In a stunning display of new Labour ingenuity (honestly it is new, they keep Prescott to remind the party and general public what ‘old’ Labour was, no retreat, no surrender), the new home secretary announced an apparent change in policy by declaring open season on anybody remotely looking a bit ‘off’ by any member of the public. In a brilliant display of political sleight-of-hand the word was let out on what to expect as policy next from the much respected Home Office, turning out to be a new advertising campaign with the strapline as ‘Don’t moan, take action’.

When later interviewed, the Home Secretary outlined the process taken to arrive at this slogan as well as others such as ‘Don’t moan, take action, it’s your street too’

“It was a long process but we finally came to the current one after tea, we had quite a number of contenders to look through, ‘Don’t moan, punch him’, ’Don’t whine, knee him in the balls’ were originally thought to be a little light so we strengthened our portfolio with ‘smack the bitch up’, ‘complain bitterly with a broken bottle’,  and ‘don’t moan, find out where they live and burn it to the ground when they are asleep, the bastards’. We also created a number with a minimalist approach including ‘Don’t moan’, ‘stop moaning’, and ‘Jesus, JUST SHUT UP!’ to name but a few. I feel we have gone for the right approach, a sort of part a) where the member of the public is told not to complain to anything resembling legitimate authority, and part b) do something to the thing that is upsetting their entirely individual concept of a moral high-ground”

The Home Secretary was then quizzed on the reasons for this approach given that it had every possibility for causing innocent people to criminalize themselves under the guise of righteous anger.

“yes, we are perfectly aware that this could cause some members of the public to turn themselves into criminals by ‘taking action’ against anything they feel is anti-social. We anticipate that this will only affect a handful of people, not to be confused with a  Chancellor Brown handful of a few tens of thousands of people, we anticipate about one ten thousand, maybe two, will find themselves in prison after perhaps sticking a knitting needle in the hand of a youth playing football in a menacing manner in the street, or some such similar object (people still knit don’t they?).  However, we do need to sort out this whole ‘Respect’ mess that we have got ourselves into.”

When pressed further to clarify this remark, the Home secretary went on to state

“Well, yes, unfortunately we have a PM who is in the habit of making up shit on the spot whenever the mood takes him, things like ‘you can’t have rights without respect’ or ‘Education, education, education’and ‘I’m going soon’ and we are certain that Ms Blair dished out black pudding on the day we heard ‘War anyone?’. In many cases we have to deal with these off the cuff remarks and develop policy around them before the evening news, we think he has a form of tourettes syndrome, either that or he has been possessed by the spirit of an amazingly bad advertising executive, who after jumping from the roof of a building is now seeking revenge on a society that went mad over Beanie Babies. You only have to sit with him for five minutes and he blurts out an ill conceived policy statement, it’s amazing. Anyway, they come so fast we have to do our best to deal with them, in the case of ‘you can’t have rights without respect’ for example, we distilled it to ‘you can’t have rights’, which seemed to keep him happy for a while. However, some of the sound bites do take a little effort because the public either see right through it, or just don’t understand what can’t be understood. For example, at the moment we are trying to deal with the ‘Give respect, get respect’ episode, which could have gone quite wrong when it was interpreted by gun toting drug traffikers as ‘pop a cap in his ass, bitch will give nuff spect, yo!’. Misinterpretations such as this are what we are looking for, but it’s no use the criminals doing it, they were bad in the first place and joe public like to see bad folks get locked up. No, we need ordinary people to act like this because if they don’t then it leads to the slowing down of our policy of removing peoples’ rights and freedoms. So we have had to re-envision a new paradigm that puts us on track. Fundamentally this means that we ask the PM to come up with advertising sound bites that look like we want the best for people but at the same time subliminally planting the message that they can do whatever they want about it. This should increase the number of bizarre assaults in the community and we will let the Daily Mail do the rest until we are in a position to make up some more legislation, personally I’m hoping a granny beats someone to death with their pet dog in a fit of incensed rage over someone dropping a fag end. That way we can get rid the world of annoying dogs and old people when the Mail starts to run the ‘Poodle Madness’ or ‘Corgi Culture’ headlines.”

The home secretary then responded to a question around the premise that the public were having difficulty understanding the definition of respect and as such were unable to either give it or take it, to which the Home Secretary responded

“Confused you say? Good, very very good. Basically this is what we were hoping for, a confused mass of people are easily told what is and isn’t respect, from this position we can finally introduce the concepts of ‘Get respect, Vote Labour’ or ‘No Labour - No respect’ and re-enforce this with a poster campaign of someone lying dead in a gutter with a flag sticking out of their arse to the strapline ‘Vote Tory- Get this much spect yo!’”