Brexit as Class War

In the wake of Brexit, we were told the vote was a great revolt by the white working-class. We were told it was grounded in racist discontent with an out-of-touch metropolitan elite. The Leave vote was entirely composed of ill-educated, poor racists living anywhere between the progressive bastions of London and Scotland. It's worth asking what's wrong with this view.

Too much bile has been directed towards the working-class for voting the wrong way. It's as if europhilic liberals cannot bring themselves to look in the mirror and examine the Remain campaigns for any failing. And the EU is left beyond scrutiny. Instead the working-class is supposed to play the scapegoat for an incoherent and lacklustre campaign strategy.

There are no legitimate reasons to advocate Brexit, in this view, the vote is simply an expression of racism and ignorance. Importantly, the European political terrain is increasingly split between liberalism and nationalism with each side helping to constitute the other. This basic antagonism has dominated the entire EU debate and, in turn, shaped the way the working-class has been tarred by middle-class journalists.

My first reaction was to characterise Brexit as a "fuck you" vote. I still think it was, but not necessarily by people who have been left behind by globalisation. As Zoe Williams has pointed out, it was the Southern English middle-class that tipped the balance – not working-class Northerners. This should not be a surprise. Middle-class and elite votes play a major role in all elections, as they dominate the whole discourse, the media and political agenda.

No War Like Class War

By holding a vote, David Cameron hoped to resolve the tension within the ruling-class and his own party. He did not believe he could lose the referendum because he was so accustomed to winning on every occasion. There was no game plan for an exit. So when the men who had always won everything finally lost, they had no idea what to do – and they still don't. But this is not the fullest account of the character of the vote.

Although the ruling-class was thinking of its own interests, the middle-classes and the working poor were significant actors. The breakdown of the Leave vote in ABC terms of class, not necessarily the best analysis, it must be said, shows 10 million upper/middle-class votes and seven million working-class votes cast for Brexit. By contrast, the Remain vote was made up of 12 million upper/middle-class votes with around four million working-class votes.

Similarly, the base of UKIP is often wrongly described as working-class and eating into the Labour vote. Actually UKIP has primarily threatened the Conservative Party, and often overtook it in Labour constituencies because so few locals would vote Tory. The UKIP base is petty-bourgeois with some elements of the poor and the rich backing them. Nigel Farage may be the first ultra-rightist to lead a party based on a cross-class alliance.

So we find the narrative of a working-class revolt is somewhat inaccurate. As in most votes, the working-class was present, but key roles were played by elite interests and middle-class votes. This is not to diminish the role of the votes cast by working-class people. Certainly, the grievances of the working-class were a significant factor. But the fact that the Leave vote was a convergence of different class forces should not surprise us.

Likewise, the vote was not a case of total white flight, though it is mostly. Around 33% of Asian voters opted for Brexit, alongside 27% of black voters. Again, this is not to explain away the role of the racism. After all, you can still cast a vote to limit EU migration on the grounds that the system privileges EU nationals over migrants from other parts of the world. This is why multiculturalism did not prevent Birmingham from voting for exit.

In fact, Nigel Farage often made this Commonwealth argument against EU membership. The basic idea goes that the UK should become closer to its former colonies and not the small cluster of European states. This reveals more than a scintilla of colonial nostalgia is present in the kind of nationalism invoked by Brexit campaigners. The wish to "get my country back" can take a variety of forms. It harks back to a dead empire.

The Left and Brexit

Still, the key question for the Left is the role of the working-class. There are those on the radical Left, who made the progressive case for British withdrawal from the EU. Veteran agitators such as Tariq Ali and George Galloway rank in the Lexit camp. Many other socialists found themselves sympathetic to this argument thanks to the EU's austerity programme. Ultimately, the prospect of siding with Farage may have been too much to stomach.

Economist Paul Mason warned against a Lexit vote on pragmatic grounds: the timing was wrong, as the Left lacked a mass movement and leadership, to overhaul the status quo. One might wonder if the time is ever right. Others like John Pilger framed the Brexit vote as an "act of raw democracy" by millions of ordinary people. This repeats the idea that the working-class was in the driving seat and this vote was a "fuck you" to the ruling-class.

Not only is the working-class not in the driving seat, the sections of the poor which supported Brexit may well have done so out of nationalism. This does not mean there was no left-wing element in the Leave vote, though it is a fact that the Left was divided over the EU – which, at once, stands for freedom of movement and neoliberalism. Poor people fell on both sides of the debate too.

Yet the Lexit crowd wants to pretend that the working-class is vote was devoid of racism. This brings us to one of the classic fixations of the Left: if the working-class as a revolutionary agent, how is it that capitalism has not been overthrown? The easy answer is that it is deficient leadership on the part of trade unions and parties. While this may well be true, it does not rule out the possibility that the working-class is open to demobilisation, as well as reformist and reactionary politics.

If liberals are guilty of presupposing the inherent backwardness of the working-class, then a number of leftists can be criticised for claiming the working-class is inherently revolutionary or even communist already. The working-class has agency, and the potential for revolutionary agency, which means the choice is not between a unwashed xenophobic rabble and a red flag-waving proletariat.

Revolutionary Ideals

Obviously, class interests are not self-evident axioms. Classes are alive, they are not subject to test conditions, as they engage in the world and face changing social conditions. If working-class agency means anything, it means the ability to disagree and make independent choices. But this does not extend to the terms of the choice itself.

Even if the proletariat is not on the cusp of a great revolt, it is the Left that needs the working-class and, likewise, class politics is the only way forward for ordinary people. Left-wing ideals without class is a form of anti-politics. If a section of working people, or even a majority for that matter, are not mobilised by the Left, this would not vindicate those who say the poor are backward.

It is worth acknowledging that the main demand of Leave voters was national sovereignty, whereas immigration controls was a secondary concern. Not that this changes the fact that the dominant character of the vote was nationalist. Sovereignty is one of those few ambiguous demands backed by radical elements across the spectrum.

Nevertheless, the Left should not try to externalise racism from the working-class in a bid to save its own romantic view of the workers. The problem here is that it presupposes that the poor ought to have the right set of ideas in order for socialists to stand with them. In this sense, the constant yearning for a revolutionary agent collapses into its opposite.

This article was originally published at Souciant.

Dumbing Down.

