The media and our posh Prime Minister, and even old Betty herself have been wetting themselves with excitement that in future both daughters as well as the sons of the monarch will be able to become the Commonwealth Head of State.
What complete twaddle!
I mean no harm to Betty or her current small army of relatives, carers, civil servants, hangers-on and flunkies in the current ‘Royal Family’, although I do get mightily racked-off by those who think we should all bow down fawning to an extended family who owe nothing more than an accident of birth to their lives of privilege. But nothing more exposes the plain stupidity of the hereditary monarchy that we arrive at the second decade of the 21st century before they even start to think of females as being acceptable progeny for someone who is supposed to be our Head of State.
Instead of Cameron grinning like a demented baboon telling us that this vitally important breakthrough has been achieved, it would be much more sensible and grown up if he had announced that our current monarch will be the last, and serve notice on the rest of the family and there dependent hangers-on that it is time to head of to Jobcentre Plus and filling out an application for or two.
Quite right, Councillor, ‘Prezza for President’, or, lest we fear that State banquets might then cost too much, then some other superannuated old political pick-pocket whom we can all look up to with pride as representing our country. (Pass the sickbag!)
By the way, I was getting worried about you – did the Villa lose – again?
Most of that dross is predictable, but heaven forbid, don’t try to give the impression you know anything about football, because you’re easily spottable as a fraud. We’ve only lost two games since April!!
Monarchy embodies the principle of sheer good fortune, of Divine Providence conferring responsibilities upon the more fortunate towards the less fortunate. It therefore provides an excellent basis for social democracy, as has proved the case in the United Kingdom, in the Old Commonwealth, in Scandinavia and in the Benelux countries. Allegiance to a monarchy is allegiance to an institution embodied by a person, rather than to an ethnicity or an ideology, as the basis of the State.
As Bernie Grant understood, allegiance to this particular monarchy, with its role in the Commonwealth, is a particular inoculation against racialism. No wonder that the National Party abolished it in South Africa, again lowering the voting age to that end. No wonder that the Rhodesian regime followed suit, and removed the Union Flag from that of Rhodesia, something that not even the Boers’ revenge republic ever did. No wonder that the BNP wants to abolish the monarchy here; it is not only because the Queen is both descended, via the “Negroid” Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, from the part-black royal line of Portugal, and descended, via the part-Moorish Elizabeth of York, from Muhammad.
Trade unionists and activists peremptorily dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist. Theirs was a movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services; a movement which proudly provided a high proportion of Peers of the Realm, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour, who had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of Her Majesty’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver the social democratic goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony.
Attlee appointed Mountbatten as Viceroy of India, and he was Wilson’s first choice for the new position of Secretary of State for Defence, which he felt obliged to decline only because of his closeness to the Royal Family, no small part of why he had been asked in the first place. The Silver Jubilee was held under the Callaghan Government. The Queen had famously good relations with Wilson and Callaghan, in stark contrast to her famously bad relations with Thatcher, who called her “the sort of person who votes for the SDP” and who sought to usurp her position in public life, using Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers to vilify the Royal Family and giving statutory effect to Murdoch’s desired weakening of constitutional ties between Australia and the United Kingdom. Callaghan threatened to resign as Labour Leader rather than contest a General Election on Tony Benn’s policy of abolishing the House of Lords as that House was constituted in 1980.
John Redwood may dine out on his opposition to the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, but it was Peter Shore who denounced it at the time, and Shore also supported Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State; both on the Royal Yacht and on fisheries, even the Scottish National Party now agrees with him. Labour MPs opposed Thatcher’s cutting of Canada’s last tie to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, so opposing for the sake of the Aboriginal peoples and of the French-Canadians, in both cases specifically as Her Majesty’s subjects. Both King George VI and the Queen Mother were honorary members of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which the latter accepted from her great friend, Ron Todd, with specific reference to her late husband’s great admiration for Ernest Bevin. The Duke of Edinburgh also enjoys honorary trade union membership, courtesy of the lightermen and stevedores.
Only a movement of this kind, steeped in royal, parliamentary and municipal pageantry and charity, could preserve and celebrate the pageantry and charity of the City of London while ending its status as a tax haven and as a state within the State, Europe’s last great Medieval republican oligarchy, right where the United Kingdom ought to be. The liberties of the City were granted to a city properly so called, with a full social range of inhabitants and workers. The Crown should explicitly guarantee the hereditary economic and cultural rights of, for example, the Billingsgate fish porters in the same way as it guaranteed or guarantees those of Aboriginal peoples elsewhere in the Empire and the Commonwealth.
