Royal Family – Blood and Porridge

January 4, 2023January 10, 2023

Mad-lands

The last time I gazed into the abyss of British politics and wrote about what I saw there, it was September 2022 and Liz Truss had just been crowned leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, taking over from that unrepentant, lawbreaking blond blob Boris Johnson. That was a mere four months ago. What’s happened since then seems a cavalcade of chaos and insanity. To contemplate it again, and attempt to make sense of it all, feels like a risk to my own sanity. As Fredrich Nietzsche warned, “…when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

But oh well. Here goes.

So, Prime Minister Liz Truss. What could go wrong? Everything, basically, at top speed. On September 23^rd, she and her chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng unveiled a plan to cut tax on the largest scale for 50 years and pay for it all by increasing government borrowing. This spooked the world’s markets in the abrupt and dramatic manner that uttering the name ‘Dracula’ would spook an inn-ful of 19^th century Carpathian peasants. The pound plummeted, banks and building societies yanked 40% of their mortgage products off the market, the Bank of England started buying UK government bonds to re-establish calm and save pension funds, and 30 billion pounds were added to the British Treasury’s fiscal hole, which effectively doubled it.

Acting on a comment in the Economist that Truss’s grip on power was likely to be as long as ‘the shelf-life of a lettuce’, the Daily Star – a tabloid newspaper not normally known for its political acumen – set up a live stream where a picture of Liz Truss sat beside a limp, green and gradually decaying leaf-vegetable and viewers were asked, “Which wet lettuce will last longer?” On October 20^th, by which time Truss’s live-stream opponent had evolved to acquire googly eyes and a wig, she threw in the towel and resigned as PM and the lettuce won. It was a fittingly farcical denouement to a premiership of industrial-scale incompetence and self-delusion and of embarrassing brevity. Managing just 44 days in office, she easily beat the previous record set by George Canning in 1827 (and Canning at least had the excuse of dying after 119 days as PM).

Still, Truss’s disastrous tenure provided much hilarity as the country’s many right-wing newspapers had to contort themselves in the style of a circus rubber-man. Almost in the blink of an eye, they went from praising Truss, for being as loopily right-wing in her politics as they were, to lambasting her. AT LAST! A TRUE TORY BUDGET! trumpeted the Daily Mail headline on September 24^th. HOW MUCH MORE CAN SHE (AND THE REST OF US) TAKE? despaired the Daily Mail headline on October 15^th. LIZ PUTS HER FOOT ON THE GAS gushed The Sun’s Harry Cole one moment. The next moment, he was writing: HOW LIZ LOST IT: INSIDE STORY OF LIZ TRUSS’ FIRST 40 DAYS IN POWER THAT ENDED IN BIGGEST POLITICAL MELTDOWN IN YEARS. The Daily Telegraph’s Tim Stanley swerved from crowing LIZ TRUSS HAS RESURRECTED THE IDEA OF CONSERVATISM, AND THE LEFT WILL HATE HER FOR IT to lamenting TRUSS OFFERED US RISK AND AMBITION, BUT IS NOW LEFT FLOGGING AN UTTERLY DEAD HORSE.

It was also gratifying to see the policies advocated for years by those dodgy, mysteriously-funded ultra-right thinktanks and pressure groups congregated in or around No 55, Tufton Street get their moment in the sun, via their adherents Truss and Kwarteng, and immediately be shown to be utter bollocks. After this shitshow, it would nice to think that the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, etc., would, out of shame, shut up about unfettering the rich, about deregulating everything, about letting the environment, workers’ rights and workers’ quality of life get ground to a pulp in the rush for profits. But probably they won’t.

From wikipedia.com / © Tim Hammond, PM’s Office

By an uncanny coincidence, Truss’s departure occurred at the same time as another blond female departed from a vital role in British society – for Jodie Whittaker ended her tenure as the title character of the BBC’s long-running and much-loved science fiction series Doctor Who (1963-present). There was almost another uncanny coincidence here for in a shock twist Whitaker regenerated not into a new Doctor, but back into a predecessor, the hunky and wildly popular 10^th Doctor, David Tennant. Whereas it looked for a while like Truss might regenerate into a predecessor too – the hunky and wildly popular in his own mind, though un-hunky and wildly unpopular to everyone else, 55^th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.

Since his resignation as PM in July, Johnson had been soaking up the sun and flashing his bronzed abs during seemingly non-stop holidays in Slovenia, Greece and the Dominican Republic. Very occasionally, he stirred to attend to matters pertaining to his 84,000 pound-a-year job (plus perks) as a Member of Parliament. Well, twice – he made a statement in the House of Commons about Ukraine and made another statement about the death of the Queen. Great work if you can get it. Following Truss’s demise, Johnson started sounding out support for him having another run at getting elected PM. And for a surreal few days in October, it looked like he might be back in No 10, Downing Street just months after he’d left it amid a merry shambles of sleaze, lawbreaking and mass ministerial resignations. However, he then announced – presumably realising that the human memory isn’t as short as he thought it was – that he wouldn’t run again after all, which left the field clear for his former chancellor Rishi Sunak.