There was a good piece in The Guardian by Frank Furedi on the effects of Gove's reforms on the way philosophy is being taught in colleges and sixth forms across the country. As I fell for philosophy as an A-level student I can't help but take an interest in the substance of the reforms. From what Furedi writes these reforms are not a step forwards:

 

Tragically, the draft philosophy syllabus offers an intellectually inferior version of the old. Some of the most intellectually stimulating questions of the existing curriculum disappear, such as that on free will, as does political philosophy. A new compulsory philosophy of religion topic – which counts for 50% of the AS course – suggests a reorientation towards the teaching of RE.

What's most disturbing is that the text disappears, to be replaced by an online anthology of extracts. Why? According to the draft syllabus, to provide "greater clarity on the content so that teachers are clear about what they need to teach". The impulse to remove a teacher's capacity to make judgment calls threatens to turn what has been an exciting intellectual adventure into an exercise in box-ticking. In line with this pedagogical orientation, the assessments have been revised to cater for a more intellectually light curriculum.

The revised assessment appears relatively indifferent to the integrity of philosophical knowledge. The draft says the methods of assessment "focus clearly on the core skills of philosophy". The language of skills and instrumentalism dominates this syllabus. The draft responds to the question, "Why choose philosophy?" with the answer: because "students will develop and refine a range of transferable skills". Philosophy, which originally meant the love of wisdom and which many regard as a guide to life, is now rebranded as the bearer of transferable skills.

 

Of course, I'm not at all hostile to the teaching of philosophy of religion (or as a subject in itself), but I am suspicious of any attempt to depoliticise philosophy in this way. I would view moral philosophy as the vital component, with political philosophy as a continuation of ethics by other means. That's no reason to leave out the God question, of course, and there's no reason why they can't be taught alongside each other. Some would argue that these changes are towards the more juicy end of philosophy of religion. That's not the key problem. It's the depoliticisation coupled with dumbing down (in the form of the raised dependence on extracts) which I'm opposed to. The emphasis on the philosophy of religion may be a crude attempt to supplant politics with moralism. This is the grass-roots impact of Gove's neoconservative agenda.

The tension in education policy has always been between the impetus for critical thinking and the need to churn out well-equipped consumers/workers. The enlightened citizen is far from the ideal of educational policy. If you swing too far towards the latter you end up with high-performing automatons and no innovation. A populace can be too deferential and obedient to the point of stagnation. And, of course, you can run into serious trouble if you find yourself with excess innovation. It could be argued that that was precisely what happened in the 1960s when the post-war generation began to question the Establishment and its authority on a whole series of questions. Education policy will oscillate within this spectrum to try and strike a balance of opening a space for innovation in one area while closing such a space elsewhere.

Far from anything new, we can now properly situate Gove in this bipolar shuffle and this is no matter of speculation. Before Michael Gove was an MP he worked for The Times as a columnist (writing at £5,000 a month for a column he churned out in an hour) and he was not shy about his views on a lot of issues. On the tuition fees set by the Blair government Gove wrote "Some people will, apparently, be put off applying to our elite institutions by the prospect of taking on a debt of this size. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is all to the good." A good education is conceived of as a commodity and, in Gove's mind, it is too readily available to the lesser classes. It's a vision in line with the view taken by Allan Bloom, a fellow neoconservative, that the masses are to be moulded by the ideas of the few great men. The bewildered herd are to be kept in check.

So I think we may risk the suggestion that Gove doesn't mean well when he guts the humanities of innovative capacity. Even the A-level course I took in philosophy, which Furedi foolishly romanticises, actually had political content in the second year. At AS we looked at epistemology, ethics, tolerance, and aesthetics, then at A2 we looked at moral philosophy in greater depth and finally political philosophy. That meant normative and meta for moral thought. Then we moved onto reading JS Mill. On Liberty has its flaws (which the English are impervious to conceding) but the students could at least develop a perspective on its content. So we could then decide whether or not we buy into Mill's utilitarian brand of classical liberalism. You would think Gove would be for this sort of thing. Instead we find the syllabus is being debauched even more than it already had been. 

In praise of Radical Journalism.

 

In the last fortnight two great journalists of the Left have died, first it was Alexander Cockburn and then it was Gore Vidal. Both men belonged to that noble tradition of radical journalism which has long served as a counter to the mainstream media. This line could be traced back to the revolutions of the US and France where journalist Tom Paine was a participant. Then there was Jean-Paul Marat who damned many from his bathtub in the newspaper The Friend of the People. It is often forgotten today that Karl Marx was a political journalist in his day and covered the French coup of 1852 which enthroned Louis Bonaparte for Die Revolution. To this day The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon remains highly readable and compulsively quotable. Today the field may seem barren at a first glance, but we shouldn’t forget the message of optimism which Claud Cockburn propagated and which his son Alexander took on to trumpet. The struggle is hardly over yet, a lot has been lost but there are weaknesses and still time.

In Britain it is the Right which is truly desolate of talent, the spirit of 1979 lives on in the form of an incompetent and barely functional gang of vandals. Hayek's libertarianism was replaced with the ‘red Toryism’ of Phillip Blond, it’s clear that Thatcherism has been put on the defensive and there is no offensive yet. Across the pond we find the Republicans have no William F Buckleys, just Glenn Becks and hogroasts for the petit-bourgeoisie. The ground is more than ripe for progressivism, let alone radicalism. Right now, the most prominent left-wing journalists this side of the Atlantic are Owen Jones and Laurie Penny. To the reader Penny Red pitches herself as a walking Feminist-Marxist dialectic with an affinity for the spontaneous non-hierarchical model of Occupy. Jones offers an unapologetic defence of the working-class from a commonsense starting-point grounded in a Eurosceptic leftism. If we want perfection then we would be better off as liberals awaiting the arrival of the angels who will redeem us cleanly, politely and without violence.

The best way to support a government in its staggering ineptitude and criminality is to keep quiet. One such instance was the US bombing of Somalia last year, which was met only with silence in the Western media. Yet there was plenty of ink and film to cover the famine in Somalia and its exacerbation by Islamists. The victimhood of black Africa is a fine story to cover when the villain is Islam. The same can be said of Sudan where the rape and killing of black Africans by Arabs has drawn universal condemnation, and rightly so, though no one ever intended to do anything about it. This is also the case with hunger in Somalia. Only cheap moralisations made safely from soapboxes by liberals were provoked. There is precious little coverage of the atrocities committed in the Congo, where armies of drugged children swarm around the mining of coltan to feed the demand for computers and mobiles elsewhere in the world. No wonder then that the complicit are silent and on Fox News the attack dog Bill O'Reilly often tells his mildly disagreeable guests to "shut up!"

