Mark Thomas Presents the People's Manifesto Read online

  MARK

  THOMAS

  PRESENTS

  THE

  PEOPLE’S

  MANIFESTO

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  1 Party Manifestos Should Be Legally Binding

  2 Shut Down Tax Havens… Bomb Switzerland

  3 Models Should Be Chosen At Random From The Electoral Roll

  4 It Should Be Legal 0For Gay Couples To Get Married

  5 People Who Allow Their Dog To Shit On The Pavementm Without Cleaning It Up Should Be Forced To Wear It As A Moustache

  6 Mps Should Not Be Paid Wages But Loans, Like Students, Because They Get Highly Paid Jobs After They Graduate From Westminster As A Result Of Attending Parliament. They Should Therefore Pay Back The Loan They Received While In Office

  7 Legalise All Drugs

  8 Thedaily Mail Should Be Forced To Print On The Front Of Every Edition The Words: ‘This Is A Fictionalised Account Of The News And Any Resemblance To The Truth Is Entirely Coincidental’

  9 To Randomly Arm Oaps With Guns

  10 There Should Be A Maximum Wage

  11 Windsor To Be Renamed Lower Slough

  12 Mps Should Have No Job Other Than That Of Mp

  13 If Mps Want A Second Job In Order To Gain A Greater Understanding Of Life Outside Government, Then Their Constituents Should Choose Which Job They Think Would Best Expand Their Mp’S Horizons

  14 The Police Should Wear Badges Which Display The Words, ‘ How Am I Policing?’ And ‘I’M Here To Help’

  15 As Tasers Are So Safe, Every Time The Police Use Them On A Member Of The Public They Should Taser One Of Themselves

  16 To Introduce The 1967 Abortion Act Into Northern, Ireland Northern Ireland

  17 Everyone Should Be Entitled To Phone In Work One Day A Month And Claim A ‘Fuck It’ Day Off

  18 Everyone Should Be Given The Day Off On Their Birthday

  19 There Should Be Separate Lanes For Pedestrians Based On The Speeds They Walk At, Ranging From A Fast Lane For People Who Know Where They Are Going To A Hard Shoulder For Window Shoppers

  20 The Daily Mail Should Be Forced To Print The Words ‘The Paper That Supported Hitler’ On Its Masthead

  21 To Introduce A Prohibition Of Deception Act

  22 Politicians Should Have To Wear Tabards Displaying The Names And Logos Of The Companies With Whom They Have A Financial Relationship, Like A Racing Driver

  23 There Should Be A Public Referendum Before Going To War

  24 The Prime Minister Hall Be Limited To Two Terms Of Office

  25 There Should Be An Age Of Consent For Religion

  26 Those In Favour Of Id Cards Should Be Banned From Having Curtains

  27 Anyone Found Guilty Of A Homophobic Hate Crime Shall Serve Their Entire Sentence In Drag

  28 Whenever There Is A Barney In The House Of Commons, They Should Play The Benny Hill Theme Tune

  29 Private Health Companies That Use Nhs- Trained Staff, Doctors, Nurses, Clinicians, Etc., Should Pay A Levy Worth 25 Per Cent Of The Staff Pay To The Nh To Reimburse Them For The Training Costs And Help With Training In The Future

  30 To Introduce A Tobin Tax On Currency Transactions

  31 All Members Of The Bnp Should Be Forced To Trace Their Family Ancestry And Make It Public

  32 All Mps’ Second Homes Are To Become State Property At The End Of Their ‘Career’ (Second Home = The One Closest To Westminster)

  33 The Garment Trade Should Print The Age Of The Person Who Made Each Item In The Label

  34 We Should Adopt An Opt-Out System For Organ Donations

  35 Those Who Peddle Homeopathic Remedies Should Only Receive Homeopathic Medicines When They Have Major Illnesses

  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

  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

  38 To Introduce ‘None Of The Above’ On Ballot Papers

  39 Renationalise The Railways

  40 Goats Are To Be Released On To The Floor Of The House Of Commons (No More Than Four); Mps Are Forbidden From Referring To Them Ever

  Notes

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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  Epub ISBN 9781407063065

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  Published in 2010 by Ebury Press, an imprint of Ebury Publishing A Random House Group Company

  Copyright © Mark Thomas 2010

  Mark Thomas has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

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  INTRODUCTION

  This Manifesto started as a live show, and the idea for the show was simple. At the beginning of 2009 we were in the middle of an economic crisis. Banks and countries collapsed catastrophically, costing us £1.3 trillion, which we paid to the very people who caused the problem in the first place, while an illiberal and reactionary Labour government twitched in its death throes and an illiberal and reactionary Tory Party waited for their moment. The words ‘creek’, ‘without’ and ‘paddle’ seemed to keep cropping up. So the plan was this: I would ask my audiences round the country for their ideas and policies to get us out of the creek, in the sure knowledge that most people think they could run the country better than any government and would be happy to share their opinions.

