The issue with the people who want to dispel the monarchy is thy actually don't believe in popular sovereignty either, even if some are naive enough to think such a thing is possible. Their ideal world is un-rooted technocrats putting edicts on people they have no relation or care about solely based on "The Science" and "Equality". They see people as Human Undifferentiated Matter in which no one should have any unique, immutable properties that might hinder the march of progress.
In the end, they are monsters just as evil as Pol Pot.
I never thought I'd say it but I think you're being too optimistic. The reaction of a lot of the new elite to the lovely weekend was thinly veiled disgust and embarrassment and I don't see a way that the monarchy survives in the world 30 years from now when that elite has burrowed ever deeper into control of every aspect of government and culture. You can do the Peter Hitchens Churchill/Diana funeral comparison with royal events and with each one it becomes less august, less serious, tweer with more sops thrown to those who will never be satisfied. It certainly is more resilient than any other conservative institution but I can't see monarchism doing anything other than dropping in status
Serious point though. Isn’t the monarchy indulged, because it has no real power and is quite useful in keeping the plebs in line. They can have their parade and flag waving for a day or two and they can pretend that things haven’t changed that much. Meanwhile, the curriculum grinds away year after year in the madrassas of progress.
Isn’t there an established argument that social progress was more radical in Britain compared to say France or Germany precisely because the visible social structures looked the same. Peter Hitchens’ point about the stealth revolution. Everything looks the same on the outside...
I tend to agree. They will seek to pick it apart bit by bit and unfortunately the new guard will be more far receptive to this than EIIR and then the critics will turn around and say : look, given what's left, is there really any point at all.
Totally un-facetiously the only long term protection I think they can have is if Prince George makes a minority marriage at which point the crown becomes a symbol of the new Britain tied in forever with the diversity is our strength mandate our leaders have filtered into every other sphere.
This would pre-suppose a level of good faith that I suspect does not exists. In my view, the critics are driven by negativity and apply criticism like acid to dissolve the whole thing layer by layer and bit by bit.
I think you're right, I find they are buttressed by all those like Nick Cave and Paxman who say "its ridiculous but I love it", the moment you acknowledge that its silly is the moment it starts to crumble and the insidious start to effectively drip their acid
the more diverse that Britain becomes, the more that monarchy will be required to hold together a fractured society. A republic - which I think unlikely because many people think this - would increase the risk of genuine instability.
I think you are probably wrong, for a simple reason: history rarely turns out the way we think it will. We tend to draw straight lines, as it were, from where we are now on into the future. But things never work out that way.
For example, I was at university in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher was elected. I remember the times and the mood of the times rather well. In an economics seminar, our wise and venerable professor expressed the view that within a year, the new radical talk of privatisation, deregulating the City, taking on the Unions, etc etc, would be ditched in favour of prices and incomes policies, more state support for British Leyland and so forth. Everyone agreed, including me.
How wrong we were. Everyone underestimated Mrs Thatcher, including her own party. Moreover, No one saw, nor could have predicted, the last throw of the dice by a group of sozzled generals in Buenos Aires. Suddenly, it was all 'Once more unto the breach' and 'we band of brothers'.
And there was the monarch, quiet symbol of our resolution.
I think you are far too optimistic too, this isnt the 70's the changes in society are far deeper and irreversible. What you're describing is people failing to predict that policies which were hated by probably more than half of the population could be challenged.
The problems the right faces now arent tired trade union bosses pushing a bankrupt ideology that a mobilised mass of the population hates, they are institutional and demographic.
You're right that history is unpredictable but we can look at trends and if you look at the socially fashionable views or the census data at 5 year intervals for the last 30 years you see a steady creep of radical change.
The leftist views of your professor in 79 were being actively opposed by a clear and powerful group who could articulate what they wanted to do and how they were going to do it, no such group exists in the UK now, there is no Thatcher there is no ideology anywhere close to articulating how to oppose the left effectively and what there is is totally disconnected from power.
