How to make money in Britain.

A DoSS Guide to the fiscal arts.

There are many, many ways of making money in Britain, but most of them can be grouped into the following few categories.

Work.
Employment is the favoured option. It involves travelling to a building in a town and then reading some company memos about productivity and pro-active models of customer service paradigms. You are then free to surf the internet for five hours a day.

This is made possible, in a furiously competitive world, by the importance of attendance over achievement. It’s not the winning that counts, but taking part.

Public Appointment.
Although often advertised in Britain’s top broadsheet newspapers, the key to winning a public appointment lies in being so close to the centre of power, you have no need to read a newspaper at all.

You can, however, gauge the relative importance and power of an official position by the size of its advertisement.

A recent vacancy for Chairhuman of the Potato Excellence Council warranted six lines of copy on the personals page. The page coincidentally featured a four column box ad with a picture of a member of the Equal Opportunities Commission as an infant alongside the caption, “Look who’s 50 today – happy birthday, you old cow”.

Self Employment.
This is typically for people who wish to own some kind of commercial vehicle, such as a small white van, and drive it around the ring road in a boiler suit swearing at cyclists, but it wasn’t always like this.

Self employment of a more glossy variety became very fashionable in Britain in the 1980s at around the same time as the slim-slat venetian blind. Advertisements of the era featured moodily-lit black ash offices full of hatchet-faced young professionals in double-breasted suits exchanging conspiratorial glances with one another. The dress code for these meetings always seemed to favour the big suit New Romantic look, so that everyone resembled a member of Spandau Ballet with a high yield Personal Equity Plan.

Blue Chip Larceny.
London’s Square Mile has always been a vibrant and exciting centre for perpetrating high-value embezzlement. It offers ample opportunities for the right individual to make enough money to buy the company they are skillfully siphoning funds away from, and to do it before lunch.

During lunch, an expert practitioner can then pass an entire multi-national corporation through a series of holding companies, leaving a trail of abandoned office buildings and burnt-out accountants which must then be carefully hidden inside hollowed-out mountains and homes for the fiscally exhausted.

 Britain: What A State

The Department of Social Scrutiny's guide to your entire life in Britain. Includes all necessary tax and identity card application forms and a full guide to the British public transport system, as officially sanctioned by Notwork Rail.

Plus: New retirement guide "Are You Alright, Dear", handy graduated tea strength colour matching chart and official guidelines for the consumption of cake, biscuits and other snacks served at ambient room temperature.

Britain: What A State

�Thank God: a book that's both clever and funny. Deserves a place on the lap of every comedy fan in Britain.� Charlie Brooker
�If you wince at the word 'benchmark', this neat parody could be just the thing to cheer you up.� Sunday Telegraph Magazine