What I like about Mark Thomas is that he is a great jokester. One of his funniest stunts was to organise for a fleet of Jaguars to drive past police guards into an official function at some stately pile to collect John Prescott. I may have got this wrong, but I think he also tried to arrest Pinochet while he was in the UK.
But he is also a switched on political analyst and his jokes and demos are all designed to make a serious point. He is currently touring with a show during which he is amassing a manifesto on which he promises to campaign. It is a collection of serious, if impossibilist, proposals, jokes and off-the-wall ideas. Unfortunately I cannot remember the host of funny ideas that he brought to his show in Cambridge. But what happened here gives some idea of important currents of opinion, on the left at least.
Firstly, I guess, resentments came thick and fast both from Mark and the audience – bankers, greedy MPs, Jacqui Smith’s expenses, the police, capitalism. One proposal was that the state should provide council homes for MPs instead of paying huge sums to instal them in privately owned properties. Another was that negligent bankers should be punished by having goats released into their homes. Another that we should replace the National Anthem with the theme from Star Wars. My favourite, as it came from my friend Claire, was that the police should be allowed only inflatable batons.
We were allowed to vote for one addition to the manifesto. The vote came down to a choice between nationalising Tesco’s, and asking everyone to keep bees. It was a close run thing, but Tesco’s came out on top, as they always seem to do.
Top of his manifesto so far is a proposal that I floated in the early 1980s – that there should be a maximum income limit as well as a minimum wage; and that the two should be linked so that both would only increase as a proportion of the median wage. The idea was Peter Townsend’s (the poverty expert, not the rocker) and we ran it in a book entitled Manifesto. What I remember best is that the Daily Mail conducted an impromptu poll on the idea – but asked only a clutch of the very rich! It is a tragedy that it won’t come about for as Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate in The Spirit Level – just published by Allen Lane – more equal societies not only perform better but are also happier.
