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Six minor twatteries of modern Britain Starmer could ban to win the public round

INDUSTRY bodies are reconsidering the legality of charging £1,906 in fines for paying for parking five minutes late. Dealing with these similar vexations could transform Labour’s fortunes: 

Hospital parking

A hospital is not the Bluewater Shopping and Leisure Destination. Nobody’s there because they love it. But somehow we’ve drifted into charging cancer patients and relatives of the dying £16.50 for three hours, the majority of which is kept as profits by bastards. What are laws for if they’re not for banning this?

Charging gig employees to get paid

An American innovation, as if it were not immediately obvious, where those employed through an app have suddenly seen their wages paid ‘as standard’ in 30 days. What? You need the money now? Then you won’t object to giving up a small percentage of it ‘for your convenience’. After all, which gig employee doesn’t have a month’s rent, bills and food spare?

Cancellation journeys

You’d like to cancel your phone contract, internet provider or other such raising-the-price-monthly arsehole? Get ready for an epic journey including a four-hour dialogue with a Virgin employee who sees it as akin to leaving Scientology and will do anything possible to change your mind. And when they can’t will just not cancel it anyway.

Airport drop-off

As recently as the 2010s, it was possible to drop a friend off at an airport gratis. Because you’re doing them the f**king favour. Today you’re charged a fiver for the privilege of briefly passing your wheels across hallowed airport-owned tarmac. The right to do this is a right they could be deprived of.

Massive advertising screens

Having already begun this one by switching Euston station’s huge advertising board back to showing train times, just extend it. Before every pavement, wall and ceilings in a high-traffic area becomes a screen showing perfume adverts, say no. Nobody wants to be waterboarded by capitalism while waiting for the bus.

‘Headphones only’ signs

We have no regulation about watching TV on the bus because we didn’t have to. Now everybody has a TV in their pocket, half of them watching SAS Rogue Heroes at 1.5 speed and full volume, it’s necessary. Headphones only, fines for repeat offenders, and strictly no porn. Not even a little bit to tide you over until your stop. None at all.

Britain to be first nation to convert all its citizens to human batteries for AI

AN AI revolution will make every British man, woman and child into productive little batteries to power their artificial intelligence overlords.

Government plans to ‘unleash AI’ in order to boost the country’s growth will see every one of us living happily in a pod of liquid used by our machine rulers to harvest our body’s bioelectric and kinetic energy – and well before the EU does it.

A government source said: “Using highly-sophisticated algorithms to look at potholes and plan lessons uses power. And that’s where this country’s useless people will finally come in handy.

“Instead of wasting your body on inefficient activities like watching a romantic sunset with your partner or ‘enjoying’ a ‘meal’, you’ll be naked in the foetal position generating energy next to thousands of your compatriots.

“Once you’re hooked up, you’ll have more time to do the things you like. In a simulation. A cheap one we’ve bought in from a 1998 VR demonstration CD-ROM, but you won’t notice.

“Just picture it. Huge people farms stretching from Land’s End to John o’Groats, all sending precious power to data centres and neural networks. Who says we’re suffering a productivity crisis?”

He added: “If you are a writer, artist or musician, you can apply for an exemption so you can continue creating work for AI to rip off. It really is a bright future for everyone.”

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