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# Britain's holiday from reality
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/britains-holiday-from-reality/
- Published: 2012-06-29T15:06:17.000Z
- Updated: 2019-02-14T22:16:29.000Z
- Description: A season of high spectacle in London offers only a temporary respite from the United Kingdom's economic and political troubles. But the two kinds of experience also overlap, says David Hayes.
- Author: David Hayes
- Tags: Europe, #Migrated, Politics & activism, United Kingdom, democracy & power, openglobalrights-openpage-blog, Democracy and government, International politics, UK, #en, #Import 2026-04-09 17:27

If any enterprising self-starter is looking for a gap in the market in London this northern-hemisphere summer, then offering therapy for "event exhaustion" might prove a lucrative sell. A city rich in attraction and spectacle even in normal times seems abundant to an extraordinary degree in mid-2012\. The celebration of Queen Elizabeth’s sixty years on the throne, the Olympic games, and England’s participation in the European football championship (always a consuming national psychodrama) are but the most compelling - or perhaps just unavoidable - highlights.

Such state ceremonials and sporting tournaments would usually command near-universal public and media attention. In this exceptional season, though, they face rare competition from prominent legal and political theatrics: a formal inquiry into media ethics provoked by revelations of industrial-scale phone-hacking by British newspapers (most notoriously so far, those under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch’s News International); the eurozone’s deep crisis (crucial to Britain, even though it is not part of the single currency); and the buffeting of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat government that, two years into its five-year term, has lost several of the qualities sound administrations most need - coherence, touch, momentum and effective results.

There are, of course, clear differences between the two kinds of event. The monarch’s "[diamond jubilee](http://www.thediamondjubilee.org/?ref=opendemocracy.net)" and the Olympics offer themselves as inclusive national–global festivities, whereas [Lord Leveson’s inquiry](http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/?ref=opendemocracy.net) and the government’s troubles are infused with political partisanship. Their respective "communities of interest" also vary. Only a small proportion of the enormous crowds that lined the River Thames on 3 June to see a [flotilla](http://www.thamesdiamondjubileepageant.org/?ref=opendemocracy.net) of 1,000 boats led by Her Majesty’s refitted pleasure-barge *Spirit of Chartwell* will be as interested in studying the possible impact of a "Grexit" - Greece leaving the eurozone - and the bailout of Spanish banks, or in parsing the testimony of Gordon Brown and David Cameron at the media hearings.

Yet the royal-sporting and legal-political dramas do overlap. Both involve huge amounts of money; both are surrounded by political decision-making and calculation at the highest level; and both are scrutinised with equal intensity by London’s power and media networks for signals of the public mood and the political weather. Taken together, they also reinforce the sense - shared inside and beyond the city – that London’s mix of wealth, opportunity, people and magnetism increasingly disconnects it from other parts of the United Kingdom.

Halfway through 2012, London’s self-projection carries an echo of the Woody Allen character who tells his intended beau: "I can’t keep up this level of charm - I’ll have a heart-attack!" Perhaps then it’s unsurprising that so many citizens, at least where the diamond jubilee is concerned, appear to have made the choice to tune out, turn in, take off - or (in lieu of that therapy) write furious letters to the *Guardian* or *Independent* about how their country rivals North Korea in the mass orchestration of obsequious loyalty.

\[To read on in [*Inside Story*](http://inside.org.au/?ref=opendemocracy.net), click [here](http://inside.org.au/a-holiday-from-reality/?ref=opendemocracy.net) \- \]