The Equal Opportunities Act

“It’s ridiculous,” the Minister for Equality said, “If the Queen takes one apple and adds another apple to it, she has two apples, same as a benefit scrounger in a council house. Maths simply fails to take account of status and social standing.”

 

Everyone agreed that this was sheer nonsense.

 

“The laws of mathematics are an absurd bolshevic irrelevance, the idea that the Queen should live by the same maths as everybody else, you might as well insist that she moves to a starter home in Swindon and lives off microwaved ready-meals,” wrote Polly Toynbee in the Guardian. The Daily Mail called for mathematics to be arrested and tried for treason.

 

It fell to Ian Duncan Smith to provide the solution. He introduced a new socially-judgemental mathematics, which adjusted pure maths to take account of social standing.  It uses a complex logarithm, which translated all day to day mathematics into a more socially-acceptable answer. As a result, if the Queen added one apple to another apple, she would be left with a million apples. A feckless benefit sponger in Slough, however, could add as many apples as he liked to his pile, the answer would only ever be one.

 

There were a few critics, mostly those stuck in single-apple hell as a result of the change, who complained that the new maths was ‘unfair’.  They’re entitled to their views, of course, they’re even entitled to vote against the government in protest. And every vote counts. Though, of course, some votes count more than others.