Choice cuts

We’re headed for even more cuts but which vital services would you dispense with?

I’d get rid of the police, judiciary, and the penal system. Before long the workings of the free market, unfettered by regulation, would conduce towards a stable and happy society with all needs met.
ERIC “FINGERS” SHRUBSHAW, CELL 419, LEWES PRISON

Since church attendances are down across the country, I suggest cutting costly Vicars and replacing them with tape recorders that emit, when a button is depressed, appropriate vicar-like phrases, such as “Very good to see you in church this week,” and “We’d like to thank you all for your donations to the steeple fund.” If he wasn’t dead they could have got Derek Nimmo to do it, but, in his absence, Tom Hollander would make an adequate replacement.
REV. STEVEN ARMITAGE, ST. JUDE’S CHURCH, PORTSLADE

I suggest halting our road maintainance and improvement programmes permanently. As soon as one street is resurfaced, Virgin come and dig it up again anyway, so you might as well not bother. The traffic flow will be improved for a few months at least, by which point we may all be using futuristic flying cars, like those seen in the Back To The Future films.
BARRY GARLOWE, MILE OAK

I have a novel idea: I propose that, rather than paying wages, the council “enslave” their current workforce, and these “slaves” should labour for bed and board. This arrangement might seem unattractive to workers at first, but I’m sure in time they would become acclimatised to their new regime.
WING COMMANDER HAROLD UNDERSHOTT (RETIRED), SALTDEAN

HOVE FACTUALLY

FIVE MORE FACTS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT FANTABULOUS HOVE

1 Hove’s Boundary Passage follows a natural fault line, and has been the scene of seventy-two earthquakes since 1839. One, in 1994, measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale, swallowed Bankers fish and chop shop whole and then spat it out again complaining there wasn’t enough salt and vinegar.

2 The Piratical exclamation “ho”, particularly well-loved of sea-shanties, is a corruption of “Hove”, so to be correct one should actually sing “Yo Hove Hove and a bottle
of rum.”

3 Millionaires’ Row’s most famous inhabitants have included Fatboy Slim, Derek Jameson, Susan Stranks, Nick Berry, A.J.P. Taylor, F.R. Leavis, Professor A.L. Rowse, Raymond Williams, Eric Hobsbawm, David Lodge, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Richard Hoggart and Professor Laurie Taylor.

4 Kurt’s Vonnegut’s last novel Ace Note Flop House, unfinished at the time of his death, was set in a future Hove, the only surviving remnant of civilisation following an unexplained apocalypse, where Time bends in on itself.

5 While the rest of Great Britain got the famous Kitchener “Your Country Needs You” recruitment poster in which the Earl points at the viewer, Hove received one in which he was instead giving the finger.