Mark Thomas Presents the People's Manifesto - Mark Thomas [6]
‘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 multi-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,