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By Jason Michael
Stop the world, there’s another royal baby in the oven! As things in Britain continue to spiral dangerously out of control the BBC goes for mass distraction with wall-to-wall coverage of a royal impregnation. This’ll make everything better.
You’d almost think the livestock of Britain’s regal stud was told when to breed, the state – as its owner – using its reproductive organs as a method of tempering the public mood. It’s like clockwork. When discontentment across the United Kingdom shows all the signs of reaching boiling point and social frustrations are on the brink of pulling the fragile fabric of this society apart one of its breeding pairs will be trotted out with the announcement of a productive insemination.
William Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, second in line to the throne, and his “commoner” mate Kate are pregnant with yet another mouth we the taxpayers will be forced to feed. Since the news broke of this otherwise unremarkable biological process, when I’ve been unable to keep it from my mind, I – as you may well have guessed – have been raging over this announcement. What angered me was my own response to this news. Something in my head exploded when I heard the bulletin, and I have been upset over what this has made me think of a young couple I have never met, their children, and their foetus. It has taken some time for the better angel of my nature to return.
https://twitter.com/jetpack/status/904648043026419712
Making this about hatred and personal animosity serves no purpose. I have compelled myself not to fall into the trap of hating these people, and I would encourage the same of others. It goes nowhere good. We don’t want or need a society haunted by the memory of slaughter as Russia is with the gory spectre of a basement in Ekaterinburg. But the fury refuses to subside. It won’t leave because we have a right to be incensed by this performance.
We have grown up in a society where the well-to-do and the privileged, through the BBC and the rest of the media, have been entertained by the systematic humiliation and dehumanisation of poor people. On the BBC I watched as The Scheme eviscerated one of the most marginal communities in my hometown of Kilmarnock for the amusement of a class that imagines itself superior to those reduced to deprivation by austerity and British state policy.
Every day we see the juggernaut of establishment television turn the horrors of abject poverty and the social nightmare it creates into distracting bread and circuses entertainment on The Jeremy Kyle Show. Then the government uses the popular negative attitude this culture nurtures towards the poor as the ground from which to launch further assaults on these people – giving rise to a truly heartless bureaucratic structure that has resulted in malnutrition, anxiety and depression, suicide, and Grenfell tower. This arrangement – Britain – is a death cult and it is a topped off with a monarchy, the functioning of which’s wombs we are expected to celebrate.
During the evening news I had to take a time out and go off and sit on the naughty step on the landing. All I was capable of thinking, as the newsreader gushed over Kate’s belly, was that I would rather a thousand Williams and Kates were burnt alive rather than those who perished in that tower block not two miles from Kensington Palace. But I am better than this. This was anger talking, and the justice denied – over which I am outraged – will never be won with the poison of wrath or by vengeance and spite. The better society we want will never be born from the unleashing of bitterness; no matter how justified this may seem to any of us.
What we feel about the need for baby boxes in Scotland, our abhorrence of the structures that have people relying on foodbanks and cloths banks, austerity, sanctions, and the rest is rooted in our hearts. Demanding better begins with compassion, and – as much as it irks the monster within me – this compassion is indiscriminate. It sees and loves the humanity as much in the single mum waiting in line at a Trussell Trust centre, in the hungry young man contemplating a leap off a bridge, and in the pensioner at the bottom of the street who can’t get warm, as much as it does in William and Kate and their family. That’s a more difficult pill to swallow.
As long as the waters cover the sea there will be inequality and injustice. Rather than accepting this as an immutable truth of the human condition, however, we can never cease working for a fairer, more equitable society. Our job is to put our house in order. This doesn’t meaning targeting other human beings, no matter how wealthy and privileged they may be. It means taking a sledgehammer to the structure and bringing it down. It’s not about bloodying our hands with rough justice – which is no justice at all. It’s about unseating the emperors, the kings, and the princes of men.
Today I am going to work on swallowing all the resentment I felt yesterday and cooling my temper, cooling it until it is cold – to wait for that day when we can at last abolish this monarchic abomination and the British imperial machinery that cynically uses their bodies to confuse and distract us. Babies are – and as they should be – a sign of hope. My hope is that this child lives long enough to see all of my dreams come true. Perhaps then another generation will feel more free than ours to share in this child’s joy at the news it is having a child.
Should We Have A Royal Family? | Russell Brand
Random Public Journal 
Things like this make me very glad I live in a republic. Sure, we have inequality, we have our own 1% creaming off the wealth, but they don’t tell us they have a right to do it because mummy has a pointy hat.
The very moment we accept that right, we accept that some people simply are better than others by virtue of their birth, that the rest of us are somehow not good enough to lead or hold public office because we aren’t in the right family.
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Would you like vinegar or salt or both for the fryer full of chips you have on your shoulders? I presume you are a 13 year old school child masquerading as an adult because if not then these come across as the embittered ramblings of someone so full of envy and anger towards anyone doing well in life..
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It is truly remarkable that anyone would think Will and Kate are “doing well in life.”That level of delusion takes some effort. Everything these people have has been been handed to them, and you Steven have contributed. Bear that in mind next time you are short a few bob.
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