IT'S bad enough having wall-to-wall royalist sycophancy on the TV with Nicholas Witchell and other professional brown-nosers gushing over the ability of some minor royal no-mark to walk in a straight line as though they had just single-handedly discovered a cure for cancer.
At least with the telly you can flee to the far reaches of the programme guide and watch the Nazi alien ghost hunter bigfoot shows that pass for content on the History channel.
This year we are in for a concentrated bout of mandatory royalist toadying in which we will be expected to fawn over the supposed achievements of an extremely wealthy family of entitled wasters whose accomplishments amount to little more than milking the public purse to the tune of millions annually and a truly epic level of hypocrisy. The occasion for this being the supposedly fantastic achievement of a wealthy elderly woman with access to the best health care that money can buy getting to the age of 95.
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According to the Office of National Statistics, there are more than 600,000 people in the UK who are over the age of 90 and more than 15,000 people who are over the age of 100. Most of these people will have had considerably harder lives than an obscenely wealthy member of the Windsor clan, and many of them will have made very real and substantial contributions to society. Yet they will not get even a tiny fraction of the attention and praise which will be heaped upon Elizabeth Windsor and by extension upon her even less worthy offspring and their families.
The most irritating thing about this monarchist boak-fest which is to be paid for out of public funds is that it will not permit any space for dissenting voices. You can forget about being critical of the institution of the monarchy or speaking about the many and manifest shortcomings and failures of individual members of the royal family, of which examples are legion, from absolutely everything about Prince Andrew, to the way in which Princes Charles and William pose as champions of the environment while indulging themselves in spectacularly wasteful lifestyles, to the family's frequent intrusion into democratic discourse, the most recent of which is William and Kate's decision to meet with Gordon Brown in order to discuss ways in which they can assist the campaign against Scottish independence.
However, the state-sponsored compulsory royalist wet dream will not even acknowledge any need to have an adult and dispassionate discussion about the nature and role of the royal family, about how it is funded, and the appropriate limits of the influence of its members in public life in a modern, 21st-century democracy. The basic problem with the British monarchy will remain unaddressed and unacknowledged.
READ MORE: UK to send patriotic Queen book to EVERY primary school child in Scotland
That problem is that the monarchy is allowed to be simultaneously a publicly funded state institution when it suits the Windsors, to be a lucrative commercial operation when it suits the Windsors, and to be a private family whose privacy is enforced with expensive lawyers when it suits the Windsors.
Now we have learned that the British Government is to spend £12 million of public money on "patriotic" – read: British nationalist – books about the Queen which are to be distributed to every primary school child in the UK. According to reports, the purpose of the book is to ensure that pupils, families and teachers develop a "collective understanding" of the Queen's reign.
That will be a Union-flag waving, uncritical and essentially infantile understanding, as you can be certain that these texts will not be designed to prompt children to think critically or independently about the role of the monarchy. They are nothing more than state-sponsored brainwashing which will not acknowledge that many people, especially in Scotland, do not support the institution of the monarchy.
These books are another desperate and futile bid to inculcate British nationalism in a Scotland which is increasingly seeing the UK for what it really is: corrupt, undemocratic and based upon patronage, privilege and an unaccountable ruling class.
Still, at least the paper they are made from can be recycled into something useful, which is more than you can say for the royal family.
This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.
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