This is the important role of the whistleblower, which sometimes cannot be fulfilled by journalists, and this is the significance of Julian Assange and Daniel Ellsberg. The real service of leaks is not to confirm what we already know, it's to undermine the ideological veneer which power needs to maintain itself. No one was outraged to learn about American crimes in Iraq through WikiLeaks. It's just that the crimes are now viewable on YouTube and that is the real outrage. Bradley Manning is a hero of our times. The fact that he has been held for so long, and possibly tortured, testifies to the impotent rage of the powerful. The same goes for when neoconservatives label Alexander Cockburn as a low level Stalinist anti-Semite. The unacceptability of Cockburn to the prevailing consensus is demonstrable of Cockburn's importance as a journalist. Its intolerance to the point of slander should be taken as a compliment. Claud Cockburn was always too prickly for the Establishment to handle, in contrast to the ease with which they swallowed Orwell.

In the same way that John Pilger is regularly accused of ‘anti-Americanism’ in his work, this is almost a stamp of honour. He’s more trustworthy because he is shunned by the Establishment. The problem with George Orwell, as well as Tom Paine, is that he has been fully assimilated into the prevailing standards and shibboleths of the liberal commentariat. The man who went to Spain to fight Fascism and didn’t take the side of Stalinism. Animal Farm and 1984 became the curriculum for Western children after his death as the Cold War got going. Even though Orwell was a heroic journalist of the democratic socialist ilk, his work has been appropriated by the rabid anti-Communists of Right and Left. The neoconservatives lay claim to him and the liberals who adore him often turn a blind-eye to Orwell’s tirades against gays and vegetarians. Thus, the appeal of Claud Cockburn, a far less acceptable figure. The taming of the once unacceptable may be rampant today, but there are still dissidents in the contemporary discourse.

If we want to get ‘pricklier’ today, then we might read the blogposts of Richard Seymour at Lenin’s Tomb. There we find a refreshing read in a blogosphere of dullards, the combination of a raging leftism and the clarity of thought. He has written extensively on liberal imperialism, the rise of David Cameron as well as the American tradition of dissent and its politico-cultural context. Seymour’s major flaw is that he is essentially dedicated to the party-line of the SWP, placing him in the heterodox Trotskyist line which has little time for autocritique and can only swallow Gramsci, Adorno, Marcuse, Althusser and Žižek with a hefty dose of Leninism. The Frankfurt school can’t be forgiven for its passivity, neither can Althusser for his ‘Stalinism’ while any suggestion that the work of Karl Marx might be in need of an update is written-off as a compromise too far. Though it has to be said that Seymour is a rarity in his intelligent grasp of theory and the issues at hand, while he exercises a capacity to blend together insight and invective with witticism.

The Gentleman Bitch.

Requiescat in Pace.

The soixante-huitard turned chickenhawk Christopher Hitchens once said that he had a kind of "penis envy" for Gore Vidal. Indeed the young contrarian had based himself on Gore Vidal and the two met in 1970 at the New Statesman. Eventually the slender Hitchens became the dauphin to Vidal's contrarianism and would later become one of many porky opponents to be outlived by Gore. Over the years the gadfly had stung William F Buckley as a "crypto-Nazi" only to apologise on the grounds that the term "crypto-Fascist" is much more accurate. Truman Capote felt the sting when Vidal described him as a "filthy animal that has found its way into the house". Later Capote's passing prompted the infamous remark "That was a good career move." Then there was Norman Mailer whose positions on women's rights prompted Gore to criticise his old friend. It was at a Manhattan dinner party in 1977 that Mailer threw a whiskey in Gore Vidal's face before heat-butting and punching him. To this violence Vidal quipped "And, once again, words fail Norman Mailer."

On that note Gore Vidal once described himself as a 'gentleman bitch' in his role as a provocateur of historians and the political class. He showed no mercy in his scathing attacks against deserving enemies and reached into areas as seemingly varied as politics, religion, history and literature. As a polymath he tried his hand at novels first then plays and scripts for film as the commentariat turned against him over The City and the Pillar. The mainstream media, with The New York Times in the lead, waged a campaign against Gore Vidal refusing to review his work. Out of this relatively dark time in Vidal worked on Ben-Hur (uncredited) as well as Visit to a Small Planet and a political drama set on a fictional campaign trail The Best Man. History is not without irony as Ronald Reagan auditioned to play the lead in the film adaptation of The Best Man. Reagan was turned down on the grounds that he did not appear presidential. Eventually Vidalian fiction was rehabilitated in the eye of the Establishment, but he remained a controversial figure.

The essay was his preferred form, placing him in the line of great litterateurs, for it was the form which he felt he had mastered and he hoped he would be remembered as an essayist above all else. There is a degree of self-awareness, detachment and cool about Vidal that led Italo Calvino to conclude that he has no unconscious. In his own words Gore stated "I am exactly as I appear. There is no warm, lovable person inside. Beneath my cold exterior, once you break the ice, you find cold water." He was as much a fixture of American life, its discourse, culture and narratives even in the capacity of opposition which he practiced. Even though Gore was a prominent commentator he remained out of the field for the most part. He could have been a politician with his family background and connections. Indeed he came close to becoming a player in the 1960s. After the disillusionment he experienced Vidal contented himself with the role of gadfly and cynic. In the words of Alexander Cockburn "Cynicism is the birth of opposition."

The contrarian tradition to which Gore Vidal belongs may properly be traced back to the Cynics of Ancient Greece. The taunting and mockery of all power by Diogenes, whether it be the waggling of a plucked rooster at Plato or telling Alexander the Great to get out of the light. It is the case that Gore was more than content to stand on the side-lines, for the most part, and attack both the Democrats and the Republicans. He deemed both parties to be just two right-wings of the Property Party. Vidal wasn't a perfect cynic, for he knew how to appeal to power at times and did so in support of George McGovern, then Jesse Jackson and later Barack Obama. But Gore Vidal remained much more of a cynic than his former dauphin Christopher Hitchens. He hadn't voted since 1964, when he did so to support Lyndon B Johnson, which severs him from the Democrats at the ballot box. Vidal explored the third party option in the form of the People's Party, a left-wing populist party looking to build on New Deal liberalism.

