49 not out
Yesterday having been my birthday – which Her Majesty The Queen kindly declared to be a national holiday – I am now just a year short of a half-century. HMQ has decreed that today is also a national holiday, thus giving me the chance to get rid of my hangover before returning to work a year older on Wednesday.
Fortunately I didn’t have to endure the Queen’s Official party at Buckingham Palace on TV last night, and instead went to see the fabulous Lady Boys of Bangkok who are in Cardiff all week as part of their UK Tour. They perform in the purpose-built mobile Sabai Pavilion which for this week is situated in Cardiff Bay. Not only did I enjoy the show, I also escaped being hauled up on stage and turned into part of the act. Other members of the audience weren’t so fortunate…
I suspect most of the audience there were also celebrating birthdays or other special occasions, but some were probably just trying to escape from the all-encompassing Jubilee celebrations, of which I’m sure I’m not alone in being completely bored. So bored, in fact, that I can’t even be bothered to go into the whole Monarchist versus Republican thing.
Still, at least I wasn’t forced to work as an unpaid steward at the stupid river pageant on Sunday, and required to sleep rough under London Bridge, under threat of losing my benefits. Slavery is another fine British tradition.
I think the people who focus on getting rid of the Monarchy are misguided. Of course it’s an undemocratic and anachronistic institution, but it only has a symbolic status; it doesn’t have any actual power. The real threat to democracy is not the Royal Family, but the rampant capitalism that taken the world’s financial systems to the brink of chaos. Only when we’ve come up with a sensible plan for the world economy in the post-capitalist era – which, in my view, is approaching rapidly – will it be worth making the effort to remove some of the tattered decorations left behind by the old system.
The ongoing financial crisis gripping the world’s economy only exists because governments were persuaded of the need to use taxpayers’ money to underwrite losses in the banking sector. Bankers like capitalism when it comes to making profits, but are happy to fall back on socialism when they make a mess. Now the bankers’ losses have turned into a crippling burden of sovereign debt that could take decades to pay off. And who profits from this? The people who made the mess in the first place.
There is an obvious solution to this problem. A one-off tax of 20% of the accumulated wealth of the top 10% of the population would raise a staggering £800 billion for the Treasury. This option isn’t even discussed in Parliament because our politicians know their masters wouldn’t like it. And so we go on squeezing ordinary folk and letting the rich off the hook. I don’t think this can go on forever without someone figuring out that we’ve been royally had.
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In the Dark 
June 5, 2012 at 12:37 pm
Congrats Peter on your birthday. I am also tired of the jubilee. I have nothing particularly against Queen Liz. But isnt the fawning we do getting a bit out of date. For example, here is how the jubilee address to HM Queen of the Speaker of the House of Lords, Baroness d’Souza started on 20/3/12:
“Most Gracious Sovereign,
We, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, are assembled here today to celebrate sixty years of Your reign. We record with warmth and affection our appreciation of Your dedicated service to Your people, and Your unequalled sense of public duty over the years – service and duty to which You have only recently, and so movingly, re-dedicated Yourself.
We celebrate too Your stewardship of Your high office. You have personified continuity and stability while ensuring that Your role has evolved imperceptibly, with the result that the Monarchy is as integral a part of our national life today as it was 60 years ago….”
finishing with
“….Your Majesty, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament Assembled give thanks for this Your Diamond Jubilee. We look forward to the years to come and we pray that You and Your realms may enjoy the peace, plenty and prosperity that have so distinguished Your reign”
Can I submit that the use of the capital Y in Yours is at least now out of date, that the use of “Gracious Sovereign” and “Your Majesty” is just a tad over the top as a way to address any human being and that the best jubilee gift might be a bicycle as used by Scandinavian etc royalty!
June 5, 2012 at 6:05 pm
I have to admit that today’s Times headline, in view of the Duke of Edinburgh’s illness, was pretty witty (“A party for One”).
June 5, 2012 at 9:41 pm
Then there’s my theory that Pippa Middleton is the biggest threat to the monarchy! Problem is that with Kate they have given up divine right of kings, blue blood and all that. So when we see sister Pippa following Kate up the aisle at Westminster Abbey, it immediately prompts the question why Kate rather than Pippa for Queen and somehow emphasises anew the randomness of royal procedures for allocating upgrades to capital letters!
June 5, 2012 at 2:50 pm
Happy Birthday Peter! I can personally assure you that the 50s feel OK too. I can’t say that the Jubilee celebrations interested me either, but I’m perhaps in a puckish mood and here are some further observations:
1. The Sovereign is in the insidious position of having responsibility without power, as she or he is expected to sign into law Bills drafted and voted upon by others. This is precisely the opposite position of her ancestors many centuries ago, but by the 17th century a King got his head chopped off for breaking his word to Parliament over constitutional matters, and by the 1930s the Sovereign couldn’t even marry who he wanted.
