I was interested to hear Dick Clameron calling for the public to offer solutions to reducing the deficit on Thursday during his visit to a children’s hospital – presumably he was there because they’re the next generation whose vote he has any hope of getting in the distant future, since they’ll be the only group with no memory of the Pinnochic tendencies revealed since the election.
While this might be the shortest time within which any government has ever run out of ideas, and certainly the first time one has admitted it, let’s welcome this once in a lifetime – this is not my beautiful government – opportunity to help shape the future. They’re especially keen on telling us what we can do to help, so in a spirit of mutual scales from the eyes spring cleaning, let us the people turn our eyes towards what they can do for us.
So let us drag the Westminster gang away from London. Let’s establish a parliament in a disused factory in Birmingham – there’s going to be plenty of them in the next few months. After all, if a change of use for business premises is good enough for a free school, it’s good enough for the government. With plenty of office space going spare in the area too, it’ll be far cheaper than paying for prime plots of land in Westminster.
With the MPs congregated in the midlands, more will be in closer proximity to their constituencies, getting rid of the need for a second home. Expenses for second homes will of course be abolished anyway – after all, it’s only housing benefit by another name, and we all know how disgusting housing benefit is don’t we? In addition, we’ll abolish all MP expenses, because the public finances can’t afford to pay them.
In the same vein, both Downing Street and Chequers will be sold off, or used as tourist attractions, because we all know how the Prime Minister loves to don a hairshirt in the hothouse glare of publicity. It’s a public school thing. He’ll move into a maisonette in Chelmsley Wood.
Those MPs who do need to rent accommodation in Birmingham at their own expense will find plenty of opportunities to move into sink estates, paying low rents as they live six or eight to a house, as those living high on the hog of welfare benefits so often do. A few of them might even be encouraged to indulge in local community activities such as instigating teenage pregnancies in order to secure the one remaining universal benefit in order to help make ends meet.
Radically, MPs will also only be allowed to take one public sector salary, and that will be the salary for being an MP. No ministerial salaries. All MPs will get the same salary because we are all in it together. We know public sector pay is destroying the country, so they will be only too glad to help in this fashion.
With Westminster empty, we will open up the Lords and the Commons as a museum – no great change with the Lords of course. Tourists will flock to the historic site, thus bring in loads of money to the country’s battered economy. Alternatively, we can use them as a hostel for some of the thousands who will be made homeless under the new housing benefit system. After all, we’re all in it together.
