A press office of pencil-necked vermin

jobcentrehassleplus

Hey, chin up. Just because you’ve lost your job through no fault of your own, there’s no need to be all down-hearted or to sink into the hand-to-mouth destitution of cheap groceries, court orders and rickets. Not just yet, anyway. It isn’t all rejection and despondency, you know, because there’s someone who always wants to see you, no matter how much you turn them away or pretend you don’t care.

That’s right, that’s us, we’re the Jobcentrehassleplus.

Jobcentrehassleplus loves you a lot, but knows you’re not ready to make a big commitment. We only want to see you once a fortnight – we can do lunch or dinner or, better still, how about a long and demeaning interview where we strip you of your dignity, kick you out of your wheelchair or surreptitiously induce you to work for free as Dolt-in-Residence at your local Tesco?

With Jobcentrehassleplus, your P45 opens a world of opportunity. Just look at the great services on offer in your nearest branch.

  • Each of our centres is equipped with the latest high-tech gear, like paper and biros, and hologrammatic claim forms that enable us to misplace your details in three dimensions at once.
  • The ATOS Crutch Burning Oven: ‘Making the lame crawl again’
  • Every local newspaper in the world with each instance of the word ‘job’ highlighted in pink.
  • A bank of crashed Jobsearchmachines that only show “marketing” jobs in Dorset offering £500,000 p.a. without mentioning it’s actually double glazing canvassing. and you will quite rightly go to Hell.
  • Overbearing security personnel with plexi-glass demeanours.
  • Teflon-coated management living a dream life of claimant oppression.
  • A press office of pencil-necked vermin only interested in writing Goebbelic propaganda designed to incite hatred so that they may sideline the actual truth of the DWP.
Comments

LibDem promise on drugs leaves no stoner unturned

The leader of the Libnick Cleggocrats, Rocky Black, has promised that if the Lib-Dems win the next General Election, no one will be imprisoned for possession of drugs again. The move comes as it becomes apparent that not even a robust mass-hallucination strong enough to send the electorate gibbering into the woods for a month can help the Lib Dems win an election.

“That’s some pretty bad shit, right there”, said Black, as smoke escaped from the gaps around his eyeballs, “but just because I’m, like, obviously off my tits, doesn’t mean to say that we errr, ah, what was I saying?”

Political analysts, meanwhile, point to the possibility that even the strongest mind-altering drugs cannot bugger the brain enough to make anyone vote Liberal Democrat ever again and only hallucinations of Castaneda proportions can imagine a prospect marginally less likely than the spontaneous metamorphosis of Kenneth Clarke into a moth.

edge
Above: The Right Hon Kenneth Clarke, MP, as a moth.

Comments

Secret Cinema cancels Back to the Future Screenings until Early Victorian Era

edge

Mixed-up mixed media promoters Secret Cinema have now officially cancelled the screenings of Back to the Future until a time firmly before the advent of Twitter, the iPhone, hipsters and telecommunications in general.

Speaking from under his top hat, impresario and ringmaster for the organisation, Colonel Buckminster Isambard T Cottle urged ticket-holders to leave their electronic devices at home to create “an immersive experience of utter shambolic confusion”.

It is thought that the new strategy will help ticket-holders meet themselves coming back, creating an event paradox by warning themselves not to go in the first place.
Comments

Join the Selfservatives


We Need You

edge


  • Are you a chinless sex-pest with wandering hands and a heightened sense of personal entitlement?
  • Do you follow a philosophy of self-enrichment through the medium of trouser-press purchase?
  • Would you be capable of throttling a pensioner if it was one of the conditions of entry into a tax avoidance scheme?
  • Has your taxpayer-funded property speculation made you into a scrounging tosser of the first order?

If ‘yes’ is the answer to any of these questions then we need you in the Selfservative Party. The Selfservatives are a like-minded group, a loose coalition, a fragrant collective of silver-tongued, soft-skinned kitty fiddlers.

Join us today; here at the Selfservatives, we are driven* by the need to help each other because, by doing so, it helps us help ourselves. Feel the camaraderie of a political party with real convictions (for fraud, gross indecency, perverting the course of justice and false accounting).

Join the Selfservatives today. Get in the trough because we’re all in it together.

*Although it was really our wife who was driving at the time.
Comments

Look what Europe wants us to decimalise now...

Decimal music is one of the unsung benefits of metrification, and is a great showcase for the simpler life of our European “neighbours”.

Screen Shot 2014-04-01 at 14.52.14

It’s easy to learn and easy to play. Whereas the eight-note English octave leaves two fingers unoccupied, the 10-note dectave has a note for every finger. What could be simpler? It’s so easy, you could master avant-garde jazz using the fingering for Chopsticks or play Debussy by typing a company memo. This is the fun face of metric. It’s certainly more interesting than a kilogram.

We’re confident that, once you hear Grieg’s Base 10 Piano Concerto in H 0.75, you’ll be so impressed with the metric lifestyle you’ll never want to buy vegetables by the pound again.

An earlier version of the metric piano – one where all the black notes had been removed – was de-authorised following the same review of discriminatory EU Directives that reversed a ban on same-sex potato relationships, but an all-white keyboard was used extensively on the early albums of Richard Clayderman.

