"I just wanna be famous"

The car in your drive; the phone in your pocket; the clothes in your wardrobe - chances are you will have acquired at least one of those through debt. Average UK household debt, excluding mortgages, now totals £9,240 and the average owed by every UK adult is £30,460, including mortgages, which represents 133% of average earnings, according to the national charity Credit Action.

What was once seen as a novel way of acquiring that much needed household appliance or once-in-a-lifetime luxury, has in the last 10 years become the only feasible way to keep up with the lifestyle pumped out 24/7 by the media - that is, the faux-celebrity consumerist dream: if you want it, if the celebrity class have it, you also deserve it. To deny one's self such a thing would invariably invite the unenviable tag of "so last season", a fate which really would be worse than debt.

Not only must one live as celebrities do, one must also, if possible, break into the celebrity class itself. Any less than being paraded on the front pages of thousands of magazines, billboards, being noticed, talked about and desired by many, is to live a life that is anonymous and boring - the most pointless and futile existence of all.

Of course, the desire asserts itself early on: "fame" has become the career of choice for many, if not most, British children. A recent study found that careers that were previously attractive to pre-teens such as teaching, banking and medicine, have been superceded by the insatiable aspiration to appear on the television or feature in magazines .

...amongst the findings was the overwhelming desire exhibited by many of the younger generation to attempt to find fame and fortune. The research found that modern pre-teens certainly have big dreams – their top three career aspirations being sportsman (12%), pop star (11%) and actor (11%).

"There is more to life than the media," observes Germaine Greer, "but not much...In the information age invisibility is tantamount to death."

The biggest growth in Internet use among teenagers and young adults in recent years has been centred around social networking. Aside from the convenience of being able to instantly communicate for free online with any number of friends attached to one's "network", sites such as Facebook and Myspace allow for a very modern marketing of the self; a way of maintaining one's status through the hierarchical game of how many friends one has or what direction one's life is currently taking - in the eye's of others of course. It has become perhaps the second tier celebrity treadmill: open to all yet decidedly elitist. One of the strangest, and most evidently "modern" phenomena, is to visit a historic or revered tourist attraction in the UK, Europe or further afield, only to find tourists whom, rather than enjoying the moment and taking in the obvious beauty of the location/place/historic building, exhibit the more pressing concern of trying to capture the perfect Facebook or Myspace photo to upload and use as leverage for social status on their return home.

Zygmunt Bauman, in his book Consuming Life, puts it this way: "In a society of consumers, turning into a desirable and desired commodity is the stuff of which dreams, and fairy tales, are made"

When yet another contestant exits the stage of Britain's Got Talent utterly humiliated, the question increasingly asked is "is this not going too far?", to whit the answer habitually follows "nobody made them do it". Indeed; nobody is made to do anything in a free society; yet people are inclined to be persuaded by advertising, desperation, poor education, financial vulnerability, plain bad sense, and the belief that fame will open up the glamorous (yet in reality utterly unrealistic) world they see on their television sets to them in a way that any other pursuit simply would not.

Those at the very bottom of society have little realistic chance of becoming bricklayers or hairdressers, (of which there is absolutely nothing wrong; although you would not think so were you to accept the message put out by the media,) let alone barristers or lawyers; and in an environment where there is little prospect of future gainful employment, and therefore - in their eyes - minimal practical point of education, the idea that "anyone can become famous" - for doing next to nothing - spreads like an extremely virulent venereal disease. It would not be inaccurate to suggest that those at the bottom are far more likely to take celebrity culture seriously than any genuinely prospective doctors or lawyers.

Rather than the typical stereotype of an underclass chocked up to the gills on casual racism, Stella, and rap music, there is a generation of poor children with aspirations linked to the top 1% of society while languishing in the inescapable trap of the bottom 10%.

While only an assumption, it would appear that the more society degenerates into gross inequality and social alienation the stronger this desperation will become - that the frenetic grasping for celebrity appears as a function and safety valve for a lack of social mobility that is engulfing both the UK and the US. At the same time, it becomes increasingly hard to imagine that a society without the twin functioning delusions of attainable celebrity and vast debt would be recognisable in any way to the society we live in today.

