Everything You Really Need To Know About Politics
My Life as an MP
Jess Phillips
Having read it
★★★★★
Absolutely brilliant, honest, to the point, funny, insightful, full of great anecdotes and superb footnotes and totally realistic about life and how politics can and needs to work more productively. Plus, as she writes, the emphasis is on us, as citizens, to be more involved to get things happening that make a real difference in all our lives for the better.
In an aside, we need to put her in charge, or at least a collective of like-minded people and the odd disagreer to keep things moving, to get good, long-term, relevant, pertinent and timely things to encourage the populous to get more involved and start helping to change things in society for the better.
Politics is everyone’s responsibility, so let’s get (more) involved!
A good passage
Every day, people write to me and say things like, ‘I am sorry to bother you, I have never written to an MP before,’ as if I am in a different category to them or they are going above their station. Too many people think that all politicians are morally bankrupt gold diggers who spend all their time on yachts with newspaper editors and tech lobbyists – because that is the stuff that makes the headlines. No wonder we are one of the most hated professions in the country. A woman in my local Greggs once said to me while serving me a steak bake, ‘I guess I, the taxpayer, am paying for this steak bake.’ I am afraid to tell you, dear reader, that parliamentary expenses do not cover my steak bake. The only taxpayer who funds my steak bakes is me.*
A second good passage
Imagine having the power to actually change anything you wanted. You could come up with a solution for social care, or support for the elderly and disabled. You could make sure people were treated fairly at work or could definitely access care and support if they had been abused or harmed. Imagine having that power and not using it. My position means that I get a platform to shout about this stuff, but we all have the power to change laws, to fight for better, to demand more at work, in our towns, cities and across our country. We all have the power to make our politicians really work for us. The greatest trick ever played by the powerful was to convince the population that we couldn’t change things, when the truth is that we can.
A third good passage
Yes, Binface is a joke candidate and that is the point, to be a figure of fun and take the piss out of the media circus that surrounds the elections of a high-level politician. There have always been political parties based on the idea that politics is a silliness and that there must be a ‘none of the above’ candidate on the ballot as an act of defiance. The Monster Raving Looney Party and the flamboyant leader Screaming Lord Sutch were the big players in this field when I was a kid. When I was a teenager, it was the Natural Law Party who took the crown. Founded in 1992, they were a political movement built on the principle of transcendental meditation, the laws of nature and their application to government. They has manifesto pledges about developing an individual’s consciousness through the aforementioned meditation and bringing the individual and the country into tune with Natural Law so that unfavourable planetary influences would be neutralised. Sure, we can laugh now, but we never gave it a shot and look at the shitshow that is global politics today. Maybe we should have seriously considered cosmic yoga as a way to save the world; it is certainly no more ridiculous than Donald Trump telling people to drink bleach to cure coronavirus.