Families across the London borough of Ealing were left paralysed with fear and unable to turn on their lights or open their curtains over the weekend for fear of attracting a visit from a group of synchronised trick-or-treaters who performed complex dance interpretations of ‘Double-dip recession’, ‘Losing your job’, and ‘House repossession’ on their gravel drives if not given appropriate treats.

JoJo D, the leader of the street dance group, who call themselves Straight Up, said: ‘Just as people’s fears have changed, so too must trick-or-treating, and interpretive street dance was the obvious medium.’

Other routines that confronted residents of the affluent, leafy suburb with what truly haunts them included ‘Your skill-set is utterly worthless, you are seen as a joke among your colleagues at work’ and ‘The value of your pension has been significantly eroded, and your retirement will be spent in monotonous poverty’.

One Ealing resident came home from a pilates class to find her husband sitting on the hall floor, hugging his knees and sobbing ‘make them go away…just…make them go away’, and many other households gave the dance troupe not just all their Haribo, but anything else they wanted from their houses to stop the body-popping poppets from reminding them of their barely suppressed nightmares with their carefully choreographed body movements.

JoJo D said that their recently devised breakdance versions of ‘Food price surge and population growth leads us to have to eat insects’, and ‘China offer to bail out Eurozone a clear signal that we’ll all be speaking Mandarin in 10 years’ also sent home-owners into choking panic attacks of terror.

As for next year, JoJo D says they are already working on some new material including ‘We know you shagged your mate’s wife’ and ‘The contents of your hard-drive are known to the police’.

“The boom in the pumpkin sector, extrapolated across the entire spectrum of British industry, and projected over the next 12 months, suggests that Britain has never had it so good,” said Osborne, “I’m not going too fast for you am I?”

Osborne dismissed critics who claimed that pumpkin sales are not truly representative of the entire spectrum of goods and services that make up the British economy. “They’ll always find something to complain about, these BBC lefties. You’d get more balanced coverage from Man United TV. We just don’t like winners in this country do we?”

‘This is so much better than the vampire costume I wore last year,’ said eight-year-old Troy Winklemann, dressed in a well-cut suit from the fancy dress store and a Barack Obama mask. ‘Usually the grown-ups just pretend to be scared, but at all the houses with Republican posters in the windows, they’ve been genuinely terrified. Can we scare the shit out of them? Yes we can!’

Nine-year-old Nathan Pintle, a life-long Republican from Kansas, agreed. ‘This costume’s just neat. Obama is easily the scariest thing that’s ever happened to America – papa told me. The only problem is so far I haven’t got any candy. Instead people keep promising to vote Democrat if I’ll just leave their families alone, or frantically offering up their taxes and telling me to spend it all on Hispanics.’

As conservatives across the US prepare for a night of terror, the White House has taken the opportunity to reassure citizens. ‘There is absolutely nothing to worry about,’ said press secretary Robert Gibbs. ‘If children choose to go out dressed as the President, it is simply because they want to express their support for his policies. And please don’t try to pretend you’re not in. All these kids ask for is a Democrat majority in both Houses, and universal healthcare for all. We’d hate to see any terrified elderly Republicans suffer seizures they can’t afford to pay for.’

Right-wing politicians have fought back by encouraging their supporters’ children to dress up as self-confessed witch Christine O’Donnell, while advising homeowners to adopt the progressive politics of Sarah Palin and shoot any intruders on sight.

Despite the good-natured political rivalry, things appeared to get a little out of hand in South Carolina when a group of diminutive Obamas were chased from town by a gang of Republican children dressed in white-hooded robes. ‘It was all we could find in our parents’ wardrobes,’ said one of the protagonists. ‘Besides, grandpaw always said you can’t bring about change from the bottom up, you’ve got to do it from the neck down.’

However health professionals fear that these masks may seriously disturb those of a nervous disposition and psychologists have warned of the trauma that could be caused by ‘answering the door to find Boris Johnson staring at you and asking for sweeties’.

Many Politicians have embraced the spooky trend however, and Tory leader David Cameron was this week seen shopping for a new mask to wear, as his current Tony Blair one was beginning to slip.

Cliffjumper

‘When Jamie arrived at school, I assumed the large cardboard box that had once contained a washing machine was being used to carry an elaborate costume’, explained Winnie Forbes, Jamie’s teacher, ‘but he then pointed to the large spooky face drawn in biro on the machine door and told me the box WAS the costume and he’d come as a haunted washer-dryer’.

The staff room fiercely debated the unusual fancy-dress with the ‘couldn’t be arsed’ camp noting that the machine featured on the packaging was a top of the range Miele, which would have set the parents back quite a bit, while the poverty group highlighted the fact that boxes from a nearby Curry’s are often dumped at the back of the local Lidl for people to use that can’t afford recyclable carrier bags, and this could have been the source of the outfit.

However the lazy camp countered by insisting that there’s plenty of poor kids that have better costumes, with their leading spokesman, Deputy Head Jane Thomas noting that the parents could have shoplifted a Transformers outfit like many other of the school’s disadvantaged parents had obviously done, and that the merely poor ‘would at least have bothered to cut out eyeholes so the wee lad could see where he was going’.

