HISTORICALLY, a jubilee year meant that to revitalise the failing economy, the wealthy had to let all debtors off the hook and free the slaves — a big economic reset.

Today, a jubilee should mean that the government must urgently legislate to halt fossil fuel driven economics.

However, during the platinum jubilee year celebrating the Queen’s 70 years on the throne, we are to applaud instead the “platinum pudding competition”; be grateful that all five to 11-year-olds will get a free book about British achievements; look forward to the June spectacle of royal parades with horse-drawn carriages, big brass bands, mounted troops in bright dress uniforms — all dutifully curated by the mainstream mass media. 

Moreover, besides reporting on the royal calendar’s weekly events, the mainstream media outlets also sycophantically broadcast each act of royal philanthrocapitalism.

For example, BBC Studios, the commercial arm of public broadcaster BBC, showcased the October 2021 opening ceremony of Prince William’s Earthshot charity, which, over 10 years, will award $1.4 million to each of five lucky contestants per year, ie $70m, who come up with winning ideas for tackling the climate catastrophe.

Nevertheless, a few days after the Earthshot extravaganza, a snippet of news, seemingly having nothing to do with anything other than itself, let the cat out of the bag — some Picasso artworks had been sold for $250m. 

Jumping off the page was the arithmetic that a few artworks are worth more than three times as much as 10 years’ worth of Prince William’s Earthshot prizes of $70m.

A key donor to Earthshot is the second-richest man in the world, anti-workers’ rights, tax-evading executive chairman of the e-commerce giant Amazon, Jeff Bezos, owner also of a multibillion-dollar space tourism outfit and proprietor of the Washington Post.

Prince William, aware of the general loathing for e-commerce robber barons but fulfilling his royal function of not talking about workers’ rights, predatory trading, perpetual profiteering, etc, has said only that space tourism isn’t a good look.

Like the Picasso/Earthshot hypocrisy, the celebrity appearance of Prince William’s father, Prince Charles, at the 2021 Cop26 conference on the fossil fuel driven climate catastrophe was marred somewhat by a British tabloid, known for its occasional contrarian stances, revealing that Prince Charles’s charity, the Prince’s Trust, took donations from Aramco, the giant Saudi Arabian oil corporation.

The mainstream media, acting as a convenient black hole for such occasional revelations, can also be counted upon to keep the British public in the dark about the national and global consequences of the royal duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, having worked for six centuries or so, and to this day, to further the vested interests of British royalty. 

Another inconvenient truth that needs looking into is that the duchies also do business through the secret tax havens set up to hide wealth and escape taxes.

In September 2018, The Lancet medical journal reported that 8.6 million people in poor countries die prematurely every year from inadequate healthcare — and no healthcare. 

Today, regionalised conflicts and the climate catastrophe also force millions of people to roam the Earth in search of a living. 

In January 2022, the international charity Oxfam’s report, Inequality Kills, stated that Covid-19 caused the deaths of 17 million people — not the 5.7 million conservatively estimated by the World Health Organisation. 

The vaccine apartheid imposed by big pharma’s refusal to waive intellectual property rights on the production of vaccines in poor countries contributes substantially to the high Covid-19 death rate.

Inequality Kills also reports that “economic violence” causes the deaths of 21,300 people in poor countries each day. The report also states that 160 million more people were forced into poverty during the pandemic — an admitted conservative estimate. Among the worst off are dispossessed groups, women and children.

In the UK alone, 4.3 million children, 31 per cent, live in poverty, nine out of a classroom of 30. Roaring inflation, much of it down to right-wing governments’ protection of predatory profiteering by the oil and gas giants, guarantees inbuilt inequalities such as these.

Nevertheless, the smooth-talking, jet-setting, the keep-the-dosh-and-pretend-to-improve-the-world, viciously narcissistic, brutally exploitative 10 richest men on Earth were legally permitted — at the very same time — to double their wealth.

Yet, Inequality Kills recommends only rescindable reforms of the sort instituted after WWII — such as increasing taxes on the wealthy; raising corporation tax; vaguely targeted debt relief; imposing a sizeable windfall tax on the wealth amassed by the billionaire class during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Even if Inequality Kills were to attract significant government legislation, the report typically ends up, despite its rightful lamentations, supporting the prolongation of siphon-up, trickle-down economics. 

Therefore, such reports act as a green light for the continuation of the systemic capitalist subjugation of the majority of the people on the planet.

Fortunately, to bring into being the decent world, deep-rooted instead in the values of reverence for life, equal human rights and responsibilities, millions of people know this must mean thwarting the constant attempts of the predatory billionaires and fossil fuel philanthrocapitalists to seduce whole populations — their grooming enhanced by reports like Inequality Kills, and by royal icons and the razzle-dazzle of a TV show awarding puny prizes to inventors led to believe some prizewinning innovations, welcome as they are, will save this incessantly battered planet and the continuously abused people on it.

Consequently, Britain’s millions of ordinary, conscientious objectors are surely obliged to mobilise in workplaces and every possible assembly to demand the government legislation urgently needed to establish a world for the many, not the few.

Simultaneously, increasingly well-informed progressive activists are also obliged — not least in this jubilee year — to call ceaselessly for the creation of a mass media that ditches the double-talk and reports instead on all that must be done to build the decent, non-profiteering economics fit for the 21st century and beyond.