By Richard Cottrell
"sleep walking into a bone fide Stasi state.”"And that’s another side to the mass hallucination we have just witnessed in London."
London has scarcely seen a frenzy like the royal jubilee celebrations since, well we can say VE Day back in 1945. True, total strangers didn’t indulge in wild sex in the crowded streets (well, not too conspicuously at any rate) yet the same sense of let-it-all-hang-out feeling came very close to one huge national orgasm.
There were other, more sinister undertones. Take the pictures of 250,000 people crammed into Pall Mall, heading towards Buckingham Palace in some kind of mesmeric trance beneath the massed union jacks, and you get the impression of a cross between the Nuremburg Rallies and H.G. Wells’ vision – in his book The Time Machine – of the factory-farmed Eloi heading for the caves where the Morlocks are waiting, knives and forks at the ready for the approaching feast.
The Guardian made the point that it took an entire regiment of mounted police and walking counterparts to escort the multitude to the palace gates. The same newspaper described the parade of river craft as looking more like a police regatta.
The city swarmed with armed policemen, officious wardens and stewards (mostly unemployed youngsters, who were given a few pence in their pockets, a bag of crisps and a sandwich and told to camp out overnight beneath the damp Thames bridges).
Der untermenchen come to mind.
Sharpshooters crammed rooftops, ready to take a potshot at any anarchists and Al Qaeda types plotting evil deeds in the teeming streets below. Londoners were hurried and bullied around virtually barricaded streets as though a revolution – rather than a “festival of joy” – was erupting around them. Without a doubt Big Brother not only had a VIP ticket for the proceedings, he was Master of Ceremonies to boot.
The choreography amounted to an unrestrained exercise in plucking selective nuggets from Britain’s shining imperial past and running them past as a live news reel played out before modern-day audience, amounting to some kind of exercise in post-natal self-reassurance.
Take the grand regatta on the River Thames. This was clearly intended to evoke memories of the armada of small boats that plucked defeated British troops from the clutches of Hitler at Dunkirk 1940 and the revenge earned at the return match represented by the Normandy Landings. “Rule Britannia, Britannia Rules The Waves” may be a stirring phrase in the National Anthem, but the plain fact is that Queen’s Royal Navy is not so much fit for a major maritime power as the run-down flotilla of a third world republic.
Even if Her Britannic Majesty had used the Thames as a royal catwalk and personally strolled on the grey waters beneath that drizzling gun-metal sky, it would not alter the brutal truth that if America should take back the nuclear Polaris subs, then Britain’s jolly tars are basically out on their ears.
After spending a queen’s ransom getting them half built, two new aircraft carriers are heading for the chop shop because of deadly cost overruns and the government’s inability to kit them out with fighter planes. There’s austerity for you, Cameron style. True grit, shall we say?
Yet, one hundred millions plus (my estimate, see below) came to hand easily enough in order to party the royals, who are themselves wading in the readies.
We may return to the matter of the copious bunting and banners, especially the egregious Nazi rally-like display along Pall Mall, which is a sort of sanctified version of the Roman Apian Way in Britannic terms.
The scene reeked of proto-fascist excess, the flags themselves dipped in tribute to the throng, in subliminal (perhaps) tribute to the animalistic excess of worship which Hitler invested in the German people.
In fact the German volk became slaves under the Nazis, just as the British people are presently slipping into the tyranny of the all-embracing Goebbelian state rolled out by Cameron and the well-loaded old Etonian chums who crowd his cabinet.
Like the feckless Eloi that I mentioned before, the hypnotized masses dutifully trooped behind the new Stormtroopers of the British state to pay their tribute at the National Shrine. If this reminds you of Shinto emperor worship in Japan, then you’ll not be far out.
Indeed, the peons poured on the monarchy never failed to mention the sixty years of “inspired leadership.” This is sycophantic journalism stretched to extreme by the doting royalista. The lionized head girl constitutionally neither leads and still less guides anyone, that is except her own dystopian, manically-depressed family of professional dedicated dunces – and what a fat job she’s made of that.