Sunak became Prime Minister on October 25^th. This was after a rushed leadership contest designed to restrict the decision to Conservative parliamentarians, and keep it away from the party’s membership who last time, apparently stricken with dementia, had elected Truss and seemed capable this time of electing someone really stupid, like Jacob Rees-Mogg, or Rolf Harris, or Thomas the Tank Engine, or Vladimir Putin. Despite his Indian heritage, Sunak is hardly a symbol of egalitarianism and fairness. He seems more symbolic of Britain in the 19^th century rather than the 21^st. He’s minted. He and his wife Akshata Murty – believed, due to her non-domiciled status, to have avoided paying up to 20 million pounds in British tax – are worth a supposed fortune of 730 million pounds. And during the previous leadership race, when he unsuccessfully ran against Truss, a 2011 video surfaced wherein the young Rishi bragged about having friends from all walks of life: “…friends who are aristocrats… friends who are upper-class… friends who are, you know, working class…”

Really, Rishi? Working class?

“Well, not working class.”

From wikipedia.com / © Simon Walker, HM Treasury

In fact, Sunak was soon performing feats of contortion worthy of those right-wing newspaper commentators who’d first applauded, then reviled Liz Truss. He became expert in the art of the political U-turn. He announced he wasn’t going to attend the COP27 climate summit in Egypt in November, apparently feeling he had better things to do than join other world leaders in their attempts to figure out a way of preventing the planet burning. Soon after – screech! Sunak announced he would attend it after all. (This change of heart came after Boris Johnson had announced he was going to pop along to COP27, presumably hoping there’d be someone there who hadn’t heard he’d stopped being British Prime Minister.) Mandatory housing targets? Screech! No mandatory housing targets – Home Counties Tory MPs didn’t fancy suddenly being in earshot of construction work in their leafy back gardens. A ban on onshore windfarms? Screech! “Yes,” Rishi decreed, “let there be onshore windfarms.” Frakking, the proposed Schools Bill, fines if you missed a GP appointment? Screech, screech, screech!

However, no U-turns yet from Sunak’s Home Secretary Sue-Ellen Braverman, who apparently likes to call herself ‘Suella’ because she hates being called ‘Sue-Ellen’ – her folks named her after Sue Ellen Ewing, the hard-boozing wife of Stetson-wearing villain J.R. Ewing in TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91). Sue-Ellen is still pushing ahead with plans to stick newly-arrived asylum seekers on planes and fly them out to Rwanda for ‘processing’, in defiance of the European Convention on Human Rights (whose founders in 1948 included that pathetic, woke, lefty snowflake Winston Churchill). At the Tory Party conference in early October, she told an audience: “I would love to have a front page of the Telegraph with a plane taking off to Rwanda, that’s my dream, it’s my obsession.” Her dream? She might have the name Sue-Ellen, but at heart she’s pure J.R.

To round off the year with a final dose of misery, the cost-of-living crisis that’s deeply troubling households the length and breadth of Britain, and that Sunak’s government seems unable and / or unwilling to do anything about, prompted everyone and their dog to go on strike or threaten to go on strike: rail workers, postal workers, teachers, driving examiners, highway workers, Border Force staff, G4S workers and, while the National Health Service is allowed to fall apart and hospitals start to resemble war zones, nurses and ambulance staff.

From wikipedia.org / © Steve Eason

Incidentally, I’m sure there are even some right-wingers out there who’ve felt the urge to join a trade union after hearing the admirably straightforward, no-nonsense tones of Rail, Maritime and Transport Union general secretary Mick Lynch. After years of being subjected to the same old waffling, prevaricating, patronising, meaningless bollocks spouted by countless politicians and media pundits, Lynch’s ability to speak Human has been a breath of fresh air.

To Good Morning Britain’s Richard Madeley: “Richard, you do come up with the most remarkable twaddle sometimes.” To Sky News’ Kay Burley: “Picketing is standing outside the workplace to try and encourage people who want to go to work, not to go to work. What else do you think it involves?” To knuckle-dragging Tory MP Jonathan Gullis: “I think Jonathan should apologise for talking nonsense… (He’s a) backbench MP who’s just learnt it off a script.” To professional bawbag Piers Morgan, after Morgan had pointed out that his Facebook page featured a picture of the Hood, the villain in TV puppet show Thunderbirds (1965-66): “Is that the level journalism’s at these days?”

Talking of journalism again, don’t expect the UK’s predominantly right-wing press to do much just now to hold Sunak’s government to account. When they aren’t castigating strikers – see the Daily Mail’s headline about ambulance crews: HOW WILL THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES IF PEOPLE DIE TODAY? – they’re happily employing smoke and mirrors to distract readers from the big issues of the moment and hide the fact that, under the Tories, the country has turned into a basket case. Mainly, of course, they’re obsessing over the Royal Family – the latter-day British equivalent of Karl Marx’s ‘opiate of the masses’ – and promoting the current spat between Prince Harry and his spouse Meghan Markle and the rest of the so-called ‘Firm’.