As a controversial figure, right up until the end, he outlived many old opponents and even the unseated dauphin only for Hitch to slander him a conspiracy theorist and anti-Semite. This is over Gore's provocative comments on the "War on Terrorism" waged by the Bush administration, let alone his long-time criticisms of neoconservatives and Israel. He first courted controversy as a proponent of gay rights, though he was strictly anti-essentialist in his insistence that there are only homosexual acts and no homosexual persons. Similarly Vidal maintained that the issue of race was a real one, even if just politically. He never bought into the language of liberal multiculturalism and political correctness. The reasoning here is that the issue is not cultural, the US is a case of a monoculture with plenty of room for hatred along racial lines. This was the same man who once rubbed shoulders with the Kennedys, Tennessee Williams and Paul Newman (he didn't mind name-dropping either). The irony of all this is that the ideal Vidalian narrator is a person who sees as much as possible, but is seen the least himself.

See also:
Proposals to Improve the US Government
Vidal looks back on his remarkable life
The Profile of a Writer
Documentary on Vidal
Hot Talk with Gore Vidal 
The Education of Gore Vidal 

Hobbes on Democracy.

Thomas Hobbes was a perfect foil for Machiavelli in a way, as Machiavelli claimed to have discovered a new continent of a new order but it was Hobbes who made that continent habitable. The focus of Leviathan, specifically in chapter 19, shifts onto the different kinds of commonwealth as distinguished from one another in terms of institutions and the succession to sovereign power, as well as in differences of convenience, aptitude in the creation of the peace and security of the people. For Hobbes there were only three main models of commonwealth: monarchic, aristocratic and democratic. This is due to the indivisible nature of sovereign power can only be peacefully manifested in representatives of “either one or more or all”.[1] For our purposes we will be focused particularly on what Hobbes has to say about democracy rather than aristocracy and monarchy. But the views he held on aristocratic and monarchic systems remain important only insofar as they can be distinguished from a democracy or a “popular commonwealth” as Hobbes deemed it.

Early on in the chapter democracy is marked out as distinct from monarchy and aristocracy, as a popular commonwealth in which representation comes in the form of “all that will come together”. Thomas Hobbes contrasts this with monarchy, where the representative is one man, and aristocracy, which is only partial assembly. In the case of a democracy every man has the right to enter into it, rather than in an aristocracy where only the men distinct from the rest can enter. Notably, if the power of the monarch has been limited then the state in question is not a monarchy as sovereignty fell into the hands of an assembly (which could be either democratic or aristocratic). For Hobbes the indivisibility of sovereign power is necessary for peace, an end for which sovereignty is instituted. Once power becomes divided it is no longer sovereign, so for conflict to be avoided it is vital for a duality of power to be averted.

For peace the sovereign must have absolute authority, be not a party to the covenants and hold absolute authority only to the extent that the sovereign has the power to enforce the law. Then it is absurd to think that there could be perpetual peace when sovereign power is in the hands of an assembly (as in a democracy) for the absolute representation of the people would fall to subordinate representatives and the power could very easily become divided. Thus subordinate representatives pose a danger to sovereign power insofar as such a system can become a source of division in the commonwealth.[2] So sovereign power can be divided, but it shouldn’t be because power ceases to be sovereign once it has been divided.[3] Think of instances in which states have collapsed into chaos amidst an uprising, a rupture of the order from which the sovereignty of the regime is undermined to the extent that a duality emerges and a rival for sovereignty appears.

There are also cases where the sovereign takes the form of a one-party state and a sudden rupture explodes the status quo. The revolution and subsequent civil war in Libya was one such example where power was stripped of its sovereignty as the people rebelled, but eventually sovereign power was manifested in a new government as the Gaddafi regime was brushed aside in Tripoli. We might even segue into theories of what makes a revolutionary situation. We might understand a revolutionary situation as defined by the emergence of what Charles Tilly called “multiple sovereignty”, which has three main features. First of all, the existing state suffers a loss of power to contenders and rivals. Secondly the rivals fall back on a base of popular support which is a significant portion of the population overall. Lastly, the existing state cannot, for whatever reason, repress the contenders and the base of support behind them. The fears of a divided sovereignty, which Hobbes had, are precisely a fear of this kind of situation arising.

Whether or not it is possible for a sovereign to hold absolute power regardless of its' form (whether monarchic or democratic) is not really explored by Hobbes at this point. For Hobbes, democracy is problematic for a number of reasons let alone the question of indivisible sovereignty. In a democracy the people of the assembly would not just represent the common interest of constituents. The individual has their own private interests which would rival the common interest and could easily come first, as Hobbes notes that the “passions of men are commonly more potent than their reason.” Where the public and private interests are unified the public is most advanced, Hobbes maintains that in a monarchy the private interest is the same as the public. The reasoning being that the wealth, power and honour of a monarch are derived from the subjects. The ability of the state to defend itself from enemies would be undermined if the people are poor, contemptible or too weak to maintain such a war. In a democracy, the prosperity of the people contributes not so much to a corrupt leadership as it does many times deceit, treachery and conflict.

Hobbes points out that a monarch can receive counsel wherever and from whomever he so deems fit, in secrecy, at whatever point before the time of action. In a democracy in which a sovereign assembly has been established, there is no time or place in which the assembly could receive counsel with secrecy because of the multitudinous nature of an assembly. So when such an assembly requires counsel, it will not be received except from those who have a right to do so and may not leave the confines of its own body to do so. Typically this will mean that the assembly will receive counsel from people who are more versed in the accumulation of wealth than knowledge. The advice could likely come in the form of long discourses, which would commonly call upon men to act in various ways rather than govern them. For Hobbes the assembly could reach out to counsel from the unskilled in civic matters, orators and so on, who give their opinions in speeches full of pretence and inept learning, this could only lead to the disruption of the commonwealth or do it no good at all.

It is possible that the assembly could strip good citizens of property to enrich friends of the assembly (e.g. friends of the people rather than the friends of elected representatives). Hobbes concedes that this is a possibility in a monarchy, he maintains that “we do not read that this has ever been done.” For the favourites of the assembly are more numerous than a monarch, so there is a greater temptation to serve the interests of their own kindred as well as to seductive orators – who have greater power to hurt than to help, as “condemnation than absolution more resembles justice.” Not only is it impractical for the assembly to be well advised there is a great potential for inconstancy as the potential for such in a monarchy is multiplied as with the mass of the representative. For Hobbes the resolutions of a monarch are subject to no other inconstancy than that of his own nature, whereas democratic resolutions are subject to the nature of the masses.

