Panic in Year Election!

Just why is the Tory government urging people to ensure that they have three days worth of supplies stocked up in their houses? Just what is the nature of the ‘danger’ that Rishi Sunak claims lies ahead for the UK? Are these nebulous hypothetical threats simply scaremongering, designed to scare the electorate into voting Tory at the forthcoming general election? “The ‘danger’ that lies ahead is quite obviously the impending threat of the Tories losing the next general election,” declares former Number Ten press advisor Ken Baum-Kleft. “They’re in a blind panic about the impending catastrophe – scores of them are likely to lose their seats and if Labour get into power they might start doing things like forcing the wealthy to actually pay taxes! There’s a real possibility that Rishi Sunak will stack his station wagon up with supplies and guns and try to escape to the hills with his family. Well, that or bugger off to the States to use that Green Card of his to secure some hugely lucrative corporate appointments.” The government’s strategy in the run up to an inevitable general election has been to try and transfer their panic to the electorate, in the hope that if they believe they are facing an existential threat then they might vote to save the Tories from their existential threat.

“Look, why else do you think that for weeks the right-wing press and Tory bots on social media have been scaremongering about the possibility of World War Three?” asks Baum-Kleft who, until recently was one of those devising the government’s misinformation schemes. “In recent weeks it has reached ridiculous proportions and with stories speculating about what UK cities might be targeted in a Russian nuclear attack, become utterly irresponsible. The truth is that despite all of these scare stories, despite all the ‘experts’ and ‘academics’ they keep digging up to tell you otherwise, it is highly unlikely that the war in Ukraine will become some kind of nuclear flashpoint – and the public know it!” The war scare is just the latest in a long line of desperate Tory ploys to scare the electorate into voting for them yet again, despite their mishandling of the economy, the environment, health care and just about every other issue that matters to the electorate. “They’re still trying to flog the dead horse of illegal immigrants invading the UK via small boats,” Baum-Kleft notes despairingly. “I warned Number Ten that the attempt to demonise them as a horde of cut-throats and rapists was always ridiculous and would only appeal to racists – everybody else can see these immigrants for what they actually are: a bunch of desperate, broken down and scared refugees with absolutely no hope left.”

According to Baum-Kleft he and others had advised the government at the time that immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees simply didn’t pose a threat scary enough to terrify people into voting Tory. “Time and again we said to them, if you want to present voters with a threat from the sea, then what you need are amphibious humanoid monsters raiding Britain’s beaches,” he laments. “Believe me, the thought of scaly and slimy things – possibly awakened by fishermen from the EU illegally trawling in British waters with illegally large nets – lumbering up from the waves to carry off British women from our beaches would have had people shitting themselves with fear and pleading with the government to do something! We could have arranged photo opportunities showing a bare chested Rishi Sunak fighting them off with a harpoon, while a bikini clad blonde swooned at his feet!” Marauding fishmen from the deep as a primary threat would also have had the virtue of not needing a bizarre solution like sending refugees to Rwanda, a policy both expensive and unpopular. “All they would have needed to propose was big nets and spear guns,” Baum-Kleft muses. “But no – they completely dismissed the idea, telling me that I was mad! Well, who’s laughing now?”

The former press advisor’s hopes that the government might have come around to his way of thinking when the right-wing press started talking of some kind of future threat facing the UK that only a Tory government could protect the country from. “I thought that perhaps they were going to announce some kind of imminent alien threat,” he says. “But I should have known that they were too cheap and penny pinching to stump up the cash needed to stage a fake alien invasion. Instead they just trotted out this tired old business of Russia and the potential for World War Three.” He concedes, however, that the government had considered some more exotic scare campaigns. “I do recall someone in cabinet proposing they claim that the country was about to be overrun by hordes of rabid sex offenders, raping anything that moved, as a result of the so called ‘woke’ policies of Labour run councils that had sought to emasculate heterosexual men – resulting in this violent reaction,” he muses. “But then they realised that most rapists and sex offenders seemed to be members of the parliamentary conservative party.”

Professional observers of British politics have also been unimpressed with the government’s crude attempts to whip up a panic about vague threats to the nation’s security. “It all stinks of desperation,” opines political analyst Fred Crackass, senior lecturer in government and politics at the Redcar Horticultural College. “They’re obviously just trying to scare people into believing that we’re facing some sort of existential threat and that Rishi Sunak and the Tories are the safe pair of hands that can safely guide us through it.” A proposition the academic thinks is patently ridiculous in view of the facts. “It’s like saying ‘You’re at death’s door, but don’t worry, I’ll see you through it’ ,” he snorts in derision. “The idea that the country’s security is safe in Sunak’s hands (or those of any other Tory) is utterly ludicrous – they’ve trashed the economy, cut defence spending far more than any Labour government ever has and they’ve accepted huge wads of cash, both individually and collectively as a party, from Russia, the very entity they now identify as the main threat to the UK’s future security. Do they really think that we’re that stupid?” In response to his latter point, other commentators have noted that people voted for Boris Johnson, not to mention Brexit, suggesting that there clearly are a lot of credulous idiots out there who are empowered to vote.