by Thomas, Mark
TRANSACTIONS
EVERY AUDIENCE, WITHOUT exception, had policies on what to do with bankers. In Bath one of the policy suggestions was simply ‘Hang a banker every day of the year’. What struck me was not the orgy of violence but the orderliness. Underneath it was written ‘and allotments for everyone’. How very British: a quaint mixture of bloodlust and gardening.
The most compelling banking policy that got widespread support was the Tobin tax. True, it doesn’t sound too exciting, unless your name is Tobin, when you might feel picked upon, but essentially it is a payback from the City, a small way for a humble group of people to say sorry.
The global market for currency transactions is worth about $3.2 billion a day.31 That’s right, a day. It is untaxed and all we seek to do is set a tax rate of 0.005 per cent.32 That is all. A global tax even of this size would raise between $30 and $50 billion a year.
Britain could introduce a Tobin tax on sterling without waiting for the rest of the world. Wherever sterling is sold we would simply apply this small tax via a global banking computer system that already exists. As the tax is applied only to wholesale currency markets (the inter-bank market) it does not affect the retails market, so there is no extra charge for converting currencies for sending money abroad or holiday cash. So your holiday pounds will still be worth as little tomorrow as they are today. A British Tobin tax would raise approximately $5 billion a year, money we could use to improve health and education. And the following year, when everyone is better and can read, get really pissed.
The Tobin tax is supported by Lord Adair Turner of the Financial Services Authority, the billionaire George Soros and French president Nicolas Sarkozy – but don’t let that put you off.
31
ALL MEMBERS OF
THE BNP SHOULD BE
FORCED TO TRACE
THEIR FAMILY
ANCESTRY AND
MAKE IT PUBLIC
IF THERE IS one thing the BNP dislike more than foreigners it is finding out that they themselves are foreign. What is the point of being a racist if your fellow racists are from the wrong race? It makes a mockery of the whole thing.
Over the past 2,000 years Britain has become a delightfully mongrel nation comprising of a good mix of French, Italian, Danish, Irish, German, Jewish, Romany, Asian, West Indian … all sorts really. Over time and generations, things can get mixed up. This policy means the BNP will have to find out the exact racial make-up of those members from ‘indigenous British ethnic groups’. I am sure they would appreciate it too. Isn’t it important to know if a BNP member is stealing British jobs, taking British houses and shagging British women?
32
ALL MPS’ SECOND
HOMES ARE TO
BECOME STATE
PROPERTY AT THE END
OF THEIR ‘CAREER’
(SECOND HOME = THE
ONE CLOSEST TO
WESTMINSTER)
THE AUTHORITIES CAN take the proceeds of crime from a criminal, so we have an established principle to retrieve the ill-gotten gains from MPs. Expenses are the reimbursement of legitimate costs, not perks, and no MP should personally profit from them. Westminster is set to phase out the payments for MPs’ second homes, but it leaves two questions remaining.
Firstly, where should they reside when in London? One popular solution, which was voted into the Manifesto in Norwich, was to put MPs in a ‘halls of residence’-type building when Parliament is sitting. As a solution it might seem tempting: relatively cheap, utilitarian and has a dash of rubbing the buggers’ noses in it. Then you realise that if you shove 650-odd MPs in a dormitory together they will breed. This is a horrible thought, though the objection is not moral, it is purely a matter of taste. If you want your imagination hijacked with images of two old Labour backbenchers lustfully thundering to climax in their vest and socks, or want to visualise Tories dressed in Bullingdon club attire smeared in lard and amyl nitrate.
Another suggestion is that MPs should live in council houses, but there is such an enormous shortage of council housing that it would be unfair to take so many flats out of circulation. If an estate for MPs was created you just know it would be a beautifully kept gated community with a high security presence and the only graffiti would be a commissioned Banksy. Essentially it would be a state-funded luxury health spa with a Vauxhall Vectra on bricks in the forecourt for appearances’ sake.
That leaves only one option left for the MPs: the Travelodge.
The second question: what to do with those MPs whose second homes have already been paid for by the taxpayer? This problem is easier to answer. The policy allows the state to reclaim existing second homes when the MP stands down, loses or dies. As MPs tend to live in more salubrious areas, their vacated property would make ideal council homes and provide a small start to replenishing our council stock.
33
THE GARMENT TRADE
SHOULD PRINT THE
AGE OF THE PERSON
WHO MADE EACH
ITEM IN THE LABEL
THIS IS SIMPLE. You can’t pay a quid for a three-piece suit and expect to find a Fairtrade logo on it. Stuff doesn’t come cheap if the person making it has pension rights or gets time off to go to school.
Perhaps surprisingly, ‘cheap’ doesn’t always mean lowest standards: the 2009 report by Labour Behind the Label gave Gap and Primark a better write-up than Debenhams and John Lewis. Basically, globalisation – or as I call it MRSA capitalism – has enabled companies to outsource production to places with the cheapest labour costs, often places with no union rights, forced overtime, low pay and child labour.33
This policy aims to create greater consumer awareness by having two numbers displayed on a label – size of the item, then age of the producer. Shop assistants would be asked, ‘Have you got this in a 14 years or older?’ That’s a whole new minefield for hapless men. Anniversaries would see partners returning gifts, saying, ‘You know I’m an age 16, you’ll have to take it back.’