To finally settle the argument Jamie’s teacher, Miss Forbes, called his parents under the pretext of needing permission for him to bob for apples. The findings of the call left both sides claiming victory, however. According to a ‘mortified’ Mrs Whittam, Jamie’s Romanian nanny Jana had been specifically told to pick up an official Harry Potter wizard’s outfit, to be paid for out of the ‘ample’ £40 weekly allowance she was paid on top of her free accommodation. Mrs Whittam then promised to speak to Jana about appropriate childcare at their monthly meeting, before arranging to have Jamie collected from the teacher’s car park, and promising a donation to the school’s computers fund in recognition of their discretion in the matter.

‘We had one last year and it was just a blast,’ said Ravyn Voltaire, a 31-year-old tattoo artist, ‘without all the black and white make-up and piercings it was impossible to recognise anyone, and it led to all sorts of daring conversations about getting a better rate on a mortgage, or what happened on last night’s Coronation Street without a single mention of visiting Bram Stoker’s grave to recite necromantic spells.’

Party host Morpheus LeStat has reportedly spent the last fortnight foregoing trips to S&M club nights and dungeons to stay home and put together party CDs, confident he can really get his friends in the mood for the party with songs by Kylie and Westlife that they all secretly liked at uni, even though they could never see themselves in that whole pop scene.

‘I’ve also got wacky prizes like Jennifer Aniston romantic comedy box-sets for the dullest costumes,’ said LeStat who will be foregoing his usual Victorian aristocratic Vampire garb to greet guests in the casual slacks and V-neck sweater combo of a moderately successful architect. ‘I just hope everybody make the effort, and we don’t have a repeat of last year when everybody turned up in their usual leather and bondage get-up and claimed to have come as Tory MPs at home on the weekend.’

Elderly residents of Manchester are reporting that they found it much easier to walk the streets yesterday evening, since the trick-or-treaters were in fact far less frightening than the same youngsters in their normal clothes.

‘It was such a relief’ reported Edna Jeffries, 76, of Whitefield. ‘I can cope with skeleton masks, devil outfits and ghost costumes. It’s the rest of the year when they lurk around with their hoods up that terrifies me.’ Other pensioners were reported to be delighted that just a handful of stale chocolate buttons seemed enough to make the muggers disperse. ‘Normally they take my purse and my keys, and then come back to the house to get the television and the bottle of sherry.’

Local residents were reportedly using this brief period of calm to stock up on supplies and shopping so as to avoid having to venture outside in the run-up to Bonfire Night, when the youngsters will be armed with projectile explosives.

In other parts of the country, police were called out to a cul de sac in Norwich where youngsters had been left confused and disorientated when a householder responded to their rhetorical question ‘Trick or Treat’ with the cryptic reply ‘Trick!’ Eleven year old Darren Hayes later told reporters: ‘I didn’t know what to say – in all my four years of trick or treating I’ve never seen anything like it. Normally people just hand over the goodies without a fuss.’ His friend, 10, agreed, adding: ‘this came completely out of left-field – we were quite simply lost for words.’

Meanwhile, parents groups took the opportunity of Halloween to reiterate their assurance to children that there were no such thing as ghosts or monsters, and that their children should not take sweets from strangers. They then dressed them up as ghosts and monsters and sent them out to knock on strangers’ doors to ask for sweets. ‘You think that’s weird’ said one Thames Valley policeman. ‘We’ve had a report come in of a Bracknell family, actually eating the flesh of a pumpkin!’

andrewtaylor, Peter74940, Quaz and The Big Yin

A gang of dangerous but physically small armed robbers were left blaming each other as an ambitious bank raid, intended to secure £20m from a City of London bank, went awry on Halloween as the criminals, wearing ‘Scream’ fright masks and George W Bush disguises, failed to find anyone in the financial institution that would take them seriously.

After months of meticulous planning, two members of the East End gang burst into the Chancery Lane HSBC brandishing sawn-off shotguns, shouting ‘Open the safe or we’ll blow your heads off!’ However, the bank robbers did not get the reaction they had expected; instead of staff handing over stacks of unused notes amid scenes of hysterical panic, queuing office workers gave them a patronizing chuckle, while the cashier told them ‘to wait while she got them some sweeties’.

‘I blame the boss Thommo,’ said ‘Wheels’ Wilson the getaway driver, ‘sending in ‘Alf Pint ‘Arris and Mitch the Titch to do the business with the shooters was a schoolboy error. They have trouble seeing over the counter at the best of times and watching that old dear on the CCTV rustle their hair and give ‘em a fluffy old Werther’s Original while they tried to take hostages…We’ll never live it down.’

However Mitch the Titch blamed the robbery’s failure on getaway man Wilson who provided the robbers’ latex masks. ‘How was I supposed to be taken seriously disguised as Casper the friendly ghost or a bloody smiley dracula?’ asked the diminutive ex-con as he counted out the proceeds of the hold-up, I’m not going to get my English pub on the Costa del Sol on a load of fun-size Mars bars, that’s for sure.’

Although the failure to be taken seriously did enable the hoods to make a clean escape, the police are now looking for anyone trying to launder large amounts of chocolate Celebrations or Cadbury’s Heroes.

The gang members’ reputations in the criminal underworld are now said to be ‘totally screwed’, principally for their naïve belief that any bank in the UK would have ‘anything like twenty million going spare these days’.

nealdoran (with thanks to ugi)