Mourn the Queen, But God Save the People

Great Britain hasn't just lost a monarch. The British social welfare state, once a shining beacon for Western democracies, is also dying.


Visitors and tourists at Piccadilly Circus interact below a colour image of Queen Elizabeth II which is on display on the large scale advertising screens on the day following her death on 9th September 2022 in London, United Kingdom. The Queen, who was 96 reigned as monarch of the UK and Commonwealth for 70 years. (Photo: Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)

RICHARD ESKOW

September 9, 2022

Every human death is a loss. But Queen Elizabeth lived a long and, from most accounts, good life. The people close to her have lost a mother, a friend, a real person. They shouldn't be dismissed. Neither should the British citizens who mourn her. The grief people feel for a public figure is real, even if what they're really mourning are the passing days of their lives.

I wish we lived in a world where it wasn't necessary to put this particular death into perspective, but we don't. Shortly before her death, the Queen met with the new prime minister of Great Britain. Liz Truss was chosen for that position by the less than 200,000 dues-paying members of the Conservative Party, some 0.3 percent of the British electorate. That's right: a handful of party stalwarts, predominately white, male, and older, paid for the privilege of choosing the country's leader. They call that "democracy."

The grief people feel for a public figure is real, even if what they're really mourning are the passing days of their lives.

Truss is a hard-right extremist in the Trump mold, a pro-fossil-fuel extremist who has already begun filling sensitive environmentally-related positions with climate deniers like Jacob Rees-Mogg. As a result, more people will die. More than half of Britons think she will be a "poor" or "terrible" Prime Minister, and they're sure to be right.

It didn't have to be this way. Not so long ago, the British social welfare state was an example for the world to follow. Its dismantlement began under Margaret Thatcher and was carried on by the Bill Clinton-like "New Labour" leadership of Tony Blair in the 1990s. Once back in office, the Conservatives stepped up that effort with ferocious abandon. Post-industrial Britain is reeling from the upward transfer of wealth now, just like its breakaway American colony. Special relationship, indeed.

A New York Times article remarked in passing that the Queen's family "is known for its longevity," noting that Elizabeth's mother died in 2002 at the age of 101. That's not just good genes. The House of Windsor receives the best medical care imaginable, is fed a steady and healthy diet, and is housed in comfort. Those comforts, promised to everyone by the British social welfare state, have an enormous impact on longevity. A report from the King's Fund notes that in 2018–20, males in the poorest 10 percent of areas in England died almost a decade earlier than males in the 10 percent wealthiest areas, with an 8-year difference among females. Each of these deaths is a tragedy, too.

What's more, as in the US, conservative mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic took many more lives than necessary in Great Britain, made worse by the ongoing evisceration of the NHS. At least 168,000 excess deaths in Britain have been estimated since the pandemic began. (The population of Great Britain is roughly one-fifth that of the United States; Americans should multiply these numbers by five to get a visceral sense of their impact.)

Most of these unremarked deaths occurred in considerably less comfortable places than Balmoral. A recent study showed that 90,000 Britons die in a state of poverty every year. More than one in four working-age women die impoverished, a number that climbs substantially among minorities.

The war in Ukraine has resulted in energy shortages which have hit the British population especially hard. As the Associated Press reports, "A cost-of-living crisis in Britain is about to get worse, with millions of people paying about 80% more a year on their household energy bills starting in October ... people will pay 3,549 pounds ($4,188) a year for heating and electricity."

Those shortages haven't hit everybody hard. They've opened the floodgates for energy company profiteering, with Bloomberg reporting that "UK gas producers and electricity generators may make excess profits totaling as much as £170 billion ($199 billion) over the next two years."

Liz Truss's preferred "solution" is to use government funds to cap out-of-pocket consumer costs at $2,800 US per households. That's still very expensive for many Britons. Her proposal also represents an enormous transfer of wealth from the British public sector—that is, the British people—to the same energy companies that have been scooping up public wealth since the war began. The obvious solution, a windfall profits tax on those companies, is not on the table.

This entire crisis could have been avoided Thatcher had not sold off the publicly-owned British energy sector to private interests in the 1980s. That dismantlement of public resources is directly responsible for the current immiseration of the British people.

It is this crisis that led to the bizarre spectacle of a British morning news program's "spin-the-wheel" contest for struggling listeners: we'll give you 1,000 pounds or pay your energy bill for four months, whichever the wheel decides. As the Washington Post reports:

Viewers of British TV show, "This Morning," watched as the wheel spun, eventually coming to a stop. "It's your energy bill!" host Phillip Schofield shrieked. The caller expressed relief at his prize, which would cover the costs of his bill for four months. "Oh my god, thank you," the winner said.

