I know everyone’s making jokes about it but also as a british citizen it is just so Fucking weird to see how the country stops when a royal dies. this man was almost a hundred years old. the news story begins and ends at ‘very elderly man dies after being ill for a long time’. and yet it’s EVERYWHERE. as if it was remotely unexpected. as if it actually affects the people in this country. every kind of broadcasting stops in its tracks and talks about this and only this, on and on, tributes, memorials, the same things again and again. when all that’s happened is an old man has died. and people consider it disrespectful if you’re not interested in it - disrespectful, to not grieve for a complete stranger! to treat his death with the exact level of engagement you would any other person you didn’t know!
it just kind of feels like a wake-up moment to how fucking backwards this country is. you realise that every single media outlet has been feeding you the idea that these people are more important and monumental than anyone else. you realise they’ve been pushing that on you for your whole life. in the year of 2021 we are still their subjects and we are still expected to care about the royals as though they have a single fucking thing to do with us
Jeremy Corbyn is the ex leader of the Labour Party, in case you thought he tweeted something rude about Prince Philip, he didn’t. This was the tweet in question:
Its simply not about Prince Philip. And it was posted after the news had broken, and that is the reason for said backlash. It has been reported in multiple national news papers that Jeremy Corbyn tweeted about something else after the Prince was already dead.
We have now entered into our 8 day mourning period, and the government will soon offer guidance as to how public bodies should proceed. Yes you heard that correctly we all need governmental guidance for dealing with the death of a 99 year old most have never met. The standard rules involve local governments ceasing operation during this time.
It is absolutely everywhere, every single radio station, news report, newspaper, magazine, television show HAS to be talking about it 24/7 right now. Went to watch BBC iplayer last night and every recommendation is about Prince Philip.
I feel like a broken record but I really cannot stress this enough, he was 99. You don’t even need to have any negative sentiments towards the royals to realise this is not actually a particularly dramatic or tragic occasion. And yet it brings the whole country to a ridiculous standstill.
for those of you who aren’t familiar with how uk parliament works, there are several “formalities” that exist within the legislative process which involve the monarchy - for example, every bill must gain royal assent (i.e. must be approved by the queen) to become law. you might be thinking: wait a second, the monarchy is unelected, that doesn’t sound very democratic. and you’re right! this is an argument that’s been ongoing for years, but mostly it’s been ignored because until recently these formalities were seen as harmless (it’s incredibly rare, as in it hasn’t happened in centuries, for the monarch to refuse to pass a bill that’s gone through parliament into law).
this scandal, however, has brought into light the reality of what these formalities actually mean for uk democracy. see, there’s this fun little thing called “Queen’s consent”. essentially, this is where the government asks the queen’s permission for parliament to be able to debate laws that affect her, and it happens before the debate takes place(rather than royal assent, which is the final stage of the legislative process). it was this procedure that the queen used back in the 70s to conceal her private wealth from the public and save her own arse by having government ministers alter a transparency law. no one has ever paid much attention to it, primarily because most people didn’t know it existed until now.
it seems, however, that the queen has repeatedly used Queen’s consent to privately lobby the government. the guardian’s investigation found that the queen used Queen’s consent to vet over 1000 laws, along with evidence of her lobbying for changes to at least four draft laws, though she might have interfered with way more. the laws she’s interfered with range from wealth and taxation laws (shocker), to laws regarding the nhs and even animal welfare. if it’s still not obvious to you why this is a problem, let me explain:
Queen’s consent is democratically dangerous enough as it is, seeing as its existence basically allows the monarchy to alter and even put a stop to legislation that has the potential to limit its power. the way that it’s being used is worse. the sheer breadth of policy that the procedure covers means that the queen, as we’ve discovered, has access to basically all legislation created by parliament, regardless of whether it affects the crown.
tldr: the queen is using parliament as means of maintaining her wealth and power, and Queen’s consent is an inbuilt tool within our democracy that facilitates that. This Is A Problem.
I’m very much enjoying every possibility which could have led to this picture:
went somewhere and paid an extortionate fee for fish n chips fusion and decided to share it with Twitter
made some fish n chips at home then decided to put it on a nice plate before sharing with Twitter
got a normal amount of fish n chips from a normal place but then at home decided to put it on a nice plate and left out a bunch of the chips because he thought it looked nice for Twitter
is on a trendy diet and so he only eats that many chips and decided to share it with Twitter
And, my personal favorite, plus what I think really happened: he got a normal amount of fish n chips from a normal place to post a photo about what a regular normal guy he is, after which there was an ENORMOUSLY lengthy argument about how to stage the photo and how many chips to put in and the end result you see posted to Twitter is a picture of some very cold, gross fish n chips which have been workshopped to death.
oh, it’s worse than that. see that little design at the 1 o'clock position on the plate?
that’s official government dishware. this was a plate served to him at some official function, so british TAXPAYERS paid an extortionate fee for this scottish tory 6 chip twat’s fish n chips fusion, and he decided to post it on twitter to show off.
There is just so much in this post, everytime I scrolled down it just went places. I was expecting a huge plate of chips and two deep fryed battered cods and just lost with the “more chips than brain cells” then.. then I saw the plate.
To give more details on this, because I have been following it - in the last UK lockdown resulting in school closures, families entitled to free lunches were given 30 pound vouchers for each child for every two weeks. In this lockdown private companies were contracted with approx the same 30 pound per child budget and the results were the above.
The reason the vouchers - which has restriction placed on them that prevented their use on age restricted items - were allegedly used to buy tobacco and alcohol. Which was not possible.
Anyway after much uproar at from a combination of people who fight against child poverty, people who believe in food safety, people who don’t like the misuse of public funding - the vouchers have been reinstated!
Not related to Skin, who's always been quite vocal politically, but I wonder. How many of the UK musicians now whining about this law actually bothered to show up and vote against Brexit. Like, how many got their actual asses to the voting polls..... or does Brexit suddenly matter to them because it now reaches into their pockets......
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