From the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard
Where socialists stand on the media coverage of the Queen Mother’s birthday
For over a year we have heard of the preparations to commemorate the 100th birthday of the Queen Mother. Newspapers have given over thousands of column inches to this most important of national events, even stimulating debate as to whether the occasion be afforded the status of a bank holiday. On Wednesday, 19 July, there was a national tribute to the Queen Mother, with military parades and presentations and the dropping of a million rose petals over the crowds who turned out in their thousands and similar events have been planned for the coming weeks.
As socialists, what is our position on all of this? Firstly, we are certain we are not alone in believing that not one penny should be spent celebrating the 100 years of luxury this ageing parasite has enjoyed. Not that we believe it should be put to better use. No doubt it could, but we are not into the business of juggling the nations accounts.
For one thing, the Queen Mother was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, into the aristocracy and into a family which, at her birth owned three luxurious homes at a time when 99 percent of this country lived in various degrees of poverty. 100 years later, she still enjoys the good life, jumping hospital queues, waited on hand and foot by maids and servants and chauffeurs, whilst the average pensioner, after decades of struggling to survive, living in the shadow of debt, having been insulted by successive Labour and Tory governments, is given a weekly rise that could not, quite honestly, buy a packet of chips.
Undoubtedly, the cost of keeping this wizen-faced has-been alive and in the manner to which her ilk have grown accustomed—in the finest accommodation, the best food, the most expensive clothes and jewellery—for 100 years, is perhaps equivalent to the annual income of many a third world country.
The contribution made to society by the Queen Mother and her greedy and incestuous clan is quite simply zilch. Each one is capable of happily consuming in one day more resources and commodities than any 100 members of the working class, perhaps 1000 times as much as the inhabitants of a small African village. Yet we are meant to kowtow to this bunch of indifferent, self-seeking brain-dead leeches, to prostrate ourselves like imbeciles in front of them?
It is time we, the working class, celebrated something of far more importance—ourselves and the latent strength we have and can utilise to help bring about a world in which we can all enjoy the nice things that civilisation ought to bring. It seems we have been led for so long by idiots, convinced we should look up to our ‘betters’ and to celebrate their shenanigans, brainwashed into thinking the same by the media, that we have forgotten our own collective strength.
The Queen Mother’s 100th birthday deserves no more our sanction than the bombing of Iraq or the reintroduction of the slave trade. If the injustices that plague our world and perpetrated in the name of profit were to receive one-tenth as much coverage as this 100th birthday do, then our case would have been well publicised and our ranks undoubtedly swollen.
John Bissett
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