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From wikipedia.org<\/a> \/ \u00a9 Joel Rouse<\/a> \/ Ministry of Defence<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A week has now passed since the Platinum Jubilee festivities \u2013 and the accompanying tsunami of media hype \u2013 that celebrated Queen Elizabeth II reaching the 70th<\/sup> year of her reign on the British throne. \u00a0I\u2019ve now emerged from my bunker and feel ready to articulate my thoughts about the British Royal Family. \u00a0It\u2019s fair to say my tolerance of the institution has waxed and waned over the years.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In my youth, during the 1980s and 1990s, I detested them.\u00a0 They seemed a bloody awful lot and it sickened me how much the media kept ramming them down everyone\u2019s throats, though of course, a lot of the public seemed happy to have<\/em> 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.\u00a0 Princess Anne, however, I didn\u2019t think was that bad, though that was probably only because she supported the national Scottish rugby team.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I knew ordinary people who were every bit as mediocre or dysfunctional as the royals, of course, but I didn\u2019t have to hear about them every time I switched on the television or read about them every time I opened a newspaper.\u00a0 It also galled me that not liking them or even not wanting to know<\/em> about them was considered unpatriotic in 1980s and 1990s Britain.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Fast forward to 2012, the time of the Queen\u2019s Diamond Jubilee, and my opinion was more sanguine, at least of Elizabeth. \u00a0It was one of indifference tempered with a certain, grudging respect for the old biddy.\u00a0 This was partly because I\u2019d concluded that countries needed their symbolic heads of state \u2013 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.\u00a0 This was the stuff that the prime minister didn\u2019t have time to do because he or she had a country to run.\u00a0 And the Queen had won a modicum of respect from me simply by doing her job for so long.\u00a0 She grew older, greyer, smaller, but still she did her walkabouts, made her public appearances, indulged in boring chit-chat with members of women\u2019s institutes, rotary clubs and Boy Scout troops who\u2019d turned out to see her, and had disreputable politicians come through the doors of Buckingham Palace \u2013 Bush, Berlusconi, Sarkozy \u2013 whom she put on a smile for.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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\u2019d have reported them to the police. \u00a0The 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?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So back in 2012, I thought I could tolerate the idea of a British monarchy. \u00a0That toleration, though, came with the proviso that the thing needed to be massively scaled down. \u00a0The 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\u2019t that be the case in Britain?\u00a0 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<\/em> or Dynasty<\/em>?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n That was then, however.\u00a0 Maybe at the time I\u2019d been infected by Danny Boyle\u2019s Opening Ceremony at the 2012 London Olympics and believed that with a bit of tweaking \u2013 for instance, modifying but not removing the Royal Family \u2013 Britain could become a decent, balanced, good-humoured and modern-minded country.\u00a0 Also, I was a big James Bond fan and, at the Opening Ceremony, I thought it was pretty cool<\/a> when the Queen, or possibly her stunt double, parachuted out of a plane with Daniel Craig.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n From pixabay.com \/ \u00a9 Ben Kerckx<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now I just want the whole thing gone.\u00a0 Abolishing the monarchy the moment the Queen dies would be fine by me.\u00a0 My reversion to republicanism isn\u2019t so much to do with the Queen herself, though she certainly hasn\u2019t done herself any favours in recent years with the revelations<\/a> about how much of her money is invested in dodgy, tax-avoiding offshore accounts or her eagerness to fund her second son\u2019s 12-million-pound settlement<\/a> with Virginia Giuffre, who claimed Andrew had sexually assaulted her while she was being trafficked as a minor by Jeffrey Epstein.\u00a0 (Andrew was unable to make an appearance at last week\u2019s Platinum Jubilee festivities because he was stricken, supposedly, with Covid-19.\u00a0 Aye, right.)\u00a0 It\u2019s more to do with the state of Britain.\u00a0 The place is now such a basket-case that it needs to have its Royal Family surgically removed \u2013 one of many drastic treatments required if it\u2019s to make any sort of recovery.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n For one thing, the Royal Family is the ultimate symbol of Britain\u2019s neurotic obsession with the past.\u00a0 Remove that symbol and you might go some way to breaking the obsession, which hobbles the country left, right and centre.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There\u2019s the dire state of its governing institutions, where more attention is paid to witless Ruritanian flummery like the State Opening of Parliament<\/a> (the crown getting transported to the Houses of Parliament in a carriage of its own, the ridiculously ruffed Black Rod getting Parliament\u2019s 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.\u00a0 The argument is that Britain’s constitution is protected by some absurd, Boy\u2019s Own Paper<\/em><\/a>-style, \u2018good chaps<\/a>\u2019 theory of government.\u00a0 I\u2019d 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 \u2018good chaps\u2019; but surely not even the most na\u00efve person in the universe would bestow that term on the current incumbent<\/a> of No 10 Downing Street.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There\u2019s 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\u2019d need to be in your 80s.\u00a0 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\u2019s minds and got them to vote for the economic and political disaster of Brexit.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Predictably, Britain\u2019s obsession with the past is focused on the nice<\/em> bits of history \u2013 pomp, pageantry, Ladybird Adventure from History<\/em> books<\/a>, stiff-upper-lipped World War II movies.\u00a0 There\u2019s not much focus on the misery, poverty and injustices that the British Empire inflicted on millions of its \u2018subjects\u2019.\u00a0 Meanwhile, with this mentality, Britain is never to going to have a scaled-down monarchy like the Swedes, Dutch, Belgians, etc., have.\u00a0 It\u2019s always going to be the full-on, super-expensive deal with parades, carriages, horses, bands, guardsmen and so on.\u00a0 It\u2019s like some balding, beer-gutted, 50-something football hooligan covering himself in bling and believing he still looks \u2018hard\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019d do away with the monarchy too because of the depressing sycophancy it engenders in British society.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is never more obvious than in the country\u2019s press.\u00a0 British journalists do so much brown-nosing \u2013 presumably hoping that one day Her Majesty will reward them with an honour for services to toadying \u2013 that their pages, or webpages, seem to turn the colour of shite while you read them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Inevitably, this brown-nosing was at its brownest during last week\u2019s Platinum Jubilee. And it wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s a lying sleazeball as Prime Minister, the country\u2019s economic growth is on track to be second-worst in the G20<\/a> (after Putin\u2019s pariah-status Russia), and nearly 180,000 people have died<\/a> from Covid-19 in the last two years.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party and someone whom you\u2019d expect to be at least a teensy-weensy bit socialist, wrote in the swivel-eyed, reactionary Daily Telegraph that it was our \u2018patriotic duty\u2019 to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee.\u00a0 There it is again \u2013 you\u2019re not patriotic if you don\u2019t like the Queen.\u00a0 Meanwhile, former Liberal Democratic leader Tim Farron tweeted<\/a>: \u201cYou don\u2019t need to think that everything about Britain is wonderful, just that being British is wonderful and that the Queen\u2019s reign has been remarkable.\u201d\u00a0 No, Tim, the Queen doesn\u2019t<\/em> know who you are.\u00a0 She isn\u2019t<\/em> going to give you a knighthood.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So yes, I just want the monarchy gone.\u00a0 Goodbye Queen, goodbye Prince Charles, goodbye William, Kate and the kids, goodbye all of them.\u00a0 But obviously, that isn\u2019t going to happen.\u00a0 The British Royal Family will endure, undeservedly.\u00a0 And as for the country they\u2019re supposed to represent\u2026\u00a0 Well, I now think it\u2019s beyond all hope.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/CI-GB-201x300.jpg\")
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