The label can also silence moaning children on shopping trips when used in conjunction with the words, ‘Some children actually work for their pocket money.’ And if the teenager in your life is sloping around complaining about being bored, you can show them the label in your trousers: ‘See? This boy is your age. He’s made 30 pairs of chinos before you get up in the morning and if he had money for deodorant I bet he’d remember to use it.’
Another policy voted was, ‘All products should have a photo of the person who made them sewn into the label. That photo should be taken at their place of work.’ So if their work conditions were good you could have a 78-year-old Bangladeshi woman grinning at the back of your pants, which is a nice thought.
34
WE SHOULD ADOPT AN
OPT-OUT SYSTEM FOR
ORGAN DONATIONS
ACCORDING TO THE Chief Medical Officer, ‘Every day at least one patient dies while on the transplant waiting list. There are something like 7,000 people on the waiting list at any one time. There is a shortage of organs in this country and the situation is getting worse.’34
The current system works on a donor card. If you die with a card, doctors can approach your next of kin and ask for permission to remove your organs. The only time the doctors get to ask is by its very nature the worst moment. In moments of extreme grief, relatives sometimes refuse the doctors permission regardless of the donor card.
The opt-out system simply assumes everyone has given their consent, unless they expressly opt out of the system and sign up to a register.
We would then have a much more plentiful supply of organs for donating, hopefully save hundreds of lives and in times of shortage the government can always change the speed limit to 120mph for motorcyclists, sit back and wait for the harvest.
35
THOSE WHO PEDDLE
HOMEOPATHIC
REMEDIES SHOULD
ONLY RECEIVE
HOMEOPATHIC
MEDICINES WHEN
THEY HAVE MAJOR
ILLNESSES
WHO WOULD YOU rather have treat an illness: a person who has undergone medical training at medical school using peer-reviewed science and tried and tested clinical methods or a nettle-waving Hawkwind fan with a handwritten certificate?
Homeopathy claims to work by insisting that ‘like cures like’, so if your cold has symptoms like mercury poisoning, then mercury is the homeopathic cure. The mercury would be diluted in water until there was no mercury left, but miraculously the water would have a ‘memory’ of the mercury. The memory water will then be made into a pill.
So water has a memory, according to homeopathy, and if kids diluted their school text books they could cheat in class. Or perhaps I have wilfully misinterpreted the ‘memory’ of water and it has a more spiritual dimension, making the sewage system a highway haunted by ghosts, where just the memory of long-dead turds remains.
Either way it is bunkum. Simon Singh, a journalist who has written extensively on New Age quackery, says, ‘There have been more than 200 trials investigating homoeopathy and the overall result is that its remedies are utterly bogus.’
This policy, that those who peddle homeopathic remedies should only receive homeopathic medicines when they have a major illness, takes the homeopaths’ dictum at face value. If ‘like cures like’ then those that live by the water memory die by the water memory.
This would help weed out those homeopaths with the odd trace of self-doubt, and when the remaining peddlers get a major illness, a quick and painful demise is pretty much guaranteed. On the upside, we can dilute their remains and sell the memory water as a cure for ignorance. It is what they would have wanted.
36
CEOS AND BOARD
MEMBERS OF ANY
COMPANY CONVICTED
OF FRAUD SHOULD BE
FORCED TO DRESS AS
PIRATES IN WHATEVER JOB
THEY GET IN
THE FUTURE
BRITAIN IS A newcomer to fighting corruption and bribery – after all, it only became illegal in 2002. It would have been made illegal earlier but someone paid a bung to keep it off the statute books and they were perfectly within their legal rights to do so. (Oh, all right, I’m making that bit up, though the 2002 bit is true.)
The first major company to be convicted under the new law were Mabey and Johnson, the Reading-based bridge-building firm, after they admitted bribing officials in Jamaica and Ghana and breaking UN sanctions in Iraq.35
David Mabey, the CEO of Mabey and Johnson at the time, resigned from the board in 2008, but under this policy he would have to dress as a pirate should he wish to re-enter the world of remunerated employment. And properly like a pirate with a big pirate hat, a sash cummerbund thingy and a cutlass. He would also be forced to talk like a pirate. So if his new job was as a receptionist he would have to growl down the headset, ‘Will you wait a minute while a salty sea dog like meself be putting you on hold.’
These pirate urchins would be able to wear normal clothes when not working, unless there was a business cross-over. For example, the Mabey group of companies made regular donations to the local Tory Party in Wokingham; were David Mabey to attend Tory Party functions, the financial cross-over between his former business and the Tories would require him to wear his pirate daywear. Indeed, at Party Conference time, it’s easy to suppose that business receptions would look like a Johnny Depp looka-like contest.
This policy forces us to take white-collar crime seriously, rather than excusing it as the price of doing business. My personal favourite is the prospect of the BAE Systems AGM commencing as the board take their places on the podium to the sound of wooden legs echoing around the room, followed by the mass squawking of a flock of parrots.
