My 77 Garden Age & Buttercups !

This is my last post before the Election.

A buttercups selection.

The next one will be a reflection 🌼🌼🌼on the result.

Buttercups are the most deceptive of weeds.

They entice you with promises of yellow flowers.

But they spread their tentacles over all around them.

Politicians are like buttercups.

Their promises are full of flowers.

But their deeds are full of weeds.

This pesky post even got into my blog

And got posted a month ahead.

Politicians are unruly like them.

They get out of control.

So the remedy for buttercups is

DIG THEM UP AT THE ROOTS.

Start again with 🌹🌸🌼🪻🪷🌻🌺🌷

🌺🪷💐🌻🌼🌸🌷🌸🌹🌼🌸🪻🪷🌺

Now you have to figure out

Which politicians are buttercups

And which are flowers ?

In my Garden Age

I still dig up weeds

and cultivate FLOWERS.

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My 77 Garden Age & the NHS

This is probably the biggest challenge of all in the electorates mind. And it is only going to get worse as the population ages. So what can we learn from my garden?

Well the NHS is choaked with weeds, all claiming their little bit of space in the garden. Bureaucratic weeds handed down by a micro-managing central government—- these need to be pulled out straight away. Then we can dispense with an army of administrators, who don’t grow any flowers in the NHS garden.

Most of the NHS staff need to be gardeners helping patients to grow back to health. It is what they do best —- creating 🌻🌹🌼🌸🌺🪷

Cottage hospitals should have cottage gardens, where patients can recuperate. Hospital wards should be full of flowers, not banned by infection control police.

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My 77 Garden Age & Crime.

Weeds are the criminals in my garden. They appear where they are not wanted and take up space that could be used for flowers. They also divert my time and effort into pulling them up.

How does that relate to crime in our society ? Well, there is too much of it and it’s growing. We need more flowers, but the ground is not fertile and just encourages more weeds. Our justice system is not fit for purpose , nor delivered in a timely way.

Prisons are full and fail to prevent reoffending. Around 25% reoffend, which costs an estimated £18 billion a year. That doesn’t include the ones who don’t get caught!

The answer is not to build more prisons; nor to effectively decriminalise shoplifting; drug-taking; burglary and car theft; nor to shorten sentences; nor to release criminals early. It is to find new ways of helping prisoners back into society with the skill and outlook to lead an honest life.

Easy to say / difficult to do !

Gardening can be hard work and take time and patience. But it is also rewarding 🤡. So let’s get our prisoners outside digging up weeds; growing flowers and planting fruit and vegetables🪴🪴🪴And trees —- lots of trees. 🌳🌳🌲🌳🌲🌲

Later they can move onto housebuilding. More homes for everyone, including them, when they are released. We will build a new skilled workforce of gardeners and construction workers.

As I write this, it all sounds too utopian and unrealistic. But it doesn’t have to be a soft option. Initially the gardening will be done in the prison grounds. Outside prison grounds, high risk prisoners will be fitted with a ball and chain. Later this can be changed to a tracker, but abscond and you will be back in the ball and chain.

After a year of gardening and construction work, prisoners can opt to switch to other work or full time education. All designed to give them a better opportunity when they complete their sentence. They will also be given a release bounty, equivalent to the minimum wage for the period of their incarceration. 50% of the bounty must be used to compensate any victims of their crime.

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My 77 Garden Age & LLLP.

My Last Laugh Looney Party blogs await the judgement of the electorate on July 4th. The wisdom of the voters might finally tell the politicians what to do with themselves🤡

Meanwhile my garden lays out a host of steps before me. Which one to take first ? —- the economy; NHS waiting lists; education; defence; crime; nett zero; immigration —- as many choices as there are tasks in my garden.

All with no money🤡

QUITE A CONUNDRUM !

We need to mobilise the nation to lift us out of this era of gloom.

Even a single flower in my garden can raise a smile !

So let’s start with EDUCATION and let a thousand flowers bloom. Teachers and children need more support so ask every teacher to recruit one volunteer for a year. Somebody known to them, so that they can dispense with all the Department of Education vetting processes.

