The talking ticket machine

27 April, 2015 (20:42) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

IF you’re wondering how to vote, I know a car park where there’s a ticket machine that can help you.

It spoke to me last week, as I stood fumbling for change and squinting to read the instructions.

‘Good morning,’ it said. ‘I am a symbol.

‘I have just been placed in this Cornish car park by the cash-strapped local council, which has had to make enormous cuts in its budget owing to our climate of austerity. Parking charges were raised to pay for me.

‘I have a keypad on which you have to enter your registration number so that you cannot then pass your ticket on to somebody else if you leave before your time is up.

‘This is why I am such an important symbol, because that little act was one of those communal kindnesses that make everybody smile, and now it’s been taken away. By me. That is what I symbolise, my friend: a world in which little acts of commonality, of goodwill, of decency, have been rendered impossible because of money.’

Symbols are important. That petty, peevish, money-grubbing machine is a perfect one. The type exists in hospital car parks, even – what could better stand for what the post-Thatcher economic consensus has done to our country?

You know only too well the people who have done it.

The people whining and snivelling about the injustice of the mansion tax while they require poor people on benefits with the gall to have a spare room to pay the bedroom tax.

The people who bought Scotland’s vote to stay in the UK, telling Scots their voice would be listened to – but who are now telling Scotland that if they exercise their democratic right and vote for a party of which the Tories disapprove they are a danger to our very existence and, to quote Theresa May, ‘the worst crisis since the abdication’.

The people who trot out the tired cliché about red Ed dancing to the tune of his trade union puppetmasters (the democratically elected ones who are part of the nation’s biggest democratic movement whose memberships, policies and funds are as transparent as glass) while they dance to the tune of their hedge fund city banker puppetmasters (the unelected anonymous ones who trade Tory Party donations for NHS contracts and corporation tax breaks). You know the cliché, you’ll have read all about it in papers like the Murdoch press, the Daily Mail and the Telegraph, all owned by unelected media barons, some of whom love our country so much they avoid paying tax to it.

That ticket machine, like the media, is taking you for a fool. Are you prepared to be a fool? Enough people are, certainly – polls consistently show that more than 30 per cent want to vote for the Conservative Party, which is truly extraordinary.

Remember the letter from all those lovely caring business leaders that was obediently reported in the press, urging everybody to vote Conservative for the good of business? It’s doing the rounds on social media this morning, with its metadata attached showing it was approved by Conservative Central Office before being sent to the press. What a surprise.

If you read the right-wing press, you’ll know that they all obediently ‘reported’ David Cameron winning the one TV debate in which he did condescend to appear. They did so on front pages that had been completed and e-mailed to the BBC for its ‘what the papers say’ slot on News 24 by 8pm – before the debate had even started on TV.

Are you reading the reports today about red Ed’s proposal to freeze rents to private landlords – the reports predicting thousands kicked onto the streets?

Who’s voting for unregulated rents? Tory MPs – 25% of whom are landlords; all of whom are supported by property magnates who pour thousands into Tory Party coffers.

And what’s putting a massive drain on the social security budget the Tories pretend to be so desperate to cut? Subsidies paid to profiteering private landlords because tenants in jobs earn less than a working wage and can’t afford the rent, let alone save to buy a house.

Continuing the existing con trick is economic illiteracy: controlling it to save the taxpayer money and help hard-working people is not only economic sense, it’s also moral sense. But perhaps you’d sooner be taken for a fool?

I think you should listen to that ticket machine, because what it is telling you is this: there is nothing more important than making sure the lying, bullying, greedy, corrupt, hypocrites are defeated. The pain of their failed economic policies isn’t even reason enough: the main reason is that they put into our life mean, petty, vindictive, penny-pinching spirit-sapping joyless symbols like my talking ticket machine.

 

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