Carry on Royals

Call it 'Britain', the House of Windsor, the Crown - whatever you want. I like the title Ruritania.

Google it and you'll find a whole culture (cult?) devoted to Ruritania. It has a queen, Anastasia, and a large royal family who wear fancy uniforms and big hats and have adventures. Ruritania has a nobility, castles and palaces, somewhere in Central Europe. Its royal family is descended from someone called Rupert who is much admired.

All this despite the fact that Ruritania doesn't exist, has no population and therefore no gross domestic product to pay for anything. It does seem to have a huge population of largely uneducated peasants, all faithful to the royal family, and a small group of anti-royalists done up in fancy uniforms who are out to destroy the Ruritanian concept, whatever that may be.

Ruritania has shown some pretty weird tendencies since the first books by Anthony Hope appeared. Most notably some truly awful films which mirror the Fascist tendencies of Mittel-Europa in the 1930s. It also has a habit of holding on to traditions that the rest of us were happy to see vanish with World War 2. Like duelling.

But it's really just all good fun and nothing to get worried about.

Unless you live in 'Britain', which is another fantasy land altogether.

While Ruritania has a single royal family recruited from inside its own kingdom, 'Britain' has a royal family that has married and inter-married all over Europe for a couple of centuries, to such an extent that there isn't a single European country where the king or queen of 'Britain' can't claim to have at least a few cousins. That's fine so long as the cousins are white, blond and own a couple of ski lodges in Zermatt.

'Britain' has in the past had some very dubious links with political movements that modern people find pretty nasty. Or they used to. Just recently, the tendency of some of 'Britain's' royal family to make jokes about people with black or brown skin has spread to minor aristocracy like the prime minister who likes to refer to people from Africa as 'picaninnies' and has been known to comment on their 'watermelon smiles.' But that's not offensive and those of us who don't like this kind of language are just spoilsports.

Most of all what 'Britain' wants is to hang on to its past. When 'Britain' meant England and there were no black or brown or even many European people to spoil the view from the Home Counties. When  colonies like Ireland and Scotland supplied the army and the navy and knew their place, mostly grouse-beating on 'Britain's' sporting estates.

Of course, we know this is laughable in a modern country and we know that we can't really turn back the clock. We actually need to welcome foreign people to live in 'Britain'. After all, the ones who came in the 50s like the Windrush people were very useful for driving buses, for example, until they got uppity and wanted civil rights.

But we don't have to like them and, if they annoy us, we can either leave the EU or send immigrants like the Markle woman back where they came from. Or we can let 'Britain's' right-wing press (we don't marry them, by the way, we just let them set the tone and the agenda for public life) do our dirty work for us.

There remains the problem of what to do with the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh - all very uppity in their own way. The Northern Irish have us over a barrel vote-wise but some of them can be bribed. But dammit, the Scots and now those wimps in Wales, seem to think they know how to run 'Britain.' We're going to have to stamp that out pretty sharpish. Where do these people think they live? Ruritania?



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