“Dave” is Dave, the heroic astronaut and Big Government is HAL 9000, the jumped-up vending machine from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dave plans to break “the grip of the state monolith” by ripping circuit boards out of HAL’s memory bank until the ailing PC-gone-mad is left singing ‘Daisy Bell’, bringing to a close the “old-fashioned, top-down, take-what-you're-given model of public services” but without, er, "top-down reforms", it says here. Not before hawking the computer’s innards on eBay, leaving Dave and his MP chums with no responsibilities other than finding more loopholes in their expenses claim forms. Nice one, Dave! At least in Dave’s head that’s how it goes.
David "Dave" Cameron uses friendly colourful words that we can all understand but which actually mean nothing, like "Big Government"and "Big Society", but avoids words that might scare us, like "privatisation". It's Dave against the machine. And something called Big Government has got to be evil, right?*
In reality, following the successful fire sales of such countries as Chile, Iceland and Russia, "comparable countries" we've "too long we've been slipping against", what few British national assets are still nailed down since the 1980s (schools, hospitals, all public services, nothing important really, but not trees – Dave's already tried that) will be flogged at Dave’s mates' rates to the people who have your best interests at heart – faceless tax-dodging multi-national corporations. Like Dave says, “power will be placed in people's hands” by, er, selling it to completely unaccountable private companies.
“Of course,” Dave continues, “there are some areas – such as national security or the judiciary – where this wouldn't make sense.” Unfortunately, this probably also covers one British institution that I would quite happily see privatised: the royal family.
Think about it – the Yanks would love to buy ‘em out. They’ve already bought London Bridge. Now we could sell ‘em Buckingham Palace (only this time the real one). Or we could fob them off to the commemorative plate industry. And what with the royal wedding and The King’s Speech**, the Windsor Plc (formerly Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Inc.) stock index probably hasn’t been this high since Diana carked it. And the best bit the sale is likely to make every single Daily Mail reader’s head explode (“I love privatisation, but I love the Queen, privatisation, the Queen – gah”). It’s a win-win situation. Instant saving of £41.5m a year – the most of any royal family in Europe and six times more than Spain’s thrifty monarchy.
You know it makes sense.
*I always thought that this particular monolith, Big Government, represented an evolutionary step forward for the human race, but there we go.
**Incidentally, The King’s Speech cost the UK Film Council around £1m to make and has already notched up more than £177m at the box-office. Again, keen bit of business there, Dave, closing down the UK Film Council.