The assembly would be prone to disagreement as a result of the nature of man, as well as due to envy and interest, to the height of such disagreement a civil war maybe the consequence.[4] So it would seem that the stability of the state in question is at stake with the rise of a democracy. At the same time, the whole of the assembly cannot fail unless the multitude fail as well and there is no place for the question of the right of succession in a democratic government for the reason that anyone can enter into such a government. Though the death of a monarch differs from the death of an entire assembly, it would still dispossess the people of a representative and leave the multitude without a sovereign which unites them. The question of stability inevitably arises once again, without the guarantee of the “peace of men” it is likely that the state could return to the “condition of war in every age” and the only alternative to this is an “artificial eternity of man”.[5]

---

[1] Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.118-120

[2] It makes sense then that Hobbes considered it absurd that the monarchy could hold sovereign power as it invites the people to elect representatives capable of putting forth the advice from the people. In the rare case of a monarchy in which the monarch is never considered a representative, though called sovereign, the status of representative would fall to those who have been sent by the people to carry their petitions and give the monarch their advice. In such cases then it is imperative for the “true and absolute representative of a people” to instruct the people in such offices and watch how they admit any other representation on any occasion.

[3] Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.120-121

[4] For Hobbes, to say it is inconvenient to place sovereign power in the office of one man or an assembly of men (e.g. rather than a democratic assembly) is to hold that “all government is more inconvenient than confusion and civil war.” All danger must originate in the dispute between those who are for an office of such honour and those out to profit for themselves.

Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.122-123

[5] Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (1994) pg.124-125

The "Scourge" of Single-Mums.

I am one of the generation deemed scum by so many newspapers and reactionary fuck-pigs. It is a generation raised by women without the hand of a man to slap them around and all the while these women - designated simply as 'single mums' - are faced with a torrent of misogyny and bad faith from a narrative of the gutters. Incidentally the attitude of many single-mothers is not one of entitlement, but of guilt, shame and self-loathing. The narrative of the right-wing media has been that the person on benefits is a parasite on the successful and hard-working, that the families which survive on the crumbs of the state are the froth of the scum which has been amassed at the very bottom of society. These people choose not to work in order to get a free ride on the backs of 'real' workers. Notice there is no mention of the severe lack of jobs in our society, the lack of opportunities, the pervasive inequality and the absence of any policy to create jobs.

One major cultural change which has been accomplished by the Feminist movement of the 1970s is the sense that women have a lot to be angry about and should be angry. We live in a time of the 'token woman' and the widespread dissemination of feminist ideas, at least at the level of a kind of Barbie Doll feminism, whilst the conditions of women's lives worsen and everywhere there seems to be a backlash against the steps forward made in the past. The women who have to raise children on benefits are often treated with scorn and even from working-class people, who are jeered on by middle-class journalists and newspaper editors. The explicit attitude of the gutter press to women is anti-feminist, it is almost as if woman is the guilt of man realised and only if he can cleanse himself of his "dirty desires" can woman cease to exist. We have only to glance at these papers to catch the orgy of misogyny in full motion, where a life on benefits is a 'choice' undertaken by the exploding numbers of women who don't think being a housewife is "rewarding".

The fact that the media is a business for which the aim is to maximise profit by driving down costs and stimulating advertising revenue. Let alone that the media is dominated by middle-class white men and has been for decades. The superfluous population are a cost to be minimised. So the press run endless stories about women living in houses worth millions on housing benefit and child-benefit, as if these crumbs are equal to a house in London that they don't even own. Incidentally housing prices have been inflated in London as council housing has been decimated and the economy has been finance-driven. The average age of the single-mum is 37 and 55% of single-mums had their children within marriage. 33% suffer from disabilities and illnesses while 34% of their children are disabled. No wonder there are working-class people cheering on the government as job centres are set a minimum target of chucking three people a week off of benefits. The disabled are a prime target because they won't kick up a fuss. But neither would most single-mums, the attitude pervasive amongst the superfluous population is apathetic parody of the stiff-upper lip.

As David Cameron rants about "runaway dads" he supports policies which make it more costly for women to pursue them for financial support. The blame is still fundamentally pinned on the woman for opening her legs and seducing the man who just can't help himself. Naturally Melanie Phillips responded by fanning the flames of misogyny and tells us that it is not the father who is the problem it is the single-mum who is just trying get by. Even though it will be single-mums who will be hit the hardest by benefit cuts, losing a month's income every year and three times as much as a childless couple. At the same time, single women will lose a little less than a single-parent on benefits due to the tax and welfare changes. Even though around a quarter of children live in single-parent households, and a high number of them do so below the poverty-line. The statistics will tell you that these children will go onto do badly in school, suffer poor health and may even fall into long-term unemployment themselves.

There is an irony in the obscene lies of the Right against single-mothers on benefits. The term "proletariat" is derived from the Latin for "offspring" which refers to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children. What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction. The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process and not from within it. Though the labour these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders. We live in a world in which the typical proletarian is a woman, as we can see in sweatshops and agricultural labour. After the decline of heavy industry it was women who staffed the huge expansion in shop and clerical work. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world the industrial working-class were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. In other words the majority of the workforce was female in the 19th Century.

The picture we all carry in our heads of the working-class is of the blue-collar brawny male off to toil away in a factory with lunchbox in hand. But the working-class is not defined by manual labour. The working-class includes anyone who is forced to rent their labour power to capital, languishes under its oppressive disciplines and have little control over the means of production. Thus Karl Marx ranked commercial workers along with industrial workers and refused to identify the proletariat with just "productive" workers, in the sense of those workers who churn out commodities in exchange for a wage. The unemployed are not part of a so-called "under-class" but are actually central to the working-class. The way unemployed women in particular are regularly singled out by the reactionary media along the usual misogynistic lines is the essence of class warfare. This is how the important role of child benefit has been jettisoned over the years, it is not even seen as an investment anymore by the elites and the commentariat.

On the Royal Wedding...

