Resisting the urge to regurgitate a load of pig jokes because you've heard them all many times already since Monday, the
#PigGate scandal, after some fantastic lampooning of David Cameron has actually raised some serious questions about who are these elitist twonks who are somehow running the country, and furthermore WHY are these silver spoon suckers making all the decisions? how do they get there?
Why does a billionaire Lord donate £8million to the Torys one day and then another day reveal their leader, the Prime Minister fucked a pig corpse???
This article brilliantly puts it all in layman terms.....
Article from
The Leveller September 21st, 2015.
What the British are really laughing about
 |
| The rituals and secret-keeping of Britain’s privately educated elites are a cornerstone of Conservative Party unity. |
Whether or not it’s true, the Internet has decided for the time being
that British Prime Minister David Cameron probably put his private
parts into the mouth of a dead pig when he was at Oxford. The
allegations have been made by extremely well-connected Establishment
figures, former Conservative Party Deputy Chairman Lord (Michael)
Ashcroft, and former Sunday Times political editor Isabel Oakeshott, and
the story is published in the Daily Mail, which makes this the highest
possible tier of character assassination in British politics.
Ashcroft’s goal is, according to the Mail, “revenge”. In the years leading up to Cameron taking office in 2010, the
tax-dodging billionaire
had donated over £8 million to the Conservative Party, bailing them out
of debt after their disastrous election defeat in 2005. He had worked
as Treasurer and later Deputy Chairman of the party, helping to manage
them back to an electable public image under Cameron. Yet Ashcroft had
expected that he would be given high office in exchange for this, and
Cameron didn’t pay up when the time came. It now appears Ashcroft has
spent the last five years compiling his new book,
Call Me Dave, in which the pig story and other damning allegations about the Prime Minister are made.
Outsiders to the British cultural landscape are focusing on the
central detail that a leader of a G8 country screwed a dead pig, because
it’s
hilarious.
But the howling laughter of the British themselves goes deeper than
just schadenfreude at a man doing something disgusting and getting
caught – this is about class.
When Cameron was at Oxford, he was a member of several secret societies of rich young men. The most famous of these is the
Bullingdon Club,
after which Yale’s infamous Skull and Bones is fashioned. The aim of
the Bullingdon Club is ostensibly to dress up fancy with the chaps, get
blind drunk at an expensive restaurant or private dining room, and trash
the place – because they can afford to pay for the damages without
doing a day’s work. Among their known initiation rites, they are said to
have to burn a £50 bill in front of a homeless person.
And that leads to the other side of what the Bullingdon Club (and
societies like it) is about: upper class right wing team-building. The
friendships and alliances forged in the secret drinking societies of
powerful rich kids go on to define their careers, and these young men
all have access to the highest rungs of British society. Three
prominent members
of Cameron’s cabinet were members, whilst many others went on to run
the banks that crashed the economy in 2008 and the media empires that
protect them.
Burning money in front of a homeless person isn’t just intended to be
a nasty prank, it serves to train a Bullingdon boy’s senses, to make
other humans seem somehow less. That David Cameron and his allies George
Osborne and Boris Johnson have all done this, and that they have all
presided over a sharp spike in homelessness in London and throughout the
UK, are not coincidental. The MP who provided Lord Ashcroft with the
details of the pig story attended one meeting of the expensive club but
left in disgust because ‘it was all about despising poor people’.
And thus part of the reason why the British are so ready to believe
Lord Ashcroft’s story, aside from the fact that Ashcroft is a top-tier
Establishment figure in a country with
absurdly plaintiff-friendly libel laws,
is that Cameron’s ideological training is already well understood by
the public. There is nothing likable about such a background,
particularly when the ruling class it produces is waging a war on the
poor and disabled that would have made Thatcher blush.
So to then hear that the guy at the top of that pyramid was
peer-pressured into putting his dick in a pig’s mouth or risk not being
included in a club of nasty, entitled people, it creates a much more
satisfying reaction than mere laughter. A figure of terror becomes a
figure of ridicule, a reversal like the boggarts in Harry Potter, who
impersonate your worst nightmares until you can cast a spell on them
that makes them look absurd.
The pig scandal that now has the world laughing at Cameron wasn’t
from the Bullingdon Club but the Piers Gaverston, less well-known (until
this week), but with a reputation for bizarre sexual rituals and
initiation rites. Where the Bullingdon boys built their fraternity
around shared values of hating the poor, the Piers Gaverston was about
sexual humiliation and the creation of shared secrets. Its structural
function is as an agreement of mutually assured destruction between the
rulers of tomorrow – I know your secret and you know mine, so let’s stay
on the same side, yeah?
This forms one of the core mechanics of the British ruling class –
why reveal someone’s dirty little secret when you can keep schtum about
it and control them? This forms the basis of the
parliamentary whipping system,
where the Chief Whip of each respective party is expected to have an
arsenal of dirt locked away in their office so that when the time comes,
their party leader can ‘whip’ rebellious backbenchers with threats that
sometimes include leaking that story about you that you really don’t
want to be leaked.
