I do have a few questions, though. I want to know if the owls will be standardised. Who-whoo do I contact if my owl is defective? Will I have to raise my owl from a chick, feeding it tiny little gross bits of mouse and mince, or will it be presented to me personally by the council on the day Miliband swoops into power? Will the unemployed have to turn up at the Raptor Centre twice a week in order to keep their owl? How long will asylum seekers have to wait until they receive an owl of their own? What if some people, perhaps because of cultural differences, might prefer a different bird of prey, say a buzzard or a crested goshawk? Will small boys in Northern towns be allowed to keep their kestrels? If we must have an owl, can we choose what kind? The public demands answers.
Perhaps it’ll turn out that the Americans are right. Maybe Britain actually is a land of magic and make-believe, in which case it shouldn’t just be students at Hogwarts who are entitled to an owl. They’ve privatised the post office, so perhaps this is Labour’s solution: owls swooping down the chimneys of local authority-owned housing, dropping eviction notices and stern letters from the Department for Work and Pensions telling people with terminal cancer that they have to get a job or be kicked out on the street.
Or maybe it’ll be more like the film Labyrinth, but instead of a snowy owl flapping into your bedroom and turning into David Bowie in a fright wig and very tight tights, it turns into Ed Miliband. Hold that thought in your mind for a second, and imagine Owl Miliband waggling a magic crystal ball about and telling jobless, hopeless young people that their benefits have been stolen away, far far away, to the centre of a treacherous maze, lost for ever unless they can find work or training in thirteen hours.
