Mark Thomas Presents the People's Manifesto - Mark Thomas [20]
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