Her younger sister Margaret turned into an introverted alcoholic when the Gang Royal refused to let her marry her chosen lover, because he was divorced, then drove her into a loveless arranged marriage like some hapless immigrant from the Punjab. Royal mismatches are now the order rather than the exception of the day.
The dumbest of the cast of clown princes, Andrew (Duke of York) recently resigned from his post as roving trade ambassador on behalf of the UK because of his intimacies with the convicted American serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
Did his very own Queen Mother fail to advise her dearly beloved son of the dangers of forming improper alliances, or was she too busy closeted in the library at Windsor Castle boning up on the classics of English literature?
The Heir Apparent, Bonnie Prince Charlie, dangles like an albatross around the royal neck. Here is the perfect example of the old truism that idle hands make the devil’s work. This Right Royal Charlie is not intentionally wicked; he is simply an arch dullard and unreconstructed pedant, who has his servants boil a dozen or so eggs for his ritual afternoon tea until he encounters one of exactly the right consistency.
The rest he throws away, his regular habit with disposable objects.
His life story is that of one long failure to escape the warm clammy confines of the palace nursery. His repressed yearning for the comforting arms of “nanny” is best expressed by his choice of second consort, the divorcee matron Camilla Shand, with whom he gaily two-timed throughout the tragic, Shakespearian episode of Princess Di.
Allowing the future Defender of the Faith (i.e. the head of the British national church) the heresy of wedding a divorced woman was yet another of those royal “accommodations” by the Queen-Empress which mocks the fate of her lost sister, the poor forgotten specter of Princess Margaret.
The tragic tale of the empire’s very own Romeo and Juliet, Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al-Fayed, son of the regally-despised Egyptian who previously owned the Chelsea temple of luxury called Harrods, hung like an unmentionable pall over the great junket.
We pass over for now the mysteries yet to be resolved surrounding Death in a Parisian Underpass.
Suffice it to say that it is unfashionable to remember in these giddy moments of national exhilaration that it was the very same fawning red top tabloids who forced the “the firm” (as the royals call themselves) to lower the royal standard at Buckingham Palace on the day of her funeral. Or equally unfashionable to recall the frozen Easter Island statue expression of the Duke of Edinburgh when he was compelled by sheer public outrage to trudge behind Diana’s coffin in the funeral cortege.
Was it some collective state of national amnesia that clouded these memories during the hysterical jubilee weekend?
Rather, it is always the fate of shooting stars to be fast forgotten.
It was the sheer mawkishness of the gallery of celebrity VIPs which defined the consummate and obvious illiteracy of the proceedings. This was show business, writ large, just as Diana’s last rites were milked as a cheap shot for primetime television.
Yet in truth, all the egregious grinners and hangers-on from fantasy tinsel world formed the perfect compliment to an exercise in shallow vanity. The limpet-like, self-preening Beckham Royal Family not only got in on the act, they virtually took it over, as is their wont.
As to the costs, to a state which is supposedly bent on saving every shekel it can to stay afloat, then austerity was the uninvited guest at the four day, no-expense spared extravaganza of indulgence.
The mainstream media, understanding the sensitivity on this score, bandies around figures of £10 million, then claims most of that was recouped in bars and pubs and restaurants, and the street tea parties that took place all around the country.
This of course is arithmetical nonsense. It presumes there was a franchise, and a profit and loss account, in which the sums divvied out could be compared to sums received. Namely, good old fashioned double-entry bookkeeping.
Forget it. The staging costs were largely paid by Her Majesty’s Treasury and no direct compensations will ever reach that holy of holies.
The policing costs for an exercise on this scale are obviously astronomical. In 2006, a bunch of Scotland Yard’s Finest barged into a two-up, two-down terraced house in the Forest Gate district of North London in search of fictional Jihadists. This event called for a mere 250 coppers, for about half a day, but the bill – mostly for police overtime – exceeded £1.2 million.
