Another royal mouth to feed…
Oh no! Another mouth (for us all) to feed…
“It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty towards their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty. howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don’t believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its artistocracies — a company of monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions…
“The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble: to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might waer silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves gods of this world. And for all this, the thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.”
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
An MEP comments on the EU budget
From a political source not often quoted with approval by Shiraz Socialist (and for “DUP” you can also read “Labour”):
Commenting on calls from Westminster for a cut to the EU budget Martina Anderson MEP said:
“Those calling for a reduction in the EU budget should concentrate on the effects of their cut and slash attitude to fiscal matters closer to home. They should realise that bureaucrats target the most vulnerable first in any budget cutbacks.
“Of course there are areas of waste in the EU Budget and they need to be tackled and eradicated. I have previously highlighted the scandalous waste of money spent moving the European Parliament between Brussels and Strasbourg every month.
“Rather than reducing the budget we should be looking at ways to redirect the funds available into infrastructural and job creation programmes. We could start by cutting the outrageous salaries paid to higher-level bureaucrats.
“And let’s look at why, for the 16th time, the EUs own auditing body, the European Court of Auditors, has been unable to accept the EUs annual accounts. So let’s make sure that the fight against cheating and fraud is a key priority in the coming years and put that money to better use in relieving the austerity measures being imposed across Europe.
“But let’s not listen to those in Westminster calling for reductions to the EU budget that would result in cuts to farm payments, investment in much needed infrastructure, training funds for the unemployed, investment in innovation and the other positive things that are done with a large part of the EU budget. And we all know that these are the things that the bureaucrats will cut first.
“The headline seeking games being played out in Westminster diverts attention from the real issues of what public authorities can and should do to invest EU funding in jobs and growth. The knee-jerk reaction of the DUP in supporting cuts in the EU budget although not unexpected could further hamstring the Executive on top of the Tory cuts being imposed from London government.”
-Martina Anderson MEP (Sinn Fein)
Abolish the Monarchy!
The government has blocked the publication of 27 letters from Charles Windsor to Labour ministers over a seven month period between September 2004 and April 2005. In doing this, the Attorney-General Dominic Grieve has overturned the decision of three tribunal judges who last month ruled in favour of a freedom of information request from the Guardian. The judges had ruled that the public had a right to know how Charles had sought to change government policy.
In an extraordianry admission, Grieve argued that releasing the letters “would potentially have undermined [Charles's] position of political neutrality.” The letters, says Grieve, contain the “most deeply held personal views and beliefs” of the heir to the throne and are part of his “preparation for becoming king.”
So much for the myth of a passive, apolitical constitutional monarchy.
We may never know what the “views and beliefs” expressed by Charles in those letters are, but we do know that he holds some profoundly reactionay and downright cranky views on a range of topics from architecture to homeopathy.
The decision to veto the publication of these letters is an affront to democracy; the prospect of an opinionated, political monarch seeking to exert an influence over government policy is an even greater affront.
The would-be Marxist left in Brtitain has, in recent years, tended to down-play the call for the abolition of the Monarchy. At one time that demand, like our insistence upon secularism, was one of the crucial issues that distinguished us from various varieties of reformists and soft-lefties. Now is the time to once again proudly raise the republican banner in Britain.
As for Charles Windsor: he has a perfect right to express his personal opinions if he renounces the throne and becomes a private citizen.
NB: the pressure group Republic has launched a “Royal Secrets Campaign.”
Republicanism (of sorts) in The Times
Philip Collins (in The Times, Friday June 1 2012). Brought to you exclusively, from behind Murdoch’s paywall, by Shiraz Socialist*:
It was the Prime Minister who made me crack. “My weekly hour with the Queen is vital because I get to draw on all those qualities; her knowledge; her commitment; her time-tested wisdom,” he crawled, Uriah Heeping on the praise. “Above all she has an abundance of what I’d call great British common sense…” Oh come on, man, pull yourself together. You’re the Prime Minister, for goodness’ sake. There’s no need to abase yourself.
Mr Cameron has form in fawning. I still marvel that, in 1981, at the ripe old age of 14, he slept on the Mall waiting for Charles and Diana. At the age of 10 you might be there with your parents. At the age of 21 you might think it was a laugh with your mates. But to be, at 14, a voluntary parade attender? A man who shares the views of his parents at 14 is a man without so much as a thought in his head.
