Big Commons

As the latest series of Big Commons, the TV ‘Reality’ show, struggles through towards the end of its latest series, more and more of the audience are demanding that they be allowed to vote out many of the contestants.

Big Commons, the Channel 22/7 'Reality' show, is set in a building the fans of the show call 'The Houses of Parliament'.

The participants in the show are first 'voted' into the Big Commons House their so-called 'constituents' in order for the ‘Members of Parliament’ (as the contestants are called) to - as the show’s production team put it - 'to represent those constituents’. The Big Commons production team has often claimed that 'entering the Big Commons House gives these ‘MPs’ some say in how this country is run.'

However, those journalists, and other political commentators, who have witnessed the televised antics of these self-styled 'Honourable Members' of the Big Commons House, have dismissed the show’s production team’s claims that it is ‘a serious social and governmental experiment’ as 'ridiculous' and 'farcical'. Credulous Lobby-Fodder, the Political Editor at The Tymes newspaper, said, 'Anyone who thinks being a so-called ‘Member’ of the Big Commons house makes them anything more than a laughing stock for media-savvy urban pseudo-sophisticates like me is just fooling themselves, and as for 'running the country'… well, you have to admire their wide-eyed naivety, if nothing else.'

Apparently, the contestants, or 'Members' of the Big Commons House just lounge around on upholstered green benches under constant scrutiny by television cameras all day long. Most of the Members’ days are spent in exchanging gossip and insults with each other, backstabbing alleged comrades and working out elaborately convoluted expense claims. The Members also seem to spend an inordinate amount of their time engaged in blatant arse-licking of those of higher status in what those in the House call ‘Parties’, certain self-contained groupings that seem to bear no relationship to the world beyond the house, but – for some obscure reason – these party allegiances are vitally important to those within the house.

However, there are some 'Members' of the house, those belonging to the self-styled 'government' party, who engage in a protracted pantomime farce where some of their numbers pretend to run the country. At the same time, the remaining 'Members' from the other smaller, antagonistic, teams, or ‘Parties’ on the 'Other side' of the house, hurl gratuitous insults and unhelpful - and often contradictory - suggestions on how they could do it all so much better, given half a chance.

Nominally in charge* of the ‘Government Party’ in the Big Commons house is a character they like to call The Prime Minister (or ‘PM’). Although the PM himself is often not actually seen in the house, occasionally he will give some of the members of his team pointless, absurd or completely impossible tasks to perform, such as sorting out things like: the UK benefits system, crime, ID cards, the education system or pensions. The sheer impossibility of implementing the PM’s latest wheeze often forces 'Members' of the Government to quit of their own accord, if they have not by then run afoul of one of the myriad of bizarre rules and regulations that are implemented - seemingly at random – in the Big Commons House and been forced to stand down.

Bizarrely enough, it is not the breaking of the rule that matters to the Members, it only matters if the member is discovered breaking the rules by someone outside of the house, and the offending Member will then have to stand down, usually only for a short while.

So, all in all, it will be interesting to see just how many of the current crop of ‘Members’ are made of the stuff that will enable them to survive, if not prosper in such an unnatural, hostile and often perverse environment. Or, if they, like so many previous incumbents, will find themselves unceremoniously expelled from the Big Commons house in the next round of voting.

 

*Although this may change before the official time comes for the viewers get a chance to vote on whether they want him to stay , or not.

PM Still Refusing To Resign

Despite the recent resignations from the Cabinet, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has steadfastly refused to countenance his own resignation. As the crisis within the Labour party deepened, an unrepentant Gordon Brown said, in an exclusive interview with The Rope last night, ‘La la la la, I’m not listening.’ He then walked off back into 10 Downing Street, locking and bolting the door behind him.

‘We tried to talk him into quitting at the last cabinet meeting,’ said an exasperated Cabinet member, one of the two or three still remaining in the cabinet, ‘but he just sat there with his hands over his ears, singing traditional Scottish folk tunes to himself.’

A civil servant from the cabinet office said, ‘Mr Brown is going around Number 10 writing his name on everything, muttering, “It’s mine. It’s mine. It’s all mine and they’re not going to take it away from me.”’

It has long been known by many political commentators that, even in the days of Tony Blair’s premiership, Gordon Brown labelled all the food in the Downing Street fridge as his own.

