EURO 2012 : FOOTBALL’S COMIN ‘OME!

Hands up all you nice people out there who travelled to the Ukraine and Poland to watch the English football team play? Hmm… five thousand of you eh! Likewise hands up those who watched the games on television from home or in a pub and were glued to the set. Christ! Millions more! And all of you so disappointed. Dear, dear, dear! Well please don’t be. This post is written specially for you because I want you to be happy!

Let me get straight to the point. I am now able to reveal for the first time to the many admirers of England’s football team the secret of their footballing philosophy and successes over so many years. We can at last share with all the many supporters and fans the great and guiding idea behind our style of play, namely that LOSING ISN’T REALLY LOSING AT ALL. No, the secret at the heart of English footballing success is the brilliant idea that LOSING IS ACTUALLY WINNING.

Yes, the idea behind each game England plays is that the team must do its best to lose.

Now please… there’s no need for you to get abusive or feel angry by this amazing discovery. The idea has been carefully considered over many years’ experience and is the only logical conclusion that can be drawn from all the many English performances… to wit, that all the hard work, the training, the effort of team selection carefully designed to pick the best players with the greatest skills, able to devote the greatest amount of energy has been for one purpose and one purpose alone… to help the team lose. Even the tactics and training are designed with this in mind i.e. spend eighty per-cent of the game in your own half… don’t attack under any circumstances… keep on passing the ball backwards, all the way back to the goalkeeper if possible rather than forwards, and more important than anything else, keep on giving it away as often as you can to an opponent.

Now of course there may be those of you who think that little skill is required to do all this but you would be sadly mistaken. From all the many results over the years it becomes clear that the chief criteria for selecting a player is PRECISELY their ability to do all these things, and please don’t knock it. Premier League footballers, the cream of the English beautiful game’s professionals, many paid more for ninety minutes work once a week than a nurse, fireman, policeman, teacher, junior doctor, scientific researcher or ambulance driver gets to see for TEN YEARS SERVICE helping people, are along with bankers, financial services executives, company directors and Russian gangsters the highest paid people in the land. Those who play for England are supposedly at the top of their game, the best that there is. They are the elite of professional football so that when these eleven players come together collectively to mostly play in their own half, pass the ball to a player from the opposing team on as many occasions as possible, kick or head the ball inches or yards wide of the other side’s goalposts from a distance of three feet away on such a regular basis, please do not tell me that this is bad or dreadful play. To do so would miss the whole point. That it is entirely intentional and that very great skill is required to do it.

Indeed, why else is it that those selected to play for England perform these feats with such panache and style and on such a regular basis? To say that it’s bad luck or that the player is ‘off form’ is to hide oneself from the truth. Huge skill and much training is required to make these so called dreadful misses, and make them look natural, and this only becomes clear once you understand the secret, the underlying philosophy of the English football team… THAT LOSING IS NOT LOSING AT ALL. IT’S REALLY WINNING!

And for those doubters and sceptics among you there is a way of proving this to be true. One which comes from the very soul of English football itself, namely the fans. Those of us who watch football tournaments where the England team is playing round the world will know that supporters of our team love singing the National Anthem or Rule Britannia. They are at their happiest when they’re singing these songs and they really don’t sing anything else. Now ask yourself… when do they sing these songs most? Yes of course, it’s when the team’s losing. Then everyone sings God Save the Queen or go on about never, never, never being slaves. So clearly, the fans are at their happiest when England is losing and that, of course, is the great secret they all share. That when the Germans have got four goals and we’ve only got one, or when they’ve got three penalties in the shoot-out and we haven’t got any it’s really England, secretly, who are winning.      

Look at it another way. When England have made the dreadful mistake of attacking and the even more ghastly error of scoring there is a stunned silence that comes over England’s supporters followed by the team instantly reacting to a dire situation and doing what they know has to done, namely, avoid making the same mistake again under any circumstances by instantly retreating so far back in their own half that ten of the eleven players are soon standing on their own goal line! In short, key at all times is to let the other side win and the best way to achieve this is to play in our own half, not score any more goals ourselves and to always give them a chance of getting a goal by passing them the ball. That way you see, they score and we win! And of course, our supporters get to sing the National Anthem!

Look at it this way. Can you imagine how happy it makes the Queen? Knowing that the most ardent supporters of monarchy come from the massed ranks of the English underclass all on song with undying devotion when the other team get all the goals!

However, if you don’t accept the view that losing is really winning, none of this would make any sense, would it? However, the evidence is all there in front of your eyes and has been for many years. How else can you explain what you see with such regularity… the English football team so totally devoid of any imagination… its players having so little basic football skills… the endless back passing… the pathetic attacks… the endless defence. It’s like watching a bunch of highly paid cowards… unless of course it’s all really deliberate! That all this supposed skill has its very own secret purpose only known some way or other to the Football Association and understood by the underclass army of “football’s comin ‘ome,” fans most of whom are one pork pie short of moronic. Or could it be that losing is really winning after all? That it binds all the losers together as a band of brothers. Supporters who deny themselves and their families everything so that they can travel one end of the globe to another to vocalise their patriotism in self-affirming loss.

Could it really be true then? That England’s football supporters and the team itself as well as its succession of managers are genuinely imbued with the philosophy that losing is winning and that the secret to success is to pick the best players possible to help England lose because, make no mistake about it, these are highly skilled, highly trained professional players who do what they do for a living and earn huge sums of money for it. Indeed, you need to be exceptionally skilled to kick a ball ten yards wide of a goal post from three feet away with no-one else there to impede you or else head the ball high over the crossbar from a few feet away when all you need to do was stick out your bum to get the ball in the net. In short, huge skill is also required at what may best be described as GOAL SCORING AVOIDANCE and that is why these players are selected and it’s all really a huge secret, the custodianship of which goes far beyond MI5.