Forgive me but you've missed the point. This isn't about the 1970s but the fact that not only can we not predict the future but that all the census, economic and other data that you can come up with is, sooner or later, totally useless. So are the prevailing opinions of left or right. (No one saw my professor's opinions as left wing at the time, just common sense)
I could have used the example of the 1930s (Given the last one, no one wants war), the 1900s (Germany is our friend, worry about the French), the 1860s (Good old Bismarck, he'll keep the French busy), the 1780s (France is bankrupt, no threat to us), the 1760s (the colonials are content under our protection), and on and on - 1347 (Plague? it'll never reach England), 1065 (William's no threat it's always the Danes), 780s (Danes are no threat it's them Mercians).
Yet the monarchy has survived them all. And, short of WWIII, (or maybe even if) will continue for another thousand years.
All is forgiven but on the contrary I think you've missed mine, there are deep seated changes taking place now that are leading to radical changes in society and have already caused radical changes to ignore them or to appeal to your whiggish boys own sense of history that everything will be fine is unrealistic and allows those changes to embed without opposition.
Whiggish history? Talk daft. My point is the exact opposite of Whig history. In the 1930s no one, except Churchill, predicted WWII, similarly in the 1900s and pretty much all the way back. But the 'civilisation is going to the dogs' notion has been around just as long and its unrelenting miserabilism is especially tedious.
I don't think anything encapsulates the surviving prestige and soft power of the monarchy than the photograph of the Princess of Wales, who, in one picture, summarized everything a certain woman in California wants to be but who will never be.
One of the surviving elements of medievalism to linger even in America, of all places, are university graduations. All the faculty are summarized, dressed in robes bearing the status of their degrees and the colors of the universities they received their PhDs, and march in a medieval process to a university president who has symbols of office. Oddly enough it's a ritual that has never been cancelled in the name of equity or supremacy. Makes you wonder.
Oh, there are many more rituals like that (the formal graduation you describe) in America and around the world and they have quite a few followers. Over 50 million in the US alone; they’re known as Catholics.
The majority of new immigrants in the US, in fact, are religious Roman Catholics from Latin America with a taste for the baroque.
What follows is not a criticism (just an observation): the rituals, pageantry and costumes of the coronation (or a graduation) stand out so much in the UK because it’s a Protestant country. Much of what seems like startling “medievalism” (and what cynical republicans in Britain may sneer at as pre-Raphaelite cosplay) exists in, at least, somewhat analogous forms in the Americas, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Russia and parts of Africa and Asia. They’re common.
“Conservative opinions tend to be low status, but that low status and the framework of laws and legal harassment interact and reinforce each other. Similarly, the financial rewards given to enforcers of progressive ideas tend to give those ideas more status; in the US, for example, many diversity and equality officers earn more than academics, while in Britain the diversity officer of the Wellcome Trust is paid more than the prime minister.”
I think what’s happening here in the states is a little trickier.
Well paid DEI officers allow colleges and corporations in the US to have greater diversity at or near the top while making their diverse “communities” (workers, staff, faculty, students) feel better by having people from “marginalized communities” in well-paying, prominent roles. The goal is for any photo of the people in power to “look like America”, i.e., have proportionate numbers of black & Latino people and women.
These jobs are made lucrative and important in large part so that every facet of American society is represented in positions of power and relative prestige. Expanding & empowering DEI staff at elite colleges is preferable to hiring yet more Asian men to teach STEM courses.
Then there’s the very real fear of legal action for not having enough diversity or failing to create an acceptable “work environment.” Simply not wanting to be sued explains an astonishing amount of corporate policy in the states.
Finally, the desire in America (especially by well-off white women) to have black women in positions of power should not be underestimated. This motivation probably isn’t best seen through a prism of wanting status. It’s much more complex, neurotic and well-intentioned. The extent to which this is a motivating force in American academic, cultural and liberal political institutions may be hard for people outside the US to grasp.
The problem with too great an emphasis on status to explain these things (at least in America) is you end up giving short thrift to other factors, including the legal incentives (and fears) that dominate American society, the unprecedented historical power of well-meaning women, a magical belief in the power of “representation” at the highest levels as a societal fix, the great desire of the young to be in “diverse” environments, and the simple role of power politics among different groups.