This is a thin week for a republican. It’s going to be all jelly and ice cream and pretending to like the neighbours. Where are the bureaucratic killjoys when you need them, banning fun on the grounds of health and safety? The newspapers will join in the festivities rather than report them. If you want a look at what papers might look like if they are neutered by Leveson, read the advertising sheets for monarchy that will publish over the Diamond Jubilee weekend. The BBC will become a state propaganda machine. I thought the BBC was meant to be a nest of lefties. Where are they all?
Maybe they leave the country. For lots of people, the second and third words of Jubilee Bank Holiday matter more than the first. Two and a half million people will flee Britain. A word needs to be said, too, for those who will pay no attention. It is amazing that 26 million people watched William and Kate get married, but that means half the country didn’t bother. More people watched the wedding in 1973 of Anne and Mark, as we didn’t call them, and 85 per cent of the nation watched the coronation in 1953.
And yet the happy throngs at the street parties will brook no republican argument. Neither does the Queen’s approval rating, +78 last time it was measured. And I don’t want to rain on the parade too much. It will be good for the country to take a day’s holiday from cynicism and the serious republican has a lot to learn from why people will be enjoying themselves.
Most of what people say about why they like the monarchy is misleadingly stupid. Otherwise sentient people will cheerfully inform you that the monarchy is good for tourism. They seriously think that people would stop coming to London and that we should devise our constitutional arrangements to suit Mr and Mrs Kawashima on a short trip from Japan. Please spare me, too, the rubbish about “don’t the British do pageantry well?” Lots of countries do their pageantry well, too. North Korea is brilliant at it, unfortunately. But when did good choreography become a political prinple?
At this point in the argument the defender of monarchy always accuses the republican of being too earnest. It’s all perfectly harmless, no need to get so aerated. This paradox is the first clue as to what this weekend will be about. It is a cause for celebration that the Queen, unlike the ministers at her command, has never let the people down. Our low expectations of the Queen are an important source of the high satisfaction we repose in her. She makes no decisions that affect our lives and therefore does nothing to irritate us. The reason it is so common to say that the Queen does a great job is that she hasn’t really got a job, unless you count watching Maori dancers with a fixed grin on your face. We might not be so forgiving if she was setting the top rate of income tax.
We are celebrating the silence of a Queen who has never given an interview. The Queen is a blank slate on to which we project a view of her as , underneath the royal veneer, somehow one of us. How else could the Prime Minister get away with the ludicrous statement that the Queen has an abundance of common sense?
This allows the Queen to float free of monarchy and this is vital. Two conclusions leap out of the academic literature on trust and both are relevant to the appeal of the Queen. The first is that people trust those whose motives they cannot impugn. It would be churlish not to recognise that the Queen embodies an idea of service with no need for financial reward (the churlish rider would be that she has quite enough money already, even before the tax cut she just got). The second point is that people find it easier to trust individuals than institutions.
The personal aspect of the monarchy may leave the door ajar for republicans. Not all monarchs have been popular. When in 1946 Gallup asked voters whom they most admired, only 3 per cent mentioned George VI who came equal with Stalin and behind George Bernard Shaw. Now, 90 per cent of Britons want to keep the hereditary principle but only 39 per cent want the Prince of Wales to be King. Almost half the country wants the crown to pass to Prince William, as if the hereditary principle allows a referendum. The only hope for the people to get what they want is if the Duke of Cambridge mounts a leadership bid.
But the likelihood is that the monarchy will survive an unpopular king in the future as it has in the past. That is because we will also be celebrating an ancestral connection that binds a country. Even more than we are celebrating the Queen, we are celebrating ourselves. The death of Diana was an occasion for buttoned-up people to find the words for unspoken grief. The Diamond Jubilee will be a statement thatn this is a good country and we like living here.
There is nothing trivial about this sentiment. Monarchy has managed to negotiate the transition from divine to secular by sublimating a longing to belong. This is about something more ancestral than the fickle flashbulbs of fame. These are deeply held intuitions that have become embodied in the dignified form of the Queen.
If republicanism is ever to stand against the tide that will engulf us this weekend it needs to satisfy these impulses too. Colourless, abstract republicanism needs its own patriotic street parties. It needs to tell its own national story, about why, in the end, this is a great country because of the liberties protected by parliamentary democracy, which rather than hereditory aristocracy, is the real bequest of the British to the world.
* I trust it goes without saying that we at Shiraz do not necessarily agree with everything in the article.
NB: another rare outbreak of republicanism in the bourgeois media from the excellent Catherine Bennett in the Observer.
