FRANKLY, I’m gutted I missed the chance to boo at Prince William at the FA Cup Final on Saturday, mostly on account of being nowhere near London during the match. Still, it’s nice to see the royal family getting a sharp reminder that the iron gates and privileges of Buckingham Palace are perhaps not as unassailable as they would like.
The reign of Queen Elizabeth is coming to an end, and while the British monarchy’s peg is not quite as shoogly as I would like, a rather terse national conversation on the future of the monarchy lies ahead of us all. In Scotland, polling would suggest that maintaining the monarchy is now a minority position. However, those numbers are not reflected in England and, as anyone with a passing knowledge of Britain’s democratic deficit knows, Scotland remains at the mercy of our significantly larger neighbour on all things constitutional.
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So, for now, we’re stuck in a so-called democracy that remains beholden to the whims of an obscenely wealthy family with magic blood that grants them the right to rule – and all the patriotic detritus that comes with it.
Never willing to miss an opportunity to crowbar some more pro-UK propaganda into our lives though, the UK Government has decided to mark the Queen’s Jubilee with a new book all about her 70-year reign over our happy family of nations. The commemorative book, set to be sent to every primary school pupil in Britain, will supposedly “help children understand how the four nations came together as one United Kingdom”. At least, that was the plan before Scotland and Wales got a look at it and decided to make the distribution of the book an “opt-in” rather than “forced upon” process.
The book follows the story of Isabella who, on a visit to her grandmother, digs through her souvenir box leading to a whirlwind journey through the history of the UK – though given that the book makes clear this fictional scenario is naturally taking place in England, the whole thing has a distinctly “dispatches from the colonies” vibe. Having skipped through the pages myself, it seems to be a rather expensive vanity project, more propagandist than celebratory, made evident by many glaring omissions.
History, after all, is written by the powerful – and the reckless and violent past of the British state is something best brushed out of our books lest people start looking a little more closely at the bonds that tie us together and how they came to be.
In its rosy summary of Scottish history, our timeline ends with the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 – but oddly enough entirely skips over the fact that the Conservative Party were fiercely opposed to Scotland having its own parliament again and campaigned against it during the 1997 referendum. Boris Johnson’s recent outburst that branded devolution a “disaster” is also conspicuously absent.
And while they have taken the time to paint the Scottish Parliament as a symbol of the enduring strength of the United Kingdom, it would appear whatever page the 1979 referendum on devolution was on must have fallen out ahead of printing. After a majority of Scots backed devolution for Scotland in the late 70s, the first referendum on founding a parliament was stymied by a Labour MP who snuck in an amendment to the Scotland Act that functionally overturned the democratic result.
“They fit together like a jigsaw puzzle!” declares Isabella on another page, looking at a map of the four nations that make up the United Kingdom while deftly stepping around any mention of how consistently the UK Government has attempted to undermine devolution in the last few years, such as with the Internal Markets Act. Even this book, originally to be sent to every primary school pupil in the UK, is technically an example of governmental overreach, given that education is a devolved matter.
The Act of Union in 1707 naturally gets a mention, though absent are the immortal words of Robert Burns: “We’re bought and sold for English gold – Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!” Burns’s protest poem was a rally against the politicians and wealthy investors of the Company of Scotland who, following the disastrous Darien project, could only get their investments back (plus a bonus) if they could bring about the end of the Scottish Parliament and pass all power to England – in which they succeeded and made quite a fortune.
On Northern Ireland, the Jubilee book skips over such trivial events like British soldiers opening fire on and murdering unarmed civilians and opts instead for more light-hearted milestones such as the Great Famine. Thankfully, before anyone has a chance to mention the role the UK Government played in turning a crop failure into a humanitarian crisis, we’re whisked along to the Good Friday Agreement: another headache of its own for our gung-ho post-Brexit government.
To consider this an accurate representation of the tense and unbalanced relationships between Westminster and the nations that make up the United Kingdom, you would have to flip through this book in a dark room – or after having raided the Downing Street wine fridge.
At a time of a cost of living crisis, the UK is spending almost £12 million to give British history a bit of a polish – but it’ll take a lot more than that to get those bloodstains out.
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