Late last night, in a further development to the story, Mr Brown appeared at an upper story window in Number 10, while Nick Robinson, the BBC’s Political Editor was doing a live piece to camera. Gordon Brown opened the window and shouted down to Robison, ‘You can just piss off! I’m not leaving, not now, not ever!’ He then threw a mobile phone at Nick Robinson, which bounced off the reporter’s shoulder as the BBC crew ran for the Downing Street gates.

A constitutional expert admitted he was baffled. ‘Usually, a Prime Minister will know when the game is up. They still – despite being politicians – do seem to have a, admittedly somewhat hazy, connection to reality and do realise when they have run out of options. Consequently, there is no real constitutional way of removing a PM who just won’t go, short of Her Majesty the Queen going around there with the ceremonial Crown Crowbar and prying his fingers off the doorframe one by one. As you can imagine, that could possibly raise a few more constitutional questions than it answers, though. I think the best idea is to wait until Gordon Brown leaves Downing Street for some reason, and then nip in and change the locks while he’s out. It’s really our only option.’

Labour MPs – Another Secret Email Leaked

Yesterday, an email that has been secretly circulating amongst Labour MPs was leaked to The Rope. The email, similar to the one which calls on Gordon Brown to finally admit he is rubbish and to sod off now, calls on Labour MPs to finally own up and admit that Left-wing policies, ideas and even its very philosophical underpinnings just simply do not work.

The email states that:

It is now time for us all, as Labour MPs, to admit finally – as much to ourselves as the electorate – that the Left is now completely discredited and intellectually bankrupt.

We saw in the late 1970s that Left-wing economic ideas simply did not work, and even then it took us several years of struggle as a party for the majority of us to realise this, and then to build up the courage to drop most of our old economic nostrums.

Recently, there has been a growing realisation by some of us that Left-wing social policy does more harm than good too.

It is now time, therefore, for us to admit that always favouring equality over liberty is a big mistake as it just leads to increasingly draconian legislation that, in turn, leads to increasing hostility and distrust between the people and the state, which leads to even more draconian measures… and so on.

We’ve also found that increasing the size of the client state through the use of benefits and so forth, just leads to a population of state dependents who lose all their self-motivation. It doesn’t even seem to result in any reciprocal benefit to us as a Left-wing party either, as the benefits culture makes them too half-arsed to vote for us out of gratitude.

While some of us obviously don’t really care about this as long as we can keep on sucking at the state’s teat ourselves, it has become increasingly clear that the general population is beginning to wise up to just how badly we’ve screwed it all up. Even some of the dimmest amongst them are beginning to notice that several state-run institutions are on the point of collapse: the Police, the NHS, the armed forces, the justice system, education and so on.

Therefore, if we want to keep this cushy job and the expenses that go with it on serving our constituents, we will need to admit that it had all gone tits-up… yet again.

If we do wish to go on calling each other ‘honourable’ members without our irony meters overloading, then we have no choice but to all resign now.

The sudden appearance of this email has caused consternation in certain sections of the media with journalists at both the BBC and The Guardian working overtime to try to understand what the email actually says.

‘It must be written in some kind of code,’ said Polly Toynbee, the noted Guardian crackpot columnist. ‘I just can’t seem to make any sense of it All of us on the regres… I mean the ‘progressive’ side of politics, know that the state is the answer to everything.’

A BBC insider said:

If I understand this correctly, and it does indeed signal a collapse in left-wing thinking then it could be a massive disaster for the BBC. I mean, how can we continue to be so patronising in a glib condescending manner as we tell the people of Britain what they should be thinking? Indeed, if the Left does collapse where are we going to get our staff from? After all we are all from the liberal arts degree mainstream, all comfortable in our middle-class trendy-left conventional wisdom. If we start to introduce even more people who think for themselves, like that horrid Jeremy Clarkson [shudder] then where will it end?

From the other end of the political spectrum media opinion was not so confused. The Daily Mail’s political editor, Ranter Bilefoaming, said, ‘Oh No! This could be a disaster for us. What, with rapidly declining sales, we rely on the things like the outrageous lunacies of the left to create the headlines that make our readers apoplectic enough to keep on buying our newspaper, in order to feed their outrage and their conviction that the whole country has gone to the dogs.’

A senior Daily Telegraph columnist, Braindeath Berkshire-Hunt, said ‘Damned Bolsheviks! A good horsewhipping, that’s what they need. If I see one on my estate I’ll have my gamekeeper give him a damn good thrashing, what.’

However, Titsout Forthelads, a political columnist on the Sun said, ‘Frankly we don’t know what to say. Mr Murdoch hasn’t told us what we think yet.’

