I blame the scapegoats (2 page)

That's
slaughtertainment!

Free
market forces

McDonald's
to go, please

The
thief of Baghdad

An American in Paris
(in a Sherman tank)

Responsible
owner sought for sawn-off shotguns

Testing,
testing . . .

Halal
Dolly

Sunday Dads

I don't want spam!

Life
on Mars?

United Nations
Closing Down Sale Open all hours Going for a song

The
plane to Spain flies mainly over Staines

Independence
Day

Acknowledgements

I Blame the Scapegoats

Introduction

It
must be tough being a Swedish satirist. 'I see the government have decided to
keep paid paternity leave at eighteen months rather than extend it to
twenty-four, the vicious bastards!' 'Yeah, and notice how those fascists in
Stockholm only partially subsidize our excellent public transport system!'
Swedish sketch writers must be praying that George W. Bush wins a second term
at the White House. 'Hurrah! There's still a psychopathic chimp leading the
Western world! Children, you shall have presents this Christmas!'

Thankfully,
in this country we have a Labour government that continues to do its best to
assist Britain's satirists as regularly as possible. I worked hard to help get
this government elected; giving me so much material was the least they could do
in return. However, I do sometimes worry whether genuine satire requires the
writer to be filled with hatred for his subject matter. Does satire demand
contempt? When I worked on
Spitting Image
we
certainly hated Margaret Thatcher. But we also wrote sketches featuring Gary
Lineker or the Queen Mother or a bunch of singing vegetables and out of all of
those I only hated celery. And now, though I regularly snipe from the sidelines
at this Labour government, I don't actually
hate
them. I have contempt for some of the things that some
members of the government have said and done, while there are plenty of other
things I applaud and admire (particularly Gordon Brown's habit of buying his
Treasury team my novels for Christmas).

In the past few years many people whom I
respect have resigned their membership of the Labour Party, others have chosen
to remain, while a third group have sent off their angry letters of resignation
but forgotten to cancel their direct debit. I can't really imagine myself ever
divorcing the Labour Party; indeed I actually returned to my home town to stand
for Parliament at the last election, 'just for the
craic’
as they say in Maidenhead's famous Irish community. I
knew the voters of Maidenhead wouldn't elect me (though you didn't have to be
that
emphatic, guys) and I have no intention of standing
anywhere again because, frankly, being a writer is a much nicer job. But the
experience confirmed for me why I'm still in the Labour Party when it would
have been so easy to resign in opposition to the Iraq war or foundation
hospitals or Roger Moore getting a knighthood. I think it is because when you
are close to it you see people really making a difference. Where I live in
Lambeth, for example, some teenagers recently began using an empty kids'
paddling pool as an impromptu skateboard arena. Because some of them had their
hoods up and weren't playing croquet or bridge, there were obviously complaints
about this. So my local councillor approached them and talked to them about
whether they ought to campaign for a proper skateboard park. She took them to
council meetings where they had the courage to stand up and give a speech
making their case. They sat through several more long and probably bewildering
meetings, understanding at last why Sky TV hasn't bought the rights to transmit
all the thrills and spills of live local government planning committees. But
at the end of this gruelling process, the council agreed to build them a proper
skateboard park nearby, which you have to admit is a fantastic testament to the
democratic process. Obviously by the time it opens these skateboarders will all
be in their mid-forties and more interested in re-potting geraniums, but that's
not the point. If Councillor Helen O'Malley (Lab.) had been a stuck-up snooty snob,
it never would have happened. Instead a sign would have gone up on the paddling
pool saying 'No Skateboarding', before being yanked off to make another
skateboarding ramp.

So whenever I get cross with this government,
I try to remember that there is a lot more to the Labour Party than what Tony
Blair is saying on television. There are a great many vital (and frankly rather
tedious) posts that need to be filled, from local councillor to Euro MP to
school governor, and I consider it a matter of utmost political importance that
as many of these people as possible are not Stuck-up Snooty Snobs.

And
while all these good people are working so hard, I try to do my bit by taking
the piss out of them all. My feelings towards the various politicians and
organizations in this book vary from affection to outright contempt, but
frankly I don't think any of that is as important as whether the jokes are half
decent. As it happens, most of the pieces in this collection are not about
party politics at all and I have tried to avoid banging on and on about the
issues that really bug me because I thought it might get a bit boring for
people to keep reading about car alarms and the uncooperative nature of my
printer. Instead I have tried to cover as wide a range of topics as possible,
from human cloning to the Miss World competition to soft-core pornography.
(Come to think of it, these are all the same subject, aren't they?)

These
columns begin immediately after Tony Blair's being re-elected to his job and
end soon after Saddam Hussein's losing his. Where there is some topical
reference that might now need further clarification I have inserted an asterisk
to denote that there will be an explanatory footnote at the bottom of the page*
But most of the subjects discussed in this book are still live issues. That's
the wonderful thing about having a regular column: one is continually having to
make new observations aimed at the latest targets to appear on the scene, such
as that right-wing Tory baldie
William Hague
Iain Duncan Smith.