  Each audience was given forms and asked for their policy ideas, grand or small, to change the world. The campaigning group NO2ID kindly organised volunteers to collect the suggestions and deliver them to me backstage, where each night I would read every one, weed out the doubles, put those that needed professional help to one side, and try to make sense of the rest.

  Then, clutching 60 to 80 bits of paper, I launched myself onstage to discuss the policies, and each night the audience voted for their favourite idea; this was conducted using the advanced scientific method of ‘who shouts loudest’. It’s not the most rigorous method but I never needed to call on UN monitors, as the audience left me in no
doubt if they thought I had not reflected their wishes.

  Ideas were often specific to the area–Hull, for example, wanted to abolish the Humber toll bridge. In Norfolk they wanted more ‘feral chicken roundabouts to calm traffic’. (There is already a feral chicken roundabout on the A142 at the Bungay and Ditchingham bypass where wild birds have lived and bred for over 50 years. Locals believe that drivers slow down at the roundabout so they don’t hit the chickens crossing the road. This, I was assured, was Normal for Norfolk.)

  Not every idea was grand. Some policies definitely focused on the small vexations of life:

  Everyone has the right to use a product without having to reference a user manual.

  Mayonnaise should not be used as a moisturiser for sandwiches. It has no nutritional value and is the work of the devil, whose real name is Hell Man. Ban TV programmes about cooking, houses and meerkats.

  The word ‘fuck’ should be included in the automatic text/dictionary on mobile phones.

  Ban golf umbrellas in cities.

  Some of the policies fixated on celebrities, and although I am sure Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t care what my audiences think of him, he should worry just a little bit in case any of them actually try and enact their suggestions. Each night produced a handful of what became known as ‘celebrity death suggestions’ but my favourite concerned Noel Edmonds. It simply read:

  Noel Edmonds should be publicly beheaded and his severed head placed in one of 22 sealed red boxes.

  Unsurprisingly many policies reflected public anger at bankers and MPs, but 4x4 drivers featured a lot too:

  4x4 drivers should be forced to drive everywhere off-road, even to Sainsbury’s.

  4x4 drivers should be forced to drive their vehicle sitting on the roof in a deckchair with a long steering column.

  Anyone with a 4x4 in a city must also volunteer for the nearest mountain rescue service.

  As did the Olympics:

  To save money and the environment, instead of the Olympics being held in one country, people could run around in circles in their own country at the same time.

  The Olympics are too costly and will really cripple our economy for little return. Why not give them to the French?

  As we are paying for them, any British citizen should be eligible to enter any of the Olympic events.

  Every night there would be ideas that genuinely took me, and most of the audience, by surprise. One chap in Leicester wrote:

  Everything in supermarkets should be stacked in alphabetical order.

  Pondering a world where Hovis would be found next to Hobnobs or coffee next to cotton wool, I congratulated this chap, saying that I thought his policy was very funny. He fixed me firmly with a glare and said, ‘It’s not funny, it’s serious. I can’t find anything.’

  Not all the policies voted through were ones I agreed with, and some nights I found myself at odds with the proposers and indeed the audience. In Darlington the policy that won that evening was: ‘Institute the Sky test on benefit claimants, so if you suck on the teat of Murdoch, no benefits for you.’ Basically, if you are unemployed and have Sky, you get your benefits cut. I said to the chap who proposed it, ‘You can’t tell people on the dole what to do with their dole money.’ ‘I work in the benefits office,’ he replied, ‘and I can tell you now that a basic Murdoch Sky package is about £4 a week. Jobseeker’s Allowance is £64.30. So if you are unemployed and have Sky, that is a subsidy of the Murdoch empire from the taxpayer via the unemployed at a rate of over 6 per cent of their benefit a week.’ Staggered by his precision, I replied, ‘Well, I still don’t think you should tell people how to spend their dole money.’ ‘But,’ he said with a grin, ‘if you campaign on this and are even halfway successful, you will force the Sun to run a counter-campaign arguing for the right of the unemployed to sit on their arses and watch telly.’ And I have to admit, that nearly won me over.

  The audience was the ultimate jury for the ideas and shows often became rowdy affairs; good points would see the crowd cheer and clap, while other times audience members argued with each other and once or twice I had to break it up. The rules were created as we went along, but audiences roughly voted for ideas on wit, ingenuity and appropriateness (though not in that order). In London one chap suggested:

  We should abolish all criminal laws in this country and replace them with two offences.

