Mark Thomas Presents the People's Manifesto

by Thomas, Mark

  Benefit cheats cost the UK taxpayer £900 million in 2009,4 a fraction of the money lost through offshore tax havens – money that could be spent on hospitals, schools and duck houses.

  Switzerland is only the start. There are 60 tax havens (or ‘secrecy jurisdictions’ as they are becoming increasingly known) around the world, and Britain has jurisdiction over or strong influence on a staggering 31 of them.

  Three are British dependencies: Guernsey, Jersey, the Isle of Man.

  Seven are British Overseas Territories: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos Islands.

  Twenty-one are members of the Commonwealth of Nations (formerly the British Commonwealth): Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Brunei, Cook Islands, Cyprus, Dominica, Grenada, Labuan, Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Nauru, Seychelles, Singapore, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, City of London (UK), Vanuatu.

  Britain could start to shut them down through diplomacy, but when did it become British policy to solve problems diplomatically when there is a chance of a fight? Bomb Switzerland and the rest will shut down automatically. What has Switzerland got that is so indispensable to the world? Fondue, luxury pralines and yodelling, that is what. If you like chocolate, cheese and shouting in gangs, you can find it at any bus stop in Croydon at 3.30 on a school day.

  ‘Ah,’ you may cry, ‘every country has a tourist selling point’ Indeed, and Switzerland’s is assisted suicide.

  3

  MODELS SHOULD

  BE CHOSEN AT

  RANDOM FROM THE

  ELECTORAL ROLL

  GET A MENTAL image of your grandfather sitting down for breakfast. The radio is on and steam gently rises from a cup of tea. In front of him is a half-eaten boiled egg and some buttered bread. He opens the morning post and as he reads his eyebrows raise until he splutters, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve got to go and model Calvin Klein pants tomorrow!’ Now imagine him standing bare-chested in baggy-fit jeans with his pants pulled right up to show the brand logo on the elasticated band. Finally imagine walking past the billboard advert of your grandad in those pants. This, then, is the full glory of this policy: the selection of models is left to chance and we end up with anyone and everyone sashaying down the catwalk in Milan and Paris.

  Instead of an idealised vision of what is erotic or beautiful, airbrushed and primped by the fashion industry and supported by a modelling industry predicated upon eating disorders, we get to see our lives and bodies reflected back at us. And at that point we rewrite the rule book for what society deems to be beautiful.

  This policy was chosen in London, but it harks back to another policy suggestion from an audience member in Hull. Roundly cheered when it was read out, it simply declared that ‘we should take fashion designers outside and bash them into the shape they think we’re in’. Although both policies have certain merits, the random selection of models causes designers far greater pain than mere physical violence – imagine the mental anguish of having to create haute couture at size 22.

  This policy would also apply to magazine and TV adverts, and would include any celebrity modelling too. So a Porsche advert might feature a mum from a semi in Wokingham. Expensive watches normally seen next to aviator-style sunglasses and polo mallets end up hanging on the wrist of your local postman. Even the Argos catalogue would have to actually choose models at random, instead of merely trying to give the impression it had.

  M&S knickers would not be advertised by Twiggy and some young thin things; it could be a student who has just come back from a gap year in Thailand, your mum, and a 25-year-old woman with Down’s Syndrome. The size zero debate ends here. And beauty becomes something that we no longer aspire to but that we just have.

  The slightly tricky question about this policy is, should it apply to porn? The answer has to be yes. It might also be an idea to make the selection process non-gender specific, and certainly non-age-specific. I think my older self would enjoy the prospect of getting a letter from Razzle informing me of my selection for their latest shoot, as I pottered around an old people’s home in slippers and a T-shirt bearing the words ‘WILL FUCK FOR BISCUITS’.

  4

  IT SHOULD BE LEGAL

  FOR GAY COUPLES

  TO GET MARRIED

  IN A FAIR society it is only right and proper that gay couples have the mundanity of marriage inflicted upon them the same as everyone else. What makes them so special that they get let off? It is patently absurd that just because you and your partner share the same type of genitals you should escape the living hell of organising flowers, invites, seating, eating, dresses, cars, in-laws, out-laws and crap discos.

  In that same spirit we should go one step further and allow heterosexual couples to have civil partnerships, for those people who still enjoy great sex but don’t want to get a joint mortgage. This would enable heterosexual couples to boldly declare to the world: ‘I love you, I’m moving in with you but I’m still keeping the flat on.’

  Many who object to gay marriage say homosexuality is not ‘natural’. Neither is hair dye, UHT milk or the closet freezer. If you want to return to an era where nature ruled then we would only use plant medicine, our life expectancy would be about 40 and anyone living longer would be seen as a degenerate. Bigots would moan, ‘I’ve got nothing against pensioners personally, I just don’t want my father turning into one.’

  Those who object to gay marriage on religious grounds often cite the book of Leviticus in the Bible, which says, ‘If a man lies with a man as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination’ (Lev 20:13).

