Posts about Britain (RSS, JSON)

6PM — I’m squarely with Doug Belshaw: Britain’s monarchy, any monarchy, is outdated and irrelevant. The king and his whole family have no role in Britains society other than selling coffee cups at crammed souvenir shops on Oxford Street. There’s no need to publicly celebrate or fund any of these events, no coronations, no funerals, no weddings. If the royal family is dying to throw a little party to celebrate their mere existence, by all means, they should. But theyshould also pay for it themselves; they can certainly afford it.

The ceremony is a weirdly interesting spectacle, steep with tradition and strange ancient rituals. There are costumes—so many robes—an abundance of shiny props and tacky horse carriages. But there is only little behind the pomp. An old man, whose sole achievement in life was to pop out of one specific vagina, is sat on an old chair wearing a coat, which is clearly too long, too heavy, and all around impractical. Another man representing an institution that has as little relevance as the monarchy, who should have no, and has no, legitimisation to put anyone in charge outside his own stuffy institution, especially not a state, he puts a hat on the first man, which is fitted with expensive rocks nicked from enslaved colonies, and, boom, you’re in head of this country now.

Imagine the ceremony took place in the local town hall as a purely bureaucratic transaction. The same way many couples get married today. Charles shows up, signs a couple of documents and ten minutes later it’s all done.

A minority in Britain still say the monarchy is very important. That’s the people who these events are for. And the tourists. I understand that sometimes you want indulge in a glamorous fairytale, even if you’re not part of it, or you want to re-live an era long gone. You can do that—in Disneyland. There’s no need for a county to spend millions so a band of cartoonish characters can parade down the street.