Land of Hope & Glory? - UK Politics and other stuff

Yup… Just what I was thinking is how can the police stay there at that spot and allow this to be happening when they know fine well it could contain an explosive.

Where’s the water cannons ffs.

Smacc_25 · April 10, 2021, 2:43pm

https://mobile.twitter.com/leethommo/status/1380808858478731264

pyatnitski · April 10, 2021, 2:52pm

Thought this article had some nice takes, including about the ludicrous TV scheduling.

By grabbing such a vast audience and directly – or so it seemed – involving them in the once-distant rituals of the state, Philip fathered a whole new phenomenon. And the tension between the institutions he pulled together – TV, the tabloids, and the monarchy – became the tripod on which Anglo-British nationalism hung, as the empire fell apart.

But the truth is that 99-year-olds die, and their eras dissipate.

TV and tabloids are no longer the vivid and exciting formats they once were. They’ve been replaced with social media and streaming websites, which have formed different kinds of audience: audiences who aren’t amazed simply to be allowed to watch the affairs of state, but insist on participating in them; audiences who it’s much harder to bind into national borders and tell which ‘we’ they belong to. Audiences who, through their connections with each other, find their understandings of the world start to shift. Audiences who, in the case of Netflix’s ‘The Crown’ are now able to access a less propagandised version of their history than the British press presents.

Smacc_25 · April 10, 2021, 3:28pm

https://mobile.twitter.com/DPRK_News/status/1380123108254834689

WAR · April 10, 2021, 9:04pm

Why is the Queen’s husband a Prince and not a King? Do they just want to be really clear on who the head of state is and in most people’s minds King outranks Queen?

Smacc_25 · April 10, 2021, 9:15pm

He’s a bloody foreigner

Edit: He was the Prince of Denmark & Greece when he arrived in the UK.

GermanGuy · April 10, 2021, 9:36pm

England and the UK have had quite a number of Queens, but the only husband Styles King and ruling in his own right after the Queen died was William III. who basically won a war to win the throne for himself and his wife, so people really didn’t have mich of a choice.
Otherwise foreign consorts of the Queen were often distrusted back to Geoffrey of Anjou in the 12th century. Philip II. of Spain, Mary Tudors husband was a special case as he was king of Spain in his own right, but the marriage contract gave him the title of King of England, but explicitly excluded him from inheriting the throne. When the Hanoverians had shrunk down to Queen Victoria, That concern seems to not have been that much of an issue anymore, and the discussion turned to renaming the dynasty to mask the fact that the whole lot of them was German anyway.

GermanGuy · April 10, 2021, 9:49pm

That name thing is frankly quite ridiculous. The ruling house of Windsor is actually named Sachsen-Coburg-Gotha, but since the grandfather’s of the current queen thought it wasn‘t such a great idea to have that last name while fighting a war against ze Germans, he (or probably parliament) rebranded himself to Windsor.
When Queen Elizabeth and Philip got married they passed a law that they would keep that last name even though Philip had changed his last name from Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg to his maternal grandfather‘s Mountbatten, which in turn was an anglicized version of Battenberg which that grandfather had changed along with the original Windsor king.

All-InFlynn · April 10, 2021, 9:50pm

I ain’t reading all that stuff GermanGuy wrote but I assume I can summarise it with: Yes.

Jalfrezi · April 11, 2021, 10:17am

That’s right. Mountbatten (Battenberg) wasn’t trusted because he had Labour sympathies (his best friend was Tom Driberg) and there was also the matter of his serial-cuckolding wife whose many lovers he welcomed (including Nehru) lol.

All-InFlynn · April 11, 2021, 10:25am

Thomas Edward Neil Driberg, Baron Bradwell (22 May 1905 – 12 August 1976) was a British journalist, politician, High Anglican churchman and possible Soviet spy

People used to live such full lives.