37
ANYONE WHO BUYS
A SECOND HOME IN
SOMERSET MUST BUY
A HOME OF EQUAL
WORTH AND GIVE IT
TO SOMEONE WHO
ACTUALLY LIVES IN
SOMERSET
AMENDMENT 1. THIS HOME WILL
BE BUILT UPON A GOLF COURSE
THE BRITISH COUNTRYSIDE is a thing of genuine and rare beauty, unfortunately ruined by the people who live there – or at least the people who drive there on a Friday night. The countryside of a weekend is essentially the City of London in green wellingtons, full of vile twats in cords who have come down to get the Range Rover muddy, walk the labradors and talk about boarding schools for their children. The type of people you hope are shot first in a hostage situation.
This policy was elected in Taunton but a very similar one was chosen in Exeter, probably because the southwest of England has suffered disproportionately at the hands of the City bonus and rich London knobs forcing up house prices beyond the reach of those who actually live there.
The south-west is the only part of England where house prices are higher than the national average but income levels are lower than the national average. In 2008, the average house price there was about 12 times the regional average wage. Between 2003 and 2008, the number of households on the waiting list for social housing has gone up by 43 per cent – one in every 14 households.36
So what can we do? One policy suggestion read, ‘Reintroduce fox hunting, replacing foxes with bankers’; another, ‘The entire population of Devon should invade the Docklands and squat in their homes just to see how they like it.’
The chosen policy, to buy a home of equal worth for someone who lives in Somerset, goes some small way to easing the housing crisis, rather than creating villages deserted during the week and full of braying hordes on a Saturday who think that being part of the community is joining the Countryside Alliance.
The amendment simply acknowledges that golf is shit.
38
TO INTRODUCE ‘NONE
OF THE ABOVE’ ON
BALLOT PAPERS
THE 2005 ELECTION saw Labour win 21.6 per cent of the eligible vote, while non-voters represented 38.6 per cent.
In 2001 Labour did slightly better, winning 24.2 per cent of the eligible vote, but non-voters won a stunning40.6 per cent.37
Under current rules, the Labour Party were able to steal the last two elections, which were both won by anarchists, or a combination of anarchists and the apathetic. Fortunately for Labour, the Anarchists/Apathy Alliance couldn’t be arsed to claim victory, despite the fact that millions of voters didn’t turn out to support them.
During the Manifesto tour, audiences often cheered the suggestion of having None Of The Above (NOTA) on the ballot paper: finally they saw the prospect of voting for something they wholeheartedly supported. There were amendments to NOTA, some preferring the words ReOpen Nominations (RON) instead, arguing that NOTA says ‘Bollocks to the lot of you’ and RON says ‘Bollocks to the lot of you, we want this run again with proper candidates’.
However, both ideas are based on a simple premise. When you vote you give your consent to be governed, but consent can only be meaningful if you have a right to withhold it. If you applied the process of voting to sex, when Gordon Brown and David Cameron appear before us and say, ‘Which one of us would you like to have sex with?’, surely we have the right to say neither.
When I spoke to politicians about the prospect of NOTA, they were vehemently against it. ‘Smaller parties will lose votes,’ they said, or, ‘It encourages voters to be lazy and not find out more about politics,’ both of which might be true. But those arguments work the other way around too: if political parties get elected no matter what the level of voter turnout, then it makes politicians lazy. I think they will find all the motivation they need to reconnect with the electorate in the prospect of losing to an empty chair.
39
RENATIONALISE
THE RAILWAYS
BRITISH RAIL WAS privatised in 1994 by John Major’s Tory government, breaking up one single entity into over 100 different companies.
I once saw a grown man scream uncontrollably at a loudspeaker on a packed platform at Clapham Junction station.
‘Liar!’ His face was puce with rage and his overcoat flapped as he yelled, ‘When. Will. You. Stop. Lying. To. Us!’ It was a Friday afternoon, not yet five, and no one on the platform turned away or giggled in embarrassment. Instead they applauded. He got a round of applause for screaming at a box of wires and amplifiers. That is how shite our railways are.
A ticket for a train is a passport to a world of disappointment, humiliation, and yes, lies. The tickets are too expensive, the trains are overcrowded if and when they arrive, and we subsidise the private companies by nearly four times the amount we did when the thing was nationalised.
Average rail fares went up by 6 per cent last year (well above inflation), when we also saw the introduction of the most expensive ticket ever, the £1,000 fare from Cornwall to Scotland.38 What will a £1,000 ticket guarantee? It will guarantee that you don’t join the rest of us standing in a corridor which is thick with the smell of piss and shit. I can honestly say I have been in refugee camps in Africa with better sanitation.
Splintering the network has made our railways the most expensive in Europe. The reason for overcrowding is economic. Privatisation separated the rolling stock (carriages) from the train operators, so the train operator now has to lease the carriages; they make more money by renting fewer carriages and cramming us into smaller spaces. Conditions are so cramped that veal calves are protesting on our behalf.