Yesterday’s King’s Speech did not disappoint me at all. I knew it would consist of nothing but elephant traps for the opposition and would offer nothing on the cost of living crisis, the underfunding of public services including and especially our NHS, our crumbling infrastructure, the abandonment of any pretence that Sunak would introduce a long promised Mental Health Act and anything else that might address the commonly held belief that in broken Britain, everything is broken and nothing works. I sat at home, watching bored senseless and King Charles, looking and sounding as bored senseless as me, read out the dross handed to him by the government. Hell, Chas probably didn’t agree with any of it, especially the anti-green stuff. Having spent the entire summer and much of the autumn on holiday (from what?) at Balmoral, Chas looked every inch the man who would return there in a heartbeat.
Increasingly, I am finding it hard to understand quite why we need to have such a lavish occasion for something that is, as we experts call it, total bollocks. Yesterday, the government unveiled next to nothing at huge expense. Chas brought with him a vast entourage of people in fancy dress, as well as a small army of security folk and – surprise, surprise! – there was a large turn out of Lords from the House of Lords, each and everyone trousering £342 JUST FOR TURNING UP. In truth, our monarch could easily have done the speech by way of Zoom, while propped up in an armchair in Balmoral. “What a waste of time and money this is,” he probably didn’t think, but I know I did.
“Ah yes, but those royals – look at all those foreign tourists!” you say. The only foreigners we like, spending a fortune on hotels and tourist tat. “And Johnny Foreigner goes home again, passing up the opportunity of enjoying free luxury housing and generous DWP benefits that these bloody asylum seekers get. That’s what it says in the Daily Mail. Disgusting.” I’m not sure whether sustaining an eye-wateringly expensive royal family just to benefit stall-holders on Oxford Street and crap London hotels is quite what the early royals had in mind, but there you go.
I come from a generation that thought, and in my case still thinks, that £342 – the House of Lords payment for just turning up, I remind you – is a lot of money. In fact, I’m still awestruck when I see a sum of money of over £20, which I know sounds a little sad, but when you come from a place where £20 literally was a fortune, £342 almost feels life-changing, especially when people are coming to our food bank without a pot to piss in. But all this pageantry – ‘WE DO THIS BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD” – has always come across to me as being completely out of kilter with the lives of ordinary people.
So-called experts debated The King’s Speech on TV and radio for the rest of the day, although I am far from convinced that anyone outside the political bubble was paying attention, apart from people in care homes who are still in mourning at the departure of Holly Willoughby from This Morning. And that’s because the lives of ordinary folk couldn’t be any different from the fancy dress costumed establishment lined-up yesterday in Westminster.
In the cold light – today I should describe it as the cold dark – of day, it’s the every day grind that consumes our attention. It’s the time-consuming commute to work, the struggle to make ends meet (tomorrow, I meet, again, those who can’t), the endless wait to be seen by an NHS on its knees, kids going to schools which are literally falling down, driving on roads with pot holes the size of sink holes that represents our mundane lives. The antiquated history of the British establishment still looms large in our psyche, the doff your cap and do what you’re told spirit of serfdom that we somehow masochistically seem to embrace, even at a time when the whole country is going to hell in a handcart.
I wasn’t disappointed with Chas’s vacuous speech but I wasn’t angry, either. I just worn down by the state of the nation, not least because we seem content to accept our lot while the rich and privileged live their lives in a parallel world the lumpen proletariat could never even aspire to, never mind join.
Remember what the King said? We’re going to ban smoking eventually, we’re going to ban workers from exercising their freedom to withdraw their labour, we’re going to let oil giants drill for oil that will make no difference to supply or price for us, we’re going to even more beastly to criminals – so Tory MPs, be afraid – and we’re going to be kinder to animals before we send them to slaughter, or something.
I almost felt sorry for Chas when sat there in his ludicrous outfit, topped off by what appeared to be a tea cosy on his head, but only almost. He loves all this so-called tradition and pageantry more than anyone else and certainly far more than his mum who carried out her duties – basically waving at and shaking hands with people and showing far more class than he ever could summon.
Ultimately, yesterday was all about nothing more than cynical and shallow than pre election politics. I keep hearing that as a country we’re better than that. Having listened to a bored and disinterested monarch yesterday, followed by a shallow billionaire snake oil salesman, posing as our prime minister, who was voted for by no one, I’m not so sure.
