Mark Thomas Presents the People's Manifesto - Mark Thomas [3]
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.