THE government has abandoned plans to force trees off benefits and into work.
Ministers had hoped to force trees to earn a living by making work more attractive than standing around in a forest all day converting carbon dioxide into organic compounds and watching Loose Women.
But now, after pressure from dozens of greasy hippies, the plans have been scrapped leaving the country’s laziest trees to thumb their bark-covered noses at Britain’s hard-working middle class.
Tom Logan, a middle class hard worker from Stevenage, said: “They should send them all back to Treeland.”
Meanwhile the government is to press ahead with plans to punish workshy human scum for possessing idle, substandard DNA.
Welfare secretary Ian Duncan Smith will today unveil his landmark reform bill in a move which Whitehall sources say will make his eyes glow red like a cauldron filled with the boiling hot blood of a freshly slaughtered lamb.
The bill is expected to give 24 regional gauleiters the power to round up thousands of unemployed troglodytes and force them to work in a munitions factory in exchange for a twice daily ration of Cup-a-Soup.
Lifting his blood-soaked head from a rotting gazelle carcass, Mr Duncan Smith said: “I’m just trying to get people to stop taking the piss.”
But critics have warned that unless there is a universal approach to benefits for all living organisms then thousands of people will simply side-step the reforms by pretending to be trees.
Sir Denys Finch-Hatton, chairman of the Berchtesgaden Group of backbench Tory MPs, said: “We now have three generations of Liverpudlians who are expert in fraudulent benefit claims and will, even as we speak, be painting themselves brown and practising how to stand incredibly still.
“The only way we will be able catch them out is to look them right in the eye and fire up a chainsaw.”
He added: “Surely it is better to remove subsidies from all living things, thereby giving trees the freedom to work themselves out of council forests, helping badgers to do something in computers and turning highly-skilled Liverpudlian scroungers into dining room chairs.”
