What the British really laugh at
True or not, the Internet today decided that British Prime Minister David Cameron, when he was a student at Oxford, put an intimate part of his body in the mouth of a pig carcass. Such statements were made by representatives of the establishment with extensive connections - the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Lord Michael Ashcroft (Michael Ashcroft) and the former editor of the political section of the Sunday Times Isabel Oakeshott (Isabel Oakeshott). This story was published in the Daily Mail, thanks to which this newspaper entered the top league of deniers of reputation and destroyers of personality in British politics.According to the Daily Mail, Ashcroft's goal is revenge. In the years that preceded Cameron's prime minister in 2010, this tax evader billionaire donated over eight million pounds sterling to the Conservative Party and pulled it out of its debt trap after a disastrous election defeat in 2005. Under Cameron, he worked as treasurer, and later as vice-chairman of the party, helping her regain her reputation in the eyes of the public, which allowed the conservatives to run successfully in the elections. Ashcroft hoped that in exchange for this he would get a high position, but when the time came, Cameron refused to pay the bills. It seems that for the last five years, Ashcroft has dedicated himself to writing his new book Call Me Dave (Call Me Dave), which sets forth a scandalous story with a pig and other murderous accusations against the Prime Minister.
People unfamiliar with British cultural characteristics focused on the central detail - that the leader of one of the G8 countries had a dead pig - because it was funny. But the British themselves loudly accompanied the story about a man who committed a disgusting act and got caught. And here it is not about gloating, everything is much deeper. It's all about the class.
When Cameron studied at Oxford, he was a member of several secret societies, which included rich young people. The most famous of them is the Bullingdon Club, in the image and likeness of which the infamous Yale Skull and Bones club was created. The purpose of the Bullingdon Club is, at first glance, to dress in wonderful costumes, get drunk in expensive restaurants and private dining rooms, and then smash them. And all because the guys afford to pay all the losses - and work for this they do not need a single day. It is said that among the initiation rites they have this: they burn the 50 pound bill in front of the homeless person.
But in the Bullingdon club (and in similar societies) there is another side: creating teams and working out the interaction of representatives of the higher strata of society from the right flank. Friendships and alliances formed in the process of drunkenness by secret societies of powerful and wealthy children determine their careers. And all these young people enter into the highest class of British society. Members of such societies were three prominent cabinet members of Cameron, and many others led banks that collapsed into the 2008 economy, and media empires that protected them.
Burning money before the homeless is not just a disgusting leprosy. This is the training of the feelings of the boys from Bullingdon, helping them to look down on other people. It is impossible to call coincidence and coincidence the fact that David Cameron and his allies George Osborne and Boris Johnson were involved in this, for which the number of homeless people in London and throughout Britain sharply increased. The MP, who told Lord Ashcroft the details of the story with the pig, visited one of the meetings of this expensive club, but left it with disgust, because "everything was permeated with contempt for poor people."
What is the reason why the British readily believed Lord Ashcroft's story, although Ashcroft himself is a representative of the establishment in a country famous for its absurdly friendly libel laws in relation to claimants? The fact that society already knows the essence of Cameron’s ideological background. There is nothing attractive in such a biography, especially when the ruling class is waging such a war against the poor and disabled, which would make Thatcher blush.
Therefore, when the British hear that a guy from the very top of this pyramid was forced by his peers to shove a member in the mouth of a pig, threatening to refuse him to accept nasty and privileged people to the club, they have not just laughter, but great satisfaction. A terrible person turns into a ludicrous person, and this transformation is like ghosts from Harry Potter, which personify your worst nightmares, and then, when you cast a spell, they seem ridiculous to you.
The pig scandal, because of which the whole world is laughing at Cameron today, did not take place in the Bullingdon Club, but in the less well-known (until this week) secret society of Pierce Gaverston, where very strange sexual rituals and initiation rites are performed. If the guys from Bullingdon are building their brotherhood on the foundation of such common values as hatred of the poor, then in Pierce Gaverston’s society the main thing is sexual humiliation and the creation of shared secrets. Its structural function is an agreement on mutually guaranteed destruction between the rulers of tomorrow: you know my secret, and I know yours, and therefore we need to be at one and the only and only that.
This creates one of the foundations of the mechanism of the British ruling class - why reveal someone's dirty little secrets when you can keep your mouth shut and control everything? This forms the basis of the “Khlystov” system in parliament, in which the main whip in each of the parties should have its own arsenal of dirt locked in a key in his office. When the time comes, the party leader may “unfasten” rebellious backbenchers, threatening to disclose such details, the leak of which they absolutely do not need anything.