Honestly, who cares? Yes, it was hideous of Jeremy Clarkson to fantasise, in his column in the Sun, about having Markle paraded naked through every town in the land while people jeer and pelt her with shit. But I don’t think the current shenanigans in the Royal Family, and the reactions to it in the media by beer-bellied, boob-chested, saggy-jowled manbabies like Clarkson, are of much importance to families panicking as inflation runs rampant, energy bills sky-rocket, and health and transport services disintegrate around them.

Still, after 2022 saw the UK become an absolute mad-lands… Surely things are so bad now that at least they can’t get any worse?

The sound you hear is 2023 saying, “Hold my beer…”

From unsplash.com / © Peter Leong

June 12, 2022June 13, 2022

Grovel, Britannia

From wikipedia.org / © Joel Rouse / Ministry of Defence

A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities – and the accompanying tsunami of media hype – that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70^th year of her reign on the British throne. I’ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family. It’s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.

In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them. They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone’s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have them rammed down their throats: the aloof Queen and her grumpy husband; the weird and socially awkward Prince Charles and his vacuous-seeming wife Princess Diana who, as it turned out, was sharper than she looked; the porcine Prince Andrew who, as it turned out, was viler than he looked; and the insipid would-be thespian Prince Edward. Princess Anne, however, I didn’t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.

I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn’t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper. It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.

Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy. This was partly because I’d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state – someone to open the supermarkets, launch the ships and sit down and sip tea with the US President or the Pope or whatever foreign dignitary happened to be in town. This was the stuff that the prime minister didn’t have time to do because he or she had a country to run. And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long. She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women’s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who’d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace – Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy – whom she put on a smile for.

If someone had forced an 86-year-old relative of mine onto the street every morning and made her tramp around the neighbourhood all day long, saying hello to people, and then when she finally returned to her house, foisted a shower of crooks and chancers upon her for company, I’d have reported them to the police. The Queen might have been one of the richest women on the planet, but what was the point of having shed-loads of money if you were subjected to torture like that every day of your life?

So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy. That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down. The inhabitants of the Low Countries and Scandinavia had modestly-sized royal institutions and seemed no less respectful of their monarchs like Albert, Beatrix, Margrethe, Harald and Carl XVI Gustav, so why couldn’t that be the case in Britain? Why did the British Royal Family have to be such a massive and costly operation, featuring as many cast-members as an opulent and labyrinthine American soap opera like Dallas or Dynasty?

That was then, however. Maybe at the time I’d been infected by Danny Boyle’s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking – for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family – Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country. Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.

Now I just want the whole thing gone. Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me. My reversion to republicanism isn’t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn’t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son’s 12-million-pound settlement with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein. (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week’s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19. Aye, right.) It’s more to do with the state of Britain. The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed – one of many drastic treatments required if it’s to make any sort of recovery.

For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain’s neurotic obsession with the past. Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.

There’s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament’s door slammed in his or her face) than to the constitution, which is unwritten and open to abuse by unscrupulous politicians, like the shower we have in office at the moment. The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy’s Own Paper-style, ‘good chaps’ theory of government. I’d struggle to describe the grinning war criminal Tony Blair, or the squish-faced posho David Cameron, or the Mother of Tears herself Margaret Thatcher as ‘good chaps’; but surely not even the most naïve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent of No 10 Downing Street.

There’s also the embarrassing preoccupation many Britons have with the Second World War and everything that goes with it (Churchill, the Blitz, Spitfires, Dame Vera Lynn), although to have even childhood memories about the conflict now you’d need to be in your 80s. In 2016, that finest-hour, standing-alone, ourselves-against-the-world narrative was exploited by self-serving ratbags like Nigel Farage, who managed to conflate the European Union with the Third Reich in some people’s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.

Predictably, Britain’s obsession with the past is focused on the nice bits of history – pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History books, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies. There’s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its ‘subjects’. Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have. It’s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on. It’s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks ‘hard’.

I’d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society. Everyone who comes into contact with the royals, and with the Establishment generally, seems to immediately de-evolve into a mollusc, apparently on the assumption that the more obsequious you are, the better your chances are of securing a CBE, OBE, knighthood or whatever. This is never more obvious than in the country’s press. British journalists do so much brown-nosing – presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying – that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.

Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week’s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn’t done just by right-wing journalists and politicians wanting to use the Queen as a Culture War ruse to distract attention from the fact that under the current Conservative government there’s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country’s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20 (after Putin’s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the last two years.

Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you’d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee. There it is again – you’re not patriotic if you don’t like the Queen. Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted: “You don’t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen’s reign has been remarkable.” No, Tim, the Queen doesn’t know who you are. She isn’t going to give you a knighthood.

So yes, I just want the monarchy gone. Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them. But obviously, that isn’t going to happen. The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly. And as for the country they’re supposed to represent… Well, I now think it’s beyond all hope.