I'm not a political expert or a journalist, I write stupid jokes and I like films so here goes. Tories to me are like Donald Sutherland at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when he sees Veronica Cartwright, the flaky nervous one from Alien, and goes, 'rwarhghghghghh!' Only instead of being aliens, they're rich, privileged cynics with their fingers in more pies than Jack Horner's extended family and the human beings they squeal 'get them!' at are on benefits.
Yes that old chestnut folks. It's Lynch the Leeches season for the boys in blue, and they're recruiting you and me. They want you and me to think that, hey there's a generation of spongers out there sucking the public purse dry at the expense of hard working, upstanding members of the community like us. Well, you know what? Point your finger at me, because I am one of those spongers.
Yes that's right folks, I am unemployed (cue thunderclap and dissonant chords on an organ. Somewhere a woman screams). Circumstances change. Tories want you to believe that people like me - I'm married, I have two kids, we have a car, a rented house and debts and bills just like every other soul - people like me are laughing at people like you, toiling away like the old bankers in Python's Meaning of Life. They want you to believe that we are rolling around in a huge carpet of money, making an army of babies to steal every last penny you own.
I was working. I was paying taxes like a good little boy. I saw the faces of the teachers I worked alongside when they found out they'd lost their jobs in the spending cuts that were 'unavoidable'. Then it was my turn. It can happen to anyone, especially if you work in the Public Sector as I did. My wife is the sole earner now, she works for the NHS, another system the Tories are dismantling, service by service.
You have to sell a big lie, just ask Sherlock Holmes. And where better to sell that lie than a shopping mall full of lunchtime consumers feeling the pinch, the pinch of winter and the pinching fingers of dole scum like yours truly. David Cameron, standing in amongst them all like a QVC presenter trying to offload a bunch of Richard Clayderman box-sets or a musical toaster with built in torch, selling, selling, selling.
A cap on benefits, as a money saving exercise, is like trying to hold back the volcanic ash of Eyjafjallajökull with a condom. It's like a busker on Holy Isle in the Firth of Clyde, paying off a student loan with the contents of his hat. It's a drop in the ocean isn't it? And yet the lie perpetuates, takes seed. People sitting on an inadequate bus provided by an inadequate bus company; a tin capsule shuffling them away from their homes and families to work, while the spongers rest, getting up at the crack of noon to buy rolling tobacco and, I don't know, a Ferrari? Why not? The seeds of their lie grow and flower. Weed them out at the next election.
Okay back to the knob gags next time.