Change? Not really

The much-used mantle during the election campaigns of both main opposition parties has been "change", with David Cameron declaring that "we need change so together we can build a stronger, better country", while Nick Clegg admonished his audience during the national televised debates to seize a "once in a generation opportunity for change". It all sounds very nice, (strawberry fields and all that), and carries with it the positive connotations of the Obama campaign of 2008/2009; all the while performing the successful con trick of hiding the clear as day prospect of no forthcoming change whatsoever.

While "Dave" seeks to present a modern Conservative Party, embodying all the buzzwords of what 21st century Britain is supposed to be about: "diversity", "tolerance" and, again "CHANGE", and Nick Clegg tells us to help forge a "new politics", a report by the Madano Partnership, The Class of 2010, paints an all too familiar picture of the continued accession of a ruling class in Britain that was, in effect, born to govern.

The report found that,

"Whilst more detailed research will be required, there is a clear trend with a marked increase in the number of likely successful candidates who were privately or independently educated - up by as much as three times the 1997 figure. The figures suggest that roughly a third (29%) of winnable candidates in 2010 will have attended private or independent schools. When considering only those candidates where we have identified their school, the figure for private or independently educated is even higher at 38%; this compares to 13% in 1997."

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In focusing only on independent schools, the report does not face the other big hurdle which blights poor children's chance of landing any kind of well-paid job, let alone a job in parliament: school selection via house price. Despite the fact that the decisions which effect everybody are taken overwhelmingly by a privileged few who attend fee-paying schools, there is another layer of inequality reproduced by the fact that it costs considerable sums of money to find oneself even in a modestly good school - via of course a house in a desirable catchment area. An expensive house usually equals a good school. Crude but consistent. Together with the rise in unpaid internships, this ensures that the route to parliament is all but closed to those from modest backgrounds, let alone those from working class families. Dr Lee Elliott Major, research director of the Sutton Trust, which campaigns to increase opportunity for non-privileged children, had this to say on parliamentary internships:

"It remains a scandal that unpaid internships are still tolerated in parliament, because they represent an unjustified and easily removed barrier to social mobility."

The results of a vastly unequal schools system exist alongside a change in the professions that are leading people on to parliament, of which the Madano Partnership recorded:

"Those candidates with a background in consultancy (up from 4% to 16%), business, finance, law, and agriculture (as well as the third sector - Charities and NGOs) are all up in 2010 in comparison with the 1997 intake. Those with a teaching/education, trade union and health/medicine background are all down from 12 years ago."

Is it any wonder that the public feels so disillusioned with politics and, more importantly, with politicians, when so many of those elected to represent them come from a small and unrepresentative pool of people? A large number of whom are either directly related to former members of parliament, directly related to each other, or brandishing the kind of double barrel surnames one thought only existed inside the pages of the novels of Charles Dickens.

As John Harris in the Guardian puts it:

[Of the Conservative Party candidates who might be elected at the next parliament]"...There is a smattering of Old Etonians, including millionaire campaigner Zac Goldsmith, Tory intellectual Jesse Norman, and Rory Stewart, once a tutor to princes William and Harry. The ranks will also include at least two alumni of Harrow, and three from Radley College, along with old boys and girls from Highgate, Millfield, Winchester, Charterhouse, Stowe and Roedean."

All of those mentioned were elected. Change indeed.

"The surface of...society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through." - Alexis de Tocqueville

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Colonel Sanders or Comandante Castro?

In the very centre of Santiago de Cuba, Cuba's second largest city, lies Parque Cespedes, on the corner of which can be found the Casa Grande hotel, built in the American style in 1914 to cater to wealthier Cubans from Havana and visitors from the United States who decided to make the trip eastwards away from the bright lights of Havana and into the "wilder" and more "Africanised" Oriente province. Fifty years of communist revolution and aside from what would once have been American accents now being distinctly European - "Ein Cerveza por favor" - the dynamic is very much the same: one marked by a distinct separation between those who have and those who do not. For a society that supposedly abolished racial discrimination some half-century ago, the patrons of Cuba's hotels are overwhelmingly white and foreign, even if the "tourism apartheid" that previously prevented Cubans from staying in hotels has recently been abolished by the "new" government of the "younger" Raul Castro. The thin and mawkish faces looking up at this hotel's restaurant terrace begging for change (of the financial kind) have a palpably darker hide - the more observant may also have noticed a distinct lack of black faces in the revolutionary leadership; in a country that is 62% black. This reflects Cuban society as a whole, whereby white Cubans of Spanish descent often have relatives in Miami from whom they may receive remittances (the vast majority of the wealthy who fled Cuba in the early 1960s to Miami were white), leaving, as during Batista's day, the Cuban blacks and Mulattos to cut the cane and roll the cigars.

