Pig Society

Rivers of inane drivel continue to steadfastly stream out of the Witangemot and the various toadying soothsayers. For some time, Caedmeron – that shifty, uliginous creature who heads up the Tree/Liberationist ruling faction - has been pontificating about the Big Society. It started some time last year, as I recall; he mapped out to the Northumbrian corner of the Anglo-Saxon realm his Big Idea for the future - a future, it would seem, without busybodies eavesdropping on private conversations in the marketplaces. He spoke of a future featuring small government. No. Really. It will be a future with no diversity co-ordinators, pigeon psychiatrists, fish quota accountants, tree wardens and cat license administrators – all of which have been subsidised through oppressive tax burdens, imposed upon longsuffering working people. The myriads of psychopathically draconian laws railroaded onto the statute book by the fly agaric-led Redistributionist Faction in the previous administration will be repealed, thus relieving the people of the burdens of being classed as common criminals. No longer would elderly ladies be violently seized by costumed thugs for allowing their pet dogs to leave brown statements on the streets of the villages and towns. Get ready, people - paradise is on its way. Whatever, Caddy boy.

What the beloved Dear Leader has been really telling his loyal swivel-eyed drones is that he's going to remove one set of burdens from the Northumbrian population and replace them with a new – and heavier - deluxe version. While levying yet more taxes on firewood, fish, spelt and suet to pay for the aforementioned non-jobs, he's going to reduce the number of jobs subsidised by the public purse, and instead encourage loyal, naïve idiots and dolts to do the work for free. Lovely lateral thinking, Slimeball. How do you do it?

Is everybody excited at the prospect of supporting big this new idea? Hmmm.. I've yet to meet one of the thousands of people who – so they tell us - are just dying to do voluntary work for the Witangemot for free, gratis and for nothing. If they are keen, it's because they're chewing magic mushrooms – or they're simply demented.

Maybe there are some willing men and women who are looking forward to being pigeon co-ordinators, tree diversity wardens and fish psychiatrists; I could be completely wrong for casting doubt on this new hallucination. But I can't help wondering if this is just another conjurer's trick to provide the gullible and unreflective majority the illusion that things are actually improving in Tree-Lib Land. Caedmeron may be slimy, but unlike his fly agaric-led Redistributionist friends, he isn't stupid. He just assumes that everyone else is.

This all sounds suspiciously like a blueprint for an Animal Farm-style Pig Society. The porcine drivellers implementing the agendas (set for them by the bigger swine at the top) are burdening the lower-order animals. But while cutbacks are made to pay for this enormous (imaginary) debt that has conveniently been presented to the serfs, the pigs will continue to feast off the fat of the land and prosper while the lower orders get poorer by the hour.

I actually like pigs – at least, the proper pigs. Although they're rather smelly, they're delightfully affable and honourable creatures; it's the human ones that make me want to heave…

Excuse me a minute – I feel rather nauseous...