Dear Tories: a Sunday Letter

This letter is inspired (!) by Richard ‘horse-teeth’ Branson’s buying up of the NHS by stealth, and his acquisition of the East Coast Line from the state as soon as it turned a profit, then his subsequent abolition of the lowest fare band, making travel to Newcastle upon Tyne, where some of Britain’s poorest people live, the most expensive mile-for-mile journey in the whole of the UK.

Dear Tory Party

I know that many of you are practicing Christians, although I am really stretching myself to work out how this connects with what you are doing to the poor and sick in Britain, because I thought the whole point of Christianity was to take care of those people, not steal their money and opportunities and hand them over to the rich.

No matter- this letter’s about something else: a fabulous idea that I’ve had that I will sell to the Tories for a reasonable, negotiated fee to be agreed at a later date.

This is the plan.

There is one institution that you haven’t sold off yet- the Church of England! Just imagine how much money you could make. I am absolutely certain that Richard Branson would be interested in buying it and I’m sure he could run it at a profit.

Here are some tips:

Those cassocks, or prayer cushions that people kneel on, and that have been hand-embroidered in woolwork and donated to the church for scores of years- they are worth a fortune. Send them off to an auction and replace them with polyurethane foam pads covered in wipe-clean vinyl, which will be much  more practical and hygienic, and easier to maintain.

Archbishops’ robes: again, why bother with expensive repairs and embroidery? These too will bring in a fortune at auction, and can be replaced with printed nylon robes, lighter to wear and easier to launder.

Church organs and pianos. You don’t need these! Sell them off to Russian churches, perhaps? Anyway, they can be replaced with audio equipment and pre-recorded hymn backings (provided by Virgin, perhaps? I’m sure that they still have a functioning studio somewhere). 
As an additional income stream, I suggest that you register the canon of traditional hymns with the PRS, copyright of the Tory Party. This should bring a fair bit of income to party coffers, for ever and ever, Amen.

Church Services should be charged for. This will be easy for the congregation to understand because they know what the word ‘service’ means. Tickets can be sold at the door, or in advance from one of the proprietary Internet ticketing services.

Hymn books can be pulped and sold on to a recycling company. For a small weekly charge, your church customers (you don’t need the word congregation any more) can download an app from the Internet with the week’s hymns on it.

They can do this by paying a small charge for the wi-fi service you have installed in the Church itself.

As for staff: put this out to tender. Pubs are losing business at the moment due to the cheap supermarket booze everyone’s buying. Why not ask the bar staff to stand in? They could probably be hired for the minimum wage; as an alternative, Jobcentres should be able to provide volunteers to man the churches on Sunday mornings if you really want to save a bob or two.

So there you go. There’s a plan for you disgusting bunch of Tory greedballs.