And horror of horrors! Could it be that 1966 was just a gigantic disaster from which English football has been trying to recover over the last 46 years?

Now either you accept this very English philosophy of football or you’ve got to accept something else. Something altogether less pleasant and you know what I’m talking about here! Or are all you ‘come on England’ supporters out there too thick, too ashamed or just too plain moronic to look truth in the face and admit it for what it really is. That English football on a national level is just a pathetic, shameless, hopelessly unskilled cowardly disgrace. That most of its players for donkeys years have been talked up media creations who’ve failed time and time over when required to step up to the plate. Pampered by the sports pundits… vastly overpaid as people with average skills at best… endlessly fawned over… feted and turned into things that they’re not by a sickening, sycophantic national press hungry to manufacture national obsessions so they can write stories and sell their shit-sheets to a public with concomitant festering obsessions. It’s like the national obsession with Royalty. A symbiotic self-serving parasitism.

  

Let’s go cold turkey and ask how an entire nation can be given the treat of a football player’s hairstyle on the front pages of its media when there was so much else going on in our country? What kind of people are we that we should be more interested in a footballer’s hairstyle that anything else? Well journalists, editors and newspaper owners would know, much the same as those Emperors of Rome. Bread and circuses! Have people changed much over the last 2000 years when they still buy into this shit?

Wayne Rooney’s fighting in the arena today and guess what? He’s had his hair done!

Well whoopee fucking do all you alcohol fuelled come on England jerk-offs. So much for your national pride! Your team of useless, pathetic losers has lost all over again and you don’t care, not really, because you’ve both got no pride. Your manager and players can shrug their shoulders and start coming out with   the excuses they’d already thought up before the game even started. Pathetic, lame, cheap excuses perfectly suited for their uncritical, semi-inebriated supporters who don’t have the capacity to think and ask themselves why. No, don’t ask any questions. Just booze it off in some foreign bar or down at the pub!

The press, the television commentators and pundits have all, over the years, played their part in the damning and shaming of national team football in addition to the superb comedy of the Football Association’s appointment of foreign managers who seriously knew a bunch of fools when they saw one and milked the situation for what it was. Yes, let’s have Swedes and Italians, joke-joke, they know what they’re doing! But then you see, the joke was so big and so vigorously promoted by a salivating press that it clouded all rational thought and judgement, if there was any in the first place that is. The jokey Swede and the grumpy Italian! Coining it in millions and the football supporters going along with it all. That’s it, all you loyal supporters of the English national team, you’re the sick joke of Europe!

And now the reasons for it all. The facts as they stand are these. In the last three decades, professional football required financial support from the money men of the City of London so that it might expand and milk a lucrative traditional working class market. The money however came with strings. The main national clubs became private companies listed on the equity market and were now required to make profit for their investors. Part of their value was in land, the ground or stadium of the club, but more important than anything else, even the weekly ticket sales to supporters or the outrageous marketing of club shirt and other token of adoration, was the value of players. Over a few decades what had once been Club value was turned into Asset value. Human beings became financial assets.  Thousands turned into millions and the buying and selling of players became club football’s biggest source of profit. Players, whether skilled or not, had to be talked up, their name and person turned into a commodity, easily and willingly manufactured. Stars! Stars with wives, haircuts and houses.

Footballers acquired the new value of celebrity. They were more important, had greater value as media creations than actual kickers and headers of footballs. Their celebrity and celebrity value became everything, their footballing skills nothing, their value secondary at best. That’s why they can’t kick a ball straight. That’s why they can’t score penalty goals… because they don’t have the skill to place a ball when they kick it. It was something they never learned, were never taught, not when being seen outside nightclubs was more important. In short, basic skill lost its value and was replaced by celebrity value and a Premier League full of prancing prima-donnas, semi or otherwise, evolved for the requirements of the London capital markets.

Poor, poor footballers! You’re just a pathetic bunch of actors now, pretending to be something you’re not. But never mind. The English team will still have its loyal army of supporters watching its thoroughly rotten performances on a regular basis so nothing to worry about on that score. They’ll still value you more highly than nurses, teachers, doctors, firemen or ambulance drivers. Your endless losing is the opium they need, the drug they just can’t shake off. Like you they need to wallow in the pathetic. It helps them stay juvenile. Prevents them from growing up and seeing things for what they really are; the politicians who deceive, the money men who cheat, the journalists who lie for a living and the Royals who smile and think what an amazing bunch of arseholes their adoring public actually are.

It’s football the beautiful game! It’s entertainment. So easy that you don’t need to think any more. You can boo or cheer. And when you’ve done your booing or cheering you can do another ten pints of lager and sing as you roll on the grass, FOOTBALL’S COMIN ‘OME!

A VERY BRITISH OPENING CEREMONY PAGEANT FOR THE LONDON OLYMPICS OF 2012

Oh look Mummy, look! There’s some men playing cricket!

Yes darling. That’s what English country life is all about!

And look over there Daddy. There are boys and girls dancing round the maypole. Just like we do in Dagenham.

Yes Jonny. Everyone’s dancing round the maypole these days, now they’ve closed all those nasty factories down. It’s all going back to what it used to be like in the good old days, before we had an industrial revolution.

Are we getting a spinning wheel too, Mummy?

Yes darling. Then we’ll be able to make all our own clothes… And have wool from our sheep, like the ones over there in the field, and milk all the cows in our barn…

Chorus… And we won’t have to buy anything more from China!

Yes, it has been decided by the British Olympic Committee under the artistic direction of Danny Boyle and the watchful eye of the Coalition Government i.e. the Tory hunting and horse-riding class, that the opening ceremony pageant of the upcoming London Olympics will reflect the full panorama of ancient and modern British country life replete with all its idyllic joys and delights. And this perhaps with the thought in mind that such jolly semi-feudal arrangements are in keeping with their vision of a new Britain; everyone moving out of cities and going to live in the country. Oh how lovely and green! There would of course be certain exceptions made for Russian oligarchs and Arab oil sheiks but then what would it matter when we’d still have the City of London investment bankers running the show.