Oh and for a year we will suspend all the “ work” in the county education offices and the Department of Education and second them to do some real work experience in the schools that Ofsted has rated poor. 8,000 people work in the DoE and 3,000 in Ofsted. Thousands more work in the county back office teams, no doubt they will gain valuable experience being on the front line for a year.

The volunteers will wear a flower to show they are completing a year of National Service.

THAT’S A START.

Then the following year, hopefully some of them will wish to stay on and remain as volunteers. Others may wish to train to become teachers.

The back office staff will not be able to go back to “working from home” and will have to justify why they are needed at all, if the education world didn’t fall apart over their year of National Service 🤡

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My 77 Garden Age.

I first started to write about “My Garden Age” in 2011 and I have periodically returned to the theme over the years since. In so many ways it’s an allegory of my life. So now I reflect on it again at 77.

The garden is a lot older than I am and will still be there long after I am gone. I can only hope to leave it in as good or preferably a better place than when I first came to it in 1979. Where did those 45 years go?????

The garden grows faster and I grow slower. The power of nature verses the power of man.

It rewards you with wonderful sights each day.

But good things demand endless effort, there is a reminder each day of things to do :—

  • Weed the path
  • Empty pots of flowered bulbs
  • Plant the next pots of bulbs
  • Compost the dead leaves
  • Cut back the ivy before it gets into the gutters
  • Dead head the roses
  • Edge the lawns and cut the grass
  • Pull up “mind your own business” before it gets everywhere
  • Deadhead the daffodils
  • Fit bamboo supports to the foxgloves and hollyhocks
  • Prune the apple trees
  • Dig out the dandelions
  • Sow vegetable seeds
  • Weed the pots
  • Lift forget-me-nots before they go to seed
  • Pot on pot bound plants
  • Water the pots and the newly planted seeds
  • Trim the hedge
  • Kill the moss on the paths
  • Mulch around the roses
  • Tie back the raspberry canes
  • Pull up the bindweed before it smothers everything
  • Dig up the buttercups before they take over every spare space
  • Carefully pull up the stinging nettles

AND ALL THAT IS BEFORE I PLANT ANY NEW PLANTS !!!!

There are so many things to do —- where do you start?

It only matters that you do start. Every long journey starts with a small step.

The Last Laugh Looney Party is in a political garden with a great many things to do. They just need to take the first step 🤡

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Last Laugh Looney Tax.

This is the last of theLLLP visionary pledges. The key one that shows how it all can be painlessly paid for. Well painlessly for all but the very very rich – the 166 billionaires on the Times Rich List.

Tax needs to be simple, so everyone can understand it at a glance. No need for accountants promoting their skills at avoiding tax. No need for highly paid tax lawyers hawking around their dubious tax evasion schemes. No need for off-shore tax havens. No need for thousands of civil servants at the Department of Tax Everything, or what ever it is called.

So here are the new tax rules from day 1 of the new LLLP parliament.

  • The basic rate of tax will be NO TAX, for anyone earning less than £100,000 a year 🤡
  • For earnings of between £100,000 and £200,000 the tax will be 10%
  • Tax will increase by a further 10% on each £100,000 thereafter. So by the time you are earning £900,000 you will be paying 90% tax on your highest £100,000.
  • Here’s the kicker —— when you become a billionaire earner you will be paying 100%tax on any higher earnings.
SIMPLE OR WHAT ?

Now people will say that all the billionaires will leave Britain. And they can move to Monaco or the Virgin Islands or anywhere that will have them in their newly impoverished state 🤡 They will be impoverished because the LLLP Tax Rules don’t allow you to take your money abroad; or your super yachts; or your private gas-guzzling jets; or your fleet of luxury cars.

Billionaires will be welcome to stay in Britain and spend their wealth here. Of course if they do leave, they won’t be able to take their many luxury houses with them. Rather than being left to rot the houses can be donated tax-free to the LOONEY HOMES TRUST who will convert them into retirement flats🤡

No doubt many lawyers and tax accountants will also wish to go abroad as there is no need for their expensive advice now that the LLLP has simplified the tax system. I doubt we will miss them!

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LOONEY SCHOOL MEALS.

My last post showed how the new Looney Education policy would move children out of the classroom. This leaves the vast school estate available for repurposing. Marcus Rashford gave the Country a great idea during Covid.