In this elite culture not all corruption is financial. When it comes
to the top of British politics, sound character and a clean record do
not make you an asset. You’ll have a hard time joining unless they can
confirm that you are scum – and can make sure that the public don’t know
about it.
An interesting example of this is the role Margaret Thatcher played
in the elevation of certain members of her government and its allies.
Recent allegations in the growing
parliamentary child abuse scandal arose that Thatcher “
turned a blind eye”
to pedophiles that she promoted, including the provision of knighthoods
to known serial child abusers Jimmy Savile and Cyril Smith. Her own
Home Secretary, the now deceased
Leon Brittan, is still being investigated.
In each case, Thatcher is now thought to have been warned by security
services about the deviancy of these men, but is alleged to have
studiously ignored it. When it comes to secret-keeping and elite power,
it is not out of the question that in knowing they were child abusers,
Thatcher would have had political leverage over these allies of hers,
and so promoting them would have helped her strengthen her own power
while in office.
The parliamentary child abuse scandal is horrifying enough on its own
terms, but beyond that it has also further undermined public trust in
Westminster, already increasingly despised for being out-of-touch and
unaccountable after financial crises and
expenses scandals turn in a unsatisfyingly low number of scalps for voters to collect.
Where this relates to Cameron’s little mishap is that the public are
already exhausted to the point of raw antipathy with the way Westminster
power works, as a marketplace of secrets among unaccountable elites.
Our politicians might be screwing children, but the ones who could help
us to find out about it are
making sure that story is blocked.
When that kind of behavior is the norm, the British public can’t really
be blamed for believing that their PM put his knob into a pig to join a
secret society. This, too, is probably normal to these people.
Something grievously misunderstood by many members of the British
ruling class is that they believe hatred of the ‘Bullingdon boy’
archetype comes from mere jealousy. The vast majority of the privately
educated men who run the country
really think that everyone wants to be more like them, and that therefore any criticism of elites comes first and foremost from envy.
This is in large part because one of the core beliefs instilled into the 7% of pupils who attend Britain’s
divisive independent schools
is that of meritocracy. This despite the fact that not only can most
people not afford to send their children to these fee-paying schools,
the ones who do attend them end up getting an easy ladder up to high
society. They make up a third of MPs, nearly half of all newspaper
columnists, a majority of Lords, diplomats and senior civil servants,
and over 70% of senior judges. It is common knowledge that the old boys’
network looks after its own.
This doesn’t stop them from
telling the public that the system is fair. Alumnus of Eton and former Bullingdon boy Boris Johnson
said in a speech
to the Centre for Policy Studies that the people with the highest IQ
have the best jobs because they’re smart. Not only was this not even
remotely true, Boris then ‘
failed’
a live IQ test on air, yet persisted in the notion that kids who go to
independent schools do well because they’re brilliant. He has served
variously as a cabinet minister, Mayor of London, newspaper columnist,
and magazine editor, enjoying each job with the support of powerful
people with whom he went to school.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne (also of the
Bullingdon Club), was criticized by charities representing poor and
disabled people whose economic and household security was ruined by his
reforms. He
dismissed them
as “anti-business” and gave tax breaks to millionaires (half of whom,
incidentally, went to independent schools) in the name of “fairness”.
And David Cameron himself often likes to talk about the supposed
existence of meritocracy in the United Kingdom. He, too, went to Eton
before joining the Bullingdon Club and the Piers Gaverston. He is one of
the most vocal Conservatives when it comes to championing the
ideology of meritocracy, telling poor people and ethnic minorities that their lack of social climbing is because they lack “
aspiration”, and that ‘free’ markets (that is, unregulated financial bonanzas, by his allegiances) “can make you a better person”.
Separate from what he says, however, his government has significantly
increased inequality and decreased
social mobility,
making it even harder for people outside of his privileged background
to fulfill the meritocratic values he regularly trumpets.
The wound of that hypocrisy was already festering before Lord
Ashcroft punished him this week for breaking the rules of the ritual:
that you will obey the people who made you, or you will be humiliated.
This wasn’t, as some have said, young men being silly. Not if the
secrets being kept are designed by powerful men to keep other powerful
men under control. That kind of arrangement is the antithesis of
democracy.
And it is also the antithesis to the meritocracy they proclaim. Not
just because it’s rich boys getting an easy ride to the top – we already
knew that – but because David Cameron’s nasty little scandal speaks to a
suspicion many people already have: that in British society, you don’t
get to become Prime Minister because you’re talented or because you work
hard. You don’t even get there just because you’re rich. You get there
by traumatizing the homeless and skull-fucking a dead pig, and that
ritual gives you power because you have demonstrated utter, pathetic
submission to your fellow oligarchs.
That is why we’re laughing.
