According to the improbably named Tim Hastie-Smith as reported in The Grauniad. I’ve always like moral vacuums myself, very effective on even ground in dirt on the deepest shag pile. The implication that more single faith schools rather than the obviously ideal number of none should be striven for is rather worrying, but seeing as we’re about to be econobombed back to the Stone Age I suppose it’s a moot point.

Stay away from the windows

An inmate at a prison in Varces, France was was killed on Sunday and another injured by a sniper shooting from outside the compound. Police say the victim was due to testify in a murder case.

The suspected gunman was apprehended almost immediately by police as he mounted a motorbike in preparation for a getaway. As if the situation was not awesome enough to begin with, the perpetrator is refusing to admit guilt, using the “Shaggy” defence despite being caught in possesion of a still-warm scoped rifle.

Five shots were fired into the exercise yard of the prison. The injured man is thought to have been shot in the hand. Better story than all this “collapsing bank” shit.

Would this man lie to you. Any more than he already has, I mean...

I, along with sixty-odd million other Brits, woke up this morning to the fantastic news that I now own part of the failing Bradford & Bingley bank. Yes, in another government bail-out the B&B has been nationalised. I’m not worried though. Oh no. Alistair Darling has promised that any shortfalls down the line will be picked up by the banking sector and not the British taxpayer. And since when did the Labour Party fail to keep it’s promises? You see; everything is going to be alright because the man with the mental eyebrows says so. Yes sir. You won’t catch me losing any sleep at night. Not one wink.

RUN! RUN FOR THE FUCKING HILLS WHILE YOU STILL CAN! SAVE YOURSELVES!

Treasury in talks to secure B&B, as another venerable financial setup looks to get its ass Northern Rocked. We didn’t set this site up purely to chronicle the demise of capitalism and return to a barter economy, but that looks to be the way it’s going.

Alistair, darling, could you pop out and fix the entire foundations of capitalism?

The financial markets are, of course, the closest thing mankind has developed to real magic over the course of their history. When iron ore is extracted from the earth, there is an obvious cost and an obvious product that, obviously, requires a profit for it to be worthwhile. When that ore is taken and refined, again there is an obvious cost, obvious product and necessary profit.

This process continues, until suckers like us by their latest car or computer or shiny bauble. The difference of this process occurs at a level above most of us can aspire to, where banks and financial institutions take the baffling steps of selling money to each other in such a fashion as to somehow magically increase the net amount of money that exists in the world. The difference, for those who haven’t fixed upon it yet, is the complete absence of any tangible product. Oh, perhaps if you’re lucky you’ll get some piece of paper that promises you the lion’s share of the Brooklyn Bridge, but if you’re buying into that then you’re part of the problem, and not the solution.

With the sub-prime crisis, collapse of multiple American banks and now the entirely arbitrary collapse of the venerable and entirely financially sound Halifax and Bank of Scotland and its resultant merger with Lloyds TSB seemingly on the whim of some financial traders on the lookout for a quick, short sold buck, it seems that the world has finally seem through the smoke and mirrors to see the horse and pony show that the FTSE and the NASDAC and their acronym compadres represent and called shenanigans.

The downside to this, of course, is that the entire basis of our capitalist civilization falls right over with the money grubbing tosstards. Repossession rates are on the rise, food costs so much it may unintentionally prove to be a boon to obesity statistics and old age pensioners are hoping for a warm winter, lest they become cryogenically frozen earlier than anticipated due to being unable to meet the fuel bills.

While any child raised in Scotland under the harsh flags of Thatcher’s Britain will typically have a natural sympathy for anyone made redundant through mismanagement and market forces, it strains my wooly, liberal heart to find any sympathy for the besuited purveyors of increasingly dodgily constructed houses of cards.

With acccusations of the FSA’s stop on short selling having been delayed so that the Americans could announce it first, directly contributing to the LloydsHBOSTSB fiasco, surely it’s time to ask quite what has been so special from our ’special relationship’ with America, apart from now having a cratering economy to add to the substantial number of craters in the hole where Iraq used to be. This relationship is special in the same way that ’special schools’ are special.

The Top Banana’s financial advice remains, as always, to keep your assets liquid, mainly in stocks of vodka. It won’t solve any economic crises, but it makes the pain of them somewhat more tolerable.