The Post says that people called the show "tone deaf," "distasteful" and "dystopian," while Russian television gloated. It's another flicker of flame from Britain's burning social contract.
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Great Britain hasn't just lost a monarch. The British social welfare state, once a shining beacon for Western democracies, is also dying. On a human level, every death is an occasion for mourning. But who mourns the needlessly dead or the system that could have saved them? If people could learn to care half as much about every victim of poverty or inadequate healthcare as they do about one person, we might yet build a just society.

They will play "God Save the Queen" and "God Save the King" many times in the days to come. But who will save the people?

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

RICHARD ESKOW
 is a freelance writer. Much of his work can be found on eskow.substack.com. His weekly program, The Zero Hour, can be found on cable television, radio, Spotify, and podcast media. He is a senior advisor with Social Security Works

After Elizabeth: Unpopular Heirs and a Changed Canada

Politicians face tough decisions on the role of the monarchy.

Thomas Klassen

8 Sep 2022

The Conversation
Thomas Klassen is a professor in the school of public policy and administration at York University. This article originally appeared in the Conversation.

Chief Wellington Staats of the Six Nations Council of the Mohawks

 and Queen Elizabeth II in 1984.

Photo by Mike Blake for the Canadian Press.

The death of Queen Elizabeth, the longest reigning monarch in British history, marks the end of an era for Canada.

Elizabeth witnessed the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, the expansion of Canada’s social programs in the 1960s, the Quebec referendums in 1980 and 1995, free-trade agreements with the United States and father-and-son prime ministers. In 1982, she signed the proclamation that repatriated the Constitution, ending the role of the British Parliament in Canada’s affairs.

During her long reign, Canada became dramatically less anglophone and anglophile. Nearly half of Canadians were of British ancestry when she assumed the throne in 1952, but that decreased to one-third in 2016 and continues to decline.

In the 1950s, high-school students across English Canada waved the Union Jack, sang the royal anthem (“God Save the Queen”), said the Lord’s Prayer and cheered cadet corps dressed in British khaki. Elizabeth saw the replacement of the Union Flag by the Maple Leaf in 1965, and the royal anthem by “O Canada” in 1980.

Over seven decades, Elizabeth successfully transitioned from embodying the key traditions and beliefs of many to a warmly regarded, but not particularly significant, figure in the lives of Canadians. She remained personally popular in Canada, although she spent relatively little time (about 200 days) in the country over visits that averaged once every three years.

Her dedication to the job as monarch was viewed favourably, as was the absence of scandal in her personal life. She harnessed goodwill from Canadians mostly as an individual, rather than as the hereditary head of an institution while acting as a living link to Canada’s days as a colony in the British Empire.

The unpopular heir

A poll on her performance, conducted in 2020, found eight in 10 Canadians believed that the Queen has done a good job in her role as monarch.

But the poll also found that half of Canadians agree that the country should terminate formal ties to the monarchy after the end of Elizabeth’s reign.

And a more recent poll in 2021 found that only one in five Canadians want to see Prince Charles become king , while only one in three would like Prince William to ascend to the throne.

Elizabeth’s successors — Charles, whose time as king given his age of 73 will be relatively short, and William, who will follow — assume the job at a different time in Canada’s history.

Charles takes on the job as head of state for a Canada almost unrecognizable from what the country was in 1952 in terms of the role of religion in the lives of its citizens, the diversity of its inhabitants and its geo-political relations.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been carefully non-committal on the future of the monarchy. In March 2021, he said: “If people want to later talk about constitutional change and shifting our system of government, that’s fine. They can have those conversations.”

With a minority government, he may be hesitant to spend political capital on constitutional reform.

The public’s mood



Should Canada Ditch the Monarchy?  READ MORE

On the other hand, prime ministers are opportunists. The transition to a new monarch — an event that has not occurred in the lifetime of the vast majority of Canadians — is an occasion to gauge the mood of the public and review existing arrangements.

The constitutional file has a special appeal for politicians looking to create or cement a legacy. Pierre Trudeau’s defining triumph was repatriating the Constitution.

Elizabeth’s great accomplishment, aided by genes that allowed an extraordinarily long and healthy life, was to keep at bay discussions of the future of the monarchy in Australia, New Zealand and the other former British colonies of which she was the head of state. Her death will permit debate and deliberation to start.

As many Canadians mourn the passing of the Queen, they should also reflect on the continued relevance and meaning of the monarchy in a nation reconciling with its colonial past and seeking its place on a complex global stage.  