Home Secretary Resigns

Yesterday the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, took time off from filling out her latest expense claims to say that she would stand down from her ministerial position at the next cabinet reshuffle.

‘Obviously,’ she said. ‘I have been forced out from my position by the media because I am incompetent and dishonest. Ever since Gordon Brown took over his rightful place as Prime Minister, he has done his utmost to end this hideous institutional prejudice against the useless.’

As a serial inadequate himself, Gordon Brown has made a point of promoting the pathetically incompetent to positions of power in the government way beyond what little abilities they possess. Some cynics have said that he has done this merely to strengthen his own position by showing how useless all the other members of the government are, even compared to him. However, others do seem to believe that Gordon Brown does seriously think that the useless and incompetent deserve to be allowed their chance to attain positions of power and influence. Supporters of this view point to the banking regulations Brown introduced when he was chancellor as proof that he was serious about letting the useless and incompetent even have a go at running the UK’s banks.

‘While he was chancellor, it did seem to the casual observer to be a great success,’ said an economics journalist. ‘The bankers seemed to be making shedloads of money without any of them having any real clue about what they were doing. But as soon as the credit system went tits-up, they were revealed for the hopeless bunch of bankers they really are.’

‘It is a shame that I’m far too hopeless to carry on a minute longer,’ said the Home Secretary. ‘I had hoped to stay to finish our plan to make Great Britain the most modern, up-to-date, repressive regime in the world, and to continue with our project to make everything that people like to do illegal.’

Harriet Harman was quick to heap praise on Ms Smith, saying: ‘We must all thank Gordon Brown for making Jacqui Smith the first female Home Secretary. It was a great step forward for feminism, proving, once and for all, that women can be just as useless, incompetent, mendacious and venal as men.’

With his leaked plan to bring Ed Balls into the post of Chancellor, Many observers believe Gordon Brown is still determined to promote the incompetent and useless to the highest offices of the government, despite all the recent setbacks to the policy.

This policy of bringing increasing numbers of incompetent loons into government really took off under the premiership of Tony Blair, especially in the post of Home Secretary, where Blair tried out a selection of hopeless twats for that position, with each one seemingly more pathetically out of their depth than the previous incumbent. In response, the Conservative Party has seemingly reverted to its traditional policy of scouring the public schools, such as Eton, to repopulate its parliamentary benches with a wide selection of Upper-Class twits such as Cameron, Osborne and so on.

[Above: Conservative Party Front Bench Selection Procedure]

However, some commentators believe the policy may have backfired when the old Etonian, Boris Johnson, ended up as Mayor of London and has – contrary to most political pundit’s expectations– not entirely buggered it all up… yet.

However, there are some who dispute the Home Secretary’s claim that the UK has an institutional prejudice against the inadequate and hopeless.

‘To claim that there is institutional prejudice against the incompetent in this country is just sheer nonsense,’ said a leading academic. ‘By way of example, just look at or so-called leading sportspeople and all our national sports teams. For that matter, just look at the massive incompetence on display in any national infrastructure project. If anything, this country could possibly be a world leader, just behind the USA, in the sheer amount of top-level incompetence it produces.’

New Directions In Social Media

In response to the burgeoning number of social media sites and applications on the web, today SodOffMedia present GetOutOfMyFaceSpace. This is the new anti-social media site where you can tell anyone who tries to befriend you to Bugger Off And Mind Their Own Bloody Business! In addition, the site will show people what you are doing without the facility for them to add any smart-arsed or sarky comments about it.

In beta, at the moment, is a add-on facility for GetOutOfMyFaceSpace, which will give each user a chance to Photoshop all their (ex-)friends in their photos, adding excess weight, skin diseases and other grossly offensive distortions of the human form to the photographs before then republishing them with optional derogatory comments attached.

Also still in beta is a self-generating Events Diary. This tells the world about all the exciting parties, drug and drink binges, hot clubs, swinger orgies and flower-arranging classes you have purportedly attended in the last week, whilst in reality you were sitting there alone in front of your computer watching clown porn in your pants, whilst eating dry cornflakes straight from the packet.

Also about to be released is TwatOff, the micro-blogging update site where you can tell the world just how much you hate it and want it to leave you alone. Rather than waiting for you to update it, TwatOff, automatically generates random updates, in 140 characters and under, in order to save you the bother of telling the world which way you like to butter your toast and other such fascinating insights into your dreary existential stumble through your dull days.

