HAPPY Duck Apple Night or whatever they call the legal waterboarding of children in your part of the country.
What’s that? You don’t get out a plastic bowl and semi-drown your family on the eve of All Hallows any more? Instead you stick fake cobwebs on your windows and let your offspring roam the streets dressed in skeleton jumpsuits begging for mass weapons of tooth decay?
Well, shame on you for joining in this over-commercialised You-Ess-Ay orgy of tat. Unless, like me, you’re planning to protest it by opening the door in a Donald Trump mask and scaring the over-sweetened stools out of the little beggars.
To be fair, tonight’s festival of shabby Americana won’t be the most fake, macabre saga of the week. That was to be found on the Tory benches after the Budget when a motley crew of ghouls staged a dire Crocky Horror Show.
I’m not saying the Chancellor (who, coincidentally, only needed blood on his chin to look like he was wearing a vampire mask) was inspirational. John Healey has the stilted delivery of a jammed-up HP sauce bottle and on Wednesday he hardly laid out Andy Burnham ’s plan to tear down neo-liberalism.
But with two semi-senile megalomaniacs running Washington and Moscow, meaning we’re permanently one surprise military attack away from petrifying the markets and leaving any economic strategy in ruins, you can see why he played it safe.
Interestingly, it was Kemi Badenoch in February who gave staunch backing to Trump’s crazed bombing of Iran (which Labour opposed) that added billions to our debt and made heating our homes virtually unaffordable.
Yet there she was after the Budget, howling like an infected banshee that Labour has “made everything worse” and “this is their mess and they need to own it” with the right-wing media orgasming over her. “She displayed the irresistible energy of a woman whose time has come. Hers was the speech of a future prime minister,” announced the Daily Telegraph.
But then four autumns ago the Sunday Telegraph’s editor trumpeted this: “It was the best Budget I have ever heard by a massive margin.” The Budget being Liz Truss ’s catastrophic attempt to gift £45billion of unfunded tax cuts to the rich which wiped £300billion off government bonds.
The chief ghoul sitting next to Badenoch, Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith, who was the “brains” behind the Truss Calamity, had the gall to mock Healey’s effort as a “rail-replacement bus service Budget”.
As opposed to a clown car-crash one that made Britain a laughing stock, authored by a party which, after 14 years in charge, left us defenceless, our prisons full, with the NHS on its knees, the economy in horrendous debt, growth pitiful and our standing on the world stage diminished by Brexit.
With perfect timing, in terms of the Budget and Halloween, mad-eyed Chucky Doll Truss rose from her tomb to publicise her latest lamentable book in which she claimed, among many other mental things, that the UK would have become so rich if she had lasted longer in No10 than 49 days, we’d have launched “several missions to Mars”.
Maybe the Chucky Doll, the banshee and her ghouls should launch a mission into the deep space of their consciences to find some humility.
Or would that be too spooky?