Monarchy embodies the principle of sheer good fortune, of Divine Providence conferring responsibilities upon the more fortunate towards the less fortunate.
Which reminds me of an employer who used to throw away every other application when shortlisting for a position on the basis that “he didn’t want to employ anyone who was unlucky!”.
Prince William, and David Cameron are Villa supporters, Bob.
So they say, comrade… so they say!
Bob; I felt a certain amount of regret when you said the other day that you were getting bored and may be packing it in. Having just read that load of codswallop from David Lindsay and Duffers usual contribution of tripe I can possibly see your reasoning; and if you do decide to go I hope it’s because of two Jeremy’s like them.
Steady on there,I thought Birminghams 2nd team were lucky to get a draw against the “Makem’s” from what I saw of the game on Match of the Day. And back to normal with Birminghams 1st team, after a lucky result in mid week, Iv’e a lot of time for Chris Hughton but I think he is wasting his time in such a footballing wasteland.
Having had to look twice at David Lindsay’s post and then pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, it’s dawned on me he’s an ideal soul mate for Gary Elsby.
Couldn’t agree more with your description of Sue Slipman and Martin Jaques, although Slipman proved to be a periphal figure, I often wondered if Jaques was some sort of agent/provocateur with the demolition job he did with Marxism Today and the Euro-Communist movement, and then when the damage was done he slithered off to the far east with some academic post, his reward. Having said that, his return to the U.K. after the tragic loss of his wife, he wrote some very good articles in the Guardian, scant reward for the havoc he and the rest of the motley crew created.
Ah, bit stumped for a reply, were you, Councillor? If you had ever served in the forces you would have learned that when you salute an officer you are not saluting the man but his commission granted by the monarch. Mr. Lindsay is entirely right, there is a difference between the Queen as a person and the Queen as head of state. Too subtle for you and the ‘bruvvers’, I suspect.
Duffy, you are the most boring person who has ever lived. Nobody needs to know this.
Seems like they have their eldest vetoing legislation as well. There is nothing like democracy and this is nothing like deomcracy
You really don’t know how much of a minority view you have on most subjects both inside and outside of your own party.
Am I bovvered?
As Someone Said On Twitter Yesterday………..
“Breaking: Buckingham Palace branded ‘a charade’ after thermal imaging cameras find 90% of 775 rooms empty ..”
Now that… I like!
How about requiring that all legislation be approved in advance by Prince Charles? It is time to get over the strange idea that he is unpopular. He may not always be right. On Greenery, Tibet, and what seems to be a sort of syncretism, he is wrong.
But what really annoys those who insist that he is disliked, that his expressions of opinion are somehow improper, or what have you, is that he is of the same, increasingly elderly, generation as themselves, yet he dares to hold and articulate views and values other than their own. Except, I suppose, on Greenery, Tibet, and what seems to be a sort of syncretism.
Most people younger than they, the mere existence of whom enrages them to distraction because they were supposed to remain the gilded youths forever, are either indifferent towards him or actually rather fond of him, and his long decades of solid charitable service, rather than his late ex-wife’s glorified photo shoots, have given plenty of them cause to be grateful to him. Not a few of them share some or all of his views, putting him ahead of the field rather than behind the times.
So those who talk about abolishing the monarchy only “once the present Queen dies” are in fact saying “never”, and probably know it, as much in Australia or Canada as here. Succession happens instantly. And by then, who would want abolition? Even fewer people than do so now.
Talk of personal fitness negates the whole concept of monarchy, and it is a complete fantasy that the monarchy is supposed to be neutral in all matters. What would be the point of that? If, for example, it could not intervene to prevent the despoilment of our built environment, then there really would be no purpose at all to it. But such is not the case.
Leaving aside the mistakes and misfortunes of his own life (which have absolutely nothing to do with the institution as such), Prince Charles is, I say again, either on the wrong track or just plain wrong when it comes to syncretism, and Greenery, and the Dalai Lama, all issues on which his fiercest critics actually agree with him. But he is right about an awful lot more.