Bush: sold your granny

U.S. President George W. Bush yesterday addressed his country in a prime time television broadcast, warning the American public that a drastic government buyout of bad Wall Street investments was necessary to avert economic collapse. The proposed package is likely to cost American taxpayers up to $700bn, equivalent to $2,300 for every man, woman and child in the country (though Tex-Mex border patrol officials are like to dispute that figure).

The news follows a number of financial crises over the past months which have cast doubt over the viability of recent Western banking practices. The world has realised, it seems, that you can’t trust fat cat bankers and hedge fund managers to run the economy with the safety off.

<–INSERT SLOW CLAP HERE–>

The Top banana would like to reach out in solidarity to our American cousins and reassure them that they are in safe hands. George Bush Jnr. may be a many-time failed business man, and he may have spent the last 8 years throwing away anything up to $1trillion (at current estimates) of your hard-earned tax money floating an unwinnable war in Iraq, but his financial credentials are surely beyond reproach. Ah, fuck it. Who are we kidding? At least us Brits are tied by the ankle to the monetary misdeeds of your leaders, so you’ll have some company on the long journey down.

The Face of The Enemy

The entirely unnecessary inquiry into the circumstances and execution of the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes by police hunting a suicide bomber has opened, further wasting taxpayer’s money in these trying economic climes.

The 27-year old Brazilian electrician, known to the Metropolitan Police as being both ‘foreign’ and ‘not entirely Caucasian’ was humanely shot seven times the day after a botched attack on the London Underground entirely unrelated to de Menezes.

While bleeding heart liberals have pointed out that Brazilian electricians were never considered major players in the Axis of Terror who Hate our Freedom, our upstanding police force have repeatedly produced evidence that de Menezes lived in a block of flats where a terror suspect was once linked to, in some way, somehow.

Combined with de Menezes’ flagrant and repeated acts of being a foreigner, there can be no doubt to any rational, balanced observer that de Menezes act of getting on board a train with malicious intent to travel deserved any less than swift, immediate bullet-based justice.

Despite our Boys in Blue performing their duties flawlessly, the left-wing media and court system have nonetheless forced Met po-po chief Ian Blair to say that procedures had “failed” that day, and that “No-one set out with any intent to let a young man die.” Cynics have suggested that the police actions were rather less ‘letting’ him die than ‘actively enabling it’, however this attitude is clearly pandering to terrorists so deeply that those who take such a tack are, in a very real sense, actually terrorists themselves.

Let no man doubt that this great country must remain steadfast in the face of people who would do harm to our culture and our wiring. We must deal swiftly not only with Brazilian electricians, but with the causes of Brazilian electricians, and indeed all electricians in general. In a culture so inured to electricians that they openly advertise their services in terror-related publications such as the Yellow Pages, we have a long way to go before we can declare “Mission Accomplished”, and much, much further than that before the mission is actually accomplished, but with our God and our faith and our faith in God on our side we are surely guaranteed victory.

Our cause is just. We must prevail. Over electricians.

Marriott Islamabad: not looking Islamagood

World leaders have been quick to voice their support for the Pakistani administration following yesterday’s massive suicide bomb blast outside the Marriott hotel in the country’s capital Islamabad. At least 54 people are so far believed to have been killed.

Western leaders joined with many of Pakistan’s neighbours in condemning the act, prompted by growing fears that increasingly devastating attacks could have a huge impact on the country’s manufacturing capacity. Many fear that the general climate of wild-eyed, abject terror among citizens afraid to travel to work, coupled with the likelihood of more attacks on “Western-friendly” targets such as clothing manufacturers, could lead to a hike in prices on commodities such as trainers and denim products.

In a statement issued to foreign press by the White House, President Bush offered his support to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari saying “The perpetrators of this act of heinousnessity will not go unpunished. These cowards, who aim to terrorise the United States through the use of terror, and who want to destroy the way of life of every man woman and man in our great country, are going to pay dearly for their actions. The United States government will not stand idly by in and idle way while it’s children wander the streets barefoot for the want of cheap sneakers.”