  However, in Leviticus God also decrees that menstruating women should be kept separate for seven days and on the eighth day that woman should sacrifice two pigeons to make herself clean again (Lev 15:29), that these pigeons should have their necks wrung by a priest at the altar, the feathers cast to the east side of the altar and the pigeon then burnt on the altar itself (Lev 1:13–16). Despite these clear instructions from the Bible, there have been no recorded sightings of religious groups offering free fowl with every pack of Tampax.

  (Or perhaps in certain religious circles women, finding themselves caught out, sidle up to other women and whisper, ‘Er, has anyone got a spare pigeon in their handbag? I’ve just come off.’)

  So, the Bible has been used selectively to back an argument against gay couples. Unusual, that.

  5

  PEOPLE WHO ALLOW

  THEIR DOG TO SHIT

  ON THE PAVEMENT

  WITHOUT CLEANING IT

  UP SHOULD BE FORCED

  TO WEAR IT AS A

  MOUSTACHE

  WE ARE A nation on the brink of apoplexy induced by dog crap. Nothing, it seems, can bring on a brainbursting fit of fury faster than the sight of a nonchalant dog owner failing to clear up their canine’s cable. Every single night the audience had suggestions of what punishment should be meted out to hapless hound owners. Here is just a small sample of them:

  ‘If a dog owner lets their dog shit on your doorstep you should be able to shit on theirs.’

  ‘Change the law so if someone allows their dog to shit on your doorstep, then you should be able to shit upon their head.’ I challenged the policy proposer, saying this law would require the police to hold the offender down while the householder, publicly and to order, produced a revenge stool upon his or her head. The proposer was adamant that that would not be a problem.

  ‘Dog owners who don’t pick up their dog shit should be put in public stocks and have dog shit thrown at them’ was another suggestion. Someone even proposed that ‘we should include a luminous dye in dog food’ so that we could spot piles glowing in the dark and thus avoid them. On hearing this, another audience member suggested an amendment. It read: ‘Like the idea for the luminous dog food but shouldn’t we include some kind of microchip bleeper to warn blind people.’ On two separate occasions people have actually suggested that we set up a dog DNA register, a mul
ti-million-pound dog-turd database, so police could work backwards to track down the offender, starting at the scene of the crime, complete with cordoned-off area, a little white tent and forensic experts in hooded bodysuits.

  In Hastings the policy adopted was that‘people who allow their dog to shit on the pavement without cleaning it up should be forced to wear it as a moustache’. So upon catching sight of the offender, police should move in, saying, ‘Is that your turd, sir? That’s it, on the top lip, sir … for the rest of the day.’

  And the rest of us could point at them and say, ‘Oh, look, a white moustache, you don’t see that as often as you used to.

  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

  IN THE PANTHEON of heroes of British democracy, amidst the Suffragettes and the Putney Debates, stand the Chartists, a working-class movement in the nineteenth century founded upon six demands:

  1. The vote

  2. The ballot

  3. Abolishing the need for a man to own property in order to stand as an MP

  4. Equal-sized constituencies

  5. Annual Parliaments

  The Chartists agitated, petitioned, marched, demonstrated, were imprisoned, rebelled, rioted, fought and died for these rights, and for their sixth demand too:

  6. Payment for MPs

  Without a salary, the Chartists argued, only the rich could afford to be MPs and thus the toffs got to stay in power regardless of who had the vote. Paying MPs a salary was regarded as fundamental to democracy. So the Chartists would approve of our current MPs getting a salary – but I am willing to bet that no Chartist ever thought, I may be facing death by hanging but one day, thanks to my sacrifice, MPs will be able to claim duck houses on expenses.

  As the policy says, MPs often get highly paid jobs as a result of attending Parliament, so consider Patricia Hewitt MP (Lab – Leicester).

  According to the Register of Members’ Interests, Patricia’s total earnings were £198,000 in 2009/10. She augments her MP’s salary of £64,766 with a series of other jobs, including working as a special consultant for Boots the Chemist (Alliance Boots Ltd) for which she is paid £45,000 a year. Now, seriously, does anyone think she would have got the job with Boots had she not been health minister?

  Patricia is also a senior adviser for Cinven Ltd (the offshore venture capitalists who bought private health company BUPA), for which she is paid £55,000 a year.5 Now, perhaps it is too cynical to believe that she got that job because of her ministerial past with the Department of Health. Perhaps she didn’t even mention it and just did a really good interview.

  This policy may not be the panacea or a silver bullet for the problems with Parliamentary democracy but it would serve as a reminder that MPs work for our betterment not theirs. Not to mention the fact that the prospect of MPs having to pay money back to the public purse will put the fear of fucking God into them, and that in itself is all the validation this policy needs.

  7

  LEGALISE ALL DRUGS

  IN ESSENCE, PROHIBITION is not a policy but a wish. Declaring drugs illegal will not make them go away any more than making unicorns legal will make them appear. Prohibition has failed; drugs are everywhere. In most urban areas of Britain it is easier to find illegal drugs than it is to find Kendal Mint Cake.

  The problem is that users like drugs, and that makes outlawing them very difficult indeed.

