How Original! How Late! A Post About The Jubilee!

A crown. Made out of cake.

So yes, this is the first entry of a blog, and how much more unoriginal can you get for a subject for a blog entry at the moment. More Jubilee stuff? Really? Even now, when it's, you know, over and everything?

Well, quite. As a Republican, I've not done much for the Jubilee. I certainly didn't protest against it, because at the end of the day, it wasn't my party. There's a time and a place for debating the pros and cons of a monarchy and frankly in the middle of a celebration of it isn't it. It would be a different story if it was a wildly unpopular event that was being shoved down the public's throats; but over 80% of the country wanted the Jubilee celebrations, and so it would have been if nothing else undemocratic to try and boycott it. Live and let live and all that; I'm not going to spoil anyone's fun for the sake of making a futile gesture. I spent my Jubilee Sunday volunteering at a garden party organised by Mencap; though it pissed it down with rain, everyone had a marvellous time putting up Union Jacks, balloons and so on, and money was raised for charity. The fact was, Monarchy didn't play a massive part, but patriotism did - the good kind of patriotism, the love of your country and what it means to be British, not the bad kind where you go hitting differences. The best illustration of how modern Britain was celebrated was when an Indian Youth Orchestra being followed by an old-school old lady British Choir.  Both were really good, and the juxtaposition was as good an example of

When I saw the pictures in the evening of the Republican protesters at the flotilla event I felt like cringing. These were not people who were going to attract anyone to any cause. They looked, frankly, like miserable buggers. They weren't dressed in interesting costumes, they were dressed like third-rate gangsters, and looked foolish. It wasn't an occasion for a debate, it was an occasion for a fun day out with the family on a long Bank Holiday. Coming across as party-poopers was a massive own goal. If you turned up to someones birthday party with the express intention of ruining it, you would (rightly) get a frosty reaction to say the least. It's bad manners, for a start, in being bad mannered is a massive turn-off for all British people. And if you're stupid enough to look bad mannered in front of your enemies who happen to be the epitome of manners (the Queen is actually what a manner looks like), you render yourself politically irrelevant there and then.

Anyway, I was looking forward to getting on with the rest of my life and looking forward to the next big occasion I couldn't give a shit about (that's the Olympics, that is), until on the news on the way home from work today I heard someone from the Government admit in a very blase way that it had cost an enormous amount at £4bn, but everyone agreed that it had been absolutely worth it.

Perhaps rather naively I hadn't really thought about the cost of the event, which is why my 'live and let live' stance was so easy to maintain. I hadn't realised quite how much money had been pumped into the event. The thing is, that's quite a lot of money. A hell of a lot of money. The European countries that are floundering at the moment are crippled in debt by less amounts; that is the kind of money that can bring a country to its knees. That is the kind of money that could improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in this country, Republicans and Monarchists. The obvious examples of how it could be used are things like hospitals and schools and things that generally improve the state of peoples' lives on a daily basis, as opposed to one long weekend in June. People say that there is no point in pouring money into the NHS because it gets eaten up by bureaucracy, and that might be true to an extent; but out of £4bn surely some of that money would find its way into the lives of patients? Certainly more than if the money was poured into the Thames to make it look all pretty for a day. And how about education? What about all those university departments closing under managerial pressure to attract more foreign students, or disenfranchised kids being bored by unmotivated educators? Again, just throwing money at a problem doesn't make it go away; but it would certainly help, at least a little bit.

Even if it was spent on less 'life and death' causes than hospitals, schools and transport, surely you could make a case for using that money to try to revitalise the British film industry? Or investing in better technology? This would still be a patriotic act, and one that could make money in the future as well. Or libraries, the heart of several communities that have been either threatened with closure or flat-out closed.

I'm not arrogant enough to think that my idea of how to spend £4bn is better than most peoples'; I don't know the ins and outs of it all, and there could be valid reasons for not putting too much money into the NHS. Maybe it messes something up economically - I am economically dense. But I do think the money could have been invested, and whatever we agree or disagree about £4bn being spent on the Jubilee it is an actual, real, bona fide fact that that money has been spent. It's gone now - bye bye. Hope you enjoyed it. The government minister I heard on the radio though it was worth it, but I'm not sure he speaks for everyone.

And ultimately, even after everything else I've written so far, if you think that £4bn is a sensible amount of money for an economically struggling country to be spending on a knees-up, there is something wrong with you. If you say to me that you can't think of anything better to spend £4bn on in this country I will assume that you are lying; because the idea that you might be telling the truth scares me so much more.

I am not arguing that it was a mistake to celebrate the Queen's Jubilee, and I'm not entirely convinced that it was a cynical 'bread-and-circuses' attempt on the Establishment's behalf to distract people from the appalling way things have been going for the Coalition at the moment. But there are ways of doing things; to be more precise there are sensible ways of doing things and extravagant ways of doing things, and unfortunately extravagance is a luxury we cannot afford at the moment.

Spending money extravagantly on things we couldn't afford is what got this country into its current financial situation. It seems we have refused to learn from this. Next time the Government refuses to do something because it can't afford it, I will think of the Jubilee celebrations and ask myself which I would rather have had.