All the joys of British country life in the Pageant! Sunny spacious thatched roofed cottages full of happy peasants weaving and spinning or gathering roses out in the garden, lots of woolly sheep, churches and bell ringing, rural industries and folk-craft like blanket making and wood cutting. There’ll be a place of course for rural delights and past-times like boiling up the copper kettle on the log fire stove to make tea, doing archery in your green hat with a feather in it and of course, that very essence of Englishness, dancing round the maypole. It’s what the new British peasants have waited a whole year to do. Put on their best clothes and ribbons for Chinese tourists and dance round the maypole on the village green.

How things have changed. All the British living in the country and eating beansprouts and faggots and the Chinese living in cities, eating roast beef and manufacturing things!

Naturally those organising the farce will want to include all the different variations of British country life. The English with their thatched cottages and maypoles; Welsh women wearing those seriously Welsh black hats with their men endlessly busy making bread out of seaweed; the Irish doing green things under-ground while whispering fiendish spells, and finally the Scots. Ah the Scots! The women weaving tartan willy warmers because all the men wear skirts and it’s so cold up there in the winter, and the men spending all their time dancing on table tops across a couple of swords. Yes it’s all so very British and now you know where table top dancing was invented!

Amazingly enough, no other nation on the planet ever had a rural history like ours! No-one ever kept sheep or cattle or lived in a cottage or dressed up in funny clothes, kept farm animals, made alcoholic beverages and cheese, and above all, danced round a stick stuck into the ground. Yes, we British were the only people in the whole world ever to do all that kind of shit… so we’re letting you know it at our Olympic ceremony. All that cheese making and pole dancing made us different to you. Gave us our own special history! Yes, all those sheep and all that cheese, all those funny hats and rainy days, all those thatched roofs, ribbons and maypoles made us British and stand out from everyone else. And that is why we are so proudly showing it off to the world. The things that are essentially us!   

Now wouldn’t some of it be fine if ANY OF IT were true. At least we could all have a laugh. Unfortunately it’s not. The history of the British rural landscape was one of unending misery for ninety-five per cent of its population and essentially a portrait of alternating heroism and violence. It was feudal for over a thousand years through Saxon and Norman epochs during which time a scattering of feudal nobility and their lackeys ruled over hundreds of thousands of peasants with unimaginable harshness aided by the Church stuffing the minds of the people with the notion that their lot was okay because some invisible god had ordained it to be so.

Let’s look at some cameos of the realities of this life. During this period there was the Great Peasants Revolt of 1381 in which the men of Kent and Essex refused to pay any more taxes to finance the foreign wars of their king. In the 16^th century there was a great Enclosure Movement in which common land which had been traditionally used by the peasants to graze their sheep and cattle was fenced off and taken from them by the new rich under Elizabeth 1st. A verse of the time went like this…

The law condemns the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But lets the greater rascal loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

The Enclosure process robbed the peasants of grazing rights forcing many to give up any land they worked and become paid labourers for the new large estate owners. Another cameo of rural life could be the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, where in 1830s Dorset a group of agricultural labourers banded together and began recruiting others to form an Agricultural Labourers Trades Union. This is a great and heroic story of the English Labour Movement in which men and women struggled to earn a living wage in the face of appalling legal threat and police violence. These Dorset labourers were taken from their families, tried, imprisoned and deported to harsh lengthy penal servitude in Australia. Their story would be a wonderful proud moment to show of English history. The first country in the world to have a Union of rural working men and women. But do not expect such a thing in the coming Olympic Pageant. Not on your sweet life! Not when its organisers only want the world to see cheese, rain, sheep and maypoles! Oh, and I forgot! Nice green grass!

An even more appalling slice of British rural life with a heady mixture of brutality, tears and terror, comes from the mid to late 19^th century Scottish Highlands, the place where Queen Victoria loved to stay and make merry with John Brown. Perhaps some of you haven’t heard about the Highland Clearances. The Highlands of Scotland were always feudal. A handful of English Dukes owned eighty per-cent of it and controlled the lives of large numbers of landless Scottish peasants who were allowed to eke out a primitive existence sharing their wretched cottages with the few cattle they owned. Then it changed overnight. The English owners suddenly wanted every square inch of land to graze sheep and the crofters were in the way. So up and down the valleys of the central and northern Highlands violence was done on a grand scale by regiments of English soldiers aided by the Scottish clan chiefs.

It all made such a delightful pageant. The crofts were burned down and smashed along with all their possessions and the wretched Scottish peasants marched under guard, often dead of night, to the screams of the women and children at the sight of all their miserable belongings burning. Marched through the forests and glens to the seaports where they were forced onto ships that sailed to Canada, Australia and New Zealand and dumped on arrival and made to work as rural labourers and domestic servants for their new masters.

How about that for a pageant of British rural life Danny Boyle, or David Cameron and all the rest of you scummy Tories? Oh sorry! Have I said something I shouldn’t have said? Have I rained on your faery glade pageant of jollities with its sheep and happy peasants frolicking round your phoney maypole? Oh, I’m awfully sorry. Would you instead like me to tell you the sunny story of life for Welsh people in rural Wales in the 18^th and 19^th centuries where kids were whipped with leather belts at school for committing the crime of speaking their own Welsh language, banned by English governments… or would you prefer me talking about the most wretched rural existence of all in our green and pleasant land, Danny Boyle, that of the lives of the peasants of Ireland, illiterate, starving, humiliated and terrorised for hundreds of years on the landed estates of the English gentry?

