Scotland’s Jesus: The Only Officially Non-racist Comedian (15 page)

Royal Bank of Scotland boss Stephen Hester handed back his £1 million bonus. Iain Duncan Smith said Hester should give up his bonus but that the government couldn’t make him do so. That’s right, the government is totally powerless to tell people what to do – hence the fact we’re all allowed to smoke marijuana and keep chimps as pets. Hester says he gave it back because he didn’t want to become a pariah – that’s good, I was worried he’d done it because it was the right thing to do.

Barclays were fined for ‘manipulating the Libor’. I’m so disgusted with them I plan to take my custom elsewhere. From now on I’ll be nicking my pens from Argos. The fine of £240 million has taught Barclays a valuable lesson. That fixing rates is worth it. Why is Bob Diamond always referred to as ‘one of Britain’s top bankers’? He lost Barclays £290 million. My son still has the fiver his granny gave him for Christmas, which makes him a more successful banker than Bob Diamond. Fuck it, on the figures alone my couch is a better banker than Bob Diamond.

Hundreds of bankers might be prosecuted for fraud, following the rate-rigging scandal. They’d better have good lawyers or they could end up in jail. Unfortunately, they do and they won’t. Allowing MPs to investigate the banks is like getting Premier League football teams to investigate the sex industry.

Disgraced former HBOS banker Sir James Crosby asked for his own knighthood to be removed. Of course, it’s better to hand it back yourself rather than sit and wait for the Queen to come and take it off you by force. This is terrible news for Crosby – without his knighthood he won’t be allowed free access to museums, exhibitions and English Heritage buildings. I don’t think giving the knighthood back is enough – I think he should have his shoulders cut off so he can never receive one again. Perhaps it’s even time for an award that’s the opposite of a knighthood. Just so we can fully show our gratitude to bankers and the like, the Queen could tap their shoulders with a dirty mop and blow a raspberry, before they wriggle out the room on their stomachs while Prince Philip flicks them with a wet towel.

Boris Johnson’s warned the government that new bank regulations could risk ‘killing the goose’. I’m guessing that’s from the expression ‘Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs made from all that money we’ve all already fed the goose anyway.’ The deadline for the banks to make the changes is 2019, giving us the structure that’s needed to avoid a second banking crisis, just after a second banking crisis has already taken place. I’m not worried about the banking problems as I keep all my money in Jersey. Not in a bank but buried in the garden of a children’s care home. They won’t look there.

The recession has led to an increase in lending and there are new laws to clamp down on loan sharks. The industry still insists they receive few complaints, then again it can be hard to type an email in a plaster cast, especially when your laptop’s in Cash Converters . . . and it’s surprising how important teeth turn out to be in forming coherent speech.

Payday loan firms have been told to sort out their dodgy practices. Some have hit back, pointing out that without them as a safety net many people could fall dangerously behind on their online bingo commitments. The move was prompted by news of an imminent cash loans advertising push, started by rumours that Carol Vorderman was to have her eyes surgically replaced with slowly rotating spiral discs. The loans are supposed to be just till the next payday. But the way the economy’s going for a lot of people that’s not expected to be till 2018.

• • •

A study claims people in the most deprived parts of the country are spending a fortune on fruit machines. The government is genuinely concerned, as all the cash it’s diverting from the lottery could bring an end to subsidised opera. I used to have a gambling problem with the horses. I’d always want to play poker, but they’d insist on snap.

The government should at least bring back the one-armed bandits. Otherwise in a decade’s time the urban poor won’t even have the strength and dexterity to open their door for the monthly visit of the man who liposucks out their fat reserves to be rendered down for biodiesel.

The cost of lottery tickets is to double. Or put another way, the UK has announced a 100 per cent increase in tax on the poor. A risky move by lottery bosses Camelot, it could threaten Tory hopes to appoint them to run the NHS. The prize for five numbers will be halved, meaning people will soon have virtually no chance of winning £50,000 rather than virtually no chance of winning £100,000. It’s part of a bigger rebranding of the lottery, including changing the logo to just a single raised middle finger.

