While Britain breathes a sigh of relief that it has finally come out of recession, the Humberside town of Dullby today proudly proclaimed that it “didn’t want to come out of recession” and that it was happy where it was. Town Mayor Dexter Downbeatte told reporters “we’re in the doldrums and no amount of positive spin is going to get us out of it, now leave us alone.”

The town gained notoriety at the start of the recession for its relatively positive attitude to what was widely perceived as bad news. Locals held recession parties in the street with jelly and corned beef sandwiches, and even introduced rationing as a way of keeping people miserable. The local newspaper “The Dullby Denizen” ran a campaign for the recession to be made permanent in Dullby, and local residents are 100% behind it.

“You know where you stand with the recession” said local glazer Warren Gobshine-Halshaw. “We don’t stand with this happy shit the government’s trying to foist on us all the time. Things are bad, things are very bad, and that’s just fine by us. We’re behind the Denizen’s campaign to keep the recession in Dullby forever if we can. In fact, since they introduced rationing, I’ve never eaten so well.”

His wife Greta, who runs the local pressure group Keep the Recession in Dullby (KRID) agreed: “If they take the recession away from us, what do we have left? Nothing. Alistair Darling is going to ruin us with his economic mismanagement and his stupid furry eyebrows.”

Residents regularly participated in games such as “guess which shop is going to shut down next”, and are fearful that the upturn will bring “hope and prosperity” to the town. Local baker Henrietta Seedmix told the Daily Shame that “we don’t want none of this hope and prosperity rubbish round here. I mean, what are they going to do next? Bring more jobs? We don’t want your jobs, we don’t want your shiny shop fronts and we don’t want your economic growth of 0.1%. They’ll be building factories and offering us benefits packages next.”

Economic figures actually show that Dullby was one of the first towns in the UK to exit the recession, ironically thanks to the upbeat way in which it received the initial news, but Mayor Downbeatte claims that those figures have been doctored by “those seedy mandarins in Whitehall”. He continued: “They talk of growth but this town has never been happier than when it’s been in decline. Alistair Darling thinks he can coax us out of recession like coaxing a timid cat out of a box but he can’t, and he never will.”