Eurotinklers-10-Forté make a range of Decimal Pianos, which can easily be identified by the words “METRIC PACK” stamped above middle C.
Comments

How to secure money


Screen Shot 2014-02-10 at 17.06.52
Screen Shot 2014-02-10 at 17.08.48
Comments

How to pay your taxes

The following advice on tax payments is issued to commoners, the plebeian masses, the hoi polloi hardworking families. Certain Corporation Tax payers may consult the Indolent Revenue’s new luxury website for complimentary drinks, easy terms and the possibility of negotiating your tax affairs with someone you would like to offer a senior management position to.

dwt1
dwt2
Comments

MI5's security advice for business

orange
Our colleagues at MI5 have asked us to pass on some advice to businesses during COPSA - the current Code Orange Panther Security Alert. In keeping with the aims of joined-up Government, we have typed up Memo 18654(a) which we received earlier today from MI5 at the foot of the Chief of Staff's domestic shopping list. For your convenience, we have deleted the words Eggs and Yoghurt from the current draft, until such time as they become important to National Security
  • Beards.
    Employees with beards are rated by MI5 as Class Alpha Security Threats, except David Blunkett. Proceed with caution when dealing with Class Alpha Security Threats at all times. If they are not members of some kind of Al Qaeda cell, they are liberals, folk musicians or troublemakers of some other kind. Or David Blunkett.
  • Perimeter Security.
    Institute a Zero-Tolerance Perimeter Breach De-facilitating Initiative. Place notices at all points of entry expressly forbidding all terrorists to enter the building. Underline the notice with the phrase "This applies to you!"
  • Stay Vigilant.
    Pay close attention to employees who speak with a funny accent or insist on holding fluffy persian cats while they are talking. Eye patches, balaclavas and unidentifiable military uniform worn at work should also arouse suspicion.
  • Behaviour
    Employees who arrive for work in unmarked military helicopters or commute from a secret island in the Pacific Ocean should be regarded with utmost wariness. Unless their surname is Tracey.
  • Recruitment
    Employ someone who is adept at navigating the workplace via air conditioning ducts and conveniently-placed grills. Train them in the use of sub-machine guns and ground-based rocket launchers. Ensure that they have access to plenty of blueprints of your building and a supply of slightly-torn string vests. Encourage hirsuteness.
Comments

Identity Security

While DoSS, GCHQ and the NSA have only just announced their product development cycle for our groundbreaking new software - which has dutifully being collecting and ‘backing-up’ all those bits of sensitive information about you unbidden for the last five years, just in case - it’s nevertheless a good idea to keep your identity secure from everyone else, apart from us.

It’s good to be vigilant, even suspicious of everything untoward, except for that strange-looking van parked across the road (the one that has blacked out back windows and bears the name of a hitherto unknown utilities company), you don’t need to worry about that at all.

With this in mind, we present you the latest leaflet in our DoSS Guide to Security: a guide to identity theft. Click the image for a larger version.

edge
Comments

Securing Your Home

A Britishperson’s home is his/her castle/castlette: so goes the popular saying, but how true is it? And why isn’t it? To help you answer these questions, the Department have published a leaflet on Home Security, so that you can feel utterly safe in your home, even if predatory stranglers are on your roof, a meth dealer puts a deposit on the semi-detached next door and you become preoccupied with a new methamphetamine clause in your Party Wall Agreement. Police attempts to deal with it are stymied by a concerted attempt to crack down on hopscotch courts in your neighbourhood. Click to enlarge.

edge
Comments

A Timely Reminder of Peril

The Department of Social Scrutiny, through its regulator the Office of Peril Announcements and National Tireless Indefatigability in Extreme Situations (OFFPANTIES), has released the following advisory information in the event of ‘something kicking off’. Click image to see full size.

edge
Comments

Home Office and DoSS Open Travel Agency

Our colleagues at the Home Office have issued new guidance to Britons wishing to leave the country – in the shape of our brand new DoSS travel agency, Go Away, your de-immigration resource of last resort! The new brochure is coming soon, but here’s a sneak peek at the cover.

edge

Keep an eye on your text messages over the next few weeks and watch out for the winning SMS, which will contain a strongly-worded invitation to Go Away. Simply reply within 24 hours or await the arrival of the Home Office limousine to whisk you away to a waiting jet where you will experience a lot of potentially concentrated personal attention from our uniformed stewards.

Go Away: Your Holiday Company of Last Resort. ®
Comments

Here is the Shipping Forecast

edge
Comments

A note about the weather

British weather runs the gamut from mildly interesting to interestingly mild, but where does it all come from and why the south west?

These were the pressing questions that were to be answered by a parliamentary select committee formed for the purpose. In their interim report, MPs concluded that most British weather does indeed come from the southwest and is carried here by wind from the southwest.

MPs immediately saw the importance of wind and proposed a tougher regulatory framework for it. They felt that an over-reliance on weather from the southwest was anti-competitive and weather from other suppliers, such as the northeast, should be an integral part of the weather in the future.

edge

Members urged year-on-year improvements to the weather to make it more interesting and approved MONA - the Met Office’s New Age weather maps, surveyed using homeopathic theodolites and state-of-the-art witchcraft (above). They applauded the recent introduction of the hurricane to the climate, but felt there was no room for complacency and looked forward to more radical weather in the future. Members voted unanimously for less drizzle, though they did recognise it is an integral part of the identity of Manchester.

The committee then went on a series of foreign fact- finding missions to investigate long periods of unbroken sunshine.
Comments