William Arthur Philip Louis has found a wife to cheat on, in accordance with the family values of Henry VIII. How can I express how little I give a fuck? The mock national anthem from Human Traffic comes as close as possible. The elephant in the room is class and that I do care about. Of course, we all know that Kate Middleton is a 'commoner' and millionairess descendent of landed gentry and solicitors as well as the odd miner. Notably it is her mother's side, the 'prolier' side, which is scrutinised more by the media than the father's side. Kate Middleton could suffer the modern equivalent of a public execution, death by media, if a past of promiscuity is uncovered by the gutter press. The persistant survival and rigidity of class in British society has yet to be levelled, the bloodlines and property deals of Royalty will dominate the tabloids until a social convulsion brings down the monarchy.
 

Britain is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't have a written constitution, as a consequence the country is typically conservative. Change comes slowly and when traditions are threatened the reaction is often despair. The British throne was once at the apex of capitalist accumulation and imperial expansion. Queen Victoria was important in providing the ruling class with the legitimacy to hold back the tide of mass-democracy, whilst the Empire can be expanded and the Church of England maintained. Today the Royals provide legitimacy for the bourgeoisie, as well as tradition and patriotism to keep the 'commoners' from despair. The ruling class and the dominant ideology have been in crisis, this wedding offers the possibility of rejuvenation. To keep up with old imperial traditions the Chief Torturer of Bahrain attended the ceremony, though Colonel Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad were not welcome. The distinction between these guests is a fine one, between "evil-evil" and "good-evil". Incidentally, April 29th is the same day that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun wed.

The press claim we are 'less deferential' than ever and yet there are thousands on the streets of London. The irony being that Westminster have been trying to drive away homeless people in recent months. Naturally this private occasion demands camping on mass on the Mall, a wave of flag-waving and piss-ups to celebrate the union. It's all about procreation of course! The bloodline must continue! It was 20 years ago that Major declared Britain to be a "classless" society and here we are fawning over a marriage like obedient plebs. Mind you, a nun was spotted wearing tatty trainers and so far 43 people have been arrested including one person who was singing "we are living in a fascist regime" in Soho. Though there were also plans for a mock execution of Prince Andrew. There are 5,000 police officers on the streets with the support of the military in case of an "attack". The EDL pledged to march if the Muslims Against Crusades demonstrated.

A Love Story: Rupert Murdoch and the Establishment.

 The Yuppie Mephistopheles.

Over the last five decades Rupert Murdoch has constructed an international media empire, it began with News Ltd which he inherited in 1953 from his father and he soon sought to expanded the family business horizontally. Politicians fear his wrath as a campaign of vilification backed by Rupert Murdoch is practically unstoppable. David Cameron had a private meeting with Murdoch before being elected Prime Minister, with the full support of Murdoch's media interests in Britain. Even Barack Obama met with Murdoch before taking office and has been the subject of a destructive smear campaign run out of Fox News - accusing Obama of being a socialist - and has openly come out in support of the Republicans for 2012. The current scandal over phone hacking at The News of the World (which began back in 2006) is interesting in this context. When Gordon Brown was Prime Minister and the scandal had just erupted, Murdoch had called for New Labour to back off and then sided against Brown in 2009.

As of last year Rupert Murdoch has contributed $1 million to the Republican Party and given the Tea Party enormous support through his media interests. Just like the way James Goldsmith funded the anti-Communist campaign against unions in Britain back in the 70s. The same framework of a fight of the common man against the liberal elite and the political class is applied by Fox News against the White House to further a right-wing agenda. In the last years of New Labour the right-wing press, led by Murdoch, attacked Brown on numerous incidents. Take "Bigotgate" in which Gordon Brown was caught on tape calling Gillian Duffy a "bigot" because of comments she made about immigration. The 40% of British media owned and influenced by Murdoch led the way in the attack on Brown as an out-of-touch elitist. In a similar manner The News of the World strived to uncover the lies and sordid secrets of the Establishment. The sex life of John Prescott is the business of the public according to The News of the World and any call for his right to privacy is just elitism.

Take the case of Russell Harty, who as he lay dying in a hospital bed from hepatitus found himself hounded by The News of the World. There was an intense undercurrent of homophobia to the media frenzy, which culminated in The Sun blaming Harty for his death just after the funeral in 1988. It was in reaction to the recent attack on the Murdoch empire by the liberal elite, it came in the form of Alan Bennett who pointed the finger at the press and said "The gutter press finished him." Even though reporters had been pursuing Harty in the hospital, posing as doctors demanding to see medical notes and photographers who rented a flat opposite Harty's hotel room, it was decided Bennett had made an outrageous statement. The Sun responded "Stress did not kill Russell Harty. The truth is that he died from a sexually transmitted disease. The press didn't give it to him. He caught it from his own choice. And by paying young rent boys he broke the law. Some - like ageing bachelor Mr Bennett - can see no harm in that. He has no family. But what if it had been YOUR son Harty had bedded?"

Every US President since Truman has met Rupert Murdoch and he has helped elect a few along the way through his media empire. It was Fox News which first declared George W Bush the President-elect and the rival news outlets soon fell in line. The Bush tax-cuts that were supposedly drawn-up to benefit the middle-classes and effectively handed over $1.6 trillion to around 1% of the American population. The surplus nurtured in the Clinton years of austere cut-backs was destroyed by this approach and a huge deficit was soon accumulated. The deficit is used to call for even more cuts to welfare, social security and health-care (notice defence is always excluded) in order for another set of tax-cuts. By 2003 out of the 247 editors, who work under Murdoch as part of his media empire, none came out to oppose the Iraq war and these are supposedly "independent" editors. Even Rupert Murdoch himself has admitted that the corporation actively supported the war until it became impossible to do so - given the level of opposition among the public.   

Buccaneer of the Press.

It wasn't until 1968 that Rupert Murdoch took over The News of the World and plucked it from the arms of an old establishment family. Sir William Carr chose Murdoch over Bob Maxwell, whom Carr hated because he was a Czech, as Murdoch had promised that even after the purchase Carr would continue to have a say in the running of the paper. This appealed to the attitudes of the Establishment at the time. Maxwell warned Sir William Carr that if Rupert Murdoch is allowed to takeover the paper "You will be out before your feet touch the ground" and he replied "Bob, Rupert is a gentleman." But as soon as Murdoch had cornered the shareholders in 1969 Carr was forced out. The Establishment decided that Rupert Murdoch was not a gentleman at all, he was a sleazy and destructive buccaneer capitalist. That same year Murdoch bought The Sun, it would be transformed from a replacement to The Daily Herald to the most widely sold newspaper in Britain.

