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Customs officer explains why he believes the government is delaying applying import checks


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Checks on imports are required to ensure goods entering a nation meet the required safety standards and any taxation due on them gets paid. Since Britain left the EU, however, no such checks have been applied and a date for implementation of import checks has been pushed back further.


Newsbiscuit asked HMRC to explain why the government appears reluctant to apply the checks and was told it's complicated.


'We have to work within the letter of the law,' explained a customs officer. 'The rules say we shouldn't allow anything rotten or harmful to enter Britain, so technically, if the government told us that checks needed to be applied, it would mean we would have to bar Tory MPs from returning from their holidays. With a bit of luck, the next government will insist we start checks asap.'

Just Stop Fun plans summer of protest


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The protest group Just Stop Fun is launching a new summer campaign against Big Oil. After disrupting all the adult sporting events this summer, the focus of protests is now switching to kids activities in the school holidays.


Colin Snide (not his real name) is a spokesmouth for Just Stop Fun. He told me that the group would be targeting children’s playgrounds, chaining up roundabouts, padlocking swing chains and putting very sticky stuff on slides so that they don’t work. ‘Our kids,’ he says, ‘will be seriously affected by climate change, so we want to use pester power to get home our message to Just Stop Big Oil. We know that their tears and screams will send a strong message to deadbeat parents who are addicted to fossil fuels and non-recyclable take-away tubs. The kids know that, deep down, we are on their side and that we are not just dismal old fun-sponges with no sense of proportion.’


A campaign of targeted interventions over the summer is planned at theme parks and seaside attractions. Planned stunts will include:


• sedating seaside donkeys so that they can’t give rides

• putting fish entrails in the splashdown at the big dipper, so that everyone smells really bad for the rest of the day

• concreting in most of the holes at crazy golf courses (not the one with the little windmill, obviously)

• putting nutella into ball ponds at pubs and play areas so that parents are freaked out when their kids emerge covered in brown sticky stuff

• using Mr Whippy vans to serve entirely liquid ice creams, to illustrate the impact of climate change


Colin says ‘for six weeks we are going to relax, kick back and do something a bit different. Once the kids are safely back at school we will get back to buggering up buses, trains, traffic and sporting events. So enjoy the summer break!’




Government to adopt public school tactics over inflation


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Borrowers have been put on notice for further Bank of England interest rate rises after inflation in the UK unexpectedly remained stuck at 8.7% in May.


Ex-public schoolboy and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, was rumoured to be entering No.10 wearing a teaching gown and mortar board he’d nicked from an old school master, muttering “The beatings will continue until the behaviour changes” as he twirled a cane.


Our economics correspondent says he thinks this is Sunak’s way of explaining to mortgage payers that if they continue to borrow money to feed and clothe their children, causing him to look silly for promising to halve inflation, he will adopt the same attitude his sports master did when he was caught puffing on his fag behind the bike shed by making interest rates even more punishing.






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