So I hope this collection raises the
occasional smile in a time when there seems to be less and less to laugh about.
Obviously some subjects are simply too distasteful for a comedy writer to even
contemplate tackling, such as public autopsy or the death of the Queen Mother
(pages 197 and 128 respectively). But as the old saying goes, 'you either laugh
or you cry'. Or you think about George W. Bush being elected to a second term
and you do both.

J.O'F July 2003

* Yup, you've got the hang of that
really quickly.

Choose the sex of your child

7
July 2001

A
doctor in America has just invented a 'sperm sorting machine'. At least that's
what he claimed when his receptionist burst into the office to find him doing
something peculiar with the Hoover attachment. Either way, a clinic in the
United States is now charging the modest fee of $2000 in order to allow couples
to choose the sex of their child. This development would have provoked the
major moral dilemma of our age, were it not for all the other major moral
dilemmas currently-piling up in the in-tray. Should we allow the cloning of
humans? Should we permit euthanasia? When you receive a written invitation, is
it okay to RSVP by e-mail?

The
world would be very different if parents had always had this choice. Imagine if
Alderman Roberts had chosen to have a son. Mrs Thatcher might have been an
aggressive, war-mongering politician instead of the gentle, loving woman she
turned out to be. Or what if Arnold Schwarzenegger's parents had chosen a girl?
'She' would have beaten up a dozen mutants, fired off her rocket launcher and
destroyed the cyber-city and everyone would have said, 'You know, Evening
Primrose Oil can sometimes help with PMT, dear.'

It's
hard to know if your parents always secretly hoped you'd be born the opposite
sex, although if I was Princess Michael of Kent I'd be a bit suspicious. Most
couples always pretend that they don't mind

what sex their baby
will be. When people said to Anne Boleyn, 'What do you want: a boy or girl?'
she said, 'Well, a girl would be nice because I could buy her dolls and dresses
and things. But then part of me hopes it's a boy because otherwise Henry will
chop my head off.' But now at last the ability to choose is a genuine reality.
Couples who've had several children of the same sex will now be able to balance
it out a bit.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
will
be remade as
Seven Partners for Various Siblings of
Alternate Sexes.

The
system used for separating the male and female sperm is remarkably simple. The
sample is placed in a petri dish with a microscopic pile of household items on
a tiny staircase. All the sperm that go straight past without picking anything
up are obviously boys. Fertilization is then just a scientific formality. Of
course, before IVF the long journey to the egg was fraught with difficulty. The
male sperm just whizzed around all over the place hoping to find it, while the
female sperm kept saying they should stop and ask someone. Eventually the male
sperm suggested that she map-read and then he got all cross because she had to
hold the map upside down to get her bearings.

Of
course some have argued that so much pre-planning should not go into a child's
life before conception. Soon pregnant mothers will be going around saying,
'It's a boy, he's an Aries and he's a borough surveyor.' Soon it will be
possible to choose not only the sex of your baby but the social class as well.
Working-class mums will find little Drusilla saying things like, 'Mother - I
want Nanny to take me to the gymkhana. It was so embarrassing last time when
you mixed up a colt with a gelding.' And instead of just dressing their
middle-class kids up in miniature denim jackets and tiny Doc Martens, right-on
parents will order a bone fide working-class son complete with skinhead haircut
and tattoos. And they'll watch him playing with his wooden blocks and proudly
say, 'Oh look, he's going to be a labourer when he grows up.'

The
news that we are now able to select the gender of our children was greeted with
the usual hand-wringing. Some commentators said, 'It is time we had a full
public debate on this whole area,' which is another way of saying, 'I haven't
the faintest idea what I think about this one.' Meanwhile there were the predictable
howls of outrage from the very quarters that are always banging on about
freedom of choice. Because while we're confronted with too much choice when it
comes to Sky Movie channels and different sizes of cappuccino, for the really
big things in life the right's instinct is to deny people real choices. Why
shouldn't parents be able to opt for the gender they would prefer? Who could it
harm apart from the people selling yellow Babygros? Either way, when the child
is born the choices will still be narrow enough.

Maybe
the critics don't like new generations having the opportunities that they
never had. Perhaps they feel that IVF makes it all too effortless. 'Honestly, sperm
today, they have it so easy,' they say. 'When I were a sperm, it were a
struggle. No fancy doctors helped me reached the egg - I did it through my own
hard work and perseverance. But young sperm these days, they don't know they're
born. Oh, they're not, are they?'

The greatest Tories ever sold

14
July 2001

Who
says the dispossessed underclass of the inner cities are not interested in
politics? The first ballot in the Tory Party leadership contest produces a
stalemate and suddenly there are riots in the streets of Bradford. Gangs of
youths set fire to cars and looted shops, expressing their anger and
frustration that Michael Ancram and David Davies had tied for last place
thereby delaying the next stage of the contest. One masked teenager, hurling
bricks at the riot police, was heard to shout, 'Why can't the 1922 Committee
organize an exhaustive ballot using a single transferable vote!' 'Yes! The
constituency associations should have had the choice of all five candidates!'
cried another, but their desperate pleas were drowned out by the sounds of
sirens and smashing glass all around.