Then Rupert Murdoch announced he was going to publish the memoirs of Christine Keeler in The News of the World. Keeler had an affair with John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War, in 1963 which scandalised high society and wrecked MacMillan's government. Profumo had since been rehabilitated after he worked for a charity in the East End. The British establishment had forgiven him and the way Murdoch had exumed the Profumo affair was a blatantly cynical decision motivated only by profit. The destruction of one of their own, who had made a "mistake" but had been reformed", was intolerable. The commentariat came to the rescue and the BBC made a more probing look at Rupert Murdoch with David Dimbleby as it's tool for doing so. It was after this rejection Murdoch moved to the US where he would continue his media expansion. From where he would contine to rail against old liberal elites, like the Kennedy family. To obscure a new array of elite interests Murdoch crafted a reflexive populism capable of slinging mud at any opponent.


At the time Rupert Murdoch had been mingling with the Mayfair Set, which included James Goldsmith, Jim Slater, Tiny Rowland, David Stirling (the man who founded the SAS), John Aspinall and Lord Lucan. The role the Set played in the shaping of the political trajectory of the late 20th Century has been well documented by Adam Curtis. Just as Murdoch was rejected by the Establishment so was the Mayfair Set. In the economic turmoil caused by the oil crisis, Slater Walker went bust in 1975 and Jim Slater was bankcrupted. Tiny Rowland was condemned by Ted Heath as the "unacceptable face of capitalism" and moved back to Africa. Lord Lucan disappeared without a trace after killing his nanny. James Goldsmith was left to pick up the pieces, but  followed Murdoch after a petty legal dispute with Private Eye. All of these men were disaffected right-wingers, who believed that the Labour Party and the media had been infiltrated by communists determined to undermine and destroy Great Britain.

Ironically these disaffected right-wingers who would undermine Britain as a nation and as a society in "liberating" the forces of the market and globalisation. Stirling had only succeeded in bringing a great deal of oil money to Britain through arms deals. Slater and Goldsmith smashed the family-ran public companies in order to make a short-term profit. The way Rupert Murdoch pursued his right-wing agenda reduced political discourse to a series of cynical exaggerations, moralising rants and politicised fear. The forces of liberal capitalism lead to a socio-economic, as well as a metaphysical, wasteland in which moral relativism (the very idea Murdoch rails against as "elitist") is nurtured. The market rationality is secular and relativistic, not to mention pragmatic, which has a subversive effect on the moral, religious and political order. This contradiction between the economic and the metaphysical is inherent to capitalism, it is inescapable. Murdoch offers a way of managing this tension, he has the power to reassert morality and nationhood that has been wrecked by the market.

At War with Elites.

The way Murdoch narrativised it, he rejected the Establishment out of a deep-seated understanding of the common man and would never "sell out" to become a "bloody press lord". To get revenge Rupert Murdoch returned to Britain in 1981 and bought The Times, to the outrage of the liberal elite and old 'One Nation' Tories. But the Thatcherites gave the take-over the go-ahead without reference to the Monopolies Commission, which was compulsory under the law. Thatcher made an exception for Murdoch on the grounds that neither The Times nor The Sunday Times made any money and he repaid her with dutiful support. In reaction the BBC, that oh so adversial pack of Oxbridge liberals, decided to shine a light on the business and personal life of Rupert Murdoch in a documentary entitled "Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?" on Panorama. It was a much more hard-hitting look at the man behind the media and was followed by another interview conducted by David Dimbleby. As it turns out, the liberal commentariat hates Murdoch as much as the British establishment.


In 1986 Murdoch had moved all of his operations out of Fleet Street to Wapping. The print unions fell into the trap and went on strike, he sacked them and claimed that the unions were part of the decadent elites. The market system had to serve the people, all obstacles to market forces had to be swept away in the name of this cause. Actually the move increased the value of British papers by over 300%. The lay-offs in Britain were used to cross-subsidise the birth of Fox TV. In 1989 he helped write an editorial to celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Sun in which he wrote "The Establishment does not like the Sun. Never has. There is a growing band of people in positions of influence and privilege who want our newspaper to suti their private convenience." By 1991 Murdoch had solidified his position as a global media oligarch and he had the last laugh at Maxwell's expense, who fell off a yacht and drowned. This came after Maxwell had become one of the greatest criminals in the history of business.


As made evident in "Who's Afraid of Rupert Murdoch?" he has been consistently engaged in the take-over of intelligent newspapers only to transform them into cynical right-wing trash. These papers effectively become a propaganda wing for any political party which Murdoch latches onto out of ruthless self-interest. The opposition is immediately subjected to a destructive smear campaign, which abides no rules or moral code. In Britain this helped elect Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and David Cameron. He was also instrumental in the downfalls of Gordon Brown and John Major (among others). The cunning manner in which Murdoch handles politicians, to benefit his own interests, led to him receiving a massive loan from the US government just after he had endorsed Jimmy Carter. Out of a hatred of what he considered to be elitism Murdoch helped conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic undermine old institutions, which were dominated by old money elites, in order to stamp out the network of opposition to him.

Rupert Murdoch supported the Conservatives in 2010 out of the same ruthless self-interest which caused him to attack Labour in 1992 and secure a Tory victory. Kinnock announced that if Labour won the election there would new ownership stipulations introduced to the market. This could have led to the breakdown of News Corporation which would amount to Murdoch's castration. The Oxbridge liberals at the BBC, who have "fought" Murdoch so valiantly for over 40 years, have now offered themselves up on a platter like the pig who wants to be eaten. Perhaps awaiting the Second Coming of Glenn Beck in the form of Richard Littlejohn? All for the sake of free-choice the BBC seems to have caved in to a policy favouring Murdoch's interests. The BBC is the biggest rival in Britain to News Corp, so it must be undermined, weakened and broken down into edible chunks for a smooth digestion. So a freeze of the license fee would be a good start. The only thing Murdoch hates more is Ofcom and that has been highlighted as a quango ready to be cut.

Republican Rhapsody.

 

And so for the first time since Prince Charles pulled a Caligula and married a horse, we saddle up for another ROYAL WEDDING, where the taxpayer’s money is gleefully spent on an inbred family whose original purpose as figureheads has been buried under meaningless luxurious ceremony. Apparently an awful lot of cash is needed to make Prince Willy look like less of an absolute farting cretin, and to make Kate Middleton look less of a social climbing trophy-wife in waiting.