Oh sorry! Did I miss out the cheese and the maypole again? Well I’ll tell you dear readers. If you want to know what it was really like for the rural people of Britain in our recent history you need go no further than the photographic archives readily available for study to see the faces of our rural folk and the conditions they lived in to understand the difference between the wretched reality and some phoney idealised myth creation.

If those organising the Opening Ceremony Pageant for the London Olympics of 2012 want to show anything more than myth and engage in anything more than myth making when portraying our rural history I suggest that you take on board the above and have the courage to let the world see it. A pageant of the Tolpuddle Martyrs for example would show the world that we here in Britain had the courage and nobility to stand together and work collectively to better ourselves against the most fearsome of odds. Would that not show us to be a people of courage and stoutness of heart? All our people, Welsh, Scots, English and Irish… acting together and for each other. Showing our nobility of purpose and our outrage against injustice. Showing the sombre reality of our rural life as well as its sticky moments.

A people’s struggle for justice and a better life… That’s what we gave to the world. Or don’t you Tory Boy descendants of the British feudal aristocracy like the idea and want to use our Olympic Opening Ceremony Pageant to tell it YOUR way?  Well we’ll see.

YOU’VE GOT A CHOICE NOW. YOU CAN GO FOR THE LIES OR YOU CAN TELL THE TRUTH!

THE MORRIS DANCERS MAYPOLE SONG

We shaft the girls and scatter

The good seed of the land

Cos Morris Girls love the Maypole

in Olympic Pageant Land.

It’s all lovely and green and rural

With ribbons, sheep and all

So let’s go shagging in the plural

Under the Farmer’s Market stall

Where there’s eggs and cheese and pasties

In our happy country life

Till you get a dose of the nasties

And give it to your wife

Yes we’re the English Morris dancers

Doing what folks from the shires do

Being rural turds and chancers

Who really belong in a zoo

But we’re in the London Olympics

Showing the world some English life,

Dancing round some fucking maypole

So delightfully rural, Mrs Claypole

That you can cut the crap with a knife!

THE DIAMOND JUBILEE CELEBRATIONS OF 2012: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

Unlike the quartz crystal, formed by the aggregation of silica atoms, whose energy is internationally celebrated, a diamond is a product of the crystallisation process of the element carbon under great pressure and temperature whose rarity makes it precious and its possession much prized. And so it is with the Diamond Jubilee Celebrations of a Monarch, a very rare event and much prized by a large population of admirers, or so the state broadcasting channel, the BBC, would have us believe. Or is it? Are we all adoring admirers of Queen Elizabeth 2^nd or should we spare a thought for the really sad situation of someone who was born to do things without having a choice in the matter.

Poor Queen! Rousseau the French philosopher once said that man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains and in a way it’s the same for a monarch only worse! They were born to serve tradition and with Queens it’s mainly cutting tapes. You know, opening things. She couldn’t go to a pub and drink herself silly or have a piss down a dark alley after getting a snog like so many other young ladies. No, she had to stay at home and practice waving to people. Doing what she was told her parents thought people wanted. Once born, trained to fit a role and really, what kind of a life is that? So as I say, spare a thought please! The only bit of rough self-expression she was allowed to get hold of was smashing bottles, and those were on ships. Oh what fun Mummy and Daddy!

No, Elizabeth 2^nd wasn’t even born free, into the only one life she’d ever have. All that long time shaking hands and having to smile, accepting flowers from kids and opening things surrounded by mayors, Court officials and policemen with everyone fawning and curtsying. One ritual after another. Did she ever want to say, ‘fuck off I want to be left in peace for an hour or so’ or ‘sod off you ridiculous looking arsehole.’ Think how sad it would be if she’d never actually been able to think of saying it, never had the mischievous imp of the perverse in her or just as bad, actually wanted to say it, I mean really wanted to but just couldn’t do it! Just imagine what it’s like will you… not being able to tell someone to go fuck themselves.

So, the Court officials, her Family, the BBC and a large number of British people, HER people, by legal definition of the British people being her subjects gave her a celebration to mark sixty years of her rule, of being what everyone expected her to be, of behaving in the way that everyone wanted without her ever having had the chance, so precious in our one life, of being what she might have wanted. In this sense then the Monarchy is a package, the Queen an entirely manufactured piece of goods. Not a free human being but something essentially artificial. That’s what her subjects want. Someone entirely predictable, smiling on cue, is where she’s supposed to be, performing ritual acts like a dummy.

That said let’s look at the Celebration people gave her for sixty years of being something and someone they wanted, for fulfilling their need to be ruled, for giving them herself as a symbol of benign reliable governance. Those who didn’t go to London to wave their flags or attend sandwich and cake parties out on dismal rain sodden streets stayed in front of a television lapping up an endlessly salivating orgy of sycophancy from BBC presenters who’d all had their heads so far up the arses of the Royalty Establishment that they knew who everyone was from the Queen’s Toenail Cutter in Waiting to the Earl of Horseshit Removal, what every little button on their tunics were, all the colours of each ship, barge and canoe down to the jolly jack tars riding them and where Lady this or that got her knickers from, only who was currently pulling them off was another matter! Yes, for most people it was the crawling establishment broadcasting channel providing all the action and detail THEY thought people should have, with anything bad or nasty definitely missed out. How typical it was that these creepy-crawly presenters kept on apologising for the weather like they were somehow begging Her Majesty’s pardon!

Proceedings on Day One, the Boat Pageant, began with a wonderful farce. A serious cock up courtesy of the police, who else! A large group of patriotic pro-monarchy supporters had gathered on the banks of the Thames with beautifully made laminated banners saying such things as LONG LIVE THE QUEEN or LONG LIVE HER MAJESTY. Everyone doing what they thought was their patriotic duty when along come the police, ask them what they think they’re doing, then confiscate and trash their hard worked symbols of affection into rubbish sacks and dustbins. ‘Nar, nar… we can’t be evin you do any demonstratin ere…’

Can you just imagine the consternation of all those patriotic well-healed loyalists! They’d gone there to show their love and they were being treated like students! No, actually they weren’t. Students get beaten!

