Author’s note: I cannot emphasise enough how much I dislike the media. Left or right. State sponsored or privately owned. Their purpose is to distort facts to support their beliefs and make you, yes you, feel miserable and dissatisfied. If you want to be happier – stop watching the news, stop listening to the news, stop reading newspapers and stay away from Twitter. Your life will improve immeasurably.
Needless to say, Tom hated this and it was never published
Politicians and pundits reacted with horror today at a new report that claimed the UK “wasn’t too bad really” and that “you could do a lot worse, you know?” An almost apoplectic Tony Blair declared “This is just the sort of nonsense that we’ve spent years trying to counter. How on Earth can we justify higher taxes, greatly increased legislation and blame the Tories for everything if people go round believing things aren’t as bad as we’re telling them they are?”
The Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, also attacked the report’s findings. “Wherever you go in Britain, not that you can easily of course with the practically defunct transport system, you find crack addicted babies, gun-toting youths stealing mobile phones and dead and dying patients littering our filthy, useless hospitals. And this is all the fault of the Government. Dangerous talk that the UK is not too bad will only encourage complacency and prevent people voting Conservative in the next election”
The report, written by a recently graduated researcher, Martin Clifford, was unusual in that it was based on objective research and approached the subject from a position of studious neutrality. The report compared the living conditions in the UK with those around the rest of the world and found that in general they compared favourably. However, the report has angered almost all influential groups, including Mr. Clifford’s employer a government sponsored think-tank called Doomwatch. Doomwatch’s president, Professor Clive Slater, claimed that the report was in draft only and was now being extensively rewritten by more seasoned researchers and that Mr. Clifford had been suspended. “Our job is to highlight problem areas that require Government intervention. We certainly don’t expect our researchers to produce this sort of rubbish. Especially when we have a funding application being reviewed”
Help the Aged has also been angered by the report’s claims that the “Good old days weren’t all that great, either”. “That’s the problem with young people today. They don’t appreciate how much better life was when we had widespread disease, malnutrition and poverty. Two-fifths of our children might have died before the age of eight and most old people might have lived in pain and abject poverty but we were happy.”
The media has also denied the reports claims that they overuse hyperbole and exaggeration. “It’s ridiculous to say that we claim every minor event is a world changing drama” claimed Piers Morgan as he leafed through his thesaurus of ‘Disaster, Crisis and Horror’. Mr. Morgan was editing the Daily Mirror’s shock investigation into “Third World Britain – How Crime Lurks on Every Street Corner” but reminded readers that “The Mirror features plenty of feel-good stories, just look at the amusing piece about a kitten on page 15.”
Mr Clifford came out in strong a strongly worded defence of his study, however, claiming that journalists used these techniques to sell more papers, special interest groups to get funds and politicians and the legislature to generate work for themselves. “I mean they need to keep making up new laws or else half of them would be unemployed. And let’s be honest, we’ve probably got enough laws already and the new ones we get don’t work very well anyway. We’d probably just do better applying the existing ones more intelligently”
As Mr Clifford was driven from his office by politicians, civil servants and journalists jabbing sharpened sticks at him, Tony Blair moved to assure the public that things really were as bad as they were being told. “After all” he explained, “if they weren’t, Parliament would be completely irrelevant to most people, wouldn’t it?”
Sex and Drugs and Growing Old 