Very much agree with most of this. I would add one adjunct and one qualifier.
The adjunct is that academia has been splitting knowledge into increasingly small silos in order to generate experts who can find employment. Pre the pure crystalline wokeness we see now, there was the whole therapeutic industry which grew by turning a failure to grow up and adapt into bewildering range of quasi ailments adhd, much of autism, ocd, anorexia, body dysmorphia etc. which could be treated by a similarly bewildering number of experts and gnostics. This came especially from female centric disciplines where creating a vulnerable group as a proxy for children was one unconscious drive, with money and a level of prestige being the other.
The qualifier is that I don't get why women help beyond the point that it serves their interests. Is it a system without an off.? You touched on one example of this help in your post which would make sense if the women had mixed race children or a lot of minority friends but not obviously otherwise. It is often said that women are just more inclusive than men but the counter to that is why then do women so weaponise exclusion to enforce norms.
I'm increasingly convinced the real reason people are anti-monarchists is because they think *they* should get to be monarch themselves. (See also the liberal OBSESSION with the Harry Potter franchise - the idea of an ordinary young person plucked from obscurity and inducted into a magical aristocracy for other special people is deeply seductive to them).
As is the case with Christianity, I think the monarchy might be saved by a large swathe of opinion among our ethnic minorities, for whom ceremony, ritual and hierarchy come perfectly naturally and who may see better than most that a focus for social cohesion which is elevated above everyday politics is a great advantage to national stability. Also, you don't mention monarchy's strong association with the Commonwealth, a body that while it gives expression to our aspiration for diversity and human solidarity is happily not associated either with the elite beliefs of the academy or with USA-aping, and so is becoming increasingly attractive to many of us now.
As Ed points out, progressiveness is a thinly held belief system e.g. a very recent data analysis shows progressives to be statistically no less likely to avoid diverse areas than conservatives. And it's thinly held because (a) it exists in direct opposition to self interest, other than those members of the majority who find employment via the disassembling (which may single handedly explain all of wokeness) ; and (b) because it is almost all obviously nonsense. No-one, outside the cult core, really believes men and women are interchangeably the same, or that white people murder at a higher rate than black people in the US (other those who believe black people killing other black people doesn’t count), or that we all have an innate gender identity which is also unspeakably important to us, or that diversity is our greatest strength or even a strength at all. And can there be anything less declassee than an intellectual movement that promotes the subjectivity of all knowledge other than the knowledge it imparts. It should be laughable.
However the propaganda is unspeakably strong as it probably needs to be . My mum relating something she read in the Sunday Times about the mild racism experienced by a Pakistani person in middle class circles in the 1980s had never heard of the events in Rotherham, Telford etc.1 My mother in law talking about a film she saw where black female clerical staff solved some problems that NASA scientists couldn’t. A female colleague sincerely arguing that a female tennis players could compete against the top men.
Footnote
1 These horrors occurred because people did not want to draw a line connecting the crimes to Pakistani men, yet this is precisely what the BBC continue to do to this day. For example, the following, appears in a BBC “debunking” article. Oddly it as good as proves the connection, but the BBC (who are less then rigorous about data when speaking about anything on their agenda) then come over all data purist in order to go on and deny the link.
“A previous piece of research from 2015 found that of 1,231 perpetrators of "group and gang-based child sexual exploitation", 42% were white, 14% were defined as Asian or Asian British and 17% black. The problem is that the data is from only 19 out of more than 40 police forces and nearly a decade old.”
"Around a fifth of the public would like to abolish the monarchy, and that feeling is much stronger among the under-30s ..."
Under-30s' feelings are expressed with expletives, but they are very shallow. They evaporate as soon as you ask, "What specific actions do you plan to take?"
I would lay good odds on there being a significant gap between what many people tweeted & FB'd about all this and what they felt. As 2012 showed us, nationalist fervour is a guilty pleasure for the bien pensants. As long as it acknowledges the NHS and whichever cutout represents Mo Farrah at any given moment, it's actually fine to feel good about celebrating your country.
