Posts Tagged ‘royal family’

“So, Venla, now that all of the homeless people have been cleansed from the royal borough, our unelected leader can marry someone the rest of us would not be allowed to bring into the country. Can you give us a facial expression that sums up how many fucks you give about the royal wedding?”

Venla: “Yes. Yes I can.”

Last year, I went to Finland to escape having to hear all about the Queen’s Jubile. This year, I went to Finland to avoid having to hear all about the royal baby. But as I took a stroll down Helsinki marina, what did I see? This…

For a long time now, the monarchy has been entirely out of step with modern Britain.

If the monarch had multiple children, the succession would be given to the eldest boy, rather than simply the eldest child. For the grave sin of being born a woman, you would be passed over by your younger brother, because men are obviously generically predisposed to be better at ruling a kingdom.

But no more! A new royal succession law is passing that removes said gender discrimination, meaning the eldest child, regardless of gender, will now inherit the Crown.

I have to say though, I can’t really believe we spent parliamentary time on this.

Ending discrimination is always a good thing, but the reality is that almost nobody is affected by this. Indeed, even if you look at the past thousand years, how many people would be affected by it? My guess is, it’s very, very few people. You would be able to count them on one hand.

That is far less than the amount of women who are going to be raped in the next 24 hours, or the number of transwomen who will be murdered in the next month. Maybe that would be a good place to spend some parliamentary time?

You can then argue that it is the principle that it is important – that the monarchy are the head of the UK, and indeed the Commonwealth, so it is important we show from the top that we don’t discriminate on gender.

This is a much better argument, but if we are going to recognise that the monarchy is a ridiculous unfair archaic system, why are we still tolerating it? Why not finally make the move to a republic? The phrase polishing a turd comes to mind, because we still have a system where 99.9999% of the population are excluded because of the circumstances of their birth – we have hardly fixed discrimination in this area – this isn’t a victory for women, it’s a victory for Kate Middleton’s daughter. That we spent our parliamentary time on.

To be sure, recent events surrounding the royal fetus, are a tragedy. Last week, two Australian DJs made a prank call to the King Edward VII hospital, pretending to be the Queen and Prince Charles and were put through to Kate’s private nurse who believed they were the real deal and revealed details of her condition. In the media circus surrounding the event afterwards, the nurse killed herself.

As a result Mel Greig and Michael Christian, the DJs on 2Day FM are now on indefinite leave, their show suspended and the radio station left not really knowing what to do. In fact, Scotland Yard are now speaking to the Australian authorities regarding their investigation.

Some reward for the public service the two DJs provided, pointing out that the security and privacy policies of the hospital are a joke.

I don’t think it’s unfair to say that if you have a strong Australian accent, you’re impression of the Royal Family isn’t flawless, and so the fact that it would seem like literally anyone in the world can access private medical information using a simple social engineering attack troubles me greatly.

Yet, for pointing this out, the two DJs are almost being held responsible for the suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who revealed said information. If we learn anything from this situation (apart from you shouldn’t just give out personal medical information over the phone – but most of us knew that anyway) is that a media circus of blame leads to suicide – so blaming Greig and Christian doesn’t seem like a sensible cause of action.

Recently, The Sun broke ranks and published naked photos of Price Harry in Las Vegas.

The Sun claimed that the pictures are in the public domain, so they might as well print them. Which, I think most of us can agree, is a really rubbish excuse for breaching someone’s privacy.

Their other defence was to suggest that it was in the public interest to see naked pictures of Prince Harry.

Now, perhaps I am a little out of touch with the old generation, but I utterly fail to see how someone being naked at a party in Las Vegas is in the public interest. He might be third in line to the throne, but first in line to the thrown is Prince Charles – a man who supports homoeopathy and suggested he should be defender of the faiths, even though the title defender of the faith was specifically given to Henry VIII for attacking other religions.

More importantly, though, public interest is an important defence. Sometimes you need to break the rules because it’s important for the media to support something – take the New York Times publishing some of the information Wikileaks released about the US military gunning down innocent civilians for example.

Using it for this kind of nonsense (naked photos of Prince Harry) is a real problem because it weakens the argument when newspapers actually need to publish something that is in the public interest, and hands the government a loaded weapon when it comes to shooting down the need for a public interest defence.

The Sun has been journalistically irresponsible. But what should we expect from the same scumbags that shat all over 168 years of British newspaper history because it turned out they were doing very illegal things.

Immigration has been a hot topic over the past decade. Many people are concerned about the level of immigrants coming into the UK, while other groups argue that we need immigrants to continue flooding to the UK in order to promote growth and ensure there is still a bit of money left in the pension pot.

Realistically though, there is really just one group of immigrants causing more problems in our society than any other. Addressing this one specific area would bring far more equality and fairness to our society.

That’s why I’m launching my new campaign Deport the Sax-Cobergs.

They come over here, they take our jobs…

They take our women…

And they live in massive council houses funded by the tax payer…

So, I’ll be handing round a petition…

Some of you may have been aware that there was recently a royal wedding.

Actually, I didn’t find the media coverage that overbearing. There was plenty of coverage of it, but then that is the media no matter what is happening – whether it’s the latest deadly pandemic, political scandal or international football competition.

What really annoyed me, was the amount of people who spent so long moaning about it. Every time I logged on Facebook, every time I looked at Twitter, every time I read someone’s blog, they seemed to be moaning about the amount of media coverage the royal wedding was receiving.

I mean, it’s not just me that thinks there is a certain level of irony that most of the coverage I have seen of the royal wedding, is people moaning about how there is too much coverage, right?

So did anyone else see the Queen’s speech yesterday?

Now before I get into this, I want to point out that I am a massive royalist. The monarchy is brilliant, they bring in far more money into our country than they cost us, the Queen is a massive symbol of power throughout the world and still head of the Commonwealth and any alternative system would be equally, indeed far more, flawed.

But I was not amused by her speech yesterday. At least by the end of it. When she first started to talk about Jesus as if he was born on December 25th (he wasn’t, Christians have no idea when he was actually born) I laughed but then she just got offensive.

She basically said that the ideas of altruism and being nice to your fellow man were values derived from Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. That is, of course, complete bullshit, I was being nice to people way before I read to Bible as I’m sure you were too not to mention the historical fact that people had civilised societies well before the Abrahamic religions arrived. Indeed all The Bible in reality detracts from altruism by saying you should be good to win favour with God rather than just because it’s the right thing to do.

I think the philosophy you’re actually looking for Elizabeth is Humanism. Because, dare I say it, “just be good for goodness’ sake.”^[1]