President Zardari later thanked Bush in an open statement, though he did also remind his American counterpart that yesterday’s actions, believed to have been the work of the Pakistani Taleban, had little to no bearing on the U.S. and should not be used as an excuse to “stir up more shit”. President Bush was apparently too busy addressing the nation in a broadcast urging U.S. citizens to build nuclear shelters and purchase shares in Lockheed Martin to respond.

Michael: horrible little crack troll

Celebrity crack-fiend George Michael has once again evaded punishment from the police after being found in possession of class A and C drugs in a public toilet on Hampstead Heath, London. Smack muncher Michael was let off with a caution after being rumbled by officers from the Metropolitan Police.

The incident is just the latest in a string of indiscretions perpetrated by the “singer”, following a number of drug and public order offences over the past decade. Most recently Michael was found slumped semi-conscious over the wheel of his car beside London’s Marble Arch in October 2006, with the singer citing “fatigue” as the reason for his diminished constitution at the time. He was later given a two year driving ban after admitting to driving while under the influence of illegal substances.

In accordance with London’s policy of “one rule for the beautiful people, another for the rest of us”, Home Office Minister Tony McNulty reminded we, the poor people, that discretion was an officer’s most powerful weapon in the fight against drug crime, stating that the law needed to be “flexible” in it’s approach to punishment. This, presumably, is the reason why a man with a string of previous convictions for drug possession, drug use, dangerous driving and sucking on a full-on frontal chubby in a public toilet can be caught, once again in a public toilet, with crack cocaine and marijuana and not be made an example of.

The Metropolitan Police have failed to respond to allegations put by the Top Banana that Mr. Michael was let off lightly after rolling the arresting officers a “fat one” and offering to polish their truncheons.

LHC: $6.6bn spin drier?

Work at the $6.6bn Large Hadron Collider near Geneva has halted due to a magnet failure it was revealed today, and the infernal contraption, labelled a doomsday device by some, will be out of action for at least two months as a result.

The over-priced gizmo, designed to smash together particles at near light speed, has already been labelled a bungle by some after it’s much hyped power-up last week failed to bring about the apocalypse.

Yesterday’s failure is thought to have caused a number of the devices supercooled electromagnets to have increased in temperature, and they will now need to be warmed further before repairs can take place. The Top Banana’s resident plumber, “Shifty” Sven Swieghorn knows nothing whatsoever about particle accelerators, but as a tradesman who frequently deals with really long pipes commented “[The LHC] looks like a cowboy job to me, love. I reckon the whole lot will have to come out.”

Sources within the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) which runs the project were unavailable to comment on Sven’s assessment, nor would they confirm or deny that a failure to install the recently released Service Pack 3 for Windows XP may have been behind the failure. Cern spokesman James Gillies would only state that the organisation’s I.T. specialists had assessed the problem fully from their end and were confident that computer systems were not to blame.

“Having conversed with the sad, speccy bastards in the broom cupboard we have ruled out computer error, even going so far as to switch it off and on again” he said. “We are instead focusing our efforts on ascertaining wether the failure was due to intervention by a well known star of the silver screen or, potentially, the leakage of over a ton of liquid helium from a component into the tunnel housing the accelerator. Actually yeah, that was probably it.”

The failure occurred during the final stages of testing the device, and scientists will now have to wait until after repairs are made before they can finally arrange an atom fight. Sky TV, due to air the fight as a pay-per-view event, were unavailable for comment.

Damon: star craves dino info

Further news has emerged this afternoon that police in Scotland may be investigating Hollywood star Matt Damon in connection with the vicious beating of Glasgow Celtic football club coach Neil Lennon. Lennon was brutally attacked on Glasgow’s Ashton Lane shortly after midnight on August 31st and left unconscious by the perpetrators.

The news of Damon’s alleged involvement follows this morning’s Top Banana exclusive that implicated him in the hacking of U.S Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s private email account by a notorious group calling themselves Anonymous. It is believed Damon may have bankrolled the group’s activities in order to verify claims that Palin, widely acknowledged as a Creationist, was harbouring sensitive information relating to dinosaurs.

Strathclyde police were originally treating the case as a “childish sectarian issue”, with Celtic having lost a match to their arch rivals Glasgow Rangers just hours before the attack, but Detective Sergeant Scott Douglas, leading the enquiry, indicated just hours ago that Damon’s incessant craving for dino-related information may have been behind the attack.

