Stuff the Jubilee

 

IN ANCIENT days Roman emperors were assumed to possess divine powers to justify their immense wealth and the power of life and death that they wielded over their subjects and slaves. In feudal times warrior kings were praised in song for the numbers they had killed or for the occasional acts of mercy and charity that demonstrated supposed Christian merit. These days we’ve been deluged with four days of commercialised festivities in honour of the Queen whose only claim to fame has been to remain on the throne for the past 60 years.
Though a thousand or so “republicans” managed to hold a spirited demonstration against the jubilee pageant in central London on Sunday, there’s been nothing to compare to the backlash that took place during the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977 when thousands sported “stuff the jubilee” badges and punk rockers hurled abuse at the Royal Family on the air-waves.
The Prime Minister, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, have led the pack in sycophantic praise of the monarchy and the only sour note was struck by the Archbishop of Canterbury who raised concern about financial greed and environmental recklessness during his otherwise innocuous Jubilee Thanksgiving sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral.
The monarchy is draped in bogus patriotism and myths largely of its own creation. Children used to be taught about the reigns of kings from the Norman Conquest in 1066 as if there was a timeless chain to the current monarch. The Civil War, the trial and execution of the king and the short-lived republic led by Oliver Cromwell that followed is portrayed as a brief interruption to a benevolent institution which exists, so we are led to believe, simply to serve the people and its elected institutions.
In fact the current monarchy only goes back to the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 which established the sovereignty of the bourgeois parliament of landowners and capitalists.
But the main myth of the monarchy is that the Queen, who is after-all, the hereditary Head of State, has no power. Apart from the reserve powers of the royal prerogative over parliament, the armed forces and the civil service it is simply absurd to believe that the House of Windsor, one of the richest families in the world, has no power or influence in Britain today.
In fact, the monarchy is a central pillar of the ruling class and the bourgeois “democracy” they uphold. The monarchy embodies the principle of hereditary power and wealth that justifies the immense wealth of the other great landowners and the inherited wealth of the oligarchs who control the financial, media and industrial empires of capitalism in Britain.
The Queen is not the symbol of the British “nation” or the supposed unity of the English, Scottish and Welsh peoples that bourgeois propaganda would have us believe. The monarch is simply the pinnacle of the bourgeois state.
These are the people who robbed and looted Africa and Asia in the 19th century to build an Empire on which “the sun never set”, killing and enslaving millions on their way; the kind who lived in luxury and ease in their grand houses while British workers slaved in their factories for pennies and died broken and destitute in the slums of our great cities; the people who sent millions to their deaths in the First World War to preserve and increase their fortunes.
They are the ruling class; the big capitalists, the bankers, the industrialists and big landowners who really run this country. They are still with us. They pull the strings.
They fear and loathe organised labour because they know that the entire wealth of the world comes from workers in the factories and peasants in the fields.
But it is working people who will eventually sweep them away to build a genuine people’s democracy where there will be no more landowners, no more capitalists and no more kings.

Unpaid Jubilee stewards had to sleep under bridge

COACHLOADS of young unemployed people were brought to London last weekend on a work programme to act as unpaid stewards during the Royal Jubilee Thames pageant.

 They had been told that this might lead to some similar work during the Olympics that would be paid.

 But when they arrived, late at night and in the pouring rain, they were taken to London Bridge and told their accommodation for the night would be the cold pavement under the bridge.

 A report by Shiv Malik in last Monday’s Guardian revealed that up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth to work for the security firm Close Protection UK.

 Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant.

            They said they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were later taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

            One young worker said she was on duty between London Bridge and Tower Bridge during the £12 million river spectacle of a 1,000-boat flotilla and members of the Royal family sail-by. She said that the security firm Close Protection UK, which won a stewarding contract for the jubilee events, gave her a plastic see-through poncho and a high-visibility jacket for protection against the rain.

            Close Protection UK confirmed that it was using up to 30 unpaid staff and 50 apprentices, who were paid £2.80 an hour, for the three-day event in London.

 The woman said that people were picked up at Bristol at 11pm on Saturday and arrived in London at 3am on Sunday. "We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them," she said. "We followed them under London Bridge and that's where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing."

            A 30-year-old steward told the Guardian that the conditions under the bridge were "cold and wet and we were told to get our head down [to sleep]". He said that it was impossible to pitch a tent because of the concrete floor.

 The woman said they were woken at 5.30am and supplied with boots, combat trousers and polo shirts. She said: "They had told the ladies we were getting ready in a minibus around the corner and I went to the minibus and they had failed to open it so it was locked. I waited around to find someone to unlock it, and all of the other girls were coming down trying to get ready and no one was bothering to come down to unlock [it], so some of us, including me, were getting undressed in public in the freezing cold and rain." The men are understood to have changed under the bridge.

 The female steward said that after the royal pageant, the group travelled by tube to a campsite in Theydon Bois, Essex, where some had to pitch their tents in the dark.

 Both stewards said they were originally told they would be paid. But when they got to the coach on Saturday night, they said, they were told that the work would be unpaid and that if they did not accept it they would not be considered for “well-paid” work at the Olympics.

 The report has caused general outrage and spurred former Labour Deputy Prime Minister Lord John Prescott to demand and inquiry. He has written to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, saying the contractor owed staff a "duty of care".

 He wrote: “If the allegations are true, it is totally unacceptable that young unemployed people were bussed in to London from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth and forced to sleep out in the cold overnight before stewarding a major event with no payment.

 "I am deeply concerned that a private security firm is not only providing policing on the cheap but failing to show a duty of care to its staff and threatening to withdraw an opportunity to work at the Olympics as a means to coerce them to work unpaid."