Mark Thomas Presents the People's Manifesto - Mark Thomas [18]
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,