A Bugs' Life

[Sweder]

This just in from a reactionary ex-pat watching from afar.
Just don't shoot the messenger . . .

A WINTERS' TALE

CLASSIC VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away...

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.
The shivering grasshopper has no food or shelter, so he dies out in the cold.

THE END

MODERN BRITAIN VERSION:
The ant works hard in the withering heat all summer long, building his house and laying up supplies for the winter. The grasshopper thinks he's a fool, and laughs and dances and plays the summer away...

Come winter, the ant is warm and well fed.

The shivering grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others less fortunate, like him, are cold and starving. The BBC shows up to provide live coverage of the shivering grasshopper, with cuts to a video of the ant in his comfortable warm home with a table laden with food.

The British are stunned that in a country of such wealth, this poor grasshopper is allowed to suffer so while others have plenty.

The Lib Dems, the Respect Party, David Cameron, the Transvestite Celebrity Party, the Single Lesbian One Eyed Mothers Party and the Coalition against Poverty demonstrate in front of the ant's house. The BBC, interrupting a cultural festival special from Grimsby with breaking news, broadcasts images of them all singing "We Shall Overcome."

Ken Livingstone laments in an interview with Panorama that the ant has got rich off the backs of grasshoppers, and calls for an immediate tax hike on the ant to make him pay his "fair share". In response, the Labour Government drafts the Economic Equity and Grasshopper Anti-Discrimination Act, retroactive to the beginning of the summer.

The ant's taxes are reassessed, and he is also fined for failing to hire grasshoppers as helpers. Without enough money to pay the fine and his newly imposed retroactive taxes, his home is confiscated by Camden Council.

The ant moves to France, and starts a successful AgriBiz company [funded by the EU] although within weeks his business is threatened with compulsory purchase by the state unless he marries a French ant.

The BBC later shows the now fat grasshopper finishing up the last of the ant's food, though Spring is still months away, while the government house he is in, which just happens to be the ant's old house, crumbles around him because he hasn't bothered to maintain it.

Inadequate government funding is blamed, Diane Abbot is appointed to head a commission of enquiry that will cost £10,000,000

The grasshopper is soon dead of a drug overdose; the Guardian blames it on the obvious failure of government to address the root causes of despair arising from social inequity. The abandoned house is taken over by a gang of immigrant spiders, praised by the government for enriching Britain's multicultural diversity, who promptly set up a prostitution racket and terrorize the community.

THE END

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Technically speaking, grasshoppers can't shiver.

But seriously, what the grasshopper should have done was set up an anarcho-syndacalist commune and invite the spiders to form a Maoist/socialist alliance with them. The benefits of which speak for themselves.

Well that's what I would have done anyhow.

Actually you can eat grasshoppers. They're nice dipped in chocolate.

Apparently.

[Sweder]

I dined on locusts on a visit to Taipei.
They were served as a bar snack, quite crispy and rather more appetising than pork scratchings, tales of which horrified my hosts. Put 'em righ off their insects, it did.