Sorry, this is not really comment on the piece, but just to inform you that you were mentioned favorably twice in a (a delicious if too self-consciously clever) hit job in the Atlantic!
If the UK removed its monarchy and didn’t have someone far worse in power within a generation, it would be the first major European nation to do so since the founding of the Roman republic.
Republicanism is never held responsible for elevating the Fuhrer to the level of Kaiser. It should be.
to me (an outsider), the biggest argument for republicanism is a financial one. How does one justify spending all that millions to upkeep the life style of the rich and famous for a whole family? I am not saying taken them all away, but maybe all that private art should be in a museum for the public, and most of those castles should be open up to the public, etc. (i.e. not quite go the extreme of the Dutch, but somewhere in between...)
Nice piece but disappointed to see the old canard of comparing people's pay to that of the Prime Minister. It is a false comparison because the PM's true "compensation package" is much more than their pay: they get free accommodation and generally have more or less zero expenses while in office; and then when they leave office they have a guaranteed source of income from speeches for many years.
I'm a believer in paying PMs £2m a year, like Singapore, in part because of prestige. Cabinet ministers in Victorian England were paid vasts amounts by today's standards!
Weird factoid about the Republican protesters - They were visibly drenched. They seem to have turned up in shorts and T shirt's I wonder if that spooked the Police somewhat. Cops play hunches
The issue with the people who want to dispel the monarchy is thy actually don't believe in popular sovereignty either, even if some are naive enough to think such a thing is possible. Their ideal world is un-rooted technocrats putting edicts on people they have no relation or care about solely based on "The Science" and "Equality". They see people as Human Undifferentiated Matter in which no one should have any unique, immutable properties that might hinder the march of progress.
In the end, they are monsters just as evil as Pol Pot.
I never thought I'd say it but I think you're being too optimistic. The reaction of a lot of the new elite to the lovely weekend was thinly veiled disgust and embarrassment and I don't see a way that the monarchy survives in the world 30 years from now when that elite has burrowed ever deeper into control of every aspect of government and culture. You can do the Peter Hitchens Churchill/Diana funeral comparison with royal events and with each one it becomes less august, less serious, tweer with more sops thrown to those who will never be satisfied. It certainly is more resilient than any other conservative institution but I can't see monarchism doing anything other than dropping in status
Agreed. Charles will likely be our last monarch before we are converted into a republic with President Stormzy at its head.
ha [swallows cyanide]
Serious point though. Isn’t the monarchy indulged, because it has no real power and is quite useful in keeping the plebs in line. They can have their parade and flag waving for a day or two and they can pretend that things haven’t changed that much. Meanwhile, the curriculum grinds away year after year in the madrassas of progress.
yes I think that's probably exactly why some people are happy for it to survive
Isn’t there an established argument that social progress was more radical in Britain compared to say France or Germany precisely because the visible social structures looked the same. Peter Hitchens’ point about the stealth revolution. Everything looks the same on the outside...
I tend to agree. They will seek to pick it apart bit by bit and unfortunately the new guard will be more far receptive to this than EIIR and then the critics will turn around and say : look, given what's left, is there really any point at all.
Hopefully the pressure of being “it” and not a “spare” will make George smarter about it.
Totally un-facetiously the only long term protection I think they can have is if Prince George makes a minority marriage at which point the crown becomes a symbol of the new Britain tied in forever with the diversity is our strength mandate our leaders have filtered into every other sphere.
This would pre-suppose a level of good faith that I suspect does not exists. In my view, the critics are driven by negativity and apply criticism like acid to dissolve the whole thing layer by layer and bit by bit.
I think you're right, I find they are buttressed by all those like Nick Cave and Paxman who say "its ridiculous but I love it", the moment you acknowledge that its silly is the moment it starts to crumble and the insidious start to effectively drip their acid
On earlier point
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2023/05/03/what-do-ethnic-minority-britons-think-monarchy-and
the more diverse that Britain becomes, the more that monarchy will be required to hold together a fractured society. A republic - which I think unlikely because many people think this - would increase the risk of genuine instability.
