Don’t panic !

I’m sure that we all remember laughing at Monty Python’s … ‘Ministry of Silly Walks’ … Well now I think that someone in our government has come up with a not so funny … ’Ministry of Scaring Them Shitless’ … For it seems that hardly a week goes by without the news of some new danger being plastered all over the front pages of our newspapers.

It’s not bad enough being warned every other day by the likes of John Reid and Dame Eliza Manningham-Bullshit that we face … “a wave of terror plots” … and that we can expect to find a member of al-Qaeda hiding round every corner, so they decide to remind us of the possible dangers when we feel at our most vulnerable, by imposing ’over the top’ security checks at airports and, on occasion, by rolling out the bloody tanks.

To read some reports, like the one by the ‘Institute for Public Policy Research’ you might think that you need a tank to drive to your local Sainsbury’s supermarket for it would seem that our country is over-run by gangs of violent feral children and vicious binge drinking yobs who are forcing our frightened population to leave these shores in droves.

Climate change is always good for a bit of a scare story, as is anything connected with our daily diet, such as … too much salt can kill you or saturated fat clogs up your arteries.  

“OK”. You can imagine the minister saying …  ”We’ve  had the buggers worried about the dangers of global warming, or was it that they might all freeze to death because of a shortage of fossil fuels ?  … So what shall we make this week’s big horror press release ? …  I’ve got it … SALMONELLA ! … Yes, there is nothing like a good old food poisoning story or something related to infected animals to put the wind up people. E. coli … bird flu … mad cow disease … they’ve all worked in the past; and don’t forget the rats …

….     I can feel a bubonic plague story coming on“.