With the government divided over Europe, facing serious terror threats, in crisis over immigration, its economic policies in disarray and the Prime Minister linked to dodgy tax evasion schemes, one Tory back bencher believes that the true existential threat to the UK lies elsewhere. “I’m demanding that bouncy castles be banned forthwith,” Bernard Dickworth, MP for North West Bedfordshire told the Bletsoe Bugle. “These blown up bastards pose a major threat to life and limb – people just don’t realise the number of casualties they claim every week! They have to be stopped!” Dickworth’s bizarre, but impassioned, pleas follow a series of giant inflatable related deaths – the most recent victim being a young child – in his constituency. Despite the local council pointing out that all of the fatal incidents involving bouncy castles were simply tragic accidents, most likely the result of health and safety regulations not being observed, the MP remains adamant that something far more sinister is afoot. “Obviously, they want us to think that they were just accidents,” he told the local newspaper. “It’s all part of the strategy to lull us into a false sense of security. Just like the way they turn up at children’s parties, village fetes and fun fairs, with their bright colours and promises of innocent fun, luring our children into their maws – then they strike, claiming innocent victim after innocent victim! If they aren’t collapsing on people and suffocating them, then they are mysteriously coming loose from their moorings and blowing away, with their victims trapped inside.”

Dickworth’s anti-inflatable rhetoric has been blamed for a recent spate of attacks on bouncy castles in Bedfordshire, with gangs of vigilantes reportedly prowling suburban streets at weekends, looking for children’s parties featuring the inflatables. “Thankfully, the kids hadn’t had a chance to start playing on it, as we’d only just finished inflating it,” Biggleswade resident Harry Hockliss, whose seven year old daughter’s birthday party was disrupted by a band of the vigilantes, told a local radio phone in. “This bunch of lunatics came crashing through the back gate and started stabbing the bouncy castle with knives! It was utterly terrifying – my daughter and all her friends were in hysterics! In the end, I managed to chase then off with a garden fork, but it was too late for the castle. The kids were devastated, they’d been looking forward to jumping around in it all day.” The frenzied attack – which involved kitchen knives, machetes and even an axe – left the bouncy castle fatally wounded. “It was ripped to shreds,” recalled Hockliss. “I’m amazed that it lasted as long as it did after the attack – it struggled on for half an hour before it deflated completely. We tried mouth-to-mouth to keep it inflated, but it was hopeless.  It was heartbreaking for the kids to have to watch it collapse and die like that.” More serious attacks have been reported from all around the county, including a drive by shooting of a bouncy castle at a Luton fairground. “We’d just finished setting up, making out sure the guy ropes were properly secured, when this estate car came past us, driving really slowly,” Bert Onker, owner of the castle and several other rides at the travelling fair, told the Bedfordshire Advertiser . “As it pulled level with the castle, one of the rear windows rolled down and we saw both barrels of a shotgun emerge. We all hit the deck as they let the castle have both barrels before speeding off. The castle was a wreck, completely ruined. It’s a miracle that nobody was killed!”

Despite fairground workers and bouncy castle operators the length and breadth of Bedfordshire demanding police protection in the face of the vigilante attacks, Dickworth is refusing to halt his campaign. Indeed, he has expressed his complete lack of sympathy for those now under threat, accusing them of complicity in the bouncy castle attacks. “I ask you what sort of person would choose to run a business renting out inflatable castles?” he asked readers of the Bletsoe Bugle. “Can anybody really make a living doing that sort of thing? The truth is that they’re in league with these inflated bouncy devils, providing them with an endless supply of victims!” In an extraordinary interview with the Leighton Buzzard Paranormal Review, the MP revealed his belief that bouncy castles were actually a predatory alien life form, which had stealthily colonised the earth. “Think about – when have you ever seen a factory which actually makes bouncy castles and other inflatables? Does anybody really know where they come from?” he demanded. “Think back – do you remember when they first appeared? I don’t remember them before the seventies, after humanity had started sending probes into space and attracted the bouncy bastards’ attention!”

Whilst backing Dickworth’s campaign to have the scourge of bouncy castles removed from Bedford’s streets, relatives of the inflatables’ victims are less convinced of his assertion that they are of alien origin. “While they are undoubtedly infernal devices, the source of their evil is closer to home than outer space,” Don Jaggles, whose second cousin’s first wife’s step son remains in a coma after suffering serious injuries in a bouncy castle incident , told the Bedfordshire Advertiser. “The fact is that they are clearly being operated by some sort of Al Qeada type terror organisation, possibly affiliated to ISIS, which is targeting our children.” Jaggles, who unsuccessfully stood as a candidate for the English Defence League at last year’s council elections, claims to have concrete evidence to back up his theory. “Most obviously, the sort of people who typically hire out and operate these inflatables are all swarthy-looking, shifty foreign types,” he told the newspaper. “Plus, have you ever seen one shaped like a mosque? Obviously, they don’t want to blaspheme their own faith by having kiddies jump all over the image of one of their holy places.” He added that he was convinced that, as an added bonus, in addition to killing and maiming British children, the money received for the hire of the bouncy castles was used to fund other terror campaigns.

Fellow Bedfordshire MP, Labour’s Brent Chuggs, who represents Luton West, has dismissed both Dickworth’s extraterrestrial theory and Jaggles’ terror claims, with regard to the recent spate of bouncy castle fatalities. “It’s quite obvious that it is simply down to a growing disregard for health and safety regulations,” he opined in the Luton Exchange and Mart. “Under this government we have seen both the Health and Safety Executive cut back and funding for local councils’ Trading Standards departments reduced. Consequently, every fly-by-night shyster thinks that they can get away with leasing out unregulated inflatables which don’t meet British safety standards.” In fact, Chuggs points out, it could be argued that it is right wing Tory MPs like Dickworth, who have consistently called for the ‘red tape of health and safety gone mad’ to be lifted from businesses, who are actually responsible for the recent rise in bouncy castle related deaths.