TwatOff also adds random abuse to its messages, so that your ‘followers’ can believe that you have not forgotten all about them, despite you only adding them to you list because their fake avatar picture made them look vaguely fanciable.

TwatOff also has a semi-public message system so you can let the world know just exactly why you find a particular loser to be such an utter pain in the arse. Or, for more personal abuse, it enables you to privately insult someone, with the optional ability to included other members of their family who are also on TwatOff in your abusive tirade at the same time.

TwatOff also allows you to set an Obscurity Rating for the songs it pretends you are listening to, in order to impress people with the depth and breadth of your musical taste. The producers of TwatOff, IhAtEyOuAlL Inc, say that all the imaginary music tracks in TwatOff’s database have all been carefully checked and are guaranteed to be esoterically-correct so there is no danger of, say, Simply Red accidentally appearing in your playlist.

Many IT commentators have praised this new direction in (anti-)social media, with one, Nerdy Mousejockey, summing it all up ‘These new anti-social sites are really way cool. Now all us true computer nerds can all go back to our true natures of being weird anti-social loners, without having to face the daily trauma of trying to be interested in people we only vaguely know from their web profiles.’

Britain’s Got Politics - Latest

Last night it emerged that one of the finalists in the latest series of Britain’s Got Politics – the self-styled Golden Gordon Economic Juggler Extraordinaire And Saviour Of The Universe – had been checked into The Priory, the clinic for ‘over-tired’ celebrities, said to be suffering from delusions of adequacy.

In recent weeks, Golden Gordon, the one-time favourite of some of the audience for his claims to have restored seriousness to Britain’s Got Politics, seems to have fallen off the rails. His economic sleight of hand was seen by some political commentators as a welcome change of pace after the comedic turn, Tony ‘Del-Boy’ Blair, had won all the last three series of the programme with his famous skits on ‘Weapons Of Mass Destruction’, ‘Being A Straight Kinda Guy’, ‘Roll Up, Roll Up, Get Your Peerages Here!’ and many, many more.

However, it seems that Golden Gordon can no longer keep any of his balls in the air, with even his glamorous assistant, ‘Mandy’ Mandelson – former drama queen of the EU - seemingly beginning to despair of him too.

Consequently, Gordon’s audience ratings have plummeted and it now seems inevitable that he will lose most – if not all – of the audience vote when the final comes around sometime in the next year. Most Britain’s Got Politics pundits confidently expect the eventual winner will most likely be Dancing Dave, the former PR man turned song and dance act, who has been wowing audiences with his ‘all your old favourites with a brand new soft-shoe shuffle!’ routine.

Gordon Brown To Reform British Politics

Yesterday the PM, Gordon Brown, admitted that British politics is in a mess and he came up with what he regards as a solution to these problems.

Mr Brown claimed that his Presbyterian conscience had led him to believe that there should be one, and only one, strong God-like figure that everyone else in the country should worship and obey without question. As the PM pointed out, he has already saved the world from the worst of the financial crisis, so it stands to reason that he must be such a god-like figure, therefore he should remain as PM, at least until the presidency of the world becomes available.

The PM also said it was therefore obvious there should be no false gods, and as opposition parties only promote blasphemy against the one true Gordon, which only confused people. Therefore, he said, all the other political parties would need eradicating.

‘So, from now on, there will be no need for the opposition parties,’ he said, laying out plans to make all other political parties illegal. 'Consequently, as there will be no more political parties, any further elections would be a complete waste of time and money, so I’ve decided they will no longer be necessary.'

Gordon Brown also pointed out that he would end MP expenses scams at a stroke because MPs are also no longer necessary. For, as the PM is now omnipotent, he can do everything that those MPs would have done, on his own and without claiming a penny of expenses for it.

‘Not only that,’ he added. ‘There is now no real need for the rest of the cabinet, as they are all a useless bunch of tossers, as we all now know.’ Mr Brown then claimed he could easily do all their jobs in his spare time, even while saving the planet (again).

Being as the PM is now all-wise and all-knowing, he said: ‘It seems a waste to let people spend their own money, especially as I, the all-wise Gordon, knows they only waste their money on things they do not really need. So I will set income tax at 98.5% and I – personally – will decide what each and every person in the country really needs and buy it for them.’

Mt Brown then faced the assembled political journalists and said: ‘Obviously, there will no be no questions as I’ve already thought of anything you could possibly ask me and decided it would just be a waste of my massive intellect to even consider answering it. Good-bye.’