Merry Christmas, You're Fired.

Do you sometimes feel that, with the world tumbling in on us all, there's a very real lack of candour in our dealings with the powers-that-be? Here, at the Department of Social Scrutiny, we feel the same.

The Department was originally formed in response to a set of unique circumstances after a scandal involving key members of the UK Government, a dozen members of the cabinet and the mutilated corpse of a rare rhinoceros.

Our government was in chaos, everybody had proved either sexually deviant, corrupt or incompetent. Our number was up. As nobody likes either deviancy or corruption, we were left with the merely incompetent. Welcome to 2020.

In light of the fact that we simply did not have enough competence to go around but managed to retain a landslide majority, we put on a jolly face, waved our arms about a bit and busked our way through the year. How bad could it get? How hard could it be?

While we retained a semblance of normal organisation, behind the scenes we created Super-Departments of State to actually make all the decisions. The Department of Social Scrutiny - the DoSS - was one such Super-Department and it assumed the portfolios of Tax, Benefits, Work, Pensions Surveillance, Counter Espionage and Counter-Counter Terrorism.

Part of our remit was to project, quietly through the traditional Departments, a sense of bonhomie and good will in order to counter the industrial scale of incompetence that marked our every foray into policy and executive strategy.

But we also sought - internally, at least - to approach every aspect of government business with a straight bat. We stopped using euphemisms in our official forms, we banned circumlocutory terminology - including the term circumlocutory terminology - along with bureaucratic barriers and protocols.

In short, we determined that because the public had become tired of being dishonestly screwed over, we would henceforth be more honest when we were screwing them over and this led to a number of explicitly confrontational forms.

Giddy with the power of truth, some of our forms became fulcrums for leveraging unwholesome states of mind. Many of our form writers went far beyond their most effective in terms of thwarting their inherent lunacies. It became customary to just “tell it like it is, no matter what”. That attitude has reached the apotheosis of its expression in this year's departmental Christmas card.

The card features a special Christmas edition of the P-45, the Xm45. The greeting within is a little more detailed than a traditional card that features the usual meaningless homilies and platitudes, to reflect the unique circumstances of your 2020 dismissal.

It reads:

Hey, chin up. Just because you’ve lost your job through no fault of your own, there’s no need to be all down-hearted or to sink into the hand-to-mouth destitution of cheap groceries and court orders. Not just yet, anyway.

Apart from the global pandemic it isn’t all rejection and despondency, you know, because there’s someone who always wants to see you, no matter how much you turn them away or pretend you don’t care. That’s right, that’s us, we’re the Jobcentrehassleplus.

Jobcentrehassleplus loves you a lot, but knows you’re not ready to make a big commitment. We only want to see you once a fortnight – we can do lunch or dinner or, better still, how about a long and demeaning interview?

With Jobcentrehassleplus your P45 opens a world of opportunity. Just look at the great services on offer in your nearest branch.

• Each of our centres is equipped with the latest high-tech gear, like paper and biros, and hologrammatic claim forms that enable us to misplace your details in three dimensions at once.
• Every local newspaper in the world with each instance of the word ‘job’ high- lighted in pink.
• A bank of crashed Jobsearchmachines that only show “marketing” jobs in Dorset offering £500,000 p.a. without mentioning it’s actually double glazing canvassing. and you will quite rightly go to Hell.
• Staff, now at software version 0,8,3 have had all their bugs – like yawning in the client’s face, spittle secretion and tongue-lolling – de- programmed and purged from their operating systems so they can now make up rules and misunderstand regulations for months on end.

Initial attempts to rewrite this in plain verse were challenged in court by the estate of a 1950s beat poet, on the grounds of plagiarism, despite many promising offers of “real publication for less than $449” we received from the Internet.

For 2021, the Department of Social Scrutiny will continue its dual roles of providing promise and optimism in public, while quietly grinding your souls with the unexpurgated truth of how little we care for you. We hope you have a happy and fulfilling new year of remorseless cheer and wild, desolate abandon. In the meantime, such as current guidelines and the outlook provide, please enjoy Christmas responsibly and check out our 192-page e-book of forms and advice: Britain: What A State.