Sunday 12 December 2010

Student protests – there's comedy in everything

The student protests in the week provided me with an opportunity to laugh out loud, mainly because there was a very strong element of comedy in the involvement of two members of the royal family, namely Prince Charles and Camilla.

Prime Minister Feathers McGraw claims that the full
force of the law will be brought to bear on 'the feral thugs'
Imagine, for a minute, that you are an angry protester, quite rightly fed-up to the back teeth with Nick Clegg and his ballot box betrayal; you're a bit hard up, thanks to the global banking crisis (nothing to do with Gordon Brown as the Tories would have you believe) and you face years of idealogically-motivated 'austerity measures' courtesy of George 'it doesn't bother me, I'm a multi-millionaire' Osborne. In other words, you are paying for the reckless bankers who have squandered everything and it's all coming out of YOUR taxes. Furthermore, you hear rumour that not only are the bankers edging their way back to big bonuses, but that big companies, like Vodafone and Top Shop (owned by that big, fat bloke who quite obviously eats miles too much and does little in the way of exercise) are managing to avoid paying hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxes. In the case of fat Top Shop bloke, he's sending it all to his wife who lives in Monaco – forget demonstrators, we need lynch mobs!

So, there you are: your kids won't be able to afford university – that's now to be reserved for people who speak like Kirstie Allsopp – you're likely to be made redundant and all the fat cats, unlike you, are avoiding paying their taxes. What's more, Eton-educated, Bullingdon Club member Feathers McGraw, aka David Cameron – take a look, they really were separated at birth – is talking about the Big Society, which we all know boils down to the attitude of 'you do it' – meaning that the Government's austerity measures are cutting things back so drastically that you, the man and woman in the street, can clear your own snow, grit your own roads – and all under the guise of 'the big society' and 'pulling together as a team'. Two words spring to mind and one of them is 'off'.

There's a lot of anger about, for all the reasons outlined above and that's liable to make any self-respecting demonstrator a little unhappy with Theresa May's assertion that peaceful protest is acceptable. Why, in heaven's name, would a protester want to do anything that was acceptable to the seagull-resembling home secretary? And, as one of the Whitechapel anarchists pointed out on television during the first wave of student protests a few weeks ago, when has peaceful protest ever achieved anything? He had a point.

So, the scene was set for a bit of a civil unrest and yes, of course, it got out of hand, like any good demonstration does, but the punchline was tremendous. A bungling royal security department decided to send a huge, black, gleaming Bentley carrying two super toffs – the very people that sum up the whole problem and who won't be suffering at all under the coalition's austerity measures. Round the corner they cruise into the path of a breakaway group of demonstrators and just imagine it for one moment, as I did on Saturday morning, what they, the protesters, must have thought. A huge, black, shiny, ostentatious symbol of wealth with huge, clear windows showing off its valuable cargo – that of the future king and queen who were unwittingly taunting the protestors from the supposed safety of the car.

Well, I don't know about you, but those students must have been eager to prise open their cans of vinyl matt emulsion and, as the car passed by, they must have been even more elated when they discovered that one of the windows was open. Game on!

For some reason, I found it all terribly funny, mainly because it was so ridiculous, like a situation comedy, which got even funnier when I heard some of the demonstrators chanting "off with their heads, off with their heads!".And then, of course, there was the possibility that some of those surrounding the royal Bentley were members of an anarchist group called The Wombles. Surely, Uncle Bulgaria's finest moment.