THUS Magazine

The financial meltdown has resulted in obvious job losses in the oxymoronic investment banking community, with the result that a lot of loutish oafs can no longer afford to go to strip clubs after work. This has caused collateral damage to the pole dancing community, many of whom have been laid-off by employers such as the Spearmint Rhino corporation and various branches of the Russian mafia (not in the least connected).

Although I’m no Gordon Brown or his friend Milton Keynes, my modest proposal is that these ladies of the late afternoon might be redeployed as school crossing supervisors. Ensnaking the stripy poles dressed in white coats with caps at rakish angles and not much else, they would almost certainly slow down speeding traffic. Cameras can add cash to council coffers by selling webcam footage on the internet, but not of the children. For recividist petrolheads such as members of the BBC TV Top Gear team, and to maintain a politically correct balance, young men dressed in loin cloths might shin up and down the poles on the opposite side of the road. The kids would need to be frisked for Stanley knives, of course. Plucky pensioners, formerly crossing supervisors, could do this – it’s certainly no job for the rent boys.

Investment bankers, meanwhile, could make themselves useful by lying in the road, acting as sleeping policemen.

This modest proposal seems a lot more sane than lowering taxes and borrowing even more money to spend on bailing out greedy and incompetent moneylenders.