A Statement from the Anti Growth Coalition

Ben Wildsmith

Here at the Anti Growth Coalition we have mixed feelings about our work suddenly coming under the public spotlight.

Prior to this week’s speech by the prime minister, we had been used to going about our business quietly and without fuss.

As luck would have it, the speech coincided with the AGC’s AGM and the joke amongst delegates was that we were so obscure, there was a danger the public might think that the PM had invented us. LOL!

But no, we are very real and, much as it goes against our instincts, now is the time to reveal our workings to the world at large.

Some might assume that the crux of our philosophy is a deep, burning resentment at those who have worked hard and prospered in life. The truth is more nuanced than that.

Cultural disgust

Take transport for example. We have no quarrel with anybody driving a bus, train, ambulance, or fire engine for monetary gain.

It is our belief that these people should qualify for a salary that permits them, not only to heat their homes, but to take their state-subsidised children for a mini-break to Center Parcs on a biannual basis.

Our problem is with the driving of white vans and private jets.

Many have assumed that this antipathy is rooted in environmental concerns, but the truth is that these are far outweighed by the cultural disgust we feel towards those eternal bedfellows: bricklayers and hedge fund managers.

Is there anything more vomit-inducing than settling in for a soy latte in the Islington Java Cooperative and having to listen to a gauche City type boasting about the tax contribution he’s made this year?

Well, yes actually, it’s being subjected to a brickie’s ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’ as he repoints the south facing wall of your yoga studio.

Absolute power

The centrepiece of this year’s conference was a round table discussion on growth suppression involving leading lights of our organisation from all walks of life.

Ours is a broad coalition and we were delighted to welcome representatives from the Trades Union Congress, Metropolitan Police, all of the judiciary, Stonewall, the National Trust, Greenpeace, the BBC (obvs), 85% of the populations of Wales and Scotland, the EU, the ECHR, the UN, Amnesty International, Sinn Fein, the House of Lords, The Church of England, and Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream who kindly sponsored the event at Newport’s Celtic Manor Hotel.

All of us were united around our central theme: hatred of freedom and contempt for the late queen.

Keynote speaker, the Duchess of Sussex, rallied the faithful with a passionate demand that Mick Lynch of the RMT be installed as monarch with absolute power to dispense justice to buy-to-let landlords and people who claim to know what a woman is.

Before a vote could even be taken, Chairman Gary Lineker brought down his gavel and declared the Duchess’s motion passed, to chants of ‘We hate democracy’ from the Remoaner Alliance, headed on this occasion by Sir Nicholas Soames.

Cymru am byth!

Delegates were delighted by the intervention of Mark Drakeford who, having closed all the roads in the vicinity, invited the assembled to board helicopters from President Emeritus, Greta Thunberg’s private fleet and fly them through the Brynglas tunnels at rush hour.

Detouring to the Prince of Wales Bridge, Drakeford landed his craft and constructed a makeshift checkpoint from unused Covid testing kits before spray painting ‘Cymru am byth!’ across the bridge’s signage and high-fiving Gerry Adams.

If Liz Truss wants a scrap then, believe me, we at the Anti Growth Coalition are ready and able for the fight.

From Vladimir Putin to Lily Allen, we are committed to tearing apart all she holds dear and ushering into reality a new Britain in which 12 years of uninterrupted Tory rule is no barrier to imagining everything must be somebody else’s fault.