I think you are probably wrong, for a simple reason: history rarely turns out the way we think it will. We tend to draw straight lines, as it were, from where we are now on into the future. But things never work out that way.
For example, I was at university in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher was elected. I remember the times and the mood of the times rather well. In an economics seminar, our wise and venerable professor expressed the view that within a year, the new radical talk of privatisation, deregulating the City, taking on the Unions, etc etc, would be ditched in favour of prices and incomes policies, more state support for British Leyland and so forth. Everyone agreed, including me.
How wrong we were. Everyone underestimated Mrs Thatcher, including her own party. Moreover, No one saw, nor could have predicted, the last throw of the dice by a group of sozzled generals in Buenos Aires. Suddenly, it was all 'Once more unto the breach' and 'we band of brothers'.
And there was the monarch, quiet symbol of our resolution.
I think you are far too optimistic too, this isnt the 70's the changes in society are far deeper and irreversible. What you're describing is people failing to predict that policies which were hated by probably more than half of the population could be challenged.
The problems the right faces now arent tired trade union bosses pushing a bankrupt ideology that a mobilised mass of the population hates, they are institutional and demographic.
You're right that history is unpredictable but we can look at trends and if you look at the socially fashionable views or the census data at 5 year intervals for the last 30 years you see a steady creep of radical change.
The leftist views of your professor in 79 were being actively opposed by a clear and powerful group who could articulate what they wanted to do and how they were going to do it, no such group exists in the UK now, there is no Thatcher there is no ideology anywhere close to articulating how to oppose the left effectively and what there is is totally disconnected from power.
Forgive me but you've missed the point. This isn't about the 1970s but the fact that not only can we not predict the future but that all the census, economic and other data that you can come up with is, sooner or later, totally useless. So are the prevailing opinions of left or right. (No one saw my professor's opinions as left wing at the time, just common sense)
I could have used the example of the 1930s (Given the last one, no one wants war), the 1900s (Germany is our friend, worry about the French), the 1860s (Good old Bismarck, he'll keep the French busy), the 1780s (France is bankrupt, no threat to us), the 1760s (the colonials are content under our protection), and on and on - 1347 (Plague? it'll never reach England), 1065 (William's no threat it's always the Danes), 780s (Danes are no threat it's them Mercians).
Yet the monarchy has survived them all. And, short of WWIII, (or maybe even if) will continue for another thousand years.
All is forgiven but on the contrary I think you've missed mine, there are deep seated changes taking place now that are leading to radical changes in society and have already caused radical changes to ignore them or to appeal to your whiggish boys own sense of history that everything will be fine is unrealistic and allows those changes to embed without opposition.
Whiggish history? Talk daft. My point is the exact opposite of Whig history. In the 1930s no one, except Churchill, predicted WWII, similarly in the 1900s and pretty much all the way back. But the 'civilisation is going to the dogs' notion has been around just as long and its unrelenting miserabilism is especially tedious.
Btw: the term 'forgive me' is always ironic.
I don't think anything encapsulates the surviving prestige and soft power of the monarchy than the photograph of the Princess of Wales, who, in one picture, summarized everything a certain woman in California wants to be but who will never be.
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/fashion/fashion-news/a43812088/kate-middleton-alexander-mcqueen-coronation/
One of the surviving elements of medievalism to linger even in America, of all places, are university graduations. All the faculty are summarized, dressed in robes bearing the status of their degrees and the colors of the universities they received their PhDs, and march in a medieval process to a university president who has symbols of office. Oddly enough it's a ritual that has never been cancelled in the name of equity or supremacy. Makes you wonder.
Oh, there are many more rituals like that (the formal graduation you describe) in America and around the world and they have quite a few followers. Over 50 million in the US alone; they’re known as Catholics.
The majority of new immigrants in the US, in fact, are religious Roman Catholics from Latin America with a taste for the baroque.
