Editorial: It’s election time again

“This is a party political broadcast by the leader of the Trusty Party. I stand upright before you in all honesty to seek your vote so that I may have another term of well-paid office.

I am in many ways just like you – I have the same two eyes, ears and other dimensions. It is true that I possess many times the average wealth, but I am poorer than my oily friend George Thicket. I know how important it is to you to have trust in your leader and believe me I have trust in my leader Jesus Christ.

My party used be called New Labour. I must sincerely apologise for having been given wrong information by my intelligence people. They assured me that no one would think New Labour had anything to do with socialism. Of course, not many people do think that way, but they are still a nuisance because they are not going away or dying quickly enough. But I was right to go to war with my opponent. The world is a better place for having me in charge instead of him, although it really doesn’t make much difference because the system runs us rather than the other way round.

We in the Trusty Party (the T Party for short) are delighted to offer you a set of policies that have been carefully calculated to cost you appreciably less than an arm and a leg but also to Do Good. On jobs, health, housing, education, transport, pensions, electric toothbrushes, cat flaps we can promise anything you wish. We know you have a choice and we are determined not to be beaten on promises.

My main opponent is the Honesty Party, but to be fair there is not a lot to choose between us apart from the length of our hair. Their leader, like myself, is an ambitious, power-hungry, plausible, unscrupulous fellow. Some people even say I am the best leader the Honesty Party never had. There is also the Trust-Honesty coalition and the People’s Democratic Republic Front for More Respect. The comforting thing is that we all stand for basically the same thing – no fundamental change.

However, I do have to warn you about one danger that could threaten our whole way of life and more importantly my very handsome pension. The Socialist Party, which has been around even longer than our distant cousin Old Labour, advocates the  abolition of capitalism and the establishment on a world scale of socialism.

I’m sure there’s no need to tell you how disastrous this would be not just for you but also for me, my family, my friends, and all big shareholders in the British Economy PLC. These socialist people claim that all useful work is now done by members of the working class, that is, men and women who have to sell their labour for a wage or salary.

People are, of course, not employed unless someone can see a profit in employing them, but as we all know that is the way things are and, as one of my predecessors famously said, There Is No Alternative.”