IN BRITAIN, election time is nigh upon us, and what with trains crashing off the rails, 10-buck a gallon gasoline just around the corner and the countryside ablaze in cows with their feet pointed heavenward, it's time to consult Cat Mandu, my political guru, about the need for change.

Cat Mandu is co-leader of Britain's Official Monster Raving Loony Party. He also is a cat, which automatically puts him several branches higher up the evolutionary scale from the political plankton who for the past decade or so have run this country with the directional sense of Captain Edwin Smith of the good ship Titanic.

It's also worth noting that Cat Mandu has been neutered, a surgical procedure the lack of which has spelled disaster for a number of otherwise promising politicians - largely among but not limited to the Conservatives - found incapable of keeping their trousers up.

I was one of 56 voters in the Royal Borough of Richmond upon Thames who put X's next to the name of the Loony party candidate in the last election. The 25,000 or so others who helped elect the winner gave us a government that promptly went out and spent 500 taxpayer dollars a roll for wallpaper.

For the past four years, we have had a Labour Party government that blew one and a half billion bucks on something called the Millennium Dome that shut down after a year and which nobody wants to buy.

Gasoline is now so expensive that you need permission from your bank manager before planning a car trip longer than 20 miles. I just filled up my tank at nearly $6 a gallon, the 10-buck millstone looms just beyond the next superhighway junction, and three-fourths of the cost is tax to buy things like the Millennium Dome.

Rail transport is not a safe alternative. Trains keep falling off the tracks, killing ex-motorist passengers by the dozens. It seems no one has checked the rails for cracks or whatever since the days when Winston Churchill was campaigning from the back of his own rail car.

Not that there's much of anything pleasurable about a trip, by train, car or otherwise, to the countryside these days. Foot-and-mouth is still rife, the air is filled with the acrid odor of burning cows or the stench of those waiting their turn on the pyres.

Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour government promised "no tax increases" - then proceeded to raise 45 of them through stealth, without bothering to tell anyone about them.

The opposition Conservatives have little reason to gloat. Under Blair's predecessor, John Major, the Tories pioneered the art of "stealth taxation," raising a score or more of their own, when they weren't otherwise tied up battling accusations of sleaze in government.

Sleaze, for that matter, is a non-partisan art. Blair's folks engaged in a bit of it by letting one member of its government spend the aforementioned $500 a roll on wallpaper for his government-issue lodgings. It made pals with a couple of dodgy Indians who donated a big wad of cash for the Millennium Dome.

A few days ago, a nasty piece of work named Ronnie Biggs, a member of the gang who pulled off Britain's "Great Train Robbery" back in 1963, decided after a life of wine, women and song following his escape from prison, he could no longer afford the doctors' bill in his hidey-hole in Brazil.

So Biggs decided it was time to come home to Britain, to "a good pint of bitter ale at a Margate pub" - and, not incidentally, free medical care under national health. Blair's government sent him a passport, free of charge.

Anyway, all this is by way of saying I think we need a change - any change. We are being run, and have been run under Labor and Conservative alike, by people whose IQs are about two points above those of sycamore trees and whose morals would make an alley cat blush.

I have managed to get a copy of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party's election 2001 manifesto from Cat Mandu and his cronies, and I like what I read. Take the section on road and public transport:

"To prevent a fuel crisis and help farmers," the Loonies say, "we will work together with Volkswagen to produce a new car which runs on farmyard effluent. We propose to call this new car the 'Dung Beetle'."

For good measure, each car owner will be given a horse to tow it in case of fuel crises. To deal with highway congestion, highways will be closed. All bus shelters will have central heating, "to be turned on full in summer and off in winter, just like the buses."

Now this is lateral thinking of the highest order.

Under Labor and the Conservatives, this country has become increasingly answerable to a batch of political pygmies operating in the brackish European backwater that is Brussels, lumbering us with the Channel Tunnel, metric measures and people who can't speak English.

The Loonies vow to "keep our British way of life. We will close the Channel Tunnel, recall all our Euro MPs, reinstate the gallon and dispose of the kilogram."

"We like our Loony weights, which aren't divisible by 10," the manifesto reads. "If the Europeans can't cope with anything other than decimal, let them stay in Europe."

On education: "We'll make class sizes smaller by standing kids closer together and giving them smaller desks."

On health: "Free Viagra will be made available to the over-69s."

On asylum-seekers: "Our policy ... is simple. The asylums should be better sign-posted."

On agriculture: "It's proposed that a law be passed making all GM foods illegal. They should stick to what they do best - making cars."

And on defense: "All bombs and guns should be kept in the fridge to stop them going off."

I'll admit I don't agree on every point. Facilitating free electric chairs for the disabled if they want them, for instance, could do with a rethink, or at least a rewrite.

Yet, on the whole, when I go the ballot box, I'll go for the cat, Mandu. But I suspect that when the last box is stuffed, the country will still be going to the dogs.

Thought for the Week: Work is for people who don't know how to fish.

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