Cuba has some of the most beautiful women in the world, and when the country was forced to open up its economy to foreign tourism to survive in the early 1990s, so were a great many of its women. Yes, open up, and yes to survive. Visit any tourist hot-spot and you will find the deliberate hustling or "jineterismo" of a usually middle-aged male (or female, especially in Havana) which camouflages a more basic sex-for-cash transaction. Some of these "relationships" even go from the bedroom to the Consultaria Juridica, in the case of those Cubans lucky enough to secure marriage with a foreign tourist. (There are sprawling Internet forums filled with Canadians and Europeans who have been "MOC'ed" by Cubans (Marriage of Convenience), each with their own heart-rending story to tell.) There is a cruel irony about those revolutionary tourists buying Che souvenirs before providing a marriage and a visa along with many wasted years of their lives after being conned into marrying someone who is taking the only democratic choice the regime cannot ultimately deny them, that is not without want of trying, - the ability to vote with one's feet and leave. Tonight is no different, and as I sip my weak Havana Club Mohito (Bacardi moved out long ago) I'm surrounded by budding Western sugar daddies, footing the bar tap and dolling out spending money to their Cuban "girlfriends", who themselves look as if they are attempting to create in fashion some caricature of what they think capitalism might look like - all smutty disco garb and gold chains.

Strolling along the Malecon, Havana's historic sea wall, one cannot but be alarmed by the frequency with which one witnesses young Cuban girls, often no older than 14 or 15 years old, fraternising with European and Canadian tourists of a certain age. "First-world" travellers, keen to gain "life experience", have taken to viewing their "third-world" counterparts as exotic products - Latinas in this case - for their own consumption. Cuba, so long discouraging of tourism, now actively welcomes those from the capitalist countries, who flock to the island with their much-needed dollars and their apparently insatiable appetite for "consuming" the locals. The Cuban government has done little to discourage this. According to Michael Clancy, author of The Globalisation of Sex Tourism and Cuba, the Cuban government's attitude towards the "consumers" of this "profession" has been to "send a message to the global sex tourist community that Cuba was open for business".

Rather than nationalising wealth, The Revolution has socialised poverty, or in this case, socialised the need to sell one's body to put food on the table.

That is not to say that there is any meaningful socialism left in Cuba. Indeed, this is an island where everybody is on the take. The capitalist economy still functions, albeit shoddily; it supplies Cubans, via the black market, with everything from chicken and soap through to the rental of the latest Hollywood blockbusters. The prohibition of private profit produces an unregulated and shoddy version of capitalism whereby government peso shops stand empty while shops which operate in convertible currency (Cuba uses two currencies) offer overpriced Western products that most Cubans cannot afford. Supplying most Cubans are illicit street vendors, who walk the back streets shouting out the name of whatever it is they are selling: coffee, chicken, pork, which itself has usually been pilfered from the state - a state which is increasingly unable to bridge the gap between production and the consumer. Now, even when possessing CUCs (the equivalent of dollars), you cannot buy much food. Even the shops designed specifically for tourists stand near empty. The situation is not unlike that of Poland in the 1980s – the switch to full-blown military dictatorship, a worsening economy, growing dissent and increasing calls for real change. The most common phrase you will hear in Cuba is "no es facil" (it's not easy).

Cabrera Infante, one of Cuba's greatest ever writers, once said: "For us Cubans socialism was a ponderous joke that killed us laughing. It is still wearing us out - a joke on us". The joke however appears not to have worn off for the rest of the world, judging by the two million tourists who flock to Cuba every year, often summing up their desire to visit the island with the disturbing phrase "before it changes", as if talking about some kind of laboratory experiment - and thereby helping to put off any real change by handing over the foreign currency that keeps the regime going. Being the reticent and lonely bulwark against the rising tide of neo-liberal capitalism is not so funny when it is you who are forced to live through this "alternative" with no chance of any interference in your own internal affairs. Cubans would probably very much like McDonalds in Havana. After all, plastic food is better than no food.