EVERY few years, film emerges of diminutive chaps brandishing rudimentary weapons in a jungle clearing on some remote Pacific island. It’s accompanied by a narrative suggesting that this is one of the world’s last, undiscovered indigenous peoples whose customs and laws have remained untouched by the march of progress in the outside world. No matter how well-intentioned these reports are they are always delivered in a supercilious and patronising tone such as you might expect in a story about cutesy animals performing unusual tricks.

As the footage proceeds you’re tempted to entertain the thought that in spite of their wooden spears (which are always poison-tipped) and laissez-faire approach to personal grooming their homes might be fully equipped with wi-fi and access to television. And when they’re not throwing spears at passing drones they’re marvelling at footage of UK royal occasions on their late-night equivalent of Have I Got News For You.

Quite what they would make of a Rolls Royce making its stately way down a London boulevard accompanied by police outriders and containing nothing more than a fancy piece of tribal headgear engages the senses. “What in the name of the wee man is going on there?” they might ask. And then perhaps a tribal elder might intervene and caution them against racial stereotyping and of the need to respect primitive cultures.

The worship of the British crown jewels at last week’s state opening of the UK Parliament was only slightly tarnished by the absence of the actual Queen, Her Majesty having cried off with a doctor’s note. Yet, there seemed to be an added frisson of reverence surrounding this year’s state opening. This, I suspect, owed something to its occurrence in the year of Her Majesty’s platinum jubilee. The celebrations and pageantry for this most august of all royal anniversaries reach their apotheosis next month with a bewildering and sprawling assortment of events.

It’s been announced that large outdoor screens will be installed in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff so that “thousands of people can come together to celebrate” the Platinum Jubilee. There will be street parties because, well … no royal occasion is ever really complete without them. Every royal birth, marriage and baptism is an opportunity to take the day off and line your street with trestle tables bedecked in bunting and groaning with the stalwart fayre of the ordinary British household: coronation chicken sandwiches, pork pies and lashings of jelly and ice cream. Reportedly, there are 70,000 of these neighbourhood feasts occurring throughout the UK. They will happen in a four-day period which also includes a service of thanksgiving, a concert and a pageant.

The UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport has also launched a children’s activity pack to help the wee ones learn about The Queen’s reign. This will include articles about “how the country has changed in the last seven decades”. Official UK Government guidance about the content of these children’s packs says they will include “opportunities to colour in a corgi or crown and bunting to decorate for street parties”.

Perhaps you might think that activities such as “colouring in a corgi or crown” are a bit infantile for Britain’s children and that surely there ought to be something of a more educational and mind-expanding nature. And then you learn that the adults will get to watch a documentary hosted by the kenspeckle baked confectionery enthusiast, Mary Berry called The Queen’s Jubilee Pudding: 70 Years in the Making.

This ‘documentary’ is part of a BBC Platinum Jubilee extravaganza, which the corporation describes as a “momentous milestone” and that it will be “marked across television, radio, BBC News, iPlayer and Sounds with content from across the UK”. It will feature “the biggest names from across the BBC” who will also host a “variety of programmes celebrating The Queen’s extraordinary 70-year reign” including that one about her Jubilee Pudding.

This orchestrated infantilising of the British public serves a more subtle purpose beyond celebrating 70 years of Her Majesty on the throne and the history of her puddings. It’s the social equivalent of boiling a frog where we are all cast in the role of the hapless short-bodied amphibians.

It’s the process of embedding in the nation’s consciousness the immutable concept of deference and unearned privilege as an essential building block of British society, indeed its cornerstone. The special attention to children is a vital component. It tells them at an early stage of their lives that you really don’t have to be good or industrious to make something of yourself. And that no matter how much you aspire to improving yourself and achieving social mobility you will reach a glass ceiling. And that the territory beyond this is reserved exclusively for this dysfunctional and unremarkable branch of the European aristocracy and those who have most to gain from their continued existence.

And that their sole purpose is to maintain a chimera of British unity and to produce offspring at regular intervals, sufficient to divert our attention while our pockets are being picked. The BBC’s licence fees are contingent on their eager participation in the operation.

The values that underpin this bogus production are also evident in the way that the governments of the UK proceed. They too peddle the myth of equal opportunity and the meritocratic imperative. Yet, if this were true then only the best available people in Government would be entrusted with our most important departments. At Westminster though, you only get promoted if you pledge blind allegiance to extremism. It means that mediocre people are entrusted with decisions and funding plans that affect millions of people.

In Scotland, we are governed by a personality cult which discourages talent and experience and rewards unquestioning deference. Amateurism is rooted in its foundations. It’s why the apocalypse in our care homes happened and why a troop of cub-scouts would have been more capable of managing the CalMac ferry farce. It’s why a couple of rootless opportunists from the Scottish Greens are in government.

And it’s why, in two decades of devolution, there has been no improvement in the health and educational outcomes of Scotland’s poorest communities.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.