Winter heating supplements for elderly people on low incomes are to become means tested, if the so-called Mean Party’s manifesto promise is carried out.
In a measure designed to support the country’s ailing economy, this has a two-pronged effect: fewer payments, and less pressure on the hard-pressed NHS as pensioners will die peacefully of hypothermia in their own home surrounded by their freezing loved ones instead of in some Godforsaken hospital bed.
This parallels the move to solve the problem of oversubscribed schools by simply allowing some of the more undesirable children to starve to death.
But what are the implications of means testing?
“We need to be mean yet well-meaning,” said Schrödinger, a spokesgeek from the Treasury. “We will calculate the mean of the means of the meanest of the mean, know what I mean?”
Meanwhile, although this explanation is clear enough for most, some are still unsure. Pensioner Diane Abbott, 74, has mixed feelings.
“I failed mymeans test,” she says, “but I was still delighted to score 12 out of 80. That’s more than half marks!”
We contacted the Department for Education for further clarification. Junior minister Marc Boockes expressed concern. “One third of school leavers are functionally innumerate,” he says. “However, that is an improvement over the last Labour government, where the figure was as high as 25%. We will be implementing strong and stable measures to be applied across all schools except private ones, naturally, to improve standards in numbery stuff.”
On a related issue, it has been revealed that Jeremy Corbyn cooks a mean vegetable curry. However, shadow chancellor John McDonnell is thought to have described it as being merely “average.”
