In the Dark

Yesterday having been my birthday – which Her Majesty The Queen kindly declared to be a national holiday – I am now just a year short of a half-century. HMQ has decreed that today is also a national holiday, thus giving me the chance to get rid of my hangover before returning to work a year older on Wednesday.

Fortunately I didn’t have to endure the Queen’s Official party at Buckingham Palace on TV  last night, and instead went to see the fabulous Lady Boys of Bangkok who are in Cardiff all week as part of their UK Tour. They perform in the purpose-built mobile Sabai Pavilion which for this week is situated in Cardiff Bay. Not only did I enjoy the show, I also escaped being hauled up on stage and turned into part of the act. Other members of the audience weren’t so fortunate…

I suspect most of the audience there were also celebrating birthdays or other special occasions, but some were probably just trying to escape from the all-encompassing Jubilee celebrations, of which I’m sure I’m not alone in being completely bored.  So bored, in fact, that I can’t even be bothered to go into the whole Monarchist versus Republican thing.

Still, at least I wasn’t forced to work as an unpaid steward at the stupid river pageant on Sunday, and required to sleep rough under London Bridge, under threat of losing my benefits. Slavery is another fine British tradition.

I think the people who focus on getting rid of the  Monarchy are misguided. Of course it’s an undemocratic and anachronistic institution, but it only has a symbolic status; it doesn’t have any actual power. The real threat to democracy is not the Royal Family, but the rampant capitalism that taken the world’s financial systems to the brink of chaos. Only when we’ve come up with a sensible plan for the world economy in the post-capitalist era – which, in my view, is approaching rapidly – will it be worth making the effort to remove some of the tattered decorations left behind by the old system.

The ongoing financial crisis gripping the world’s economy only exists because governments were persuaded of the need to use taxpayers’ money to underwrite losses in the banking sector. Bankers like capitalism when it comes to making profits, but are happy to fall back on socialism when they make a mess. Now the bankers’ losses have turned into a crippling burden of sovereign debt that could take decades to pay off. And who profits from this? The people who made the mess in the first place.

There is an obvious solution to this problem. A one-off tax of 20% of the accumulated wealth  of the top 10% of the population would raise a staggering £800 billion for the Treasury. This option isn’t even discussed in Parliament because our politicians know their masters wouldn’t like it. And so we go on squeezing ordinary folk and letting the rich off the hook. I don’t think this can go on forever without someone figuring out that we’ve been royally had.