  1) Being out of order

  2) Being bang out of order

  This received the best reaction to a policy all night – the audience clapped loudly and indeed he had to take a bow – but his policy did not win the vote. Neither did the man in Hemel Hempstead who got a great reaction to:

  All cash point machines should have a GAMBLE button, so if we can’t get enough out we still have a chance of affording what we want.

  What I loved was that audiences could be discussing something quite serious one minute and talking about yoghurt flavours the next. We could be exploring the idea that car parking fines should be based upon a car’s value and then be arguing about what colour salt and vinegar crisp packets should be.1 We’d be debating the merits of a policy that read:

  Employers have to afford maternity and paternity leave; they should also give time off for conception leave,

  and move on to:

  Extend the sex discrimination act to the church and all religions.

  Many performers say that they couldn’t have done it without the audience, but I really couldn’t. So thank you to everyone who came along to the show. I especially want to thank the audience in Canterbury. When they heard I would attempt to campaign on policies that got voted through, they kindly opted for:

  MPs’ expenses should be printed in the local paper every two weeks and constituents get to vote on whether they are accepted or not.

  Which thankfully narrowly won over the close rival:

  We should disguise leopards as foxes to fuck up the gentry.

  This is the People’s Manifesto as chosen by audiences around Britain. Each policy in this booklet was created, selected and shouted for at these shows. Whether it will end up in the British Library next to the Communist Party Manifesto or the Rights of Man remains to be seen.

  Mark Thomas, December 2009

  1

  PARTY MANIFESTOS

  SHOULD BE

  LEGALLY BINDING

  HOW DO WE make MPs do what we want them to do, short of donating money to the party coffers or through the more traditional method of sleeping with them? One solution is to make political manifestos legally binding.

  When MPs fail to honour their election pledges, there are a limited number of things we can do about it. We can name and shame them in the press (though for that to really work requires your MP to attend a series of shame-awareness workshops); we can lobby them, protest and even beg them. But nothing really motivates an MP quite like the sight of a smiling lawyer.

  I asked a smiling lawyer what she thought of this policy. She replied, ‘I have one word to say on the prospect of taking MPs to court: “Kerching!”’

  Unsurprisingly there is little support from MPs for this policy. Despite spending much of their time devising new ways of getting us into court, they don’t relish the prospect of ending up there themselves. They give two arguments against. Firstly, that the ultimate sanction against an MP is the ballot box at the next election – meaning once elected, an MP is unaccountable to the public for the next five years, not to mention that in safe seats there is little chance of removing an incumbent MP short of catching them dressed as Osama bin Laden while buggering sheep in a telephone box, and in certain rural areas even then it’s not guaranteed.

  Their second argument is that in politics ‘stuff happens’, the unexpected occurs, forcing governments to reprioritise. To an extent this is true and to a greater extent, it is an utter cop-out. The answer is a fixed number of key pledges that are legally binding, each pledge costed, planned and timetabled, with the prospect of legal action being like a penalty clause on a building
project.

  A good practice run could be the mayoral manifesto of Boris Johnson. He pledged to ‘act immediately to provide long-term funding for four Rape Crisis centres in London’. He would do this by ‘cutting the number of GLA spin doctors’ to find the ‘£744,000 which would fund our commitment to dramatically increasing access to support services for rape victims’.2 This funding was to be annual. Johnson took over City Hall on 4 May 2008. After being publicly embarrassed, Johnson finally got £265,000 to one centre in November 2009, but at the time of writing the rest of the money still hasn’t appeared.

  It took a year and a half and a lot of public pressure to get less than a quarter of the money promised in the manifesto: wouldn’t a little court order nudge things along?

  Either fully fund the centres or Boris Johnson ends up in cuffs in the back of a van. Like most I would prefer the former but the latter has its upside.

  2

  SHUT DOWN

  TAX HAVENS…

  BOMB SWITZERLAND

  IT IS IMPORTANT to bomb Switzerland if only to prove that just because you’re neutral it doesn’t mean anyone likes you. In any case, the Swiss were bankers to Nazi gold and hoarded art works, which in my book doesn’t count as ‘staying out of it’. Not so much being neutral as being service providers for fascism.

  The real issue here is tax. Switzerland is one of the biggest tax havens in the world, so financially advantageous that bombing it is probably tax-deductible. You might even be eligible for a rebate. The low tax rates (and in some cases no tax rates) for businesses, added to legendary banking secrecy laws to hide behind, make tax havens the financial pirate coves for multinationals, tax dodgers and corrupt politicians. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs loses about £18.5 billion each year to offshore tax evasion, tax avoidance and corporate tax ‘efficiencies’.3