In this elite culture, not all corruption is financial. If we talk about the very top of British politics, the firm character and pure reputation do not make you worthy. It will be difficult for you to get to the top if those in power cannot make sure that you are a bastard and do not hide this fact from the public.
An interesting example of this is how Margaret Thatcher helped some members of her government and his allies to climb the career ladder. During the recent parliamentary scandal about child corruption, there were claims that Thatcher "closed her eyes" to those pedophiles she promoted, including raising to the knight’s name perverted perverts such as Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith. Even her own interior minister, the late Leon Brittan, is still under investigation.
Now they say that in each of the cases, the special services warned Thatcher about the deviations of these people, but she stubbornly ignored their warnings. Since this was about keeping secrets and about the power of the elite, it cannot be excluded that Thatcher, knowing about the pedophilia of these people, wanted to have leverage of political influence on them. By promoting them, she strengthened her own power while in her post as prime minister.
The parliamentary scandal associated with pedophilia is terrible enough in itself, but it also further undermines public confidence in Westminster, which everyone already despises for being detached from reality and unaccountable after all these financial crises and cost scandals. According to voters, too few heads flew.
As for the small incident with Cameron, society is simply tired of its antipathy towards the methods of work of Westminster, which has become the market of secrets for no one accountable elite. Let our politicians have sex with children - but those who help us learn about it, do everything possible so that such stories do not come out. When this behavior becomes the norm, the British public cannot be blamed for the confidence that its prime minister put his choke in a pig's mouth to join a secret society. Probably, for these people, such an act is also the norm.
Many members of the British ruling class are sadly mistaken, believing that the hatred of "bullingdon boys" is due to elementary envy. The vast majority of educated men who studied in private schools and now run the country really believe that everyone wants to be like them, and therefore any criticism of the elite is primarily a manifestation of envy.
This is largely due to the fact that the seven percent of students attending British private schools are inspired by the idea of meritocracy, which says that a person is rewarded according to his abilities. And this is despite the fact that most people cannot afford to teach their children in paid schools, and that the students who graduated from them then easily go up to the high society. They make up a third of the members of parliament, almost half of all observers in the media, most of the House of Lords, diplomats and high-ranking government officials, and more than 70% of high-level judges. Everyone has long understood that the system of ties between classmates and old friends protects itself.
This does not prevent them from talking about how fair she is. Eton's graduate and former bullingdon boy Boris Johnson said in a speech at the Center for Policy Studies that people with the highest IQ have the best jobs because they are smart. This is not only very far from the truth. After the speech, Boris failed a live test for the IQ, and nevertheless continued to insist that the kids from private schools study well, as they are very capable. Johnson in his life managed to work as minister, mayor of London, newspaper columnist and editor of the magazine. Each of these posts he received with the support of influential people with whom he studied.
British Finance Minister George Osborne (also from the Bullingdon Club) has been criticized by charitable organizations representing poor people and people with disabilities whose economic and domestic security he has destroyed with his reforms. He waved his hand to them, calling them "opponents of business," and under the label of "justice" gave tax breaks to millionaires (half of whom, by the way, attended private schools).
David Cameron himself is also not averse to talk about the existence of the meritocracy system in Britain. He also studied at Eton, where he became a member of the Bullingdon Club and the Pierce Gaverston Society. He advocates the ideology of meritocracy the loudest among conservatives, telling the poor and national minorities that they do not climb up the social ladder just because of their lack of “ambition”. He also says that a “free” market (that is, no one regulated sources of big profit from devotion) “can make you better.”
But whatever he says, his government has significantly increased inequality and reduced social mobility, which has made it difficult for people not to belong to its privileged circle to use those meritocratic values that it regularly praises.
The wound from such hypocrisy began to fester even before Lord Ashton punished Cameron this week for breaking the rules of the ritual, which say: you must obey the people who made you, otherwise you will be humbled. And it's not about the stupidity of young people, as some say. No, if guarded secrets are invented by powerful people in order to control other powerful people. Such a system is the exact opposite of democracy.
It is also the direct opposite of the meritocracy that they proclaim. Not just because rich boys go upstairs without any problems (we already know this), but also because David Cameron’s small and disgusting scandal confirms the suspicions that many have: that in British society the prime ministers are not due to talent and hard work . You will not get this post even because of your wealth. You can get it by mocking the homeless and fucking dead pigs in your mouth. Such a ritual gives you power because you have shown complete and slavish obedience to your fellow oligarchs.
That's why we laugh.
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