Then there was the endless singing of Rule Britannia. People mouthing words that Britons never, never never shall be slaves… Sounds like a noble sentiment and it is ever mouthed and sung enthusiastically as such, only does anyone ever think for a moment about what they’re saying? Britons shall never be slaves…This country is ruled by a monarch and its people are subjects of the monarch. The BBC said as much during the Celebration, “the Queen and her subjects.” So what then is the actual status of a subject to a monarch? Well it certainly isn’t that of a free being. A subject cannot be a free being because they are a subject of another, like a slave to a master or a serf to a feudal lord. What you are most definitely not is a free citizen. The true status of a subject in such a relationship is most definitely not that of a free being and if you are not free then you are a slave. The Monarch has a property right over their subject so the words of the song that everyone lustily bellows without thinking is not the precious protestation of what they don’t want but the wretched confirmation of what they actually are!

And why not? Think about it! Didn’t you get the first dose of it in the National Anthem? Consider the wonderful words that you routinely sing without giving them a single thought. Well now, what is it actually called? A National Anthem. Right! That’s an Anthem to the Nation. Your nation! Your country! And what is that? I’ll tell you. It’s the land and its beauty. It’s the people… their history and their character, from the Irish and Welsh to the English and Scots… their history and their achievements. Great achievements actually in exploration and industry, in art and science, in technology and music. A great and magnificent sweep of so much to take pride in. Amazing country, amazing people, amazing achievements. Now think about the words of your National Anthem and what they say. Where is there any mention of the land? Where is there any mention of its people? Where is there any mention of our history?

Listen, all of you…    God save our gracious Queen,

                                 Long live our noble Queen,

                                 God save the Queen!    

                                 Send her victorious,

                                 Happy and Glorious

                                 Long to reign over us;

                                 God save the Queen!

Now please tell me. What is this all about and for who? And why not try learning the rest! It’s got some choice phrases that will strike a real chord with the homeless, the poor and the unemployed.

“Thy choicest gifts in store… On her be pleased to pour…”

The Scots are also in some versions of it but only as a rebellious people who need to be crushed. Now what kind of National Anthem is it that damns a fair percentage of the British population? There is nothing in the British National Anthem about freedom or liberty, the land, its people and their achievements. It’s mainly about one person, its ruler. Talk about personality cult! No other country on the planet has a national anthem like ours although it still remains the ‘royal’ anthem of nine or ten small island members of the Commonwealth along with New Zealand, Canada and Australia. Simply ridiculous for the last two places.

The national anthems of most other countries are about the land and its people, and they’re optimistic, heroic and proud. More often than not they have a tune. The British National Anthem by way of contrast is sung flat and monotone, its participants collectively sounding like a bunch of zombies having a jam session. That’s the whole thing really. There’s no tune, no melody, no song in what is essentially a revolving homage to a single individual.

So what is it I wonder that the British so lustily mutter? It certainly isn’t about their country or its people unless, that is, you are actually saying that its ruler, the Queen, actually represents the entire people and an entire land. Well that’s absurd. To say that one person represents everything and everybody and must be protected has the ring of Nazi Germany about it. There was a great Civil War in 17^th century Britain to do away with all that kind of thing and create the sovereignty of Parliament, so to mouth its words without thinking is not being patriotic. It’s ignorant and pathetic and has all the character of a cringing kow-towing serf about it. Never mind those well damned Scots, the real question is, how can people really care about something they never consider?

The mass circulation press that closely followed the BBC in sycophantic adulation reported that crowds of adoring revellers close to two million strong lined the Thames for the Boat Pageant. When you contrast this with the two groups of pro-republic anti-monarchist demonstrators at a paltry 500 apiece, you know what’s what! The sentiments of the latter were brave, even honourable, reminding us why there was a Civil War, but when all’s said and done they meant nothing when set in the great tide of affection. The British people need to adore a figurehead much as the German people once needed to adore Hitler. The Boat Pageant itself, styled as rivalling the Venetian Boat Pageant once painted by Canaletto was, despite all the talking it up, sawn off and tawdry. Given all the wonderful sailing craft in this country still around from our 19^th century trading history, not one out of many hundreds was commissioned to sail through Tower Bridge let alone a handful of Navy Warships. What a glorious and uplifting sight that would have made. Alas, the organisers never had the imagination. Instead the public were given rowing boats and tourist transporters.

It all looked a bit mean. However there was a real treat in store. When the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra struck up the sharp jig of the Sailors Hornpipe there was the splendid farce of various Royals on the Platform bobbing up and down like a bevvy of demented Meerkats about to tell us to compare the market! Simples… Elizabeth and her husband at least had the good sense not to join in but pride of place in the performance stakes of this unannounced jollification went to Charles and Camilla who really got into the swing of it and certainly deserve genuine commendation for being only too human.

The whole experience was a grand exercise in pageant throughout though without any real pomp, but then there was alas another side to it all. Something altogether less pleasant, that most of the revellers wouldn’t have given a tuppenny damn about had they known. In contrast to all the flag waving adulation there was the misery of a dozen or more unemployed youth brought to London in buses from Bristol and Bath to act as stewards. It was only when they boarded the buses that they were told they wouldn’t be paid, but they naturally assumed they’d be given food and shelter. When they reached London they discovered that this wasn’t so. They were dropped off in the middle of the night at London Bridge and told to sleep under it until their morning work began. No hot tea laid on! No food! They were part of the Government’s Welfare to Work Scheme. The Company who’d got hold of them and being paid good money for their use is part run by a Tory Baroness.

