When the Tories were first elected, I saw it as something to tick off my list of UK Things To Do, along with ‘Drunken Gardening’ and ‘Getting Called “Our Kid” By Someone Without Irony’. Everyone in this country tends to go on a bit about the Thatcher years, so I thought “Ooh! Now I’ll get to see what all the fuss was about!”
I have now seen the fuss and, um, wow. It’s not exactly the non-stop rocketshipride-on-acid laughfest I had anticipated. In fact, it’s kinda awful. Virtually overnight, I seem to have acquired the UK sense of perpetual rage every time I turn on the TV. I used to love watching the news – “Ha ha ha, look at all those horrible things happening to other people!” But now it seems to be happening to me. The vast increases in rail and bus fares and (gasp) cycle-to-work scheme. The VAT rise jacking my gas bills up. Cuts and the rises in student fees putting my uni job in jeopardy. Every other day, my bank threatens to fold altogether. What the hell? I’m a middle class thirty-something white guy – I thought the government was supposed to be on my side!
Privatising the police force. How do you even do that? Adorn police stab vests with 888.com
patches, like him off the snooker? Febreze ads on pepper spray canisters that read; Wouldn’t
you rather be smelling the freshnosity of Febreze than tasting the searing pain of CS gas? This taser was brought to your eyeball by NPower?
Why stop at privatising the police force? Why not privatise parliament itself? Chasing tax-dodging corporations and regulating the banking industry to recover lost assets is obviously a waste of time, why don’t MPs do ads for Cillit Bang instead? And doctors, ha! Look at them running around all smug with their flashy, obscenely blank white coats. Do your share, doctor man! You think saving lives is enough? Get some Sky badges on that coat. In fact, use it to advertise drugs!
Ooh, I know! Let’s tax charities, or even better, churches! It’s a tough old world out there for Johnny Taxpayer and it’s about time these parasites started doing their share. When Cardinal Keith O’Brien comes out to bash gay marriage, why not do it with an ad for Kirk Cameron’s latest Jesusflick playing on his big, stupid Cardinal hat? Then we can have two out-of-touch assholes spewing hate at us at once! That’s almost double the message. Kids today are sophisticated animals, they don’t respond to crusty old pajamaed fuddy-duddies spreading bigotry with their boring analogue mouths anymore, it’s 2012 for God’s sake!
You need to digitise that discrimination, god boy! Pimp that prejudice! I mean, come on, those hats are literally crying out to be projected on. Virgin Hospitals, Barclays Nottingham City Council, the Senior Court of Appeal brought to you by Tesco; we are limited only by our imagination.
Unfortunately, we only have a few short years before those pesky Labourites come back and ruin everything. If only the Conservatives had someone as dynamic and inherently electable as Ed Miliband. He is precisely what a sausage would be like if it could talk. Is this pasty milquetoast really the one to go up against Cameron in the next election? This is exactly how the first debate will go:
Miliband: Excuse me! I have something like totally important to say or whatever.
Cameron: Oh, do shut up, Talking Sausage.
Boom. Five more years of Tory Hell™. Why has no one but me figured this out?
Ed may have some sound ideas for the country and he might care about poor people, but that don’t mean jack these days. This is the problem with you British people, you haven’t figured out that sexy beats common sense every time. Our Canadian Prime Minister, who is arguably the most boring man alive, has figured this out. Despite being Canada’s answer to Vladimir Putin, he has successfully conjured a majority government simply by playing street hockey and putting videos of himself on YouTube playing Proclaimers covers on the piano. That might not sound sexy to you, but to a Canadian, that’s like spraying himself with beef-flavoured Lynx deodorant and reverse cowgirling Salma Hayek on the back of a Harley Davidson. He could only be sexier in Canada if he accidentally chopped his leg off with a chainsaw.
David Cameron has figured this out. In the UK, the Bullingdon Club is sexy. Trust funds are sexy. Owning lots of land and offshore accounts are sexy. Tax avoidance is like freaking Spanish Fly. Miliband needs to sexify himself to the max, and quick as he’s already got a few strikes against him. I mean, not only did Ed not go to Eton, but his parents weren’t wealthy landowners, in fact, they weren’t even born in Britain! Yuck! He needs a little razzle-dazzle to distract the nation from the fact he is a horrible broke-ass foreign Talking Sausage.
When some smarmy Labour backbencher fiddles his expenses, Miliband needs to walk up and kick him square in the face. Then when the papers get on his back, drive around the East End handing out free cash. When Cameron starts giving him crap for his close ties with trade unions, ram a lit firework up his keister and spend the next day breaking the notouching rule in a strip club. Being intelligent and sensitive is Election Day poison. Selfish tantrums, infidelity and violent eccentricity are what people want these days. Get your social media persona right and the British people will forgive you anything. I mean, hey, it worked for Mario Balotelli.