The book is a hilarious compilation of spontaneous proposals by the audience of Mark Thomas radio shows. They are ideas of people who think that they can do a better job than the politicians that represent them.
Some of the policies would, if enforced, result in the end of the civilisation as we know it, like making party political manifestos legally binding or ending tax havens, including the many British ones (and bomb Switzerland). Other are deceptively simple like legalising all drugs or enforcing that members of parliament have no other job than, well members of parliament.
I go for these two: the right to use a product without having to reference a user manual and the opt-out system for organ donations.
There is a direct route from power to disaster: it’s called ideology. From the horse’s mouth:
“Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
Alan Greenspan admitted in October 2008 that there was a “flaw” in this “ideology”. Now, that is a tautology. He mounted a defense of this last 25 years as Fed chairman based on two axis:
- The scale of the crisis was much bigger than the room of maneuvre of the regulator
- Forecasting is futile: nobody could have prevented the housing bubble and the criminal activities of the banks in the US
Public finances have in common with astronomy the incomprehensibility of its numbers. Can an average human being visualize £7 trillion for instance?
Quoting a confused minister talking to Malcolm Tucker: I don’t know what level of reality I should be operating on. The UK government does. It knows exactly how much money it recognises as debt. Which is significantly less than the liabilities that it currently holds:
The Office of Fair Trading found 103 building firms infringing the law in cover pricing in projects in the UK. The very British practice involve builders disclosing to one another or agree upon what price they intend to quote for building projects across England. The inflated quotes mislead the client (mostly authorities and councils) about the real price of their projects.
The OFT found projects worth in excess of £200m, including schools, universities and hospitals, between 2000 and 2006. This is where building firms submit quotes for jobs that are not actually priced to win the contract, so the client gets a misleading idea about the real extent of competition.
Kier Group was fined £17.9m, Interserve was fined £11.6m and big names like Carillion, Balfour Beatty, Galliford Try, Ballast Nedam, ISG Pierce and Crest Nicholson, John Sisk & Son, Connaught, Concentra and Durkan Holdings and Bowmer & Kirkland all more than £5m.
The Chartered Institute of Building also found that cover pricing was a widespread corruption practice across the building industry.