No pay, nowhere to sleep except under a bridge, no warm food or drink. So that’s what this Government of Eton Boys means by Welfare. But that’s not the real disgusting shame of it all, that something so filthy should be connected to a Pageant meant to honour the monarch. Most offensive and disgraceful of all is that there was no public condemnation of this sordid exploitation by any Trades Union or by the Trades Union Congress. No word of condemnation by the Leader of the Opposition Labour Party, Ed Miliband. Shame on you all! Only John Prescott had the heart and indignation to protest at this disgusting treatment of our youth.

So, with all your flag waving, your street parties, your bunting, your cheering and your adulation there was a worm at the heart of your apple. Some dirty smudge of indecency on your red, white and blue.

Moving forward to Day 2 I have to say that even the sight of members of the Royal Family earlier bobbing up and down on the Platform was nothing compared to the visceral joy of the Diamond Jubilee Concert. Many of those performing could have been cut out of Pop Music history books, indeed, Royal Variety Memory Lane programs. Names that courtiers thought their Queen liked and remembered out of the deep past. Cliff Richards, Paul McCartney and Elton John… the latter looking like a big old lady, the former as ever a sprightly bachelor boy until you got a much closer look. Then there was Shirley Bassey and Grace Jones who both contributed to James Bond films one way or another when dinosaurs still walked the Earth. They and others were dragged out of their fireside armchairs and asked to reprise what the monarch must have remembered once upon a ball gown or so. Apart from Tom Jones and Robbie Williams, still about to belt out stuff from the Jurassic Period, and a nod to modernity in Madness, the rest was a carnival of once upon a timers. People pumping out the same wretched old stuff in the best way they knew how. Nothing exciting… nothing pulsating… Everything just plain reassuring.

Plain reassuring! The very best image this monarch has always sought to convey. Reassurance. Reliability. Stability. This is what your monarch was taught to convey to HER people by her parents, in contrast to the man who preceded them, the populist gadfly Edward 8^th and this is exactly what the people want from their ruler, reassuring stability and reliability. They can remember her being this way for so long. Almost like she’s been with them forever. A calm watchful eye over the nation. Politicians? Why, they just come and go. She’s seen them all, and upon this the media spin like mad on her lengthy experience, but anyway, she’s above all that like a star in the sky. Shining down on all those who come and go and the changes they make. She’s different. She’s fixed, her benevolent smile unchanging. A bit like the Virgin Mary in orbit over Britain, occasionally jumping to a fixed orbit over Jamaica, Canada or the Bahamas when she’s doing her Commonwealth duties.

She is fixed and therefore reassuring. Stable and therefore reliable. Benign and therefore benevolent. A river of comfort to her people. Comfort! Far more important than cash. Presidents come and Presidents go, like Popes, Dictators and any other spiritual leader, but she is there to serve. It’s a miracle really, such a great person, a monarch who seeks only to serve. That’s the wonder of her really. She’s the head of state. She’s got everything. She doesn’t have to serve. She’s been cutting ribbons and shaking hands for 60 years now. She’s not obligated to do it anymore only she wants to you see. That’s the crux of it really. Without serving HER people she wouldn’t know what to do anymore. It would be like her being made redundant. Put in an Old Monarchs Home. But then she should feel reassured. HER people wouldn’t let her stop. I mean, not everyone’s got the DNA for it you see.

A monarch’s DNA is unlike anyone else’s. They’re genetically programmed to go on and on. She’s a monarch who needs to serve HER people and they, psychologically, are programmed to love and admire her, to want more than anything else that God should protect her, save her, send her victorious, make her happy and feel all glorious, long to rule over us. Her people need her just as just as much as she needs to serve them, otherwise what other excuse does she have for all those palaces and servants after Oliver Cromwell stuffed the Divine Right of Kings in the dustbin. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship that some might call parasitic. Who needs who here and why? Or do people and the monarchy both need each other? Their adulation is an acknowledgement. Her smile, never anything but gracious, is her acceptance. The flag waving and smiling feed off each other.

And when it falters? Because it does and then everything isn’t always plain sailing! Remember Diana? Some 13 years ago when she died our beloved monarch refused to return from her palace in Scotland and lower the flag over Buckingham Palace in London. Soon no-one loved her anymore did they?  Everyone suddenly loved Diana only she was dead. Remember how quickly everyone changed sides. The adulation evaporated when the love of her subjects wore off like aftershave in a rainstorm. In hours rather than days. Soon the people turned frosty and things began to look bad. A schism began to develop. Monarch on one side and a dead Princess and HER people on the other! Separation looked to be on the cards and after that an inevitable divorce. Enter Tony Blair and the rest is history. Diana survives in her popular sons and now everyone’s part of the Family all over again. I mean, that’s you I’m talking about. All you admirers out there. HER people! In a way part of her much greater family  

But there are also many people who don’t want to be part of it all. They may not be hard-nosed republicans or anti-monarchists. They just may not like her or her husband. They might not like, or even loathe her oldest son the heir to the throne who does good work unseen for people in need. Or it could be that they just can’t be bothered with royalty. Resent having to cough up money in their taxes to pay for an undeserved luxurious lifestyle. That there are many such people is an undeniable certainty and one of the most interesting aspects of royalty is that support for it can be geographically mapped as can those against or disinterested in it. One of the best guides in this respect lies in the distribution of recent applications for Jubilee Street Parties by the residents of various towns and cities to their local councils. These applications it has been observed, closely follow the lines of support for Royalists on the one hand and Parliamentarians on the other during the English Civil War.

It is an extraordinary fact that applications to hold celebration street parties in 2012 follow a pattern set some 370 years ago. In other words it is possible to relate support for the monarchy today through these applications to areas that gave support to the monarchy all that long time ago. There is close to an exact fit between the two just the same as a correlation exists between areas low in applications to celebrate with areas supportive of Parliament and Oliver Cromwell in the mid-17^th century. This is an extraordinary geo-political historical fact that none of the media have picked up on. Numbers of street parties high in the Midlands towns and cities today high in support for King Charles then, same as in the West Country. A low volume of applications in Scotland outside Edinburgh today and negligible support for Charles among the Scots Covenanters then.

