On a Pilgrimage

Over the weekend several thousand members of one of the UK’s fundamentalist religious sects made a pilgrimage to London in order to worship at their most Holy site, known as The Place of the Magic Money Tree.

The worshipers of this religion apparently wanted the Magic Money Tree to protect them from a mythical evil devil-creature they call The Cuts.

The Cuts is a mythical creature which they believe will bring about plagues, the apocalypse, the end of times, and will lay waste to their beloved public-sector pension schemes and other such benefits that the members of this sect enjoy because of the special protected status granted to their religion by the last government.

A pilgrim to the holy site of the Magic Money Tree said:

I have several A levels in subjects like, Extreme Exam Coaching, Multiple-Choice Box Ticking, Cut and Paste, and Downloading from the Internet. Therefore, I more than deserve to spend three years at taxpayer’s expense, inventing new drinking games, having sex with everyone on my course, experimenting with illicit substances and indulging in naïve political posturing like this. All while the people I was at school with will have to go out and get jobs just so they can pay the taxes that will pay for my University course in watching TV... er… Media Studies.

Another pilgrim said:

I am a local authority Diversity Awareness Officer, so I’m on the front line, doing a vital job. I’m making people who actually work for a living realise that they are – sometimes quite literally – superficially slightly different to some of the other people they work with and this could – occasionally – make them see things lightly differently, but this doesn’t necessarily mean they want to eat your babies. It is essential,.. vital work.

Another devout pilgrim was asked why he was on the pilgrimage:

I’ve been sitting in a local government planning office for nearly thirty years waiting for someone to tell me exactly what my job is, and in that time I‘ve built up quite a substantial pension. I don’t want to lose it now, or have to face the prospect of trying to get a proper job out in the real world where I’ve heard they have less that 20 tea-breaks a day. So I’m praying like mad that The Magic Money Tree will save me from The Cuts!

As the pilgrimage progressed, a spokeswoman for the cult said:

Our wise and noble priests say that the rich (that is anyone earning more than me) must have magic money trees of their own. So we think it is only fair that we take their Magic Money Trees off them to make sure everyone else can use them instead.

Anyway, my trade union boss says the rich must all have their own magic money trees and he gets paid as much as them, so he should know shouldn’t he?

When they arrived at the Holy place, the pilgrims listened to sermons from their high priests, all claiming that The Cuts would bring about the end of days and the apocalypse, and that it was all planned by the evil Tories who wanted to eat their babies.

The priests claimed that the rich must have secret Magic Money Trees of their own to keep themselves rich, which was unfair and a sin against all the tenets of the religion of the Magic Money Trees. For the Magic Money Tree believers say that the fruits of these trees should be shared out equally between all, all the time.

Furthermore, the sect is convinced that Magic Money Trees just suddenly miraculously sprout into life, fully-grown, out of nowhere. Therefore, all this talk of growing the delicate trees, caring for them and making sure there were enough magic money seeds left over to plant new Magic Money Trees was just lies perpetuated by those who wanted to keep the fruits of their own Magic Money trees for themselves and their acolytes in the evil baby-eating Tory party.

At the same time as these sermons were taking place, in other parts of London, extreme fundamentalist members of the ‘Political Activist’ sect, known colloquially as ‘Morons’ attempted to make sacrifices to the Holy Magic Money Tree by damaging shops and other such businesses and injuring some of the police. Although, just how this was supposed to help in any way they were unable to make clear.

However, those arcane wizards who actually understand economics, and those who have visited what the religionists dismissively call ‘the real world’ and lived to tell the tale, have all have pointed out that the Magic Money Trees do not exist. The religionists, though, have dismissed all such talk as the work of those they believe worship the devil the religionists call The Cuts.

The economists have pointed out, however, that The Cuts, does actually exist, but it is not a devil, instead it is - in fact - a very small fluffy creature with a tiny appetite. It is a creature that only nibbles around the very edges of the massive debt ran up by the last bunch of political idiots, inept economic criminals and mendacious self-serving imbeciles who were the government before the current – now seemingly very similar - bunch.