A Fairy Story

Hello children everywhere. Let me tell you a little bedtime story.

Once upon a time there was a very naughty man called Mr Hitler. He put lots and lots of people into big prisons, killed lots of people because they were not like him and made a very big war. Lots of people from all over got very cross and fought Mr Hitler and his friends. Lots of these people died but eventually they beat Mr Hitler and told him and his friends to stop it and behave themselves. Most of then did behave themselves but some of them would not so the people had to kill them or put them in prison so everyone would be safe. The people then said this is a ‘New World Order’ and we must not let such naughty people do their wicked things anymore.

As part of this ‘New World Order’ the people in a country called Britain decided to make some new things that would be nice for all the people. This was very new, you see, because before they fought Mr Hitler most of the people in Britain had to live in dark and dingy places with smelly water and dirty clothes. Only a few people had nice things. Those lucky people had motor cars, sea cruises, very big houses and nice comfy beds. The ladies of the lucky people wore long dresses with sequins and the men wore top hats. They were called the plutocrats. Now children, Britain is the name of the country we live in, and yes this story is about us.

Now, you may be wondering exactly what the nice things were that we decided should be for everybody. Well, there were lots of things such as hospitals, schools and houses. There were also other things such as better wages and free medicine. We were very pleased with these things and some of us even called Britain the ‘New Jerusalem’. Now, it was quite difficult to make all these things and it cost lots of money, and the war with Mr Hitler had already cost a lot of money. So, to make all these lovely things we had to do something called ‘raising taxes’ which meant that everybody put a little bit of money in the pot to help pay for things. This still wasn’t enough money though so we had to borrow some money from our best friends in another country called America. To help us do all this we got a man called Mr Atlee to help us. This all went very well and everyone was very happy.

This lasted for many years; sometimes we didn’t want to pay quite so much tax so we had a few less things and at other times we wanted more nice things so we paid a bit more tax.

Then after many years, there came along a very clever lady by the name of Thatcher. She became very powerful and told us that she knew best what we would like and so we told her that she could decide what was best.  She did lots of things that we didn’t fully understand but because she was very clever we let her keep doing them as we knew that she knew best. She started to take away some of our nice things, and told us that we didn’t need to pay as much tax. She told us that we would like to keep our money because money is better than nice things, and we believed her. She even made some of the nice things private so we could buy them with our own money if we wanted to or just not bother if we didn’t. She said this was choice and we it would bring us joy. Then she tried to kill all our children and make quite a lot of us live in cardboard boxes. She told us that this was a good thing and that it would make our country great again. She also told us that we had been much happier when we were fighting Mr Hitler and to make us happy again she would make us another war. How we cheered as our soldiers and sailors went off to the other side of the world to fight a new set of naughty people who were called the ‘Argies’.

But as time went on we started to become unhappy and thought that we would like her to go away. She became very sad at this and let one of her friends, Mr Major, look after us and make our decisions. But Mr Major was not very clever and got cross with his friends. He even called them ’bastards’, which is a very rude word indeed. So we let another person look after us and he was called Mr Blair. He said that he thought we would like to have our nice things back but that we would still like to have all that lovely choice and not have to pay lots of tax. His friend Mr Brown helped him to make this happen in a very clever way. Mr Brown built us his very special thing called a deficit and for a while everything was lovely. To make us even happier Mr Blair made us some new wars along with our best friends, America. But we did not cheer and these wars made us unhappy so Mr Blair left and let Mr Brown look after us by himself. Mr Brown then made his other special thing with a complicated name. He called it ‘light touch regulation of the financial sector’ and it made us very happy and gave us lots of nice things.

But things went wrong. You see, Mr Brown’s new thing was so complicated it led to a very bad new thing called ‘toxic debt trading’ and this new bad thing made an even worse thing called ‘sovereign debt’.

Then Thatcher’s son came along and said he would help us along with his best friend, Nutcase Nick. He has told us that we have to get rid of all our nice things and pay more tax, and that doing this is a very good and noble thing that will make us happy because we will have so many nice things in the future and even more choice than ever before. Her son is called Cameron and he says that we are broken, and to mend us he is going to take all our food away and then we will be very happy, our country will be renamed Airstrip One, and we will return to the ‘Old World Order’.

Now, children, I cannot tell you anymore as the story has not ended, and for all we know may never have an end.