“According to a recent poll, more than 70 percent of Britons under the age of 50 are indifferent to the coronation. Even so, a staggering 250 million pounds ($315m) of magicked-up taxpayer money will be spent on this single day even as thousands of nurses, doctors, teachers and other key public workers have been told for months there is no money in the coffers to offer them a meaningful pay rise.”
@aral Can you imagine how much more popular he would be, how much more relevant and contemporary, if he’d simply asked how much all this would cost and then instead had a simple ceremony and instructed that exact amount of money be given directly to these people who need and deserve it?
You want people under 50 to care about the monarchy? Show people under 50 that the monarchy cares about them.
Exactly. There are several reasons why the Big Hat Day happened.
Jug Ears himself wanted it. He deserved it. He's waited for this day for so long, because mummy wouldn't let him have it.
The tories wanted it. They'd had a hammering in the local elections two days prior and they desperately needed some brilliant news to hide the piss poor showing at the ballot box. Little Rish! Sunak loves nothing more than a good old knees up at someone else's expense. Even though he's the richest man in Parliament.
The flag shagging brexiters needed this. They call it the Greatest Brexit Benefit of all time because the nasty, unelected people in the EU wouldn't let them have it at all!
@aral I'm convinced the only way to save the monarchy at this point is for everyone else to abdicate to Harry and Meghan, allowing them to recast the monarchy as a low-profile, privilege-renouncing, purely symbolic emblem of a modern, multiracial, culturally egalitarian commonwealth. Absent that? It's dead. By 2050 Sweden will have a stronger monarchy than England.
@aral@chargrille The bigger picture is, how a society is psychologically conditioned over time, to believe that somehow aristocracy should exist. 🤯 They steal wealth from others to provide for their lifestyle. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.
@aral we need to see the cost breakdown, the military would be paid marching or sat in baracks, same with the crown household, many of the police would be on duty anyway, what was the EXTRA cost
@Mark62@aral coronation street parties were paid for by raiding food banks:
".. our local food bank supported about 760 people last week out of a population of about 10,000 in the local area. In recent years, the food bank has used grants from the national lottery to support its activities, but recent applications for funding have been unsuccessful. They have been told that much of the funding is going to events celebrating the coronation."
Source on this page: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/05/coronation-extravaganza-sits-badly-in-todays-britain
I don't think the UK government even thinks about a majority of its citizens. It only cares about a majority of its supporters, which will skew heavily towards people over 50 (I think their party membership is in its 70s?).
It's the end result of an electoral system where the government is chosen by a minority of voters, and elections are decided by a tiny number of seats with close results.
Brexit, 1960s-style anti-immigration rhetoric, rants against the metric system, use of fahrenheit etc is designed to get nostalgia hits for their likely voters.
@FediThing@aral I've been saying for years that since about the early 2000s at the latest the UK has been run as a gerontocracy. Politics is about appeasing the pensioners because they turn out to vote and they own property.
@aral While I totally agree that the spending in question is a waste of funds, and that salaries of nurses, teachers, and others should be the higher priority, a one-time expenditure doesn't create a permanent budgetary obligation into the future. So it's not the same thing when politicians are trying to balance budgets from tax revenue projections into the future.
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