  TEN REASONS TO LEGALISE DRUGS.

  1. People take drugs. Why turn them into criminals? Save money on prison and spend it on treatment.

  2. Spot the flaw in the logic that says: we shall teach drug users a lesson by putting them in prison … where there are no drugs at all.

  3. Illegal drugs are often impure. Ecstasy has been found mixed with heroin, making it a gateway drug to addiction, and cocaine is cut with baby milk powder, making life very difficult for liberals boycotting Nestlé products. Ending prohibition should improve drug quality; from a consumer angle this is a huge step forward.

  4. Legal heroin can be sold in supermarket pharmacies, so users can get cheap, high-quality drugs and collect Nectar points.

  5. Prohibition fuels gangsters, so legalisation means gangsters will lose a major source of money and power. Of course they will seek new illegal markets, but they will struggle to achieve the money and status that coke, crack and smack brought them when reduced to smuggling exotic pets. There is no rebellious cachet in wandering around festival campsites hawking wares with the plaintive cry of, ‘Macaws and parakeets, macaws and parakeets.’

  6. For Daily Express readers: if Class A drugs are cheap then users will have to commit less crime to pay for them, and reduced crime levels will bring down the cost of your household insurance.

  7. Drug profits are so enormous that the government can produce drugs cheaper than gangsters and still put a whacking tax on them, putting an additionally high ‘wanker tax’ on cocaine.

  8. We would need to find a new moral panic to fill the vacuum left by drugs. I suggest beards.

  9. The problem with the legalisation of drugs is the free market would then step in, so we could end up with L’Oréal crystal meth at one end of the market and Asda own-brand cocaine at the other. Somewhere in between will be Fairtrade cocaine, with middleclass liberals snorting lines to support collective farmers in Peru. So instead we should nationalise the drug industry. It is sensible and profitable– and nothing is guaranteed to deglamorise drugs quite like a staterun industry.

  10. We could buy opium off the farmers in Afghanistan, thus giving them decent money, lessening the grip of the Taliban and enabling troops to come home quicker.

  8

  THE DAILY 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’

  THE DAILY MAIL is not so much a newspaper as spite spat on dead trees. The paper’s founder, Lord Northcliffe, admitted as much when he famously said he gave his readers their ‘daily hate’ and the paper has steadfastly clung to that dictum. Essentially it is a Pravda for Middle England, existing to promote one singular idea: that the hard-working British middle class are being exploited by degenerate, lazy people who are probably poor and frequently foreign, although it has a sideline selling Princess Diana memorial china plates.

  The world inhabited by the Daily Mail is brimful of pregnant teenagers, travellers, migrants and homosexuals, often all one entity, conspiring to defraud taxpayers of their money from an increasingly gullible left-wing state, obsessed with political correctness and stopping children singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. The cast of villains each has their identifiable wrongs: single mothers sponge off the state, asylum seekers have come to Britain for our generous benefits and teachers in state schools want to give sex education lessons to foetuses so they can abort themselves.

  In a world like this, thank God the Daily Mail stands up for the taxpaying earners of Middle England.

  However, when it comes to actually paying tax in the UK, the Daily Mail itself is not as forthcoming as it could be. The Daily Mail Group Trust states that its ‘ultimate holding company and immediate parent company is Rothermere Continuation Ltd, a company incorporated in Bermuda’.6 We can assume the Bermuda in question is the same Bermuda as the offshore tax haven and not any high-tax-rate Bermuda that might exist.

  In addition, Private Eye alleges that Lord Rothermere is a ‘non domicile’, a tax status where a person can live and work
in Britain but avoids paying their full share of tax here. Rothermere has refused to comment on this.

  None of this has much to do with the essence of the policy. I just thought you might like to read it.

  9

  TO RANDOMLY ARM

  OAPS WITH GUNS

  THERE IS ONLY one surefire way to improve the quality of life for Britain’s elderly population and that is to arm them, properly, with everything from Tasers and 9mm handguns through to AK47s. Want to try and rob an old dear of her pension? Think again! You could be staring down the barrel of an Uzi while a blue-rinse trills, ‘I don’t fucking think so, sweetie.’ Meals on Wheels, you better up your game: someone wants venison with a cranberry and port reduction – give it them or leaden death will come at you from under a tartan travel rug quicker than you can say ‘Bugger me with a Countdown dictionary’.

  These scenarios have much to recommend them but the real reason to arm pensioners is that a state pension for a single elderly person is £95.25 a week or £4,797 a year. For an elderly couple it is £152.30 a week or £7,919.60 a year.7 Put it another way: Sir Fred Goodwin, ex-CEO of RBS, walked away with a pension of nearly £1,0008 a day. He gets in five days what an OAP on a state pension gets in a year.

  Pensioners and various agencies have lobbied and campaigned to improve this. They have tried begging. They can’t borrow. So now it is time to steal. Arming the elderly is not so much about protecting them from muggers but giving them the means to become the muggers. This policy is nothing short of creating a pensioner bandit army.