ABC (Andrew’s Book Club) 5 : The People’s Manifesto by Mark Thomas
I’m a little behind with these ABC posts. Even not counting the various Doctor Who related books I read in February, which I’m not going to blog about because I’ve submitted a story to Big Finish’s Short Trips (the series many of those books were in) and so don’t think it ethical to review them, I’ve still got four books to talk about
The first and shortest of these is The People’s Manifesto.
Last year, the comedian and anarchist political activist Mark Thomas toured the country with a simple show. Members of No2ID would, every night, ask members of the audience to write down ideas for a ‘people’s manifesto’ – changes the general public would like to see made. Thomas would then weed out the duplicates and insane entries, talk about the rest on stage, and get the audience to vote on which idea should make it into the manifesto.
Some of the ideas that *didn’t* make it are personal favourites of mine. I especially like:
Mayonnaise should not be used as a moisturiser for sandwiches. It has no nutritional value and is the work of the devil, whose real name is Hell Man.
But I also have a soft spot for disguising leopards as foxes ‘to fuck up the gentry’ and severing Noel Edmonds’ head and placing it in one of 22 sealed boxes…
The forty ideas that made it can roughly be split up into a few categories. There’s general anti-politics whining, by far the least interesting part of the book. Saying “MPs should be given a loan like students, rather than wages, which they have to pay back when they leave office” isn’t even especially funny, let alone practical. Then there are a lot of ideas which are actually mainstream among the left but which would probably never be implemented – Tobin tax, a levy on private hospitals that use publicly-trained staff, making manifestos legally binding, maximum wage, drug legalisation, giving women in Northern Ireland abortion rights, that kind of thing.
Then there are the ideas that just attack an annoying thing, whether that be forcing the Daily Mail to print “The newspaper that supported Hitler” on its masthead or forcing people who let their dogs foul the street to wear the dogshit as a moustache for the rest of the day. My two favourites in this category are introducing fast lanes for pedestrians (after taking TWENTY! FUCKING! MINUTES! to get from one end of Market Street to the other yesterday thanks to all the people who’ve apparently forgotten how to walk properly, I’ll vote for any party that offers to bring this in) and everyone being given a ‘fuck it’ day every month, when they can just phone into work and say they can’t be bothered working.
And finally there are the surrealist or joke ideas – some of which (“Anyone who supports ID cards should be banned from having curtains” or “Anyone found guilty of a homophobic hate crime should have to serve their sentence in drag”) make some attempt at solving real-world political problems, while others (“Goats are to be released on to the floor of the House of Commons (no more than four); MPs are forbidden from referring to them ever”) .
While the book is well written – and absolutely hilarious at many points – it’s also depressing. And this is because even though the policies are a mixture of Guardian leader column and student Rag Week whimsy, they’re much more sensible than the policies of the two main parties at the moment.
If we *HAVE* to have stupid, unworkable laws, thought up in five seconds, I’d *far* rather they involved MPs having to ignore goats than that they be tyrannical nonsense like the recent Digital Economy Bill. I’d rather those with ‘nothing to hide’ never *could* hide while the rest of us were left to get on with it than have ID cards enforced on the lot of us. And if we have to have an economic policy put together by people with no understanding of economics, I’d rather it be one that attacks the banks rather than one that attacks the poor.
Because all these policies – workable and unworkable, sane and goat-based – all of them at least reflect things that some real people care about, whether that be *NOT TAKING TWENTY SODDING MINUTES TO GET DOWN MARKET STREET I MEAN SERIOUSLY TWENTY MINUTES FOR GOD’S SAKE* or speculators making money from causing currency crashes. They’re all at least *attempts* to solve real problems for real people, unlike things like the Digital Economy Bill (which no-one except a few record executives wants) or the law criminalising ‘extreme pornography’, or being forced to let people at airports look at naked pictures of you.
No-one wants those things. No-one asked for them. No-one’s life – not one single person’s – would be one iota the worse for their removal, and yet no matter which of the two major parties forms a government, we’ll have another five years of more of that.
Those things, the *truly* surreal, unworkable, impractical, insane ideas, came from ‘respectable’ ‘moderate’, god help us even ‘progressive’ politicians. People who are *paid* to do this. People who have been *voted for*, and who get taken seriously by Jeremy Paxman rather than just being pointed at and laughed at in the street for being the bumbling incompetent buffoons they so clearly are.
Goats in the commons are sensible in comparison.
I’m actually in favour of people being able to take positions in a market that include the possibility of it going down as well as up. If enough people are doing so then that tells you something very important about the current valuation of your currency.
Other than that, I’m with you.
I actually know almost nothing about economics (though I can bluff it a bit because I *do* know a lot of game theory and cybernetics) which is why I tend really to concentrate on social issues when I talk about politics. My economic ideas tend to boil down to “rich people are all bastards, take all their money off them and give it to poor people, ideally starting with me and my friends.”
I accept, however, that this is not necessarily an economic policy that would actually have the desired effect in the medium or long term, so I tend to go with anyone who sounds like they know what they’re talking about and who’s sensible in areas I *do* know about…
I know bits and pieces, but it’s all picked up higgledy-piggledy from a variety of places, and some of it comes from working inside a multinational finance corp, which probably makes me untrustworthy from the get-go :->
But I’m definitely open to argument on these things (or even polite disagreement).
I do agree that mass inequality is a bad thing, although I’d be giving it to people who are worse off than I am (which does, admittedly, include a fair few of my friends).
You sound like that Fry & Laurie sketch where Stephen goes on about the most important policy of his posh party is NOT TO BREAK INTO MY CAR.