as feudal society' speech in the early 1980s. It's typical of the Sheriff's staff to politick in this way to detract from the real issues - entrenched poverty, chronic lack of jobs and stagnant economic growth leading to yet more borrowing".
"They've taken my theory of redistributative policy and turned it on it's head" Hood told our reporter "and are using the Robin Hood brand in a way that damages my reputation". He continued, saying "robbing old folk of their pensions carefully salted away over the years would have played very badly with my key Merrie Men demographic, let alone then handing that over to the already wealthy. My theory of redistibution very definitely went in the other direction and that's the issue here".
On the wider economy, Hood also had words for the Chancellor. "He seems wedded to the idea of a trickle-down economy, but this has been shown time and again to be a complete fallacy - an illusion at best, a downright lie at worst. Indeed, I only entered the economic arena in order to help it trickle down a bloody sight faster than it would otherwise have done".
Hoodian economics has proved controversial in the past, with critics in the office of the Sheriff of Nottingham claiming it is 'the politics of envy'. "It's nothing to do with jealousy", countered Hood, "more a sense of fairness that's been sadly lacking since King John's infamous 'no such thing as feudal society' speech in the early 1980s. It's typical of the Sheriff's staff to politick in this way to detract from the real issues - entrenched poverty, chronic lack of jobs and stagnant economic growth leading to yet more borrowing".
Ancient documents set for auction records
Two ancient documents are to be sold at auction in London where they are expected to break all records for historical texts.
Discovered in a cellar in the London borough of Westminster, the documents are believed to be authored by Danny Alexander, a Caledonian noted for his fables, and renowned Victorian novelist and eccentric Oliver Letwin. The two are companion pieces to one another, forming the majority part of a series known as The 2010 Election Manifestos.
These two sections of the series were particularly noteworthy as they contained such fanciful notions of scrapping tuition fees, no top-down reorganisations of the NHS, a reform of banking regulation and a more progressive tax systems. Clearly, and with the benefit of hindsight, this was pure whimsy on the part of the authors, but in scenes reminiscent of Orson Welles's successful radio play of The War Of The Worlds, contemporary commentators report that people did actually believe that what was contained in these works was actually true and that the authors were in some sort of position to make it happen. Instead, the documents have gone down in legend alongside the great hoaxes of the time such as Piltdown Man, the Turin Shroud and Britain still clinging onto the notion of monarchy well into the second decade of the 21st century.
Head auctioneer at Christie's Hammar Gavelbasher, who will be conducting the auction, told us these lost texts are set to break all records. "We fully expect to record a price of less than the paper they're written on", he said. "Frankly we'd be better off auctioning real toilet paper".
Discovered in a cellar in the London borough of Westminster, the documents are believed to be authored by Danny Alexander, a Caledonian noted for his fables, and renowned Victorian novelist and eccentric Oliver Letwin. The two are companion pieces to one another, forming the majority part of a series known as The 2010 Election Manifestos.
These two sections of the series were particularly noteworthy as they contained such fanciful notions of scrapping tuition fees, no top-down reorganisations of the NHS, a reform of banking regulation and a more progressive tax systems. Clearly, and with the benefit of hindsight, this was pure whimsy on the part of the authors, but in scenes reminiscent of Orson Welles's successful radio play of The War Of The Worlds, contemporary commentators report that people did actually believe that what was contained in these works was actually true and that the authors were in some sort of position to make it happen. Instead, the documents have gone down in legend alongside the great hoaxes of the time such as Piltdown Man, the Turin Shroud and Britain still clinging onto the notion of monarchy well into the second decade of the 21st century.
Head auctioneer at Christie's Hammar Gavelbasher, who will be conducting the auction, told us these lost texts are set to break all records. "We fully expect to record a price of less than the paper they're written on", he said. "Frankly we'd be better off auctioning real toilet paper".
Friday, 16 March 2012
Osborne offers hope to beleaguered wealthy
With the Budget around the corner, Chancellor George Osborne today offered hope to the beleaguered wealthy with a hint that the top rate of income tax - currently 50p in the pound - is to be cut to 40.
Answering claims that this is an unfunded tax cut, Osborne retorted by pointing out the many areas that spending has fallen in order to pay for it. "By cutting funds from luxuries like libraries, schools, hospitals and the poor, we can make this gesture to those that have, so far, borne the brunt of the burden of generating extra tax revenues in difficult times".
"It's not a question of penalising those at the bottom end", continued the man somehow entrusted with the public purse, "more a case of rewarding those that have contributed to the success of the British economy as it slides towards another recession. However, if we can give the poor a good kicking while we're at it, so much the better. After all, we are the Conservative party and that is what we presume we weren't quite elected to do".
"We are all in this together", the Chancellor said before adding "but some of us are in it more than others".
Answering claims that this is an unfunded tax cut, Osborne retorted by pointing out the many areas that spending has fallen in order to pay for it. "By cutting funds from luxuries like libraries, schools, hospitals and the poor, we can make this gesture to those that have, so far, borne the brunt of the burden of generating extra tax revenues in difficult times".
"It's not a question of penalising those at the bottom end", continued the man somehow entrusted with the public purse, "more a case of rewarding those that have contributed to the success of the British economy as it slides towards another recession. However, if we can give the poor a good kicking while we're at it, so much the better. After all, we are the Conservative party and that is what we presume we weren't quite elected to do".
"We are all in this together", the Chancellor said before adding "but some of us are in it more than others".
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Government hails boom in repossessions industry
The government today announced that repossessions rose 14% last year in a massive boost to the bailiff and soup kitchen industries.
"Our policies have contributed directly to these fantastic figures", said a government spokesman, "and the opposition sit there and completely fail to recognise the important steps we've taken to reverse the decline they presided over and restore this vital sector of the economy to health".
Asked by our reporter whether he had considered that this boom resulted in over 48,000 households classed as homeless, housing minister Grant Shapps said "I'm glad you asked me that" before going on to talk about something completely different.
"Our policies have contributed directly to these fantastic figures", said a government spokesman, "and the opposition sit there and completely fail to recognise the important steps we've taken to reverse the decline they presided over and restore this vital sector of the economy to health".
Asked by our reporter whether he had considered that this boom resulted in over 48,000 households classed as homeless, housing minister Grant Shapps said "I'm glad you asked me that" before going on to talk about something completely different.
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