You would think that sycophantic idolatry of national leaders would be confined to those who are likely to have you shot, exiled or otherwise terrorised; the likes of Kill Bill Nut of North Chorea or the late and unlamented Pol Pot and Idi Amin.
Not a bit of it.
Here in dear old Blighty our peasant past seems to have ingrained in us a cap tipping, kowtowing genuflexion to all things aristocratic. Right there at the top are the royals… even the mad (King George III), the bad (Edward XIII, Nazi nearly king) and dangerous to know (Andrew the spare prince). We are so blinded by the light of their magnificence that we vote for them although experience should warn us that they will take the offered inch and steal a mile or many.
If they tell us that the poor need to suffer because the rich gambled or stole their money we are OK with that. If they assure us that all our ills are down to Johnny foreigners coming over here to work diligently in jobs we’d rather not have to do thank you very much, we believe every word. If they con us that a few hundred million scrounged by the hoi polloi to squander on food or shelter, is a bigger danger to our economy than the billions avoided in tax by the fat cats and idle rich we swallow it hook, line and benefits street. We are even happy to take as gospel that the entire world recession had nothing to do with bankers and others making money from money, but was in fact all caused by a Labour administration. 37% of us were self-interested, conned or kowtowed in this year’s election… yet we are constantly told this is the majority of the population… it seems we are even prepared to suspend mathematical laws, our love of heredity hegemony is so deep!
It seems too that we so thoroughly ‘know our place’ that we readily acknowledge the truth that more than 1% extra pay for poverty-line nurses is profligate, but 10% extra income and massive bonuses for the already over indulged is a necessary incentive. Apparently the rich will leave in droves taking all their ill-gotten gains with them, but there is no danger of nurses fleeing for better wages, perhaps because they can barely afford the bus fare home let alone the cost of the private jet out of the City of London.
People being stupid, short-sighted and allowing themselves to be conned is our lookout of course. We are, apparently, intelligent enough to see though the sham of the politics of greed. What gets my goat more than all this is that we seem to value privilege for a few much more than we value the natural world.
For some centuries elite groups whose ancestors stole land from us all (enclosure) have legislated so that whatever is upon, under or above that land, is owned by the title deed owner. That this includes ‘wild’ animals is, of course anachronistic nonsense. Land, which should be commonly held and allowed to return to nature is kept in an artificial way so that one or two species can thrive… in order for rich people to slaughter them purely for the pleasure of killing things. Driven ‘shoots’ and ‘grouse moors’ are virtually unknown outside of these islands. The short lives of these benighted creatures is bought at the expense of many other species and game keepers’ masters continue to trap, shoot or poison natural predators to ensure that there are plenty of grouse or other game that rich people can predate instead.
Then there are those (many of whom are of course the same people) who delight in trampling the countryside while chasing down foxes or deer for the pleasure of… what exactly?
If you believe their nonsense its to keep ‘pests’ down… but foxes are much better controlled in other ways and deer should be kept under control by lynx or wolves not the red-suited, selfish that Oscar Wilde called the ‘unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable’.
Animal lovers and conservationists spent years fighting for an end to this privileged barbarity and now the cabinet of millionaires is trying to wash that away and legitimise in public what has still been going on in private
Make no mistake, this is not town versus country, nor soppy sentimentality versus pragmatic animal husbandry, this is the elite versus the majority and our sycophantic stupidity is likely to let the nobility win rather than the noble!
Its time we put a stop to this minority madness and embodied in law rights for the wild world!