2. “Slavery is another fine British tradition.” It was as wrong in the British Empire as everywhere else, but might we also remember that we were the first empire in history to abolish it, and to do so on moral grounds? In the ‘Land of the Free’ it took another generation and a major war to effect the same.
3. “The real threat to democracy is not the Royal Family, but the rampant capitalism that taken the world’s financial systems to the brink of chaos.” It might be worth defining ‘capitalism’ here. The besetting problem is the irresponsible proliferation of the money supply, permitted in interbank trading, by governments who think it is smart to run up bills then promote inflation in order to reduce the real value of those debts. This practice was not part of capitalism in the era in which capitalism’s sharpest critics wrote, and most people regarded as capitalists today would disapprove of the practice. A further problem is the utopian financial union of various European countries in the Euro currency without a corresponding fiscal union. Plenty of people warned that it would lead to trouble, and this has nothing to do with capitalism either.
4. “Only when we’ve come up with a sensible plan for the world economy in the post-capitalist era – which, in my view, is approaching rapidly…” It will also be a post-Welfare-State era if government runs out of money. I regard *subversion* of the Welfare State as the most important social problem in Britain today, and while I would not wish to solve it in this way, the results will be interesting.
Anton
June 5, 2012 at 4:20 pm
1. I agree. The Royal Family have plenty of material wealth, but their freedom is more limited than for must of us. I don’t envy them one little bit.
2. Yes, the British did abolish slavery, but not until the Empire had made huge profits from it.
3. Governments no longer have the power to intervene usefully in the money markets. This has obviously been the case since 1992 and probably before. The result is that the political establishment does what the markets want it to do. Other than taking the entire banking and financial services industry into public ownership, I don’t see a solution.
4. I’m not sure what you mean by “subversion” here, but I think the biggest problem is that we want too many things and aren’t prepared to pay for them.
June 5, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Peter, let me focus on no.3. A bank that is based in a particular country can operate only within the laws of that country. It was only because of too much morally corupt chumminess between US bankers and politicians that the Glass-Steagall Act, separating deposit banks and investment banks, was repealed in the USA in 1999. That was a bad day. New forms of interbank trading were also invented that the regulators – who report to government – did nothing about. As big a capitalist as Warren Buffett called them financial weapons of mass destruction. The result is that the big banks are in mutual debt to each other to the tune of multiples of GDP. The money ‘invented’ in those deals has not so far leaked out in away as to cause serious inflation, but it might. This could not have happened had central banks that report to national governments not permitted those banks to create the money involved in those deals. And under the Gold Standard it would have been out of the question.
June 5, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Slavery is indeed profitable – that’s why it was commonplace before we led the way in abolishing it (a task still far from complete worldwide).
To be clear, I am simultaneously ashamed that it was ever part of the British Empire and proud that we pioneered its abolition.
June 5, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Here’s a poem for the jubilee from R Burns – its from “A Cotter’s Saturday Night” – a Scots peasant farmer reads the bible to his family after their Saturday night meal….
“They chant their artless notes in simple guise,
They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim;
Perhaps Dundee’s wild-warbling measures rise,
Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name;
Or noble Elgin beets the heavenward flame,
The sweetest far of Scotia’s holy lays:
Compar’d with these, Italian trills are tame;
The tickl’d ears no heart-felt raptures raise;
Nae unison hae they, with our Creator’s praise.”
……
“Compar’d with this, how poor Religion’s pride,
In all the pomp of method, and of art;
When men display to congregations wide
Devotion’s ev’ry grace, except the heart,
The Power, incens’d, the pageant will desert,
The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole;
But haply, in some cottage far apart,
May hear, well-pleas’d, the language of the soul;
And in His Book of Life the inmates poor enroll.”
……..
“From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs
That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad:
Princes and lords are but the breath of kings,
‘An honest man’s the noblest work of God’;
And certes, in fair Virtue’s heavenly road,
The cottage leaves the palace far behind;
What is a lordling’s pomp? a cumbrous load,
Disguising oft the wretch of human kind,
Studied in arts of Hell, in wickedness refin’d!”
Well at least it makes a change from Huw Edwards et al….
June 11, 2012 at 7:58 pm
I’m not sure the one-off tax would work or be a good idea. If presented with such a tax bill the rich might have to sell some of their assets to pay it, and the only countries that have any money and are looking to invest are those states with different ideas on the status of women, gay rights and allowing dissenting voices to air their views.
Would we want the Treasury to get a lot more money so they can spend it on another invasion of a country or a pointless train line so we can all get to Birmingham 20 minutes earlier. No doubt they will award the contracts to their mates and their companies who are probably in the 10% of the population paying the tax. It wouldn’t be long before they clawed the money back.