I went to my street party for the silver jubilee and prior to that appeared on an amusing front page in The Leamington Courier after receiving a letter from Queen Elizabeth II (I have the letter still).
However, I've never been more convinced that castles and unearned privilege and vast quantities of public money siphoned off to the already vastly wealthy ribbon cutters plus tinsel titles and silly dressing-up costumes belong back then, in the mind of a 7 year old.
As a grandmother of 3 young children who will never breathe air as clean as I enjoyed as a child in the 1960s/70s, who will not get the free university education I received (twice) and who belong to a generation where ordinary people may never own a home or know real security, I see absolutely zero reason to celebrate the accession of a man who accepted supermarket bags of cash from a Saudi mate, didn't support his black daughter-in-law and who has a hissy fit over a pen that doesn't work. And don’t get me started on how he’s clearly bracketed his ‘wayward’ second son with his paedo brother in terms of how they are treated at public events.
Despite what the focus groups and opinion polls tell you about the generational divide on this issue, not every granny in Britain is on-board with the melodrama and farce - even those of us who received royal mail...
So, ¼ of the union (the English) are actively foisting
a new serfdom on their children and the rest of us. Unnervingly, friends/family
members – including some of mine are ‘testing’ acquaintances by making
unsolicited statements about the virtues of the Queen or questions about what
you are ‘doing to mark the occasion’ to gauge reaction – the wrong one they
already suspect – like McCarthy era USA.
Meanwhile under cover of hysterical, nonsensical,
media-induced public mass stupidity – Truss – the only person left on the
planet who believes in trickle-down economics - is handing other rich folk a
windfall of cash in tax cuts while refusing to do an EU-style profits windfall
tax on the energy companies to help cushion the blow of the extraordinary rise
in the cost of domestic fuel – which will see elderly and vulnerable people,
not living in palaces, die this winter.
Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwarteng is removing the
cap on profits for fat cat bosses because what the country really needs to get
back on its feet is for bankers to earn much more!
Home Secretary Suella Braverman (yes – they managed
to find someone more stupid than Priti Patel) is gung-ho for the migrant
flights to Rwanda – reminiscent as they are of the 1960s ‘reverse freedom’
buses in Southern Unites States organised by segregationists.
Therese Coffey – who looks like a walking heart
attack, Secretary of State for Health is dealing with the 6.8 million patient
backlog and massive understaffing by tackling poor grammar in an early formal
communication with NHS administrators. And that is before you even begin on
already over-stressed London hospitals and ambulance services further
challenged by those fainting in day- long queues to file past the coffin of
QEII
Fascism is on the rise in Europe. Putin’s war is far
from over. The forgotten victims in forgotten wars remain – well – forgotten.
The climate crisis is relegated to very low down on
the news despite the fires and floods and thousands of resultant deaths of
recent weeks.
If the fabled stability provided by the presence of
rich people living in palaces that folk repeatedly refer to is in the mediaeval
sense of everyone knowing their place and accepting that a very tiny handful of
entitled idiots have everything because they were born to other people who also
had everything while increasing numbers of ordinary folk and their children
shuffle through life’s gutter – then yes – we have stability.
Somehow the vastly wealthy and those benefitting
from an increasingly unequal system managed to convince the have-nots that what
they have is stability while wiping out all the post-war gains of the working
class. If you object to the mad obscenity of it all – you are lacking
compassion or unpatriotic or maybe a communist...
It’s an amazing sleight of hand.
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