All governments great and small

My Lords, Ladies, Gentlemen, and whatever-to-God that ghastly critter is in the olive cagoule at the back by the latrines. Kindly shut your traps and lend me your earrings.

I’ve been invited here tonight to the Diogenes Club though not yet paid, to say one or two words about the United States presidential election, what it means, where we go from here, and all that applesauce.

I’d planned to warm up with a few ritzy gags about your cosmetic surgery, but seeing as how you slimy trouts aren’t biting any maggots this evening, I’ll skip the banter and get straight to the hub.

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Amongst the many anomalies of this recent cirque d’électoral d’Amérique, and that includes the news that Democratic candidate Senator John Kerry is a “caveman” in the bedroom, one oddity struck my famished democratic soul as particularly rasping.

Am I the only windbag to notice – and I certainly hope I am for the sake of my rake-off – that the traditionally Yankee-doodle option of small government was not this time offered to them the people?

That’s right, shoulder-shruggers. In the blue corner, from Boston, Massachusetts, we had John F Kerry – bloated government bleedin’-heart liberal luvvie with a heavyweight appetite for taxing and spending. In the red corner, from Crawford, Texas, we had George W Bush – big spendin’ deficit-expandin’ social conservative with an upper tax cut that’s as upper as you’ll ever see. Even those of us without the vote had no idea who to vote for.

Now, correct me if I’m wrong – though good luck making it to your car tonight if you do – but an American election without a candidate promising to get government the hell outta your wallet is a bit like an evening such as this without a pisspoor after-dinner speech: hardly worth the entry fee.

Men like me, promised payoff for speeches like this, are horror-struck by what we recognise as a foul and unseemly new trend. Democracy, it pains me to say, suffers from a terrifically annoying flaw: you can only vote for one of the candidates on offer. Rarely do you get to choose who is offered to you. An election is a town with one restaurant. You choose from the menu, even if you don’t fancy the food. There’s no choosing the restaurant, no option of cuisine, no “Ooh, I think I fancy a so-and-so tonight” or “Man, I could a murder a what’s-its-name”. If you don’t like the filet mignon, folks, you can’t just pop across the road for a red hot chicken dopiaza, or head around the corner for a slimy prawn chop suey.

Like that kid in The Corrections, you are forced to eat what’s put in front of you. “That’s more democracy than most people in this world see in a lifetime”, we are told. “Vote up”. Resources, as my bank manager is fond of saying, are as scarce as tramps in the countryside.

I can see some of you are looking at your Oysters, wondering when the hell you can get out of here, anxious to catch the football highlights. I urge you to bear with me a few more minutes. Gulp your coffee – the caffeine will help you stay awake. I’m doing this for you.

This week, in my own beloved country, the same one we’re in now in fact, one of the worst members of parliament to ever fart on the leather of the Commons benches hung up his gloves and called time on his life as an idiot public savant. Tony Banks MP left the world of politics with this observation:

“I most certainly won’t miss the constituency work. I’ve got to tell you that honestly. It’s twenty-two years of the same cases, but just the faces and the people changing. I found it intellectually numbing, tedious in the extreme. It might sound a little disparaging to say this about people’s lives and their problems and we did deal with them … but I got no satisfaction from this at all. I really didn’t. And all you were was a sort of high-powered social worker and perhaps not even a good one … You are working your nuts off and you are getting abused by journalists. I have got a very thin skin on these things. And it really has annoyed me. I’m going to leave the House of Commons with overdrafts in all my bank accounts, with hardly any savings. Now, I’m not complaining about that because I represent an area where people are very poor, but you know … that was a personal thing that really upset me.” Never before in my life have I heard a better argument for limiting the power and scope of government. A man like this complaining about us, the people! He whines about being “a sort of high-powered social worker”. Surely his socialist party invented social work, didn’t it? Surely a proliferation of hapless social work is a socialist party’s most effective electoral strategy? Simple arithmetic: the more welfare dependents, the more registered socialist voters, the more years men like Tony Banks get to make laws in our name. And yet still we have to listen to them moan about how they’ve mismanaged their own finances and failed to cream enough out of the public pot to make our plight worth their while.

What’s worse, Banks admits that when it comes to being a social worker, he’s “not even a good one”! There’s nothing like honesty in a politician. Look at his own facts: twenty-two years social working his “nuts off” to “represent” us, and what has he achieved? Bugger all, by his own admission. “I represent an area where people are very poor”, he says, “twenty-two years of the same cases, but just the faces and the people changing.” But not, note, their situation.

Funny this. The same day, children’s minister (really) Margaret Hodge, a member of Mr Banks’ self-admittedly under-achieving party, talked about her government being like “good nannies” who are “ensuring you can make real and informed choices for yourself”.

I’ve made my choice: I want these interfering politicos out of my life.

But Mrs Hodge thinks I don’t know what’s best for me. “Some may call it a nanny state,” she says, “but I call it a force for good.”

Perhaps we should send her a record of Mr Banks’ achievements as an MP – whose main concern, by the way, is not the “very poor” constituents who he finds “intellectually numbing and tedious in the extreme”, but the rights of animals (yes, animals). Mr Banks has spent twenty-two years having his mind numbed by humans as he campaigns against fox-hunting and badger-baiting – an inhumane and illiberal record he is extremely proud of.

The answer, in fact, bursts out of Mr. Banks’ text: TAKE AWAY THE “HIGH-POWERED” BIT. This man should never have power. Ever. Here endeth the lesson.

Oh, and one more thing before we rush home to catch the football highlights. Which social group voted least for George W Bush? Answer: the under-30s. Why? Many reasons probably, but it cannot be coincidence that according to all surveys the vast majority of under-30s are socially liberal and economically conservative. Gay marriage, cool. High taxes for lame-ass government programmes, uncool. These kids are the future. But where was their candidate? Possible answer: in California. The future, my friends, is Arnie. Good night.