Do You Think Canada Should Cut Ties with the Monarchy?

Please note that Tyee Barometer polls are only intended as a quick and engaging non-scientific snapshot of our readers’ opinions on various topics that fit with The Tyee’s very broad editorial mandate. They are not intended to be seen as a representative sampling of BC opinion.

Queen Elizabeth II, the longest reigning monarch in the history of the U.K., has died.

Over the course of her 70-year reign, the Queen became a familiar wallpaper to Canadian national consciousness. Officially our head of state and a striking symbol of our colonial identity, she was also, for many, an increasingly quizzical figurehead. For now, she remains embossed on our coins.

Now that she’s been instantaneously swapped with King Charles III, and the U.K. reckons with the ramifications of what this means for the selfhood of the former empire; Indigenous people and settlers continue to shine light on the context here. Many people in Canada are now saying its officially time to cut ties with the monarchy.

Forty years after the British Parliament officially stopped overseeing our affairs, many say the end should have come much sooner. With this in mind, we want to ask:

Do you think Canada should cut ties with the monarchy?

* Please note that all poll answers will be publicly viewable, but anonymous.

It Is Time to Throw the Monarchies of the World Into the Dustbin of History

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class.


"Off With Her Head." (Carton: Mr. Fish)

CHRIS HEDGES

September 12, 2022 

by Scheerpost

The fawning adulation of Queen Elizabeth in the United States, which fought a revolution to get rid of the monarchy, and in Great Britain, is in direct proportion to the fear gripping a discredited, incompetent and corrupt global ruling elite.

The global oligarchs are not sure the next generation of royal sock puppets – mediocrities that include a pedophile prince and his brother, a cranky and eccentric king who accepted suitcases and bags stuffed with $3.2 million in cash from the former prime minister of Qatar Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, and who has millions stashed in offshore accounts – are up to the job. Let’s hope they are right.

“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories,” Patrick Freyne wrote last year in The Irish Times. “More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

Monarchy obscures the crimes of empire and wraps them in nostalgia. It exalts white supremacy and racial hierarchy. It justifies class rule. It buttresses an economic and social system that callously discards and often consigns to death those considered the lesser breeds, most of whom are people of color. The queen’s husband Prince Phillip, who died in 2021, was notorious for making racist and sexist remarks, politely explained away in the British press as “gaffes.” He described Beijing, for example, as “ghastly” during a 1986 visit and told British students: “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.”

The cries of the millions of victims of empire; the thousands killed, tortured, raped and imprisoned during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya; the 13 Irish civilians gunned down in “Bloody Sunday;” the more than 4,100 First Nations children who died or went missing in Canada’s residential schools, government-sponsored institutions established to “assimilate” indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture, and the hundreds of thousands killed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are drowned out by cheers for royal processions and the sacral aura an obsequious press weaves around the aristocracy. The coverage of the queen’s death is so mind-numbingly vapid — the BBC sent out a news alert on Saturday when Prince Harry and Prince William, accompanied by their wives, surveyed the floral tributes to their grandmother displayed outside Windsor Castle — that the press might as well turn over the coverage to the mythmakers and publicists employed by the royal family.

The royals are oligarchs. They are guardians of their class. The world’s largest landowners include King Mohammed VI of Morocco with 176 million acres, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with 177 million acres, the heirs of King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia with 531 million acres and now, King Charles III with 6.6 billion acres of land. British monarchs are worth almost $28 billion. The British public will provide a $33 million subsidy to the Royal Family over the next two years, although the average household in the U.K. saw its income fall for the longest period since records began in 1955 and 227,000 households experience homelessness in Britain.

Royals, to the ruling class, are worth the expense. They are effective tools of subjugation. British postal and rail workers canceled planned strikes over pay and working conditions after the queen’s death. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) postponed its congress. Labour Party members poured out heartfelt tributes. Even Extinction Rebellion, which should know better, indefinitely canceled its planned “Festival of Resistance.” The BBC’s Clive Myrie dismissed Britain’s energy crisis — caused by the war in Ukraine — that has thrown millions of people into severe financial distress as “insignificant” compared with concerns over the queen’s health. The climate emergency, pandemic, the deadly folly of the U.S. and NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, soaring inflation, the rise of neo-fascist movements and deepening social inequality will be ignored as the press spews florid encomiums to class rule. There will be 10 days of official mourning.