We all have our ways of picking the numbers. I tend to write numbers on forty-four eggs then place them in a giant incubator. When they’ve hatched and matured, I ride the biggest ostrich at the head of all the rest, tether it up outside the newsagents and ask for a Lucky Dip. Though of late I’ve swallowed forty-four numbered ping pong balls, then jotted down the first six that I reflexively regurgitate when played the
Loose Women
theme tune.

A high proportion of lottery players are older women. So an easy way to guarantee some pretty vigorous action with over-fifties divorcees is just to get your cock coated in scratchcard foil. I think if I won it’d be important to share that kind of wealth. I’d have a hundred grand changed into 2p coins, put in a tip-up truck, then I’d drive round looking for buskers. I’d also get a penis extension. Nothing too big, just a room big enough to display them all in.

Some of the sums being won are ridiculous. What would I do with that kind of money? It’s a cliché but I’d have one forearm replaced with an outboard motor. Then I could commit a crime near any body of water and skilfully avoid detection by tipping Fairy Liquid from my hollow top hat and thrashing the surface with the propeller, before disappearing into the spume.

Ray Winstone says he’ll leave this country as he’s being ‘raped’ by high taxes. I hope he moves to a country where they have no taxes. And he’s then raped. Most people would happily pay more tax if they thought it was going towards raping Ray Winstone. That could be the new television advert for HMRC come self-assessment time: the little tax collector cartoon character in a pinstripe suit and bowler hat raping Ray Winstone. I reckon you’d get people earning seven grand a year offering to pay 40 per cent tax.

Stamps are to rise by a staggering 30 per cent. Maybe the Post Office should try to appease public anger by at least having the Queen lower her top to expose a nipple. If you’ve little kids you can save money; they’ll think it’s a real adventure del-ivering the easier ones for you. Which reminds me, I must phone the Congolese embassy again. I know, I’ll never forgive myself; if I hadn’t treated him to all those extra crusts he’d have been able to squeeze out through the bars like normal.

Research shows there’s a ‘fine line between being willing to pay more and walking away from the service’ – a line that was crossed about eight years ago. In their defence, the Royal Mail have had to raise prices because there’s less birthday money in cards for their postmen to steal nowadays. The postal service is to be sold off, with staff receiving £2,000 in shares. Not all employees will receive them, as they’ll be sent out by post. The government has been warned there could be striking at the Royal Mail, but sadly for the unions people thought they already were.

Ed Miliband called for all UK goods to display ‘Made in Britain’ stickers. Aren’t our exports suffering enough as it is? We might shift a bit more with ones that say ‘Made in Germany’ (or Japan). It’s a good idea for electrical stuff. Then I could cancel my
Which?
subscription as I wouldn’t need them to tell me the worst buys. Surely we’re in enough trouble with the likes of al-Qaeda as it is without their operatives glancing at a tiny Union flag on the clamps being fastened to their testicles by the Saudi police?

It seems there are now four hundred and ten different UK gas tariffs. The cheapest way to keep warm must be to get hold of all the different companies’ promotional literature. Burning it should see you through till spring. David Cameron has promised to reduce gas and electricity bills. He’s planning to do this by making as many people as possible homeless. No, he actually made energy companies send a letter to their customers. He denies that’s all he’s done to help people heat their houses, pointing out that they can always put the letter on a saucer and burn it. It’s a particularly helpful development for all those many internet-savvy eighty-year-olds who like to research what the cost of freezing to death this winter will be. An advisory letter? If I’m going to stay I at least want some petrol-station flowers and a huge card with an embossed puppy on it.

Dave says insulation is essential. That’s true. If there’s any hint of heat escaping from your house local pensioners will surround it like in
Dawn of the Dead
. Do keep an eye on your local elderly during the cold weather. Remember, all it takes to sneak into some people’s wills is a couple of trips to the Co-op.

The Energy Saving Trust has found out that overfilling our kettles wastes £68 million per year. Which is nothing compared with the amount of energy wasted by the Energy Saving Trust coming up with that fucking useless statistic. If the Trust really wanted to save some energy the first thing they should do is sack the team of scientists who were boiling kettles 9 to 5, seven days a week for a year, turn off the website and board up the office. They recommend that by cutting just one minute from our showering time we’d save £215 million a year. Life’s tough enough. Which would you rather: spending an extra minute in the shower every day getting away from your problems or once every three months not even noticing that you’d saved forty pence? Here’s an easy way to cut energy usage – imprint ‘Do you really need to?’ on all light switches in braille.

