Ban All Political Parties

Ban All Political Parties

I popped in to my local filling station for a carton of milk, and asked the man at the cash desk whether he was ready to form a government. Without hesitation, he said “Obvious what we need: fixed term parliament for two years, and the best minds from all three parties working together to get us out of the mess.”

I haven’t had deep conversations with him; he is no “homespun philosopher.” I guess he would be perfectly happy to describe himself as an ordinary working man.

How infinitely preferable it would be to have him organising the political system rather than the puffed-up nonentities who claim leadership over us.

This is the point. Anyone and everyone can see how to approach the problem: we have all got to do without a bit of what we’ve taken for granted over the last thirty years when we lived beyond our means. But that means all of us, not just nurses, teachers, and postmen; it means seriously taxing all incomes over £100,000. It means ordering the bankers to repay the money they have robbed from us under licence, and to surrender their passports so they are confined to this country for the next five years. It means the armed forces coming home from Afghanistan; it means Britain not buying a replacement for Trident; it means politicians not strutting around as if they were leaders of a “Great Nation”, for we are no longer a “Great Nation.” It means members of Parliament willingly and eagerly taking a salary exactly the same as a teacher’s.

There is, of course, one more thing. For the next two years all political parties must be dissolved; all party funds must be frozen; all party offices must be turned into temporary residences for the homeless. Members of Parliament must sit at random in the House of Commons. All ministerial offices will be held jointly by two, three, or four, people acting in concert.

Then there is a chance that the good old spirit of the good old British working man and working woman will rise to the occasion, and the jokes will be cracked, and the trousers patched, and once again the folk, the ordinary folk, will pull victory out of the defeat into which our self-serving, conceited, and supremely incompetent, leaders have led us.

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