All hail El Presidente Cameron and Generalissimo Osborne! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – the UK’s descent into being a banana republic has been alarmingly swift. It was the Diamond Jubilee that really brought it home to me. All that public veneration of people standing on balconies, wearing uniforms dripping with gold braid and sporting silly hats sprouting feathers. I’m not sure what I found the more depressing – the blind adulation of the crowds as the gold-plated carriage trundled past the peasants, that bloody river pageant or the fawning of the ‘stars’ as the performed for Her Majesty at that bloody concert. Actually the latter event was depressingly reminiscent of the sort of ‘entertainments’ that the dictators of totalitarian states have organised to celebrate their birthdays. You can see the desperation in the faces of the performers, all worried that if they don’t entertain El Presidente sufficiently, they’ll be incarcerated or shot. In the case of the Jubilee concert, the worry was that they might jeopardise their chances of getting an OBE or a knighthood.
Obviously, the transition to banana republic isn’t quite complete: it’s still the royal family up on that balcony wearing the uniforms and soaking up the adulation, rather than Dave and George and their coterie. But give it time. For now, the royals serve their purpose of diverting the public’s attention away from the economic decline, the corruption and robbing of the public coffers. Our public services are being raped in the name of austerity, but don’t worry, the Queen’s still smiling and waving at us unwashed masses. That’ll make it all OK. It’s all about keeping up appearances – stuff like the river pageant and the Buck House fly-past by the RAF are all meant to give impression of our continuing strength and potency as a nation – just like those military parades South American dictators are fond of – yet in reality serve only to reveal our weakness. Thanks to the Cameron regime’s defence cuts, the Queen has to be satisfied with a pageant of rowing boats rather than warships, and the RAF appears to have been reduced to a pair of Spitfires and a Lancaster bomber. Trust me, the decline is shocking – I can remember the Silver Jubilee, when the Queen was able to review an entire fleet of Royal navy warships. I remember the lines of frigates, destroyers and submarines assembled in the Solent for the occasion. Nowadays we can’t even muster a warship to protect British merchant shipping from Somali pirates. But hey, let’s all dance around our sombreros and fire guns in the air whilst whooping for joy.
But this military weakness hiding behind pomp and bluster is another hallmark of the banana republic. Sure, those military parades all feature lots of conscripts in shiny boots and freshly-pressed uniforms marching past to salute El Presidente, and lots of 1960s vintage tanks rolling past, but that isn’t where the real strength of the regime lies, in terms of maintaining power over the populace. Oh no, that lies in the regime’s ability to secretly monitor them and control them through an increasingly politicised and unaccountable civil police force. Not that I’m saying that our government’s attempts to introduce legislation to monitor your internet activity, hold trials in secret and the like are the sort of civil liberties restricting activities that a banana republic might get up to. Nor would I compare the police apparently getting away with murder – the newspaper seller at the anti-globalisation demo, the guy whose death sparked the Tottenham riots and the suicide bomber who wasn’t who was gunned down on the underground, to name but three examples – with the operation of police death squads in certain South American countries. Indeed, I wouldn’t dare to suggest that the police’s cavalier attitude toward civil liberties and the law in general was indicative of an unaccountable organisation being used to repress the populace. That said, it might be a good idea to start cultivating those Zapata moustaches…
But believe me, things are getting much worse – the police are just one example of a supposed public service no longer operating so as to serve the whole community, but rather being run for the benefit of private interests, (News International, the Tory Party and their banker friends, to name but a few). The government’s plans to privatise large swathes of police work makes their intent quite blatant – the establishment of private police forces serving those who can afford to pay. Viva Cameron! It’s the same all across what was once the public sector, from health to education, it’s all about ‘out sourcing’ services to private contractors (who probably evade paying UK corporate tax), which, in reality, means that they will be run for the benefit (i.e. profit) of private concerns, rather than for the benefit of the whole community. Again, isn’t this exactly what happens in a banana republic? Everything being run for the benefit of the great leader’s cronies? It is all about who can grease the right palms with the right amount of hard currency. Excuse me while I strap on this bandolier and spit on some gringos…
All of which brings us to the corruption. It isn’t so much that the Tories are a bunch of corrupt bastards that worries me, rather than the fact that they don’t seem to care who knows it. They unashamedly tout for funds, offering potential donors the opportunity to meet Cameron and influence government policy for a few hundred thousand quid! Tax cuts for the rich, benefits cuts for the poor – who are all scum anyway! Why do you all stand for it, that’s what I want to know? What will it take for you all to get off of your apathetic backsides and effect change in the only way you can in a banana republic – by getting out on those streets and revolting? Last year, when London was burning, the police powerless and Cameron cowering in his holiday home, I really thought that maybe things were actually going to happen. But here we are, nearly a year on, with things getting worse and people seem more apathetic than ever! Really, what do these bastards have to do? Or maybe what we have here is a Magnificent Seven situation – you poor peasants don’t believe you have the strength to fight big bad bandido leader Cameronero and his band of brigands. So, I guess that we’ve no choice but to go to that border town with all our valuables and hope that we can hire seven badass gunfighters (all with individual quirks and personal dilemmas) to come and save us. Well, I’m telling you now, I’m not shaving my head, so somebody else is going to have to volunteer to be Yul Brynner. I’ve still got dibs on being Steve McQueen, though…