Ofgem criticised the big six gas and electricity firms for their lack of transparency. Which is odd, because they can’t be more transparently a bunch of money-grabbing bastards. Research shows 70 per cent of people pay too much to their energy supplier because they’re on the wrong tariff. The other 30 per cent pay too much to their energy supplier because they’re on the right tariff.

How nice of them to freeze prices this winter. It explains why they were continually putting them up over the summer. So we have to continually search for a better deal. Basically, the energy firms are like an abusive spouse: the more loyal we are, the more we get punished. Ministers have vowed to fine energy firms that fiddle gas and electricity prices. However, will they think of a way of paying such fines?

Energy prices are rising at such a rate that many people will have to go back to the traditional method of heating their home on a cold winter’s night. Getting pissed and setting fire to it with the chip pan.

The elderly are, of course, particularly vulnerable, as nobody gives a fuck about them. Scottish Gas has put heating prices out of reach for so many pensioners they’re thinking of rebranding themselves as ‘DigniGas’. The government won’t act, as the projected springtime surge in the number of estate agents after the hypothermia cull is its only current plan to cut unemployment figures.

David Cameron says he wants to restart the Right to Buy scheme so council tenants can share the same dreams as home-owners. I wonder if he means the one where you’re eating shredded newspaper so you can pay the mortgage or the one where you’re trapped in a loveless marriage by negative equity. The UK has the smallest new homes in Europe. Many new homes are only as big as a London tube carriage. A good comparison. In my experience both often contain at least one woman who can’t bring herself to make eye contact.

House prices are continuing to drop. Experts fear that if the trend continues property might soon only be worth something close to its actual value. A house in Wales is on sale for zero pounds. It’s so dilapidated you’d have to be mad to live there. And yet three million people do. The poor have nothing to fear from the recession. It’s just about being resourceful. Simply pop into a branch of Millets just before 6pm and when the assistant’s not looking sneak into one of the display tents.

High-street sales fell over Christmas for the first time in four years as millions of shoppers switched to the internet. After all, why go out shopping in the cold and rain, and be jostled by crowds of strangers, when you can stay at home and watch porn? Let’s face it, Tesco would go bust if someone could email us a sandwich. People now do preliminary research in the real world but inevitably finish up online – a vision of the decline of the UK high street . . . and of the sex life of most men over thirty.

The big high-street chains are really suffering, which is a shame considering the amount of effort they’ve made over the last twenty-five years to force local shops out of business. It’s a real pity that so many HMVs have gone. Now where will I go when I want to ignore a World Music section? HMV is ninety-two years old, which probably explains why it doesn’t know anything about downloading music or films from the internet. I actually preferred going into HMV than buying things from Amazon – mainly because when I was in a shop I was much less likely to get distracted and have a wank instead.

And poor Jessops. Such a cruel irony that the high street’s leading seller of telescopes failed to see it coming. It’s unfortunate, but maybe they should have considered opening branches of their camera shop somewhere that people would use them – like the 80s.

Blockbuster went block bust. This was a real shock, as most people thought it had closed down years ago. A Blockbuster spokesman said, ‘The core business is still profitable.’ What, films? Yes, they are. But renting out an old DVD copy of
Dances with Wolves
for two days? Not so much. It’s certainly a shock to me. Who would have thought clicking a mouse could ever replace trudging through the sleet to be told you need three not two forms of ID?

And Little Chef is up for sale. You know you’re in trouble when even truckers turn their noses up at your food. Who could forget that illuminated sign? Even now I reflexively salivate if my headlamps swing across a fat man while I’m parking at a dogging site. We used to get taken there on birthdays. This might have been more of a treat if Dad had had a car. They are pricey, though. I prefer to gaffer-tape a shrimp net on to a three-metre pole and stick it vertically through the sun roof. Before long you’re stuffing your face with engine-warmed starling.