How would you feel if you knew that this country’s economy was being deliberately destabilised by, say, Estonian gangsters? I’ll say they’re Estonian not as a slur on Estonians in general, but because Estonia is a far away country of which we know little, whose citizens’ behaviour normally has little bearing on our lives. Anyway, let’s say that these gangsters have accumulated vast wealth, originally through the trafficking of child prostitutes and narcotics, and thereafter through the powers of intimidation which vast wealth buys. These subtle and not so subtle forms of intimidation have also allowed them to acquire a certain kind of rough respectability, which has opened an entree for them into polite society and the salons of the political elite. Despite their propensity for using the wrong knife, spitting on the carpets and pistol whipping clumsy waiters to within an inch of their lives, this also means that the gangsters now have many conventionally powerful friends, even though these “friends” privately despise the gangsters for their rough ways, though naturally naked fear of extreme physical violence prevents this emotion ever being expressed out loud.
Among the many things the gangsters do to amass yet more wealth is to buy a few political parties, so that no one gets any bright ideas about investigating the gangsters’ activities too closely, especially when the parties they’ve bought like puppies in a pet shop go on to form governments. Other things they do include gambling, but always making sure the odds are massively on their side.
And then the gangsters set about the destabilisation of the British Economy entirely to serve their own interests, but in such an arcane and complicated scam that hardly anyone can fathom how it’s done. Worse, there’s no one there to stop them doing it, even though everyone knows it’s going on. This is because the only people powerful enough to stand up to the gangsters either already work for them, or are simply too frightened to act.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair. Various international bodies, taking a cue from Ethelred the Unready, think the best thing to do is to try and pay off the gangsters in a modern kind of Danegeld, although predictably (because they are, after all, gangsters) the hoodlums simply trouser the bribe and continue the thieving that’s draining Britain dry.
So dry, indeed, that the gangsters begin to lose patience with the slowness of the speed in which the money’s being pumped out of Britain into their own pockets. They blame the Government –- and who wouldn’t? The answer, then, is to borrow the window dressing of democracy and change the government, but obviously not for just any old alternative government chosen by the people, who are daily being tear-gassed and clubbed in Parliament Square to protect hapless politicians from their electors’ wrath. Clearly, the gangsters will choose some pliant stooge to do their bidding, to guarantee the endless flow of money. Moreover, they won’t want anyone with any electoral strings attached.
(At this point it might be worth digressing for a moment and speculating – that, after all, is this year’s thing – what exactly the gangsters spend all that money on. Surely they can only buy so many ocean-going yachts to go along with the politicians, cocaine, prostitutes and policemen they’ve already got. Who knows? Perhaps they have sex with endangered species and eat gold.)
But to return to my original question – how would you feel about all this? How would you feel if our elected Prime Minister, however appalling and pitiful he may be, was replaced at the insistence of some foreign gangsters by some patsy from the House of Lords, like Leon Brittan? Or even Neil Kinnock? And solely in order to ease these gangsters’ even greater enrichment? And how do you suppose your fellow Europeans in Greece and Italy feel, now that this has happened to them?
Of course, it’s not exactly what’s happened, but the scenario I’ve outlined above can hardly count as satire, or even a metaphor, because it’s too close to reality. I may have overegged the violence bit, but the speculation in government bonds which is systematically destroying the eurozone, and may yet destroy the European Union, is almost entirely the work of hedge fund billionaires after a quick buck and seeking to destroy any political structures that might regulate or control their actions.
This isn’t, in other words, a sovereign debt crisis, but a crisis of sovereignty. It’s about whether the pooled sovereignty of states and international bodies, which ultimately flows upwards from us, can be trumped quite so effortlessly by a tiny group of individuals who are, to be polite, little better than gangsters, and are often much worse. And yet the solution is so simple. All we need is governments to recognise gangsters when they see them, and outlaw this kind of trading in the same way we long ago outlawed the trade in drugs and children. The one slight problem with hoping for that, though, is that the hedge funds bought the Conservative Party years ago – and cheaply.