Tradition it seems has somehow stayed strangely alive and kept going, running silently all the way down the centuries, having little or no connection with radical politics or the rise of an industrial working class. This could be a subject for the PhD research of some bright young student of political science perhaps.

To conclude this post I’d like to end on a personal note. The relationship between the Queen as monarch and the majority of her subjects is neither one of love or hate. It’s more complex than that. When called for, people are keen to show their affection and in the case of quite a sizeable number of ga-ga heads, love and adulation. The great majority of people are tolerant, uncritical and supportive. Appreciative more than anything. As for myself she doesn’t enter my head all that much. Could I think of anything better to replace her and the institution she represents? Sure I can. The idea of rule by the people, but then that’s quite impossible at this time given the staggering political immaturity and levels of generalised ignorance among the population at large. I’d like to be a free citizen but I can’t, and trying to imagine what it would be like being ruled by an army of Premier League football fans among others gives me the creeps. As long as people here are what they are I’ll take what I’ve got and ignore it. Monarchy doesn’t force itself on me and I’ll respond likewise. As soon as it does I’ll take a plane elsewhere, but until that time I’ll marvel at all the sentiment, the love, the ignorance, pageant and colour, but more than anything else the sheer outrageous fun of it all. It’s ridiculous in the extreme and as smug as a smug population allows it to be. It’s fun, frolics and the biggest most wonderful joke in the Universe. Take it seriously, like so many need to do, and you could wind up addicted. It’s just like any other drug. Start waving that flag and you start feeling happy. You’ve become part of a crowd of like-minded people. If you were anyone in the first place you’re not you anymore. You’ve become one of them now. So open your mouth and start singing…

THE EURO-DERISION SONG CONTEST FROM THE CRYSTAL STADIUM : GANGSTER REPUBLIC OF AZERBAIJAN

Where, any sensible European, or actually any other thinking person might ask is Azerbaijan? Is it anywhere in Europe? Well actually it isn’t. According to the Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World it borders the Caspian Sea in south-west Asia. One of those former Soviet Republics whose leader sat on Gorbachev’s politburo representing an oil rich patch of crap so when the USSR packed up it was kind of left to him! Great! A whole republic all yours and after he died it naturally went to his son! Elections? People voting? Don’t be ridiculous. In best dynastic style he inherited it. Got it for nothing! Little knife head looking guy with a sharp moustache, suave dolly looking wife who doesn’t know how to put on her lipstick, two regal style daughters and a millionaire teenage son. This is The Family, as they are called, who run the country and gave orders for their police and heavies to bulldoze the flats and houses of hundreds of poor people so they could build a Crystal Stadium for the Euro-Derision Song Contest. A shameful excuse to advertise what a lovely place Azerbaijan is and put barrels of oil dosh into the pockets of the organisers.

So, the place is in Asia, like most of Russia, but that’s okay. Bulldoze houses, arrest anyone who complains let alone protests and put on a show of choreographed nationalism along with fountains and lights and call it culture. That said let’s get down to business. Why do people in Europe watch Euro-Derision when most of the lyrics and music are juvenile at best and often plain rubbish that any computer can write, the loudness of the music more often than not drowning out the words. You are lucky you can hear what’s being said but that’s not the reason why most men watch. The great majority of lead singer performances of each group are given by girls with legs so amazingly long, wearing skirts and shifts so unashamedly short that they’re half way to soft porn. For the payment of a licence fee guys can get a taste of the national flavour of some of the best gyrating good-lookers in Europe and wonder about the national character of what lies beyond those adorable thighs. And if you remember the babe from Romania, her legs went just about all the way up to her mouth, or was it yours?

In that sense the Euro-Derision Song Contest for most men, if they care to admit it, is a series of nationally flavoured erections between sips of coffee, coca cola or schnapps.

But then that’s only the girls. There are also the boys! Many handsome at best but more often pretty. But that’s all right. Plenty for dryzabone housewives to ogle at and grannies to cop off on! Don’t you realise it, all you pretty young Russian, East European and Scandinavian boys? You’re being gobbed off by grannies to say nothing of countless numbers of elderly gentlemen!

So come on you fiscally prudent and imprudent Europeans. A large number of you get off on the acts. There are tarts to please and boys to tease but that’s not the only reason why so many of you watch. It’s a spectacle for sure only it’s much more than that. Many performances take spectacle so far that they fall into the realm of the ridiculous. That said there’s the ordinary run of the mill ridiculous like Jedward, two Irish lads wearing silly silver suits who originally came to ludicrous prominence as a pure publicity creation by doing little jumps. That’s all they are, a couple of Irish boys who say silly things and do little jumps which they did in spades at Euro-Derision. The little jumps I mean! On the other hand there’s ridiculousness of an altogether different league. During the recent contest a group of toothless Russian grandmothers, or was it great grandmothers, dressed to the gills in national costume performed together as deep oldies and had people mesmerised by the sheer cheek of it.

Now either this was a superb joke, a wonderful piece of black humour cynically pulled by the Russians on Western Europe as a mainstream gas or it was for real! However Russian politicians are not particularly known for having any real sense of fun so they must have meant it and amazingly it worked. Something so deeply ridiculous, so shamelessly awful that they actually got away with it and came close to the top. So what does that say? Well I’ll tell you. People all over Europe saw it in similar fashion. The Grannies were totally different. So far out that despite their age you couldn’t help admiring the sheer gall of them and their toothless smiles. Another verdict on age though was poured all over the British entry! It’s one thing to be 76 and flabby, it’s quite another to be so vocally past it that you sound like you’re on loan from a mortuary. Was Engelbert what’s his Dink the best Britain had? Some song, some way past retirement singer who was so stupendously nothing? If that is genuinely the case then we’re facing something far more serious than an economic crisis. It’s like the cultural character of the nation is being taken over by Wet Wipes.