In 1953, Her Majesty’s Government sent three warships, along with 700 troops, to its colony British Guiana, suspended the constitution and overthrew the democratically elected government of Cheddi Jagan. Her Majesty’s Government helped to build and long supported the apartheid government in South Africa. Her Majesty’s Government savagely crushed the Mau Mau independence movement in Kenya from 1952 to 1960, herding 1.5 million Kenyans into concentration camps where many were tortured. British soldiers castrated suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers, and raped girls and women. By the time India won independence in 1947 after two centuries of British colonialism, Her Majesty’s Government had looted $45 trillion from the country and violently crushed a series of uprisings, including the First War of Independence in 1857. Her Majesty’s Government carried out a dirty war to break the Greek Cypriot War of Independence from 1955 to 1959 and later in Yemen from 1962 to 1969. Torture, extrajudicial assassinations, public hangings and mass executions by the British were routine. Following a protracted lawsuit, the British government agreed to pay nearly £20 million in damages to over 5,000 victims of British abuse during war in Kenya, and in 2019 another payout was made to survivors of torture from the conflict in Cyprus. The British state attempts to obstruct lawsuits stemming from its colonial history. Its settlements are a tiny fraction of the compensation paid to British slave owners in 1835, once it — at least formally — abolished slavery.

During her 70-year reign, the queen never offered an apology or called for reparations.

The point of social hierarchy and aristocracy is to sustain a class system that makes the rest of us feel inferior. Those at the top of the social hierarchy hand out tokens for loyal service, including the Order of the British Empire (OBE). The monarchy is the bedrock of hereditary rule and inherited wealth. This caste system filters down from the Nazi-loving House of Windsor to the organs of state security and the military. It regiments society and keeps people, especially the poor and the working class, in their “proper” place.

The British ruling class clings to the mystique of royalty and fading cultural icons as James Bond, the Beatles and the BBC, along with television shows such as “Downton Abbey” — where in one episode the aristocrats and servants are convulsed in fevered anticipation when King George V and Queen Mary schedule a visit — to project a global presence. Winston Churchill’s bust remains on loan to the White House. These myth machines sustain Great Britain’s “special” relationship with the United States. Watch the satirical film In the Loop to get a sense of what this “special” relationship looks like on the inside.

It was not until the 1960s that “coloured immigrants or foreigners” were permitted to work in clerical roles in the royal household, although they had been hired as domestic servants. The royal household and its heads are legally exempt from laws that prevent race and sex discrimination, what Jonathan Cook calls “an apartheid system benefitting the Royal Family alone.” Meghan Markle, who is of mixed race and who contemplated suicide during her time as a working royal, said that an unnamed royal expressed concern about the skin color of her unborn son.

I got a taste of this suffocating snobbery in 2014 when I participated in an Oxford Union debate asking whether Edward Snowden was a hero or a traitor. I went a day early to be prepped for the debate by Julian Assange, then seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy and currently in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. At a lugubrious black-tie dinner preceding the event, I sat next to a former MP who asked me two questions I had never been asked before in succession. “When did your family come to America?” he said, followed by “What schools did you attend?” My ancestors, on both sides of my family, arrived from England in the 1630s. My graduate degree is from Harvard. If I had failed to meet his litmus test, he would have acted as if I did not exist.

Those who took part in the debate – my side arguing that Snowdon was a hero narrowly won – signed a leather-bound guest book. Taking the pen, I scrawled in large letters that filled an entire page: “Never Forget that your greatest political philosopher, Thomas Paine, never went to Oxford or Cambridge.”

Paine, the author of the most widely read political essays of the 18th century, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason and Common Sense, blasted the monarchy as a con. “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself as King of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original…The plain truth is that the antiquity of the English monarchy will not bear looking into,” he wrote of William the Conqueror. He ridiculed hereditary rule. “Of more worth is one honest man to society, and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.” He went on: “One of the strangest natural proofs of the folly of hereditary right in kings is that nature disproves it, otherwise she would not so frequently turn it into ridicule, by giving mankind an ass for a lion.” He called the monarch “the royal brute of England.”

When the British ruling class tried to arrest Paine, he fled to France where he was one of two foreigners elected to serve as a delegate in the National Convention set up after the French Revolution. He denounced the calls to execute Louis XVI. “He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression,” Paine said. “For if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.” Unchecked legislatures, he warned, could be as despotic as unchecked monarchs. When he returned to America from France, he condemned slavery and the wealth and privilege accumulated by the new ruling class, including George Washington, who had become the richest man in the country. Even though Paine had done more than any single figure to rouse the country to overthrow the British monarchy, he was turned into a pariah, especially by the press, and forgotten. He had served his usefulness. Six mourners attended his funeral, two of whom were Black.

