My cut-out-and-keep guide to the manifestos

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/19/party-manifestos-easy-to-read

Version 0 of 1.

God love the Liberal Democrats. After five years during which they have become less popular than Ukip, their hopes now rest on how sincere they sound in television studios when they have to apologise for their U-turn on free tuition fees. You can’t, though, accuse them of over-estimating the voting public or taking any of them for granted. Thus the Lib Dems have produced an “easy-to-read” version of their manifesto. My first thought on reading this was that it was a clumsy attempt to show us all why they have chosen education to be one of the key drivers of their “hard-to-read” manifesto, the one that’s aimed at sentient beings.

These are among a few of the Lib-Dems’ easy-to-read manifesto key messages. “We believe in everyone. Liberal Democrats do not exclude anyone. We think children should have good education. People buy things like food and clothes and sell things like cars and houses. Businesses buy and sell things. For example, a business that makes washing machines buys the parts for the machines and then sells the finished washing machines.

“The banks look after our savings and lend us and businesses money. How all this works together is called the economy. There are lots of problems in the world with money. We want healthcare to be good.”

And so, in a spirit of filial goodwill in the run-up to the general election, I have produced a series of easy-to-read mini manifestos for each of the other major parties.

The Conservative party

Great Britain is a country just off the west coast of Europe and is a jolly big island. It has a lot of people in it who can be divided into those who have lots of money and those who do not. This was an act of God and so we just have to accept the situation. There are many people who “have not” and very few people who “have”. It’s difficult to get round everyone in these circumstances so we have chosen to represent the people who have lots of money and encourage them to jolly well get their fingers out and share with the poor people.

The economy is, first and foremost, about ensuring the rich people can go about their business of making money without too much interference. Seven years ago, the rich people and the bankers over-reached themselves a little and so we had to bail them out. This act of sacrifice means we have since had to make cuts in all the services that poor people use. But that’s all right because shops such as Lidl and Iceland will always be around to help them make ends meet.

Our Foodbank Entrepreneur scheme is working a treat too. Indeed, there are now so many of them that we will pledge to privatise them and allow the poor people to purchase shares in them. This means they will also benefit the hedge fund community. We call this Big Government. We are also helping the hard-pressed banking community by enticing the poor people to buy their own council houses with mortgage commitments that will keep them off the streets at night and out of pubs. In this way we will bring down crime.

The Conservatives: Your Money or Your Wife.

The Labour party

We are the Labour party and we have been representing poor people for many years. Lately, though, we have discovered that many poor people have become middle class and are thinking about voting for the Conservatives.

In order to keep their support we have become a little like the Conservatives ourselves, but the diet version. We also think there’s a jolly lot of people out there and we don’t want to spend valuable public resources reaching them all either. We want to balance Britain’s books by cutting services, but not as many as the Conservatives.

But, hey, we can’t forget the poor people, so we will raise their hourly wage within the next five years. This means they will get an extra 20 minutes’ pay for every year. This means that, if they deploy fiscal rectitude in their own daily lives, they may be able to save up and have a Marks & Spencer £10 meal every month. This will lead to things like aspiration and a sense of wellbeing, which will boost the economy as well. This is called joined-up thinking.

Labour: Thinking about Poverty

The Scottish National party

Many people in England didn’t know about our party until 2014 when they discovered that we wanted to wreck the United Kingdom by making Scotland an independent country. So the big Unionist parties got together in a vile Mayfair strip club and came up with a set of bribes to old Scottish people on the back of a Kensitas cigarette packet that they called The Vow.

But although we don’t like the UK, we want all Scots to help us run the rest of Britain by screwing the Tories and the Labour party over a barrel. Scotland is a kinda leftwing country and so 20 years ago we kidnapped the entire rabid, rightwing, kilt-wearing section of the party who were bringing us all down and sent them to live in a commune in Ullapool.

Then we adopted Das Kapital as our inspiration and got pure, dead left wing. Now we are the party of the people and we intend to use Alex Salmond to ram it right up the Unionist parties until they let us go; just like Moses did to the Egyptians a couple of thousand years ago.

Every new SNP member gets a gift of £25 in cash.

Ukip

Britain used to be a great country until we started letting the fuzzy-wuzzies in hand over fist. Don’t get us wrong: in the beginning this was all right as they all simply wanted to drive buses and work on the London underground. Soon though, they started to save money to send their children to university and then they started to get ideas above themselves. Lots of other foreign types saw this and wanted a piece of the action too. Now, the UK’s immigrant population is about 75 million and growing. And if we don’t start doing something about it they’ll be playing calypso music on Radio 3. And that’s just not good enough.

If that gives you the pip, vote Ukip.