This content originally appeared on The Laura Flanders Show and was authored by The Laura Flanders Show.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Not everyone is in celebratory mood this weekend. Curtis Daly explains why he is opposed to the monarchy.
By Curtis Daly
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With millions suffering through crippling price rises and hundreds of thousands of homeless households, the Jubilee is an unwelcome and costly attempt to distract us from the class war being waged by the Tories.
Video transcript
We’ve been hearing about it a lot in the news recently…
Reports have shown the celebrations are costing tens of millions of pounds. But with many struggling to pay bills and put food on the table, we’re asking: what should our country really be focused on right now?
Millions of people are facing extreme and sudden increases in their energy, food and general living costs and the Tories have provided little relief, with the poorest families still £300 worse off this year.
This is made all the more revolting when tens of millions are spent on the celebration of an already wealthy monarch instead of people who could desperately do with support.
Every year the royal family are given a Sovereign Grant from the taxpayer, and last year they got over 85 million pounds – all the while, those claiming social security are chastised in right wing media as ‘lazy’ and ‘undeserving’.
Since the Tories came to power in 2010, councils across England have seen their budgets cut in line with the Tories ‘shrinking of the state’. This has meant shared community amenities like libraries, youth centres, and schools have been cut down, or taken away entirely.
While councils have had to prove their ‘cost efficiency’ and endlessly shrink their budgets, it’s written into law that even if profits from the Crown’s properties fall, the royal family don’t lose out and receive the same amount of money as the last year.
The queen and royal family are known for their multiple residences, including Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Holyrood Palace, Balmoral Castle and multiple properties littered across Central London. Yet whilst the Windsors are spoilt for choice on where to spend their days, the number of rough sleepers has more than doubled since 2010 and an estimated 227,000 families and individuals are homeless.
So while the parties go on and the wealthy royals celebrate decades of being on the throne, just remember, these celebrations are a distraction. A distraction meant to hide the fact that unearned privilege and class segregation still runs rampant in British society.
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Queen Elizabeth I used to enjoy the ‘sport’ of bear-baiting. That’s the grizzly practice of people setting a pack of dogs on an incapacitated bear to see who makes it out alive.
Thankfully, bear-baiting is a thing of the UK’s distant past. But bears – dead ones – will very much be present at Elizabeth II’s upcoming Jubilee celebrations. That’s because, according to PETA, each and every ceremonial bearskin hat that the UK’s army guards wear requires the taking of a bear’s life. And if the rehearsal was anything to go by, there will be lots of dead-bear-headed guards at the ceremony.
It doesn’t actually take any dead bears to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee though. Here’s why.
Time to move on
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been under pressure for a while to ditch the hats. Campaigners, including Born Free, have urged the department to end their use. So have some 75 MPs, who signed an early day motion calling on the MoD to recognise that the use of real fur:
is not in line with the UK Government’s commitment to have and promote the highest standards of animal welfare
Most recently, an assembly of wildlife photographers, such as Springwatch’s Megan McCubbin and president of We Animals Media Jo-Anne McArthur, have joined with PETA to pressure the government to drop the fur. In a letter to officials, reported on by Digital Camera World, they said:
As wildlife photographers who have spent our lives documenting the beauty and fragility of the natural world, we are acutely aware of the need to protect – not pillage – the living planet, which includes the animals we share it with.
The perfect alternative
PETA has even worked together with a faux furrier called ECOPEL to develop an alternative for the ministry. Along with the designer Stella McCartney, they have come up with a product that Born Free says is “visually indistinguishable from the real thing.” Under MoD tests, the alternative also performed as well as the version made of bears, PETA asserts. Moreover, ECOPEL has offered to provide an unlimited amount of these free to the MoD up to 2030.
However, the MoD has refused. In particular, the defence secretary Ben Wallace has opposed the move.
Ben Wallace & bear hats scandal grows, we now learn that he overrode commitments from Defence Ministers & from Prime Minister to end the use of bear fur hats in British Army. We will not let him get away with it @BWallaceMP @BorisJohnson @carrielbjohnson @PETAUK @ZacGoldsmith pic.twitter.com/Y8xsdX2kwZ
— dominic dyer (@domdyer70) November 21, 2021
According to the Blackpool Gazette, Wallace has been challenging efforts to switch to a cruelty-free alternative since 2006, when a fellow MP first floated the idea.
An unethical choice
The MoD has suggested that the caps are made from bears that die in state-sanctioned culls in Canada. But as PETA and Born Free have pointed out, this is somewhat misleading. Yes, the Canadian state sanctions bear killing. But it’s not generally by the state, it’s by trophy hunters.
The UK government claims to be committed to banning the import of trophies from hunting. And an army spokesperson insisted to the Gazette that:
Bears are never hunted to order for use by the MoD.
But whether the bears are ‘hunted to order’ or not, they are still hunted. And the fact that trophy hunters are able to make a tidy profit from selling the skins of the bears they kill can only incentivise more bloodshed.
Canada isn’t exempt from the ethical issues that surround black bear hunting in places like the US, such as the killing of mothers. As the Georgia Straight reported in 2015, it has also faced questions of the accuracy of its bear population figures, and the sustainability of its hunting quotas. In short, just because UK guards are wearing dead bears from Canada on their heads, it doesn’t make it ethical or sustainable.
With a free supply of alternative caps on offer, it doesn’t need to take any dead bears to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee or ceremonially dress the army for other purposes.