My assessment is that the related costs for an exercise on the heroic scale of the jubilee weekend will approach £100 million, simply on grounds of grossly over-cooked security measures.
Wager on it that police overtime will again top the bill. Give those cops a bunch of finely sharpened pencils and a stack of mint time sheets, then you can guarantee they’ll make their pocket calculator play Home Sweet Home.
When all else is built in such as shipping military back-up, back room stuff like office admin, extra staff, the usual PR hangers-on, food at warp factor five on the orgy scale, enough fireworks to be spotted from the Moon, massive cleaning costs and so forth – and allowing for the usual grossly exaggerated contractor bills – then count at least £120 million as on the sensible side of realistic.
And what, in the end, was it all about? The United Kingdom is a nation undergoing a severely stressed identity crisis. It is neither European nor a fully subservient colony of the United States. It is a federation in the making, with the Scots likely to go their own way, and in due course, the Welsh to follow them. They already have their own governments, as does the disputed province of Ulster.
The excess of the flag worship, the adulation heaped on old lady Windsor who could well afford to pay for the entire fiesta from her spare change, the gratuitous praise heaped on a regal leadership reposing in a small closeted and feuding clan, is utterly absurd whichever way you choose to look at it.
The monarchical apologists will always counter that having a harmless, nominal head of state is far better than some presidential system, or the risk of a dictator.
The answer to that of course is that any dynasty is of itself a mistaken enterprise, which is exactly why the British themselves steadily winnowed down the powers of the Royal Household to the equivalent of Toy Town.
If you look at the royal dynasties of Spain and Holland, then the Queens of both those countries are regular Bilderberg courtiers (see the 2012 Bilderberg attendee list here), and it was the Dutch consort Prince Bernhard who set up Bilderberg in the first place.
One gets the feeling that the globalista reckon the collective IQ of the Windsor Set is not quite up to those demanding tests.
Finally we come to the confused business of “Englishness.” Much of the sheer banality of the sixty-glorious-years exercise was designed to paper over a gaping hole, the absence of a parliament where a certain parliament should obviously be, namely the missing English one. As it is, all the concessions granted to the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish (on top of the loss of Southern Ireland in 1922), have steadily eaten away at the foundations of the centralized empirical state.
It is well understood – and feared – within the ranks of the Tory Party that “Great Britain” and “United Kingdom” are increasingly redundant terms. If there were to be an English parliament, then the writ of the one currently sitting at Westminster would be dramatically curtailed.
The Crown is therefore regarded as a kind of backstop and guarantee of one nation under a single flag and monarch. So in that respect think of the recent festivities as one vast national orchestrated identity parade.
But all the rejoicing in London, and around England, could not disguise the simple fact that the sniffy Scots allowed the jubilee to pass by with barely a nod.
The independence-minded nationalist government sent best respects, and that was it. Feint praise, indeed. Even Wales – which in the past was well to the fore in populist royal loyalties – hung back this time around.
All the pomp and circumstance displayed the symbols of a latter day declining power refusing to divest itself of past glories. The nature of fascistic symbolism always revolves around deity worship of the state and all its trappings. Nowhere was this more obvious than during the recent four days of junketing in London.
Yet behind the cheer lay the trauma eating at the inner heart of the state: the increasing fear of the governed by those who are their governors.
Thus the capital was transformed into an armed camp, harmless, happy party-goers scanned from the rooftops for signs of intent to commit crimes or just “the wrong kind of look.” Intrusive, militarized police shunted the loyal “sheeple” from one event to the next.
The UK or Great Britain, call Shakespeare’s “sceptered isle set in a silver sea” what you will, has acquired all the appurtenances of a police state in formation.
There is a single famous statistic that makes this all too clear. A small offshore nation with 1% of the global population now has more than 20 percent of its CCTV cameras.
No less than the government’s own former Information Commissioner Sir Richard Thomas warned that Britons were “sleep walking into a bone fide Stasi state.”
And that’s another side to the mass hallucination we have just witnessed in London.
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