Читать книгу The World and London According to Nick Ferrari - Nick Ferrari - Страница 8

If it’s true, as somebody once said, that a society gets the politicians that it deserves, what on earth have we done to get this lot?

It seems to me that the whole idea of politics is currently flawed. Each time an election of any sort rolls around – be it a general election, a local election, a European election or even an election to vote in the local librarian – politicians unite as one to urge the electorate to come out and vote. ‘It’s very important,’ they tell us. ‘It’s your duty!’

What utter tosh!

It is sickening to think about the promises and pleas politicians make at each election. Just look at the election before last. A party was actually voted into power on the assurance that it would not introduce university top-up fees. A couple of years into their administration, it becomes necessary for all of their MPs to be ‘whipped’ into shape so that they can put through a policy that they had actually told the electorate they were not going to use.

And then they have the brass neck to tell us it is important that we vote!

If I had my way, I would do it very, very differently. It should not be my duty to have to vote for somebody I don’t like. I currently live in a part of London where a donkey wearing a Labour rosette would be sure to be voted in. So I could waste my vote by going for the other parties, or just join in with the winners and see the donkey make its majestic progress into the House of Commons.

This is obviously wrong. So, welcome to General Election Nick Ferrari style.

As many parties as wanted to would be able to stand, but at the end of every single ballot paper would be one box that would simply say ‘None of the Above’. This would allow people who are increasingly dissatisfied with the bunch of back-slapping, half-baked, useless cronies who give themselves and all their friends as many jobs as they can, to express their utter disgust.

And before any of you go getting any ideas, I hereby declare that I shall become leader of the None of the Above Party – you can consider this book to be my manifesto.

On a serious note, this would allow us to show that, while we are interested in politics, while we do care about the system that educates our children, runs our hospitals, looks after our elderly, tries to combat crime on the street and even takes the occasional look at the environment, we do not necessarily believe that the way it’s currently put together is correct.

Whenever this conversation comes up on my radio programme, you will hear callers phoning in saying we should adopt the same system that they have in Australia – the system in which voters are actually fined if they refuse to vote at the general election. This is simply wrong. It means that people will be forced to vote for a party or a politician in which they have no trust, belief or interest.

Let me make the first of many confessions. I have deliberately scribbled across my ballot paper in a recent election of one sort or another. I did it in an attempt to make the point that I had no confidence in the sort of people who were available to be voted for. However, it will go down as a ‘spoiled vote’. This makes me sound as if I have the mental capabilities of an elderly, retarded flea, or that I was actually a member of the care in the community project who had been allowed out for the day. In fact, I was wholly aware of what I was doing but had no way to vent my frustration and anger within the fairly rigid constraints of the voting system. Hence my belief in the None of the Above system.

In the past I have been quite interested by politics, and in my late teens I actually actively canvassed for one party during a general election. Now, before any senior representatives of any of the major parties start scrambling through their archives in the desperate fear that they will uncover that Nick Ferrari actually worked on their behalf in the late seventies or early eighties, I hasten to add that I will not be revealing my allegiances – and it’s not who you’d think! But what it gave me was an insight into the system: the most important consideration for this particular party was not whether they had the best man or woman for the job, nor whether their leader had made the best impression in all the television broadcasts, nor even whether we had the right policies; it was how many people I could fit into my car to drive to the polling booths if it was a rainy day. As I was at that time driving a Morris 1100, I was viewed with little regard as it would appear I would be hard-pushed to get more than three old ducks in at any one time. When I volunteered to round up people and drive them to the vote polling booths – even against their will, but with the promise of a lift home and a bottle of Sanatogen for their trouble – it didn’t seem to cut any ice. My career as a political activists came to a rapid end, but I remember it vividly: the West Wing it wasn’t.

