Well, I pretty much avoided all of it – the Platinum Jubilee, obviously. It was pretty easy really – I just avoided the main TV channels and any public places, like parks or the local shopping centre, for four days and was able to pretend nothing was going on. There were no street parties in my area, (at least, none that I was invited to – I didn’t wake up on the Sunday to find the road outside my house closed and trestle tables set up, anyway), no bunting and only a few houses with flags or balloons outside. The plus side of it all was that the roads were pretty much empty, so, on the Friday, I was able to drive out to the country for a pleasant walk. I also took the opportunity to watch an eclectic mix of films with no Jubilee connection whatsoever. So, you might say that I successfully returned the favour to Her Majesty by completely ignoring her big event the same way that she once ignored me. Now, I know that I’ve told the story before but, as we’ve just had a weekend full of people telling their stories about how they met the Queen, I’m going to retell my story about how I didn’t meet her. We’re going back more years than I care to remember, when I was working in London, it was during President Mandela’s state visit and I was walking down Whitehall one lunchtime when the Queen’s limo, complete with police escort, drove past. Now, I was the only person on that side of the street as they came past – I could clearly see Her Maj and Nelson Mandela on the back seat and they saw me. Indeed, Nelson Mandela waved at and I waved back. But do you know what? Not only did the Queen not acknowledge me – at the time one of her civil servants – but she actually turned and looked the other way. I’ve never forgotten that slight. Fucking outrageous.
Which is why I’ve always taken a jaundiced view of such things as Jubilees and Royal Weddings. I found the build up to this recent one particularly offensive, with all that shit about wanting us all to sing ‘Sweet Caroline’ in unison at street parties celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Obviously, the correct response to this should have been ‘fuck off’. The idea that the entire population were going to go completely ga ga and uncritically worship at the feet of the Royal Family was simply revolting. There are still some of us who find all this fawning over something as archaic as a hereditary monarchy quite repugnant. This is the twenty first century, for God’s sake, not the middle ages. Monarchy is an anachronism which has long passed its sell by date. My late father was a fervent anti-monarchist. I remember both the Silver Jubilee in 1977 and the later Royal Wedding of Charles and Diana not for street parties, but for the fact that we went to the beach instead. We were the only kids in our street not to attend either street party.
Not that this turned me into an ultra Royalist in reaction to my father. I simply developed a disinterest in Royalty, an ambivalence which saw them as a harmless anachronism. It was the Diamond Jubilee that really radicalised me – I started out ambivalent but ended up turning into my father. It was the TV coverage that really did it for me – all the deference and creeping and crawling. It made me realise that my father had undoubtedly been right – there’s nothing harmless about the continued existence of our monarchy. It is used to constantly reinforce the idea that there is a correct social order in the UK and that we should all ‘know our place’ – a justification for the class system and the snobbery, privilege, entitlement that comes from unearned hereditary wealth. The sort of wealth that too many of our leaders enjoy and use to wield disproportionate influence.
It isn’t that I want to see the UK equivalent to the storming of the Winter Palace, or see the entire Royal Family executed in a cellar, you understand. I don’t really have anything against them personally. But, at the very least, we need to see them radically scaled back, much like other constitutional monarchies have been in places like Norway, Denmark or the Netherlands. Get rid of all the bloody hangers on and the extended family of parasites. Moreover, we need to make them properly constitutional. I used to labour under the common misapprehension that the ‘Royal Assent’ required for parliamentary bills to finally pass into law was merely a formality. But this turned out not to be true – the Queen has refused assent to some legislation, namely that to do with her and her family’s finances. This really must stop – it undermines the fundamental concept of the ‘rule of law’ which is meant to govern democratic societies – nobody gets to pick and choose which laws they observe. But hey, as, thanks to the propaganda of the right wing press and establishment, daily brainwashing the UK into believing that accident of birth is a perfectly reasonable criteria for selecting leaders, none of this is likely to happen.
So, instead of getting involved in protests or attempting to disrupt protests, I decided simply to ignore the Platinum Jubilee as retaliation. Just as I did the Golden and Diamond Jubilees. Which brings me to a more serious point: how many of these bloody events are we, the public, expected to finance. Because, make no mistake about it, it’s the taxpayer who has footed the bill for four of these Jubilees in the past forty five years. I’m not going to say that it is ‘obscene’ that public money is being spent on celebrating an over privileged hereditary elite – ‘obscene’ is a word both over used and misused these days – but it is perplexing that our governments are willing to sanction such expenditures while we have increasing levels of poverty in this country. Especially right now, when we are in a cost of living crisis with increasing prices making it increasingly difficult for even those employed in relatively well paid jobs to afford basics like food and fuel. But, of course, the spectacle of those four days, (the press tell me it was a spectacle – I didn’t see it so I’ll have to take their word for it), was undoubtedly meant to divert our attention from the various crises engulfing the country. In particular, the multiple crises engulfing Boris Johnson. Getting back to the Platinum Jubilee, if anybody asks me, I can honestly say that I enjoyed the Jubilee weekend. I didn’t see any of the event itself, but I enjoyed not seeing it and doing other stuff instead.
Doc Sleaze