“Witnesses at a city centre bar had reported seeing Mr. Lennon in an innebriated state earlier in the week.” said Douglas. “A number of individuals we questioned gave sworn statements that he had been shouting angrily, mentioning on several occasions a stegosaurus and a pterodactyl. Given Mr. Damon’s well-documented compulsion for collating dinosaur facts and this morning’s revelations over just how far he may be prepared to go to secure that information, we are leaving no stone unturned in our search for the truth.”

Detective Sergeant Douglas would not be drawn further on rumours the police were working on the theory that the two assailants may have been members of Anonymous, and that the attack was intended to squeeze Mr. Lennon for any information he may have had on the afore-mentioned dinosaur species.

“That Damon’s daft on dinos,” said Douglas, adding “I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Desperate for tit: Chinese infant craves bazooty

Dairy products across all ranges are being removed from shop shelves throughout China today. The move follows recent reports of infant death related to both fresh and dried milk products, and the revelation today that 10% of liquid milk from three Chinese dairy firms was found to contain traces of melamine.

There have been alegations that the chemical, most frequently used in the manufacture of plastics, may have been added to increase the apparent protein content of the milk after dishonest distributors diluted it to increase profit.

Worried punters have spoken to the press of their dismay at the withdrawal, asking how they are now supposed to feed their infants. The Top Banana wonders when a) Chinese women forgot they had breasts and b) at which specific point the Chinese started caring enough about their children to not just ditch them in the gutter anyway.

US VP Candidate Sarah Palin

Hollywood megastar and dinosaur fanatic Matt Damon is at the centre of a controversy today following the revelation that U.S. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin suffered at the hands of internet hackers. Palin’s personal Yahoo email account was hacked by a group calling themselves Anonymous, and private messages and family photos were published online for the amusement of the callous, baying public.

Following his offbeat remarks made just over a week ago, Matt Damon has found himself prime suspect in ongoing police investigations. A source close to Matt told The Top Banana the star’s fascination with prehistoric creatures, coupled with Palin’s belief in Creationism, had lead the star to fund the activities of the notorious hacking group.

“Matt is just nuts about dinosaurs!” said the source. “He felt that if there was any chance Palin was in possession of any information about them then he simply had to act.”

This is not the first time the wealthy star is alleged to have used his accumulated monies to fund covert information gathering exercises, with previous suspicions having being aroused when British hacker Gary McKinnon stated during his extradition trial that it was Damon who had requested he root for information on UFOs held on top secret US military computers.

Our source confirmed that Damon was indeed “also interested in UFOs.” The investigation continues.

Eleanor 'Tiny Torpedo' Simmonds

In stark contrast to the nation’s overall economic and social woes, the Great Britain Paralympics team returned home jubilant today on a gold-nosed plane having finished second on the overall medals table. Out of a haul of 102 chocolate coins 42 were gold, giving the team a total of 510 seconds (8 1/2 minutes) inside Richard O’Brien’s crystal dome. Olympic officials were quick to point out that subtracting the silver and bronze coins would mean the team have actually only earned 25 seconds inside the dome, but Team GB chief Phil Lane is unperturbed.

 ”We have a very definite strategy for our remaining time inside the dome. Our athletes of restricted growth will busy themselves scouring the floor for gold tickets, while that bloke with the bendy metal leg will be hopping like a fuck-nutter for those gathered in the apex. The remaining team members will flail their arms wildly in support whilst sticking out their tongues, though that’s a bit of a busman’s holiday for the ‘tards. It’s in the bag, basically.”

 Lane is confident that his mottley assortment of mis-shapes can bring further cheer to a nation besieged by economic and social insecurity.

 ”I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that these guys can bag a net profit of at least 100 gold tickets, and that means a day out on a jetski on Lake Windermere for every man, woman and child in Britain. What could lift spirits more than that?”

Oooh, well done Woody. You really understand British culture soooo well, and have made such an entertaining film. Well done Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrel, especially on your massively convincing accents that don’t at all sound like Dick Van Fucking Dyke. Do one, you poxy spunkbag.