Now the Looney Party intends to expand the approach by offering free school meals to all children and old people by using the school kitchens and the empty classrooms. Food banks will continue to supply all the homeless. Supermarkets will be required to donate 10% of their food produce to the project.

To promote good healthy lifestyles plenty of fruit will be on offer.

The remaining school accommodation will be used as a play area, so that children and grannies and grandpas can look after each other all day. Markus Rashford and his other highly paid footballing pals ⚽️⚽️⚽️⚽️ will provide exercise and games classes. All the Ronald McDonalds🤡🤡🤡🤡 will offer fun and entertainment now that the fast food outlets have been closed on health grounds.

Schools will become LOONEY FUN AND SOCIALISING COMMUNITY HUBS. All aimed at getting people out and about after the isolating years of Covid and austerity.

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LOONEY EDUCATION.

Tony Blair when he was Prime Minister said his top priority was education, education, education. Then he all but abolished grammar schools. The Conservative/ Liberal Democrat government that followed then proceeded to introduce University fees and burden young people with a debt ridden start to adult life. Now we have a new generation of woke teachers, who have forgotten about teaching reading, writing and arithmetic.

The Looney Education policy is radically different and takes politicians out of the picture. All children at the age of three will be given a free tablet and then encouraged to navigate their own educational path through life. Lord knows where they will end up, but it couldn’t be any more haphazard than the current system.

Nobel pride winners could emerge from anywhere.

Mentors will spring up everywhere, many of them former school teachers or university staff. They will be able to charge for their support, but they will have to prove their worth to their students. They will of course be able to work from home, just like so many other public sector workers, but of course they won’t have a furlough scheme to pay them.

Meanwhile schools will be repurposed —- more in the next post.

Universities will be much smaller and just be hubs for learning. The days of lecturers on cushy salaries and Vice Principals earning more than the Prime Minister are over.

Tablets will give access to education for everyone everywhere.

University grants will be abolished and the £millions returned to the taxpayers. Students can pay their own way if they wish. I doubt there will be many who want to pay £30,000 for a Micky mouse degree.

The Department of Education annual budget exceeds £100 billion and after paying for the free tablets and free school meals, most of the billions can be used to pay off the student loans. This will encourage lots of young people to vote for the LAST LAUGH LOONEY PARTY 🤡🤡🤡🤡

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LOONEY HOMES

Every recent Government has promised to build around 300,000 new homes a year. None has got anywhere near this target. Meanwhile the UK population is growing by over1.5 million people a year, mainly because of immigration. The result is higher and higher house prices, but there is also a shortage of rented accommodation.

Mr Stammer is promising, if he is elected, to build 1.5 million homes in the next five years. He needs a daft idea and the Last Laugh Looney Party can help.

Looney Housing Carousels take up far less land and probably can be modified to provide free power to the home owners. They will however have to work from home most of the time, because they will only touch ground a few times a day🤡

Looney Bungalows can be mass produced in the hundreds of disused car factories. They will then be dropped carefully onto brownfield sites and unused railway lines and unused airport runways. This just one of the benefits of the travel restrictions required to meet our much reduced carbon footprint🤡

The LAST LAUGH LOONEY PARTY thinks this will solve all our housing problems.

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LOONEY SECURITY.

To make everyone feel safer the first LOONEY SECURITY idea was to give everyone a personal robot policeman. This would put an extra 65,000,000 police men/ women on the beat. Unfortunately this would be a bit expensive and didn’t meet the LLLP requirement to be fully costed and fully funded. So the idea was quickly dropped.

The next big LOONEY SECURITY idea was to have cameras everywhere. On every tree, lamppost, road sign and telegraph pole. There would also have to be a swarm of drone cameras crisscrossing the sky to ensure there were no blind spots. The cameras would be equipped with automatic face recognition and linked to the police national data base so they would know where you are at all times.

Sadly not all the camera images worked very well, particularly at night, when most burglars are out and about.

The cameras were also going to be strapped to every cat, dog and pidgin, but the RSPCA objected on the grounds that it would infringe their animal rights. So LOONEY PET POLICE never took off, which was a great disappointment to Coco who was raring to go.

STILL WE DID SAY IT WAS A LOONEY IDEA. AND LIKE A LOT OF POLITICIANS PROMISES THEY OFTEN DON’T WORK.

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