You Can Take a Tour Through Revolution, Poverty, and Misery Thanks to This Sleazy Company

Screenshots taken from politicaltours.com

Do you want to go on a vacation in which you gawk at impoverished locals as they fumble around in the ashes of their broken existence? Are you eager to make an unnecessary burden of yourself in an area with pressing political concerns, such as establishing a government after a revolution? Well, now you can do exactly that, thanks to Political Tours.

The UK company describes itself as “a revolutionary concept for travelers passionate about politics and current affairs.” Basically, it’s a travel agency, but rather than taking you on tours with names like “Romantic Danube” or “Mysteries of the Catacombs,” it offers journeys through a post-revolutionary Libya still teetering on the brink of chaos ($7,000, excluding flights), through Turkey as it flirts with authoritarianism ($4,400), and through Ukraine, where the blood on the Maidan has barely dried ($5,400).

In other words, if a nation's downtrodden masses consider having a revolution any time soon, it's feasible that they'll have an audience of nosy rich foreigners who've paid thousands of dollars for a front-row seat to their misery.

While clicking through the site, I came across the “London & the Financial Crisis Tours: Debt and The City” (which appears to be a weird, shitty pun on Sex and the City), and for whatever reason, the idea of turning the economic mess that precipitated the Tories’ wanton destruction of the welfare state into a tourist zoo didn’t sit all that well with me. The tour costs $670 for two days; if you need to spend that much money to understand the impact of the financial crisis, you'll probably never really understand it at all.

That said, the description does make it sound pretty great. “We start off in Mile End, East London, one of the poorest areas in Britain despite its proximity to the City—we look at families affected by debt.” What does that mean? Will you literally be walking around and staring at poor people as they peer mournfully through the front window of Cash4Gold? The agency also promises prospective tourists the chance to “look at a major construction project that came to a halt following the credit crunch—part of a debt fueled credit boom."

Now, as I've made my way to work over the last few months, I’ve walked past a building site that is gradually being turned into a new gated community of condos that will most likely be bought up by foreign billionaires as investments. I often think about how, over roughly a year, I’ve observed a piece of socio-economic history in the making: the selling off of London as we know it and its "regeneration" into a playground for millionaires. If I'd have known that other people were ready to pay hundreds of pounds for that privilege, perhaps I'd have stopped stressing about being late and taken some time to breathe in the experience. Who knows, maybe I should envisage every dull aspect of my existence as an enlightening tour package about life in 21st-century Britain. The upside is that I’m getting it completely free of charge. The downside is that I’m never allowed to leave.

A slideshow displays the excitement of rubbing shoulders with London workers.

Next in the itinerary is a “crash course in the financial weapons of mass destruction” from a “leading city investment firm.” I guess having a megalomaniac explain where he hid the bodies would be pretty interesting, in a gruesome kind of way. Presumably this would invovle some bankers, who are inexplicably still employed, attempting to explain how they ruined the economy through a bunch of financial mechanisms that are specifically designed to fuck people over and then confuse them so they don't understand how or why. I wonder what emotion would come first, anger or boredom?

The second day has basically the same vibe. Highlights include hearing “from the politicians who tried to hold the bankers to account, and the regulators—the FSA [Financial Services Authority] and the Bank of England—on how they handled the crisis" over lunch. Given that the FSA was recently shut down for what Wikipedia politely describes as “perceived regulatory failure of the banks during the financial crisis” and is usually preceded in articles by financial journalists with the words “the much-maligned,” I imagine this would either be very depressing or a revisionist fantasy on a par with Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Some more tours offered by the company

If walking around London doesn’t tickle your fancy, why not go on the “Scotland Tour: The Road to Independence”? For a mere $4,400 you can “meet former Labour supporters at a working men’s club and see how the [Scottish National Party] took a foothold as traditional industry decline [sic].”

I’m not sure why, in the age of the internet, you couldn’t just find a working men’s club, buy a cheap pint, and talk to the people there. But then these are Scottish nationalists who have been robbed of their traditional industry, so maybe they’d eat anyone with an English accent alive just for sustenance if there wasn't a tour guide there with his electric cattle prod.

Of all Political Tours' offerings, perhaps the most egregious example of poverty porn is the “Greece & The Euro Tour.” For just $4,600, you will be let into the secrets of the “origins, purpose and value” of the Potato Movement, a program where “municipalities buy large quantities of agricultural products and sell them to citizens at cost value.” Now I’m no expert on the Greek financial crisis, but my guess is that the "origins, purpose and value" of the Potato Movement are that people couldn’t afford food. There’s also a talk about the economy called “How the Real Economy Was Destroyed,” in which “one economist argues Greece is in need of major structural reform.” Yeah, Greeks, what's the deal? You've been flailing around in shit for years now; haven't you thought that perhaps your economy could do with major structural reform?

Hey, here's an idea: Maybe the Greeks could get themselves a real economy in which cunning entrepreneurs get rich idiots to pony up cash to visit a UK food bank and ask people why they can’t afford to eat.

The crass stupidity of this tour is best summed up by the visit to Athens's Syntagma Square, “where the demonstrations protesting austerity measures have culminated and where many riots have started.” Colleagues of mine have stood in that square dodging Molotov cocktails as the Greeks turned violent over political differences brought to a boiling point because of the dreadful toll austerity has taken on a once-proud nation. It’s an ongoing tragedy, and these cocks want to milk it for cheap entertainment value. Who the fuck does that?

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