Unicorns
It all changed after the unicorns.
The Right Honourable Member for Southampton Itchen, Testit and Scratchit was the primary cause of the big change. Everyone knew, and sort of accepted, the fact that the system, and the people who operated it, was corrupt to varying degrees but he had gone too far and he wasn’t the quickest finger in the till either. I mean, it is just about believable to claim your stud farm business as your main residence – even if it did generate a few sniggers in the office of expense irresponsibility but to set up a zebra farm using public money and then to sell the meat as best Aberdeen Angus beef was probably going a little too far. He got caught, of course, when people started cooking the meat, he hadn’t realised that the stripes go all the way through.
By this time other MPs had got season tickets on the tanker train carrying liquid meat sauce so it was all becoming too visible. It is ok to rub the public’s nose in the fact that MPs were getting away with murder and other more serious crimes but when the Daily Herald exposed the Unicorn scam people decided that something had to be done
It worked like this. Everyone knows that Unicorns put on weight very quickly so they are the ideal animal to fatten up and sell for meat but they are very fussy eaters and only thrive on a diet of the best nut and grain mix which makes them uneconomic to farm. This is in spite of the fact that the horns can be sold to Doctor Beijing for a premium to be ground down and turned into a powder used as a remedy for various ailments that are too delicate to be listed here. Suffice to say that the powder cannot be applied without first removing one’s pyjamas.
The Honourable Member for North Whernside had the idea of importing retired Rudolfs from Finland, pruning their head gear, putting them out to pasture for a couple of weeks, just long enough for them to learn to speak Unicode and then selling them on to the market as best Unicorn carcases for premium prices. The golden fleeces were quietly sold to Jason to clothe his Argonauts but this is what inspired the famous headline in the Herald,
‘MP fleeces public with mono antlered, openly sleighn Rudolfs’
Something had to be done.
There was a flurry of ‘public consultations’, referendums and focus groups that achieved nothing, just as the MPs hoped but a Facebook group was set up by a Graham Tweedle, who at that time was a fourteen year old with a computer in his bedroom. This eventually attracted twenty seven million members who demanded a completely different system of democracy. The pressure for change was irresistible and became known as The English Spring. Yes, I know it was November and the movement included Scotland Wales and Northern Ireland but history isn’t perfect and usually isn’t true anyway so let’s move on.
The end result was based on the jury system. A computer system - yes, I know what you are going to say about trusting computers but let’s move on again - would select five hundred people at random from around the UK who would have to serve as MPs for five years. They would be paid well, with no expenses. Anyone who refused would be put in prison for the five years. Each year another hundred would be selected to replace the cohort who were due for retirement at the end of their five year service. These would each be awarded a bonus equal to five years pay to help them to settle back into normal life. The thinking was that anyone who puts themselves forward as a candidate has thus proven themselves to be unsuitable. The only way to get a group that is representative of the population is to select them at random. So, just as a jury is a sample ‘of your peers’ so now are your MPs. Oh yes, talking of peers, they were all past their vote by date anyway so the upper house was shut down as the honours system was cancelled.
There were the expected cries of horror from the outgoing MPs.
‘How can someone possibly hope to run the country if they weren’t born into a rich family and were educated at Eton?’
‘Dunno mate but we can’t do worse than you did cannus?’ was the general tone of the replies.
What really happened, of course, was that the UK entered a new golden age of honest governance. Because the new MPs didn’t have the arrogance of the previous incumbents and had no sense of entitlement to position, power and money, they just did the job using applied common sense which worked very well. There were several mistakes but they were generally small scale, low cost and didn’t include January fact finding trips to far away sunny countries or spending big brown envelopes of money on consultants who happened to be related to the said MPs.
Any large group will always include a few bad apples. These were quickly found out and put in jail – to encourage the others.
There were a few letters in the Times from Tunbridge Wells with some nostagia for the days of the Unicorns but generally the new system was accepted as being fair to all even though most people waited for the arrival of an OHMS enevelope each November with some trepidation.
Dr Beijing had to make do with dried, powdered snail porridge but this seemed to be just as efficacious as the previous recipe.
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