Bono, multimillionaire Rock god and all round right-thinking chap is out there breaking all the rules again. As a purveyor of monster selling slices of rock he is one of the industry’s great speakers and rebels. And he is rebelling again. He has announced in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) — Germany’s most establishment of media voices, it’s equivalent of the Times – that he is ready to raise the standard of transgression again.

I’m told a rock band is at its best when it’s a little transgressive: when it pushes the bounds of so-called good taste, when it shocks, when it surprises. Well, U2 is kicking off its tour in Berlin this week, and we’ve just had one of our more provocative ideas: during the show we’re going to wave a big, bright, blue EU flag.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this one. He is, as they say, sticking it to “the man” in a big way. Where once transgression meant rebellion against the great governmental or corporate interests of the day, Bono and so many more of his confederates in the arts, comedy, music and theatre seem to think that the height of rebellion is to rally to the cause of Goldman Sachs and the titans of big business.

He is “rebelling” in favour of an EU supported not just by a generation of establishment European politicians, but by corporations that revel in a high regulatory atmosphere that hinders entrepreneurship and stifles competition. It is also adored by global banks, who can transfer costs to the general public whilst still raking in profits.

And the EU has the firm support of subversive institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, institutions that in the past were the target of fashionable protest. They are now the harmony to Bono’s lullaby of complacency.

But this is the same Bono who has made hypocrisy into an art form. In the same article he waxes lyrical about how Ireland “belonging to Europe enabled us to become a better, more confident version of ourselves”. The very same Ireland deserted by U2 in 2007, when its preferential tax regime for musicians ended. The band switched its lucrative back catalogue to the Netherlands and deprived the struggling Irish government of tax revenue.

This is the same Bono who later on appeared in the infamous “Paradise Papers”, in which even his spiritual home the Guardian pointed out, “Bono chose to invest in a company based in ultra-low tax Malta, which incorporated a Lithuanian company – in order to buy a shopping centre – which has paid no tax in Lithuania despite having made profits. The company was later transferred to zero-tax (on company profits) Guernsey.”

His response to this chicanery? “It’s just some smart people we have working for us trying to be sensible about the way we’re taxed. And that’s just one of our companies, by the way. There’s loads of companies.”

Now, I don’t begrudge him his immense wealth, far from it. I applaud the talent and the sheer hard work that amassing that fortune has entailed. What I despise is the rank hypocrisy.

His support for the EU, and his oh-so-brave waving of the EU flag, is part of the same twisted logic as his emoting for the poor while using every trick in the book to keep his money from the taxman.

He waxes lyrical about his pride in Mrs Merkel’s decision to welcome a million immigrants into Germany, an act that has created a political crisis across the continent. Of course, he calls them Syrian refugees, despite the fact that less than half were from Syria. That decision created a situation where thousands drowned as they took to unseaworthy boats, where people traffickers and terrorist groups have made millions off the back of misery, where terrorists have been able to infiltrate European countries and where local institutions and society is creaking under the a decision that was never sanctioned by the people.

But he is transgressive and rebellious when he flies that EU flag. His rebellion is on behalf of those that command the heights of society, and looks down on those who are ignored and left behind. He kicks down, not up.

As with mainstream comedy, which is so often today a series of transgression-free political statements and largely humour-free statements of current cultural thinking, so with Bono. He describes the loss of sovereignty as gaining sovereignty, he describes the desire for difference as a desire for uniformity, as if his clearest ambition is control over a dictionary.

Once upon a time when rock musicians called for some form of revolution, by God they meant it. When MC5 took to the stage demanding that their audience had to take a choice about being part of the problem or part of the solution, when even Red Wedge could credibly claim that it spoke against the system. Today the “rebellion” exemplified by Bono’s FAZ article is the opposite: it is against the common people and in support of the elite.