Profits that bloom in the spring

SPRING

An announcement by

HM Government

ood morning.

You may have noticed that it is now spring.

There are primroses in the hedges and daffodils in the woods.

There are little lambs in the fields.

There will soon be bluebells in the woods.

And spring weather is also here, with its distinctive mixture of blissful sunshine and heady showers.

This spring is brought to you by the Tory government.

As indeed were the past 15 springtimes.

The Tory party is the party of springtime!

None of those primroses was here under the previous Labour government.

All those lambs were born under a Tory administration, as indeed were most of their mothers. The Tories can fairly be said to understand spring, and how to bring that feel-springy factor to the electorate.

But we are not a party to rest on our laurels.

If a thing can be improved, we will look for new ways of doing it, new ideas for doing it, new justifications for doing it.

And new ways of making it more profitable.

Accordingly, we have been rethinking spring.

And we have found that in many, many ways it is time we brought it more up to date and in line with market requirements.

We want to make spring more responsive to customer demand, less subject to regulations, more free-ranging in its application to appropriate focusing of consumer awareness ...

Sorry ! We seem to have left the clich programmer on too long there!

But seriously, this spring is the last spring you will see in its present form.

No longer will you have a nationally controlled, uniform, over-regulated spring.

From next year onwards all seasons will be put under the control of a series of regional boards called Scotspring, Westsummer, Northfall, Borderwinter and so on.

The weather itself will be privatised and sold off to private companies, who will be able to put into it the kind of capital injection it has needed for so long.

In the case of spring, there will be a new authority created called Springtrack, which will actually own the rights to all the aspects of spring which make it such a distinctive and much-loved season.

Springtrack will have the sole rights to market such symbols of springtime as gambolling lambs and primroses and daffodils and St Valentine's Day and everyone connected with it will become extremely rich and the chairman will have a salary undreamt of even by other national chairmen, and he will have share options which will give him an unparalleled feel-rich factor, and the pundits will shake their fists and say, you are selling off our birthright, you are carving up our heritage, you are giving everything to the fat cats, but we won't care because it will be too late and there will be nothing that anyone can do about it, just like with the railways, and the gas, and the water ... !!!!

Why, you may ask, are we doing this ?

Why are we selling off a series of seasons which have been running perfectly well under national control hitherto?

Why are we letting the get-rich-quick merchants and the cowboys in?

Let us tell you why.

It is because we in the Tory party live in constant fear of winning the next election.

We ran out of ideas long ago.

We have been in power so long that we have become vegetables.

The only idea we have left is that we no longer wish to be in power.

Therefore we want to lose the next election.

Therefore we want to create as big a mess as possible in order to (a) be voted out; and (b) leave a horrible mess for Labour to clear up.

But there is only one thing we have not yet so far got our big greedy hands on and that is the weather and the seasons.

Hence our intention to privatise spring.

Shortly, you will be able to purchase shares in Springtrack and flog them off at a profit.

Keep watching the national press for details.

Meanwhile, thank you for reading this far.

If there is anything else you think we might privatise that has escaped our notice, please write in extreme confidence to 10 Downing Street, London SW1.

Thank you.