So the #RoyalBaby has arrived. Congratulations to the Duchess of Cambridge and her husband.
Already tired of the preposterous media circus? Frustrated by the sycophancy? Here’s a constructive way of looking at the coverage:
You know how people like Michael Gove and David Starkey bang on about the importance of monarchs past? The traditionalists say that our Kings and Queens are useful milestones, markers or entry points to the wider social history.
Well, that can be true for future monarchs, too. The baby boy born today is now the perfect future milestone for discussions of the country we are making. He will likely begin his reign in the last decades of the twenty-first century. That’s precisely the kind of planning horizon we need to sensibly discuss issues like climate change, technological innovation and population control.
Want to say something about the birth of this child? Set it in future historical context.
Category: Diary (Page 87 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Last week I was at a Demos #ResponsibleSecurity event in London for a speech by the Shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper MP, on the balance between Liberty and Security in a modern democracy [full text]. It was a timely intervention on a crucial debate. Of course the revelations about widespread and illegal government surveillance are still in the news, and there had been recent, appalling revelations that the family of Stephen Lawrence had been bugged by the police. However, it has also been said that stronger surveillance measures might have prevented the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in Woolwich.
Cooper said that Labour’s approach to balancing a need for security with our human rights and civil liberties would be based on evidence. By this measure, she said, the attempt by the last Labour Government to extend detention without charge first to 90 days and then to 42 days, was wrong: “The politics of security had become more important than the evidence.” She also said Labour had also failed to stop the powers granted within the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) from being abused by local authorities, and that they should have done something to mitigate the effect on ethnic minorities of the stop-and-search laws.
Cooper praised the current Government for trying to fix RIPA and the stop-and-search problems, but criticised them for introducing new laws without proper checks-and-balances on state power. She cited the recent Communications Data Bill (a.k.a. The Snoopers’ Charter) and the appalling new secret courts as examples of this. Continue reading
The #EqualMarriage timeline on Twitter is full of people praising Queen Elizabeth II for approving the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. There is a strong sense of knowing irony steaming off those messages. I feel that most of the people celebrating the new law think its rather ridiculous that the approval of the Monarch is still required.
What a relief, then, to learn that actually, Queen Elizabeth II did not formally approve the new law. ‘Royal Assent’ is actually a procedural step in the House of Lords. The monarch is invoked in the process, but she is not personally involved in the decision. From the Wikipedia page:
The granting of the Royal Assent … is simply La Reyne le veult (the Queen wills it)
This matters, because we should recognise that this pro-family reform of the law is the work of Parliament and Democracy. It is not a gift to us from the Establishment. It is not that ‘La Reyne’ or ‘Le Roy’ wills it… but that the people of the United Kingdom have willed it. That’s important.
Benjamin Cohen, a long-term campaigner for the reform, has the right formulation:
https://twitter.com/benjamincohen/status/357502765620142081
Here’s a euphemism laden sentence from a Daily Telegraph editorial:
[The research] shows a continuing pattern of “white flight” from areas where indigenous Britons find themselves surrounded by new minority communities.
Where they say ‘indigenous’ they mean ‘white’, and when they say ‘minority communities’ they mean not-white (Aisha Phoenix called this out in The LIP Magazine, a decaded ago). The posh language dresses a racial issue as a cultural one.
And the research in question is questionable. I found the Telegraph editorial via a blog post by Jonanthan Portes of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. Portes was taking on the grand claims for “white flight” by David Goodhart in his book The British Dream. If people in the ‘White British’ group are leaving London, they are doing so in relatively small numbers.
Over at the Spectator, Alex Massie analyses an Ipsos-Mori poll on some of the beliefs the British people hold about our country and the way the Government operates.
To pick just one statistic:
Then there’s this doozy: 29% of respondents think the government spends more on unemployment benefits – the Job Seekers’ Allowance – than on pensions. In fact, pensions cost 15 times as much (rightly so!).
Apparently the British public is similarly misinformed about the propoertion of Muslims in the country, the number of immigrants, the budget of the Department for International Development, the rate of teenaged pregancies, and the crime rate.
Massie shies away from calling the British people stupid, though the headline to his post ‘Abandon All Hope’ suggests this is what he thinks. And clearly this poll shows that we are, indeed, a highly ignorant bunch.
But I think it would be wrong for we the public to take the blame. To my mind, this poll shows that we are being failed by our media. Their primary purpose is surely to keep us informed about what is going on in our democracy, and clearly they are not doing that job effectively. That’s not something that Alex Massie cares to consider in his article.