There are many puzzling things about the world of politics, and one of the great conundrums is how the successful exponents of the dark art manage to do so well. For instance, let’s invent a phoney politician for a phoney party: we will call him Billy No Mates of the Sensible Party. Billy went to a grammar school and then on to a decent university where he studied Hebrew and Sanskrit and came out with a 2.1. Then, having wasted all of his sixth form and university education on bizarre subjects, he realised his true vocation lay in politics. Because of the system we currently employ, this is no problem for Billy. He simply writes scores of letters to MPs from as many political parties as he can think of, saying that he has a deep-seated and long-held interest in politics (it actually surfaced about eight weeks ago at a cider-and-gin party in a squat in Battersea) and he would be willing to work untold hours for very little pay, if any, as a researcher for one of the MPs. Billy then sits back and waits for the letters to come back. Eventually somebody cracks and Billy gets a job as a researcher for the third undersecretary of the Welsh Lamb Marketing Ministry. There, through a combination of shameless brown-nosing and occasional hard work, he shines. And enjoying the patronage of the Minister of Welsh Lamb production, he eventually gets given the chance to run as an MP on his own.

Fast-forward the tape some ten years. Billy No Mates, an MP with the Sensible Party, is now in politics and desperate to climb the greasy poll. What does he do? He slavishly follows all party directions, tells any waiting journalist or TV or radio crew that his leader is an absolute genius (while secretly plotting with other party bigwigs to bring the oaf down) and says that he realises he is there just for the benefit of his constituents.

He occasionally attends ceremonies in his own constituency but finds them desperately boring. Eventually, a bit of fame starts to beckon and they come looking for Billy for a junior role in one of the ministries. Fairly quickly, Billy No Mates ascends to the role of Agriculture Secretary in the government run by the Sensible Party. Billy knows nothing about agriculture. He was raised in a flat above a video shop and off licence just next to a council estate in Corby. The nearest he has ever been to agriculture was to buy a packet of bacon or six eggs from the local Co-Op.

He does well in that job. He agrees that his party leader, otherwise known as the Prime Minister, is an utter genius, and never says anything against the party line. His long-standing affair with his secretary is never discovered. As a consequence, at the next reshuffle he is promoted to Northern Ireland Secretary. Billy has never been to Northern Ireland in his life. If you were to say sectarian troubles to him, he would probably think it was a punk rock band from the late seventies. He thinks the Orange Men are probably a children’s cartoon series and Bloody Sunday is when you’re stuck at home with a car to wash and the kids are playing up. But that doesn’t matter, because Billy is now in charge of the brief for Northern Ireland. So he has gone from knowing nothing about agriculture to running the government department about it and now the same as happened with Northern Ireland.

In the very tricky position of Northern Ireland Secretary, Billy is an instant success. Fortunately there are no bombs and very few people shoot each other – so there’s another promotion in the next reshuffle. Billy is now Foreign Secretary!

Back at school, Billy’s grades in geography always hovered around a D – except for his GCSEs when he actually managed to score an E. To Billy, Rio Grande is a football player and the Yangtze is a rather embarrassing condition you don’t talk about at dinner parties. G8 is just another pop group and the Oslo Accord is available in both hatchback and coupé with air conditioning and leather upholstery.

You probably know where I am going to have this story end. Billy is such a blinding success in the role of Foreign Secretary that, when the Sensible Party has a ruthless back-stabbing shakedown of their leadership and a new man is needed to become Prime Minster, Billy ‘Safe Hands’ No Mates is there. We have a Prime Minster who has come through a series of jobs for which he has no ability, talent or training but who has simply kept his nose clean. He now stands in control of this country, despite never having done an actual day’s work in his life.

And that last fact seems to be true of many of our leading politicians today! How can that be right? How is it that they can be in a position where they believe they are so intellectually able and so philanthropically versatile that we should fund every aspect of their lifestyle? My solution is this: every now and again, however senior the politician, they should be forced to start up a business or go out and work for a month or two in a proper job. Then, the next time you see them standing up in the Houses of Parliament, fighting with each other or telling us how we have got to tighten our belts, be more prudent or take pension advice, at least they will have seen the real world.