The fact that this upcoming celebration will feature so many of them is nothing more than gruesome and unethical.
Featured image via Ed Dunens / Flickr, cropped to 700×403, licensed under CC BY 2.0
This post was originally published on The Canary.
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The Queen’s Jubilee celebrations are set to pop up next week. June is going to begin with a four-day bank holiday weekend, a pageant in London, and the promise (or threat?) of street parties across the country. A lemon trifle has been crowned the Platinum Pudding, beating out 5000 other desserts. You’d be forgiven for thinking the whole country’s gone mad.
Unfortunately, it’s very British to have a mass event that celebrates a monarchy whilst most people suffer under Tory rule. A cost of living crisis is making life much more expensive for the poorest people, the Home Office is trying its best to restrict protest, the climate crisis is rapidly worsening, and to top it all off, politicians are mired in corruption.
And it’s not like the royal family’s image is faring much better. The Queen’s son, Andrew, had his military titles and royal patronages stripped after sexual assault allegations. Meghan and Harry stepped aside from formal royal duties after telling Oprah about the racism Meghan faced. However, those scandals fit into the pattern of who the royal family is, and how desperately the monarchy needs to be abolished.
Timing of the Jubilee
In fact, it’s good timing for the royals – they can distract everybody with an extra-long bank holiday weekend and some readymade patriotism. Supermarkets eager to cash in are readily jumping on the idea of white people gathering under Union Jack bunting to eat terrible sandwiches and soggy trifle.
But in reality, huge numbers of people are turning to food banks. The Trussell Trust says that, aside from the first year of the pandemic, they’ve had to give out 2.1 million food parcels for the first time ever. Meanwhile, charity Turn2Us found that since the government decided to take away the £20 Universal Credit uplift, 4 in 10 families on Universal Credit have become food insecure. That means they can’t afford to eat. And some food banks are even turning away donations of potatoes because people can’t afford the energy costs to cook those potatoes.
Enter the royal family. Or, should I say, enter the taxpayer-funded royal family. Last year, the government gave the Queen £85.9m. The press teams of these parasites haven’t yet made clear how much taxpayer money the Jubilee celebrations will cost. We can be sure, however, that it’s going to be a huge amount of money that would be better spent on making sure people can feed their families and heat their homes.
Who doesn’t want to celebrate?
It may come as a surprise to some in Britain, but people aren’t particularly fond of the British Empire because of the devastation it caused across the world. At its peak – way back in 1922 – the British Empire covered a quarter of the Earth’s land surface. Britain invaded and pillaged so many foreign lands that 65 countries have had to fight for their independence from the British. Atrocities of empire include the Mau Mau uprising, in which thousands of Kenyan people were raped and tortured. The partition of India displaced 14-16 million people, and some estimates say that it killed 2 million. Winston Churchill famously starved 4 million Bengali people to death. During the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, British soldiers fired continuously and without warning until they ran out of ammunition. They killed hundreds of people, and the British general who gave the order was celebrated as a hero.
There are so many more atrocities that the British empire has committed. Britain has done nothing to reckon with its colonial past. Other countries make serious attempts to recognise and remember past wrongs, but empire is barely taught in British schools. In fact, a YouGov poll from 2016 found that 43% of British people thought the empire was a good thing. And 44% were even proud of Britain’s colonialism.
But there’s a reason why the Union Jack is known at the butcher’s apron. The British empire has murdered, displaced, and tortured millions of people. It doesn’t take a genius to understand why people living in Britain who come from countries that the British empire ransacked might not be too eager to pick up a cucumber sandwich and sit down with Sally and George from across the street to celebrate the Jubilee.
Test of belonging
Even now, the Commonwealth includes 54 countries, with the Queen as their figurehead. But, she’s not just a figurehead – she’s a colonial figurehead. She is British colonialism, stolen gems and all. Colonialism is by no means over. So often, when the British empire is brought up, white people rush to say it wasn’t them who committed genocide, so why should they have to listen to angry people of colour banging on about colonialism?
It’s because the Queen is the head of an institution which wouldn’t exist in its current form were it not for the British empire. Britain would not be the country that it is now without empire. The royals’ recent tour of the Caribbean had them come face to face with even more countries who want reparations and independence. The continued Windrush deportations show that Britain doesn’t just have a legacy of colonialism. It has a present built on colonialism, and if the elites get their way, a future that’s also colonial. See, for example, the money that Britain pumps into aiding Saudi Arabia with the bombing of Yemen or the ongoing scramble for oil and other resources in Africa.
Why so mad?
The reason British people get so mad when the Queen doesn’t receive adoration, and when people don’t want to see Union Jacks littered all over the place, is because national events like the Jubilee celebration are a test of belonging. They want everyone to join in the good time and unquestioningly raise a glass to the parasite in chief.
That’s not going to happen though. It doesn’t matter if you tell us to go back home, or if you ask why we’re here if we hate it so much. Britain’s colonialism brought us here. And we’re happy to ignore a set of days that celebrates privileged people while others are sinking into poverty and hardship.
It’s typically backwards of Britain to even have a monarchy. It’s unspeakably arrogant to expect everyone to be pleased about the Queen and her little party. And it doesn’t matter one bit if white British people are offended on behalf of their Queen. After all the terror the British empire has wrought, and continues to wreak – too bloody bad.
Featured image via Youtube screenshot/The Royal Family Channel
This post was originally published on The Canary.