The Judge RANTS!
Date: 07/04/18
A Name Too Far
I hope My Reader will understand when I tell him (*) that I can't write about this:
- I can't write about the sheer arrogance involved in Colonial Governor-General Cairns suddenly announcing this without any public consultation with the people who actually, y'know, live here (I know we're only a colony, but if Greater England is going to keep up the pretence that we matter so much to it, it should - if only for the look of it - at least appear as if it is seeking consensus and consent).
- I can't write about how naming anything in our country after Charles Philip Arthur George Saxe-Coburg Gotha von Battenburg is grotesquely inappropriate, since he has never lived here and the organisations he fronts for have historically been of little relevance and even less use to us (and they would be no more so for having his name appended to the letterhead).
- I can't write about Cairns' wretched appearances on the ever-obliging Imperial Briticising Corporation, in which his performances of obsequiousness to CPAGS-CGvB were sufficient to render not only Uriah Heep but ipecac obsolete.
- I can't write about Cairns' arrogant dismissal of opposition to his attempt to get a 'K' as 'fashion', nor his demand that we 'respect' old FA Cup Head. Respect comes when you've earned it, not because you have been squirted out of the requisite uterus at a convenient juncture; not that someone so obviously lacking in self-respect as the future Baron Cairns of A Place Whose People Didn't Give Him Permission To Call Himself After It to understand that.
- I can't write about how this is all much of a piece with Cairns' clear desire to turn the south-east of our country into a suburb of Bristol - part of his 'Western Powerhouse' bollocks - in which the Big Ears Bridge will play a key part in locking Cardiff and Newport into an even more subservient relationship with England and flooding our country with yet more English immigrants - in an act of what the Martiniquois writer Aimé Césaire called 'genocide by substitution' - to join the stoned trust-fund hippies of Pembrokeshire, the racist white-flighters of Powys and Ceredigion, the junk-addled criminals installed along the north coast (and, increasingly, far into the hinterlands thereof), the three-car-family commuters of the A55 belt, the farmed-out grannies of Lancashire and Cheshire and the downsizing pensioners and other superannuated non-productive net burdens from Leamington Spa, Letchworth and Leatherhead. All in a clear process of our being 'Englished out' of our own land, or at least reduced to an impotent minority.
- I can't write about how, when the furore over this started to take off, the Greater England Broadcasting Corporation started to bury the story, whilst also failing to report that the petition set up to demand that GG Cairns think again - and here I give the wretched serf the benefit of the doubt that he thought the first time - has reached 25 000 signatures in less than three days, the equivalent of a 'UK'-wide petition gathering half a million signatories (which would, of course, have been thought sufficiently significant to warrant media coverage).
- I can't write about how 'our' 'government' was apparently notified of this change last year, and not only gave it their firm approval but refused to tell the people who elected them about it.
- I can't talk about the weak response - to the point of silence - of nearly all of 'our' politicians to this calculated insult. Perhaps they too are eagerly anticipating their gongs and ermine. Or maybe this is of a piece with the attitude which led to the trumpeting of Ken Skates' annulus horribilis last year.
- I can't write about how this may be an extreme example of kite-flying on the part of the imperial-colonial power to soften us up for - or direct attention from - something more sinister coming down the line, maybe in connection with the power grab that Westminster and Whitehall are seeking whereby powers which currently reside at the EU level and which should, by the legislation currently in effect, be returned to the devolved parliaments will instead by grabbed by London with no prospect of London ever letting them go again.
(It is a well-known governmental tactic to float something particularly extreme knowing that it would cause a storm and then appear to row back to the position that you actually wanted in the first place (‡). This is why governments, particularly of the kind we currently have to endure, announce plans for such things as razing all the cities of Northern England and ploughing the derelict land with salt, then backtrack and say that - having of course listened to The People™ - they will compromise by just bulldozing half of each city).
- And I most definitely can't write about my sure knowledge that the vast majority of the native population of this fading nation will either support (even if only sotto voce) the naming of a key bit of our national infrastructure in commemoration of a useless, inbred reactionary twit, or will meekly aquiesce in the further erosion of their identity because, "Well, there's nuffin' we can do about it, iznet?".
I can't write about all of these things because I'm too fucking angry to write about them.
* Or her. Or it: there's a danger that I might write a piece about all this stuff floating around about gender at the moment, because it's starting to get on my tits (†).
† Which I most definitely have because I have 'self-identified' as having them.
‡ It's known in committee circles as the 'two-by-four' ploy. I'll illustrate: say you're on a committee or similar deliberating body. You want something called '3', but you know that a clear majority of your fellow members want something called '4', which you definitely don't want. When the decision comes up for discussion, you keep silent until very nearly the end, at which point you say that, whilst you can see the merits of '4', you can also see major benefits in something called '2', which 'major benefits' you then enumerate at length even though you know that your argument is bogus. You then, in 'a spirit of compromise', suggest '3' as a via media; which is, of course, what you wanted all along. The success of this strategem is one reason why you can't get a fucking thing done.