Louis’ Jubilee
This is the only Jubilee I’ll be celebrating this weekend:
…Though I have a horrible feeling that Louis himself (like Duke Ellington) would have been only to pleased to honour Her Maj…
Anyway, here’s what the late Dick Sudhalter wrote (in his book ‘Stardust Melody’) about Louis’ performance of Hoagy’s song on a highly productive day in the studio; read it as you listen:
Armstrong recorded “Jubilee” for Decca on January 12, 1938, backed by Luis Russell’s orchestra, and his performance stands out for a great jazzman’s ability to ennoble an otherwise pedestrian song through majesty of conception and execution. After making short (if enjoyable) work of Adams’s generic “let’s all have a good time” lyric, Louis points his Selmer trumpet at the heavens and, lofted atop by Paul Barbarin’s drumming, rides ‘Jubilee’ into high orbit.
He spends one chorus paraphrasing the melody over band riffs, then intones complementary replies as Russell’s horns punch out the melody in the second. Taking over at the bridge, he works to a final, soaring, transcendent high concert F. The balance and wisdom of these seventy-four bars defy explanation or analysis: what divine intuition dictated that he hold the concert G in bar 26 of the final chorus (corresponding to the word “of” in the phrase “carnival of joy”) for three and one half beats, rather than the gone-in-a-blink eighth note assigned to it by the lyric, before landing emphatically on the F for “joy?” Only a a peerless aesthetic sense could have understood the effect of that move, one among many, on the emotional density of its phrase. The word “genius,” so devalued in this age of inflated superlatives, surely finds its rightful application in such details…
Sudhalter also wrote (in his notes to the American Decca CD Louis Armstrong & His Orchestra: Heart Full Of Rhythm):
Of Jubilee little need be said. The Carmichael tune has never been played or sung better. The wisdom, balance and vision of Louis’s two choruses places them almost beyond musical analysis: placement of phrases, a tip-of-the fingers knowledge of when to hold back and not play; understanding of those moments when one long note will do the expressive work of many short ones.”
How to deal with the monarchy
Alec Guinness: excellent!
Petshop Boys: crap…sorry about the soundtrack.
Still, this’ll do you a power of good after the nauseating events of today.
Police kidnap anti-monarchists to prevent protest
Submitted on 29 April, 2011 – 11:37 on the Workers Liberty website
Sacha Ismail and Esther Townsend report:
12.50pm, Friday 29 April: This morning about ten anti-monarchy protesters, students and young workers who are mostly socialists and anarchists, were stopped by the police outside Charing Cross station, searched and handcuffed. When we left to write this report, they had been held outside the station for about an hour.
Trafalgar Square was tightly controlled, with the help of the police, and it was not actually possible to protest. The group of comrades were preparing to leave to attend the Republic street party in Holborn when the police stopped and searched them. Another thirty police were then called in, arriving in four vans, and surrounded them.
This paranoid, over the top action by the police is part of a wider assault on civil liberties in the run up to the royal wedding.
Updates as we have them. For more information ring Sacha Ismail on 07796 690 874. Please reprint this report widely.
Update, 5.30pm: The comrades were arrested for ‘breach of the peace’, even though there was no possible way this could be justified. They were then taken to Sutton police station, in deep south London, where they were eventually released – of course – without charge. This was essentially an act of kidnapping by the state to prevent a protest.
Thanks to everyone who got in touch to express solidarity or offer support.
Up the Republic!
Stupid Wanker: The racist dogmatism of the republican fundamentalists
Stupid Wanker, organ of the Stupid Wankers Party comments:
“A new group of anti-Royalist fundamentalists has grown up in the run-up to the marriage of King William and Ms Middleton.
“This crude, one-sided hostility to the monarchy fails to take into account the fact that many working class people, many of them black, have illusions in the monarchy. Of course, we do not: but by crudely denouncing the monarchy the sectarians repeat the anti-Caribbean and anti-black Christianophobic propaganda put about by the Tories and the BNP. Most black people are Christians and love the Queen, so those secular republican fundamentalists who denounce religion and the monarchy are racists.”
Prof Alex Callinicont contributes a learned comment:”There is nothing in Marx calling for the abolition of the monarchy: therefore those who do are racists.” Mr Lennie Seymour agrees and submits an article into the Guardian ‘Comment Is Free’ to that effect.
Above: an example of crude, racist Republicanism.
**********************************(end of satirical bit)*******************************************
N.B: Many apparently quite intelligent people are members of the Stupid Wankers Party. Therefore, being fairly intelligent, clearly, is no obstacle to being a complete fucking idiot - C.C.
