Government Seeks New Anti-Nuisance Powers

Yesterday, the Government Minister for Minding Other People's Business, Trigonometry Punkbuster, announced that the government would be seeking new powers under new legislation to be brought forward in the next Queen's speech.

Punkbuster said, 'for too long now the ordinary people of this country have had to suffer all manner of petty inconvenience, nuisance and irritation from a few, and they are only a minority, of their fellow citizens. Under the proposed new legislation we want to enable government inspectors - with police backup if necessary - to enter people's homes and examine the arrangement of their cutlery drawers.'

The government - it seems - is responding to recent research - splashed in lurid headlines over the front pages of the middlebrow tabloids - that strongly implied that people with disordered, unarranged and untidy cutlery drawers are those most responsible for many of the crimes committed in this country.

The University of Camberwick Green Sociology and Theme Park studies Department carried out the research for the government. The head of the department, Professor Sprinkle Hoodihugga, said, 'Those from the middle-class, or even more privileged backgrounds, would regard with something approaching horror the chaos that exists in some cutlery drawers. Especially the cutlery drawers of those who - through no fault of their own - are dispossessed, marginalised, alienated, excluded and on the fringes of society. Some of our student researchers, who themselves come from reasonably privileged backgrounds were aghast to discover that some of these poor dispossessed people had no cutlery trays at all in their cutlery drawers. One of our students had to be taken to hospital suffering from shock when she opened the cutlery drawer belonging to a teenage single-mother on a London estate and discovered that the spoons, knifes and forks were all just dumped into the drawer together… without even any attempt whatsoever to keep them separate.'

A spokesbeing for the Conservative party opined’ this is yet another attempt by this cynical government to distract attention from their failures. Why my butler knew someone who grew up in a working class household and he assures me their cutlery drawer was immaculate. Instead, I blame whatever it is we are blaming this week for this malaise.’