cap'n dunc's duelling dictums

on the eve of the official launch of iain sunken smith's welfare flagship, hms universal cockup, one can but sympathize with the precarious position of our poorly-served night-watchman prime minister, his reputation already riddled with friendly-fire, nails bitten ragged to the quick, as he prays, to any god prepared to offer him the fleeting courtesy of half-an-ear, for a smooth snagless slipway to guide the british-built public vessel, which holds together all his party's electoral hopes and dreams, into the merciless ocean of common reality - although no doubt a good portion of his pious petition will be devoted to despairing pleas that his mizer for work and pensions may not choose this particular mayday to perform that oh so emotionally-honest impression of a loose-cannon for which his cabinet colleague has garnered such national renown...

...just a tip mr smith, but i really reckon that the damp decadence of smashing a jeroboam of top-tipple champers across the bow of this byzantine benefit boat of babylon may not go down too well in the country at large - and personally, i recommend a vintage can of super-strength skol lager, the viking's choice.

clearly, mr smith's religious commitment to the social safety-net is completely unparalleled in contemporary political history, and he has unquestionably been almost irrepressible in his tireless desire both to make the system more transparent (by cleverly cutting down on the raw material required for its manufacture) and to design bigger safer holes (in order to cater for the unfortunate eventuality of innocent british citizens becoming irretrievably trapped beneath it). nevertheless, there does seem to be a duality, and maybe even a dichotomy, in the minister's philosophical approach to reform, which, being a right-of-centre blog, we here at spark up! are duty-bound to give some form of cursory examination, whilst stopping short of out-and-out moral judgment, of course - for although his 'cap' on benefits is laudably universal, the decision to deduct surplus monies solely from claimants' weekly living-allowances does indeed foster the almost certainly illusory appearance that the cap'n is deliberately discriminating against our communities' shopkeepers in favour of our landlords; a small point perhaps, yet mr smith might consider, in these critical commercial circumstances, that his passionate love for our welfare system might well be more fully expressed in an altogether unbridled and uncapped state...?

...and then there is the albeit minor question as to whether the well-off should repay unrequired sums of benefit back to the government, so that funds may be rightly redistributed to those in actual need - followed naturally by that other, complementary question, which must surely pop-up like a big bobbling belly-dancer and groovily gyrate around in the dissonant dialectic of the cap'n's intellectually rigorous mind: should those who decline the state's assistance be obliged to pay any taxes whatsoever...? at the very least, some might like their contributions back, or so one could well surmise...?

now, to be fair to the minister for flogging a dead horse, some of our more intuitive westminster commentators are currently suggesting that the chaos caused by this meddling and tinkering with the benefit payments-system is not down to duncan at all, but is in truth of fact the purely paranormal result of psychopathological poltergeist activity by maggie, a miscreant former inhabitant of those offices...

...however (and i propose this alternative view as an untested theory and by no means as established fact), there is another quite plausible explanation for these potty political phenomena which are now being witnessed by the witless in whitehall and confirmed as regular daily occurences - but in order to understand this most convoluted of hypotheses, one must delve dangerously deep into the very psyche of the man, duncan smith, himself...

...you see, i intend to publish a paper on the subject, and it pans out something like this:

cap'n smith possesses two great yet eternally conflicting loves in his life, or maybe they perhaps possess him, on that point i'm not precisely sure - his first love, chronologically-speaking, is none other than the limbotic spirit of the battering baroness herself, margaret thatcher...with his second love being the volcanically voluptuous venus which we each know as the british welfare state...now, when his obsession for the welfare state forces itself to the fore, why, he wouldn't even harm a fly...but when his ardour for his mental matriarchal mentor is triggered to rise into the ascendancy, and becomes dominant in the flimsy frontal lobes flopping off from his cerebral cortex, his placid personality suddenly undergoes a terrific psychological transformation and gross gender transmutation such as you would never ever wish to behold ever...and then, dear readers, 'she' is prone to a wailing, a flailing, a fearful gnashing of teeth, and a paranoic although perfectly logical predisposition to stabbing-up her perceived metaphysical rival in love, the welfare state...these aforementioned events constituting a serious psychotic episode which usually culminates with 'her' slashing wildly in the shower.  so whacky.

what a woman.


(due to an unforeseen virus rampaging through the editorial department, tonight's special column was composed, off-the-cuff, by esteemed spark up! ghost-writer, professor pinkwinkel brainstove the third)