Sherbet Lemon Crisis Looms

17/12/10 -- Labour backbenchers have warned concerned shoppers that supplies of the nation's favourite sweet, the sherbet lemon, are running at "critically low" levels after the failure of almost the entire Russian sherbet crop.

"This useless government just seem willing to stand by and do nothing, thousands of children, and adults too, will be distraught this year when they find that their Christmas stocking favourite has been replaced with a packet of bloody liquorice allsorts," said one.

Another MP, who refused to be named for legal reasons, said that government-owned stocks of sherbet had virtually "run out" after "deranged" sweet shop owners had been exporting the boiled sweet to "all manner of fancy Johnny Foreigners" at knock-down prices.

Hugh Jarse, an East Anglian sherbet farmer, says that he doesn't stand to make a penny from the boom. He and his mates sold all their sherbet to a faceless US-owned multi-national conglomerate back in the summer when they told him that sherbet prices could only go one way - down.

"What a chump I am," laughed Mr Jarse "I've lost almost everything. I've only got the six bedroom Jacobean farmhouse, five thousand acres of prime sherbet growing land, the Jag, the Range Rover, the Porsche for Sundays and my 25-year old Ukrainian nymphomaniac girlfriend left," he sobbed.

French analysts Sherbetie Sweeties forecast yesterday that EU supplies of sherbet may last until the middle of next week, but after that it's every man for himself.

The US Department of Sherbet estimate that the Russians may have "up to" 10 million tonnes of Sherbet Lemons in store. However they've been there for a couple of years and are probably all stuck together and to the side of the bag, so they're probably about as much use as a one-legged man in an arse kicking contest, they add.

The US Sherbet Council & Little Round Tin Sweetie Company meanwhile estimate the China's "insatiable" demand for boiled sweets may see them import "up to" twenty five million tonnes of those travel sweets that come in the little round tins that we keep in the glove box by 2015. That's an increase of two billion percent on the one tin of those travel sweets that come in the little round tins that we keep in the glove box that China imported last year.

Chinese peasants are adopting a more Westernised diet, so sales of those travel sweets that come in the little round tins that they will keep in the glove box of their car when they one are set to boom, they added with authority.