What follows is not a criticism (just an observation): the rituals, pageantry and costumes of the coronation (or a graduation) stand out so much in the UK because it’s a Protestant country. Much of what seems like startling “medievalism” (and what cynical republicans in Britain may sneer at as pre-Raphaelite cosplay) exists in, at least, somewhat analogous forms in the Americas, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Russia and parts of Africa and Asia. They’re common.
“Conservative opinions tend to be low status, but that low status and the framework of laws and legal harassment interact and reinforce each other. Similarly, the financial rewards given to enforcers of progressive ideas tend to give those ideas more status; in the US, for example, many diversity and equality officers earn more than academics, while in Britain the diversity officer of the Wellcome Trust is paid more than the prime minister.”
I think what’s happening here in the states is a little trickier.
Well paid DEI officers allow colleges and corporations in the US to have greater diversity at or near the top while making their diverse “communities” (workers, staff, faculty, students) feel better by having people from “marginalized communities” in well-paying, prominent roles. The goal is for any photo of the people in power to “look like America”, i.e., have proportionate numbers of black & Latino people and women.
These jobs are made lucrative and important in large part so that every facet of American society is represented in positions of power and relative prestige. Expanding & empowering DEI staff at elite colleges is preferable to hiring yet more Asian men to teach STEM courses.
Then there’s the very real fear of legal action for not having enough diversity or failing to create an acceptable “work environment.” Simply not wanting to be sued explains an astonishing amount of corporate policy in the states.
Finally, the desire in America (especially by well-off white women) to have black women in positions of power should not be underestimated. This motivation probably isn’t best seen through a prism of wanting status. It’s much more complex, neurotic and well-intentioned. The extent to which this is a motivating force in American academic, cultural and liberal political institutions may be hard for people outside the US to grasp.
The problem with too great an emphasis on status to explain these things (at least in America) is you end up giving short thrift to other factors, including the legal incentives (and fears) that dominate American society, the unprecedented historical power of well-meaning women, a magical belief in the power of “representation” at the highest levels as a societal fix, the great desire of the young to be in “diverse” environments, and the simple role of power politics among different groups.
Well put. One cannot underestimate how the Civil Rights pseudo-religion in America created both a legal and mystical need for diversity.
Very much agree with most of this. I would add one adjunct and one qualifier.
The adjunct is that academia has been splitting knowledge into increasingly small silos in order to generate experts who can find employment. Pre the pure crystalline wokeness we see now, there was the whole therapeutic industry which grew by turning a failure to grow up and adapt into bewildering range of quasi ailments adhd, much of autism, ocd, anorexia, body dysmorphia etc. which could be treated by a similarly bewildering number of experts and gnostics. This came especially from female centric disciplines where creating a vulnerable group as a proxy for children was one unconscious drive, with money and a level of prestige being the other.
The qualifier is that I don't get why women help beyond the point that it serves their interests. Is it a system without an off.? You touched on one example of this help in your post which would make sense if the women had mixed race children or a lot of minority friends but not obviously otherwise. It is often said that women are just more inclusive than men but the counter to that is why then do women so weaponise exclusion to enforce norms.
I had this exchange with Melissa Benn on Twitter. She was condemning the 'system' that allows the Royals to exist and succeed. This from the daughter of Viscount Stansgate. The lack is self-awareness by some on the privileged left is astonishing. https://twitter.com/melissa_benn/status/1655123774071513090?s=46&t=ybRRTz_D9hb8iFJgxTP3ug
I'm increasingly convinced the real reason people are anti-monarchists is because they think *they* should get to be monarch themselves. (See also the liberal OBSESSION with the Harry Potter franchise - the idea of an ordinary young person plucked from obscurity and inducted into a magical aristocracy for other special people is deeply seductive to them).
As is the case with Christianity, I think the monarchy might be saved by a large swathe of opinion among our ethnic minorities, for whom ceremony, ritual and hierarchy come perfectly naturally and who may see better than most that a focus for social cohesion which is elevated above everyday politics is a great advantage to national stability. Also, you don't mention monarchy's strong association with the Commonwealth, a body that while it gives expression to our aspiration for diversity and human solidarity is happily not associated either with the elite beliefs of the academy or with USA-aping, and so is becoming increasingly attractive to many of us now.