That’s it really for the British. A national character of Wet Wipes on the one hand or crowds of heavily tattooed men all wearing earrings heard at England football matches yelling Come on In-ger-land… In that sense it’s either Wet Wipes or In-ger-land. In a culturally easier and far more talented past it used to be the Beatles. Now it’s pseudo-romantic, geriatric wet wipes twaddle or In-ger-land shouted by tens of thousands of Staffordshire bull terrier type men. But then we don’t care we British and quite frankly why should we when we think about the Euro-Derision Song Contest and the way the people of these countries voted in the recent piece of European nationalistic awfulness? The British entry was dreadful but then were so many others. Yet in votes garnished we came second from last and those equally abominable scored large numbers of points. No-one with any brain could have missed the significance.

Consider the vote of the British. Our judgement was eclectic, neutral and generous. It went all over the place to those we thought were deserving. The same could hardly be said for the people of seventy percent or more of other countries from the nasty little shit hole republics that once formed Yugoslavia, the Nazi flavoured Baltic states some of whom give pensions to former SS killers, the ghastly national urinals of Albania, Moldova and Georgia to say nothing of Poland and the ex-Soviet republic of the Ukraine whose governments facilitate the extraordinarily offensive anti-Semitic hate demonstrations of their football fans on stadium terraces by doing nothing about them. In the vast majority of cases these ‘new’ European national political entities of the last twenty to thirty years, best described as banana republics, all gave maximum or near maximum points to their geographic neighbours and even the respectable Scandinavians were in on the act and just as bad neither the Germans, French, Spanish and Portuguese had anything to be proud of.

To put it bluntly, the sight of many of these dirty little dumps voting for each other said a great deal. Told us a lot about Europe!

The Crystal Stadium of Baku, Azerbaijan, was definitely no place of love and peace, for healing of any kind. Beneath all the tarted up cultural gloss the Euro-Derision Song Contest was not an event proudly displaying European cultural diversity but in reality a forum for national chauvinism and separateness. I saw no sense of unity or union. A delight of diversity in a collections of nations. Only a silly desperate cultural froth egged up by ambitious politicians jerking the gyrating performers behind the screens like puppets on a string.

Hello Baku! This is Ireland, Portugal and Greece… Thank you for the wonderful show you’ve put on… Now please, please Germany, give us some money!

Hello Baku! This is some government sponsored television go-go boy or girl from Moldova, Georgia, Byelorussia, Albania and Bosnia…Thank you for the lovely show you’ve given us. Everything’s just fine in our lovely country never mind all those people our lovely police beat up for protesting about all the  violations of basic civil liberties and human rights.

You heard it all dear readers, didn’t you? That’s real progress! All those carefully chosen presenters saying… Hello, we’ve only recently become independent so it will take time for us to become part of the happy European ‘family’. Really? Who’s kidding who here. May I suggest you go stuff yourselves, you and your gang of vile little dictators!

Right, so who wins our Special Award for sheer unmitigated awfulness? We’ll have a poll. Only the British voting because we’ve got the most seriously cynical humour in Europe. We’ll call it the Crystal Sphincter. A small geode full of crystals that’s shaped like an arsehole mounted on a gold stand with the name of the winning group engraved on it. Awarded once a year right after Euro-Derision. And we’ll need a celebrity   to make the presentation. A real special person and nobody better for the job than Nick Clegg! Okay, think about it. Why is he so perfect for handing out such a great honour?

So which of the acts you saw do you think should be candidates for the prize, and please don’t tell me you’ve forgotten them already! Right, just send me your selection of what you remember for its sheer awfulness marked 1,2 and 3 and we’ll see what happens. Yes, send your selection to the Comments Page

on my posting site. Will it be the Russian Grannies… the Albanian Rope Hair Women… the Jumping Irish Boys… or Englebert Geriatric-Dink?

And finally, do you realise that if I asked the same question to people all over Europe suggesting they take part in such a poll they wouldn’t, quite frankly, know what I was talking about. It’s called having no sense of humour. They’re too up their own arses to see the funny side, and as plain awful as so many aspects of British society are, like having such a rotten and deeply offensive criminal justice system and living in a country that’s still semi-feudal, where people only have the legal status of being SUBJECTS of a monarch, that is furthermore not far from being a police state, we still have the main saving grace of being able to see that so much of life is ridiculous. We can still somehow grasp the sheer awfulness of situations and make our own judgments because we all share a precious, powerfully anarchic British sense of freedom.

Despite our current economic situation, the sheer vile character of politicians of the main political parties, most of whom have been on a thieving spree for donkey’s years and the too often threatening and offensive demeanour of our police, we can still laugh at it all. It’s not a happy laughter born of mirth, more a grim sickly laughter. A mischievous chuckle and sometimes even a damn good belly laugh.   

We can’t laugh openly at rude or offensive policemen or we might be arrested for something or other and that’s nothing to laugh at. Not being able to laugh anymore just because we couldn’t help laughing at someone’s conduct! So in effect our social ability to laugh is constrained and what kind of freedom is that? Not being able to laugh out loud? More often than not then our sense of humour, our laughter, is confined to within ourselves. Thus the great opportunity provided by the Euro-Derision Song Contest. We can laugh harmlessly out loud and therefore the Contest is liberating. A force for freeing our anarchic emotions. Letting them out on the loose without fear of reprisal.

Therefore I’ll raise a glass to Euro-Derision. It helps free our restrained British emotions. Gives us a chance to psychologically liberate ourselves from our social constraints by letting our anger out on something else. It may not really be up to much in terms of human character but more often than not in bad times it’s just about the best people can be with the best chance they can get.