Unless you’ve been on the moon for the past couple of weeks, with your fingers in your ears and your eyes stapled shut, you will inevitably have heard that William Wales and Kate Middleton are engaged and will be married next year at the tax-payers’ expense. Yes, its true, the Prince has found a wife to cheat on, following in his illustrious father’s footsteps. Naturally the feeding-frenzy led by the parasites, who call themselves “journalists” and “paparazzi”, is underway with an enthusiasm rivalled only by a teenage boy’s yearning for privacy having just discovered masturbation. The media frenzy has barely got started and has yet to “climax”, the press has already shot down the Bishop of Willesden for expressing his views on the Royal wedding. It is obviously a grave crime to express indifference or opposition to the Royal Family, for it is an institution endowed by God with the right to rule us and live off our taxes, because their better than us and we’re their bitches, so sit back and watch all the fantastic ceremony kick off at your expense, bitch.

It is somewhat ironic that Christianity has been taken up as the religion of the ruling class. After all it was Christ – a radical Black Jew who came from the Middle East and looked like a goddamn hippie – who denounced the rich and the powerful, who held that the losers and deadbeats would inherit the earth, before being done to death by the state. Not an obvious hero for the British monarchy, with its family values derived from Henry VIII and pillaging the most of the world in the name of “civilisation”, which also has a history of crushing dissent to prevent the rise of a mass-democracy. The vote was not a gift from above, it was seized from below. It was gained after centuries of struggle against a clan of inbred hypocrites and syphilis-ridden playboys “entitled” to rule only by a hereditary principle.

Actually, speaking as writers, it’s probably a good thing that this wedding has been announced, because damn it, we need material for this column. Prince William, our future King lest we forget, is being hitched to another hot piece of St. Andrews ass (don’t think too much about that metaphor, I certainly didn’t) whom he first “fell for” (i.e. made Prince Will’s little Wills go SPROING!!) at a University catwalk, where Kate was wearing a dress that left very little to the imagination. An adventurous lady could possibly replicate the effect using four cobwebs and three beer bottle-tops, but it would be a near thing.

So, then, Prince William. Already balding, and always seen with an insufferable and inherently punchable smirk on his over-privileged face, he is the centrepiece to this royalist burlesque, and it’s hard to figure why he’s so popular. He’s not even that attractive. His “brother” Prince Harry could, potentially, be considered attractive if one had just served a long voyage at sea, but William just looks like a New Yorker caricature of the stereotypical British toff, all braying laughs and absence of chin. More innocent or less cynical writers than we would wonder what Kate saw in him, but then one remembers that the prospects of a fortune and endless photo shoots for Hello and OK! Magazines would turn Jo Brand into a fanny-magnet. But there’s one thought that keeps circling the mind like a vulture, which is the thought of whether or not William is good in bed. The idea of William’s cut-glass English accent expressing explicit sexual pleasure is one that will haunt my dreams forever, as is the thought of whether or not William says “crikey” at the vital moment. Though at this rate, the media coverage will catch the “vital moment” for YouTubers everywhere.

The current estimates for security alone are £20 million. That’s an astonishing amount of money to be throwing around. The money spent on the caviar and smoked salmon alone could probably neatly settle my student loan. Twenty million pounds is more money than the average working Briton will make in their lifetime, and here it is being thoughtlessly frittered away on lavish fripperies that make your average Bullingdon night out look like a monk’s lifestyle. The fact that this money is coming from the taxpayers, who have mortgages and bank loans and other plebeian concerns is the point that turns this farrago from merely an exercise in repulsive decadence into a downright insult. As we said before, the subtext of the glamour and luxury of this wedding is not to celebrate the union between two whinnying upper-class toffs, but instead to highlight the fact that some people are just born better than you. That’s right, they are better. God says so. Nobody cares if you don’t believe in God or if you don’t like how they’re living, this family of scroungers descended from a line of murderers, madmen, syphilitic lard-arses and tyrants are better than you.

The affair brings to mind nobody less than a giggling little “People’s Princess” Diane Windsor nee Spencer. When so much money was spent on the wedding of her to that gloomy bat-eared man, only for the marriage to fall limply to the ground like an overused condom, how we would have laughed, had the population not been footing the bill. The dress and ring alone cost the equivalent of £100,000 today, paid for with the wealth and land bestowed onto them by God and the public. Diana Spencer was a voluntary member of the dynasty in pursuit of a fairytale life as a Princess and Queen in waiting. The media indulged her in this puerile quest and has succeeded in creating a cult to the Princess. As for philanthropy and the two days she spent in Angola and Bosnia, when you’re a borderline airhead with millions of pounds and nothing to do except shag the riding instructor and contemplate regurgitating lunch, these things are something to do. This also helped cement the cultish following in the press. So when the Spencer girl died the press lost control of this cult and had no choice but to suspend reality. The non-event of 1997 would be mourned incessantly in the mass-media, not out of genuine adulation but to retain circulation. No deviation would be tolerated. Banning and censorship were the penalties for doing so. Today the Memorial to Diana’s memory seems very similar to her as a person. Both pointless and gushing, though unless my memory fails, Diana never drowned any squirrels. Feel free to correct us on this point if you have proof. But we digress.

I guess that the point that we are trying laboriously to get to is that this wedding is, at best, ridiculous, and at worst a spit in the eye of the taxpayer. What needs to happen is for us to reassess the position of the royals in society. The kind of unquestioning loyalty that so many people have is completely groundless. Loyalty needs to be earned, and it cannot be wasted on these non-elected, inbred sponges. So many people never seem to question the privileged position of the royals in society, despite the omnipresent implications that some people are born better than others and that you should pay for the honour of being ruled by these toffs. Not that we want to sound like Cromwellian abolitionists (we are, but we don’t want to sound like it) but the Royals are an utterly vestigial part of Britain today, a detriment to the equality of man and the last remnant of imperial rule and all the nasty baggage that goes with that. If we must have them, then let’s not waste our time harping on about the wedding, but have the incestuous pricks tone it down. Give Willy and Kate a registry office-followed-by-local-pub wedding. Move the Queen into just one of her stately homes, and give the rest to the National Trust. Give Prince Phillip an ASBO for “racial insensitivity”. Tear down the Diana Memorial and replace it with the verdant beauty of Hyde Park once again. If we are to have the Royals, don’t have them be the symbols of a lingering aristocracy. Make them normal people. It’s either that, or we can dust off the guillotines.

Written by JT White and Josh Ferguson, November 28th 2010, for the Heythrop student newspaper the Lion originally.