As Ed points out, progressiveness is a thinly held belief system e.g. a very recent data analysis shows progressives to be statistically no less likely to avoid diverse areas than conservatives. And it's thinly held because (a) it exists in direct opposition to self interest, other than those members of the majority who find employment via the disassembling (which may single handedly explain all of wokeness) ; and (b) because it is almost all obviously nonsense. No-one, outside the cult core, really believes men and women are interchangeably the same, or that white people murder at a higher rate than black people in the US (other those who believe black people killing other black people doesn’t count), or that we all have an innate gender identity which is also unspeakably important to us, or that diversity is our greatest strength or even a strength at all. And can there be anything less declassee than an intellectual movement that promotes the subjectivity of all knowledge other than the knowledge it imparts. It should be laughable.
However the propaganda is unspeakably strong as it probably needs to be . My mum relating something she read in the Sunday Times about the mild racism experienced by a Pakistani person in middle class circles in the 1980s had never heard of the events in Rotherham, Telford etc.1 My mother in law talking about a film she saw where black female clerical staff solved some problems that NASA scientists couldn’t. A female colleague sincerely arguing that a female tennis players could compete against the top men.
Footnote
1 These horrors occurred because people did not want to draw a line connecting the crimes to Pakistani men, yet this is precisely what the BBC continue to do to this day. For example, the following, appears in a BBC “debunking” article. Oddly it as good as proves the connection, but the BBC (who are less then rigorous about data when speaking about anything on their agenda) then come over all data purist in order to go on and deny the link.
“A previous piece of research from 2015 found that of 1,231 perpetrators of "group and gang-based child sexual exploitation", 42% were white, 14% were defined as Asian or Asian British and 17% black. The problem is that the data is from only 19 out of more than 40 police forces and nearly a decade old.”
"Around a fifth of the public would like to abolish the monarchy, and that feeling is much stronger among the under-30s ..."
Under-30s' feelings are expressed with expletives, but they are very shallow. They evaporate as soon as you ask, "What specific actions do you plan to take?"
I would lay good odds on there being a significant gap between what many people tweeted & FB'd about all this and what they felt. As 2012 showed us, nationalist fervour is a guilty pleasure for the bien pensants. As long as it acknowledges the NHS and whichever cutout represents Mo Farrah at any given moment, it's actually fine to feel good about celebrating your country.
Sorry, this is not really comment on the piece, but just to inform you that you were mentioned favorably twice in a (a delicious if too self-consciously clever) hit job in the Atlantic!
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/national-conservative-conference-london-brexit/674095/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230518&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily
If the UK removed its monarchy and didn’t have someone far worse in power within a generation, it would be the first major European nation to do so since the founding of the Roman republic.
Republicanism is never held responsible for elevating the Fuhrer to the level of Kaiser. It should be.
'I look at some of the royal superfans and wonder if, had they been raised in the United States, they might have ended up killing someone by now.'
I'm just picturing an American Gyles Brandreth in battle fatigues waddling through the US Capitol building on January 6th.
to me (an outsider), the biggest argument for republicanism is a financial one. How does one justify spending all that millions to upkeep the life style of the rich and famous for a whole family? I am not saying taken them all away, but maybe all that private art should be in a museum for the public, and most of those castles should be open up to the public, etc. (i.e. not quite go the extreme of the Dutch, but somewhere in between...)
Nice piece but disappointed to see the old canard of comparing people's pay to that of the Prime Minister. It is a false comparison because the PM's true "compensation package" is much more than their pay: they get free accommodation and generally have more or less zero expenses while in office; and then when they leave office they have a guaranteed source of income from speeches for many years.
I'm a believer in paying PMs £2m a year, like Singapore, in part because of prestige. Cabinet ministers in Victorian England were paid vasts amounts by today's standards!
The “great and the good”? I suppose Hello! readers might believe that.
Weird factoid about the Republican protesters - They were visibly drenched. They seem to have turned up in shorts and T shirt's I wonder if that spooked the Police somewhat. Cops play hunches