And that makes him the voice of huge numbers of people who have none in the supposedly more legitimate parliamentary process, of which the monarch is properly, but not currently, an integral part, complete with a power of veto in the defence of certain interests now impossible to defend by means of voting because not exactly dear to the hearts of New Labour or the Coalition.
Give me Charles over them any day. And remember that the monarch would not be there to give parliamentary effect to public opinion in the nation at large at the given time, any more than MPs are there to hold a referendum on the EU merely because their constituents might happen to want one, or Lords Spiritual are there to vote through the assisted suicide apparently supported by the majority of Church of England churchgoers.
To suppose such a relationship between the monarch and the nation, or between an MP and his or her constituents, or between the Lords Spiritual and the Christian basis of this State, is spectacularly to miss the point. Prince Charles understands that. King Charles will understand that. But does anyone else?
I think Douglas Alexander (him who looks like he’s got a fly on the end of his nose) could just sway massive crowds to turn out In Toronto and Sydney and so a hereditary Monarch travelling to similar destinations on behalf of the Sandwell folk should need to start wetting their pants……………………………………..now!
It’s ok we’re all in Common Purpose apparently.
(I’ve told you before, lay off the bottle in the morning, it is addling your already confused mind)
No no Bob, Royalty heads up freemasonary and not CP.
CP is everywhere controversial decisions and contracts are to be found.
Find a dodgy big spend and you’ll find a string of CP from delivery to cheque book.
It’s designed to keep you in the dark and you are one person who knows f*** all about CP.
The cops are coming back to Stoke….again……to surround uncle Ian’s little Elected Mayor puppets (CP to a man).
Put a pound on it Bob that the cells are going to be full soon.(£100,000 trousered….nearly).
How’s at! Reel him in, get the keep net ready, hooked another sucker.
What the hell is Elsby on? I can’t understand a word of his. Bob, where did you pick him up?
More to be pitied than scolded, Paul, as my old granny used to say.
David Lindsay, I’m a relatively young fellow – at least in comparison to the other people who’ve contributed to this debate – and I actively dislike Prince Charles, the reactionary old duffer. It seems to me that the moral and philosophical justification for hereditary rule was demolished pretty comprehensively in the closing decades of the 18th century, by people of greater wit, decency and imagination than the House of Saxe-Coburg. Inbred, boring, bloated parasites.
P.S. And I don’t give a flying fart about Canada either
Hello Paul.
Paul, have any of the clerics in St. Paul’s undergone Common Purpose training (boot the campers out!)
and have the corporate benefactors sitting on its Council done the same?
Come back with the results.
What’s common purpose training?
Christ! Don’t start him off! It is Gary’s equivalent of ‘reds under the bed’ …. otherwise known as total conspiracy bollocks… or paranoia in medical terms.
It’s a way of keeping an ever marginalised New Labour group in power by having a chain of command with loyalists and keeping internal questioners at bay marginalising all protesters. Basically, f***** off the Labour left.
Gary what are the 39 Steps ?
Dunno, but I think he must have banged his head on every one on the way down!
The 39 steps is a covert plan to deter favourite candidates from entering a selection that they would win hands down.
Loyal wheremacht types fiddle ballots to favour a kid with a silver spoon in its mouth that has never done a days work in its life.
The kid is then wheeled out, after losing everything before, and then promoted as a benefit to the local society that he now calls “home”.(bail out, move south later to the ‘second home’).
This near Nazi organisation (slightly different i its actions to Neo Nazis) is rumoured to operate from near JCT 10 using the code name ‘Uncle Ian’.
Uncle Ian ( a crazed meglomaniac) issues instructions to all agents in the field to counter democracy via a known operation code named ‘stitch up’.
I wish to point out that the 39 steps has no connections with any British political party that Bob Piper reckons he’s a member of.
Put a freedom of informaytion request into CP in your local authority, ask how much cost has gone into it, who is trained up (ten green bottles) and then ask how come it doesn’t appear on the balanced budget last year, this year, next year or any accounts.
Then ask how come a tender went out and was accepted even though it is 300% more than any other returned quote.
That’s how you find a string of CP, tender to cheque book.
Another great post Bob.
A few weeks ago, I almost got lynched in my Working Mens Club for daring to question the value of the Monarchy.
By the time I’d got to arguing that the Monarchy were undemocratic a 90 year old was breaking a snooker queu over his knee and heading my way.