You can watch my talk with Cornel West and Richard Wolff on Thomas Paine here.

There is a pathetic yearning among many in the U.S. and Britain to be linked in some tangential way to royalty. White British friends often have stories about ancestors that tie them to some obscure aristocrat. Donald Trump, who fashioned his own heraldic coat of arms, was obsessed with obtaining a state visit with the queen. This desire to be part of the club, or validated by the club, is a potent force the ruling class has no intention of giving up, even if hapless King Charles III, who along with his family treated his first wife Diana with contempt, makes a mess of it.

Copyright Robert Scheer, 2020.



CHRIS HEDGES is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is "America: The Farewell Tour" (2019).

Anger over past, indifference meet queen’s death in India

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Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi speaks at the inauguration of the revamped Central Vista Avenue at the India Gate in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Sept. 8, 2022. Modi urged the country to shed its colonial ties in a ceremony to rename Rajpath, a boulevard that was once called Kingsway after King George V, Modi called it a "symbol of slavery" under the British Raj. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)


KRUTIKA PATHI and BHUMIKA SARASWATI
Mon, September 12, 2022

NEW DELHI (AP) — Just hours before news of Queen Elizabeth II's death spread, Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered a fiery speech urging India to shed its colonial ties in a ceremony to rename a boulevard that once honored King George V.

Rajpath, formerly called Kingsway, was a “symbol of slavery” under the British Raj, he said. Instead, under the newly named Kartavya Path that leads to the iconic India Gate, “a new history has been created,” Modi beamed.

His speech last Thursday was the latest in a concerted drive to purge India of its colonial relics. It was also a clear sign that the country, once the largest of Britain's colonies that endured two centuries of imperial rule, has moved on.

The renovated avenue now boasts a black granite statue of Indian freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose, in the place where a mold of King George V, Elizabeth's grandfather, once stood.

The queen’s death provoked sympathies to a deeply respected figure from some while for a few others, it jogged memories of a bloody history under the British crown. But among most regular Indians, the news was met with an indifferent shrug.

The British monarchy “holds precisely zero relevance to Indians today — they are of no importance,” said Kapil Komireddi, author of “Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India.”

British rule shaped the country in significant ways, but India has since overtaken the British economy in size.

“The country has come into its own ... As a rising power, India can gain a lot from the U.K. but the U.K. can gain a whole lot more from India,” Komireddi added.

On Thursday, Modi penned a heartfelt note, calling the queen “a stalwart of our times,” while the government declared a day of mourning. But for most Indians born a generation after independence from the British in 1947, there is little attachment to the queen or the royal family.

Sankul Sonawane, 20, was at home when he heard the news, which had “no impact” on him. “We have no sense of emotional connection with the queen. She was a monarch and I don’t believe in the idea of a monarchy.”

Dhiren Singh, a 57-year-old entrepreneur in New Delhi, felt the same way. “I do not think we have any place for kings and queens in today’s world, because we are the world’s largest democratic country,” he said.

Elizabeth visited India three times during her reign and was the first monarch to tour the newly freed country, cementing the start of fresh ties with Britain. After her coronation in 1953, she arrived in the capital New Delhi in 1961, where she addressed a massive crowd and nearly a million people lined up along streets to catch a glimpse of her and her husband, Prince Philip.

Darshan Paul was 10 or 11 years old when she stood along a road in New Delhi and waved an Indian flag at the queen. “I remember her gloved hand waving back at me and was so impressed,” Paul, now 71, said.

There was abundant excitement and curiosity around her visit, Paul recalled, as she and her friends poured over newspaper photos of the queen and were dazzled by the gowns she wore.

But it was a different time then, Paul said, as she acknowledged that the traditional bond some Indians once held with the royal family has morphed dramatically since.

“To young Indians today, they seem like any other high-profile celebrity family - you might follow news of them because you want to know what is happening behind closed doors. But beyond the glamor and celebrity allure, they don’t hold any significance any more.”

If her son, who was formally proclaimed King Charles III over the weekend, were to make an official visit to India, “it will certainly not matter as much,” Paul added.

The queen’s last visit in 1997 was tinged with controversy when she traveled to a memorial dedicated to hundreds of unarmed Indians who were killed by British colonial forces in 1919, amid calls for an apology over the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

For many, the royal family remains a hallmark of a deeply painful history. Colonial rule is still remembered for the extraordinary violence and suffering it spawned, from numerous famines and economic exploitation to ultimately an unprecedented level of bloodshed in the partition of India and Pakistan.

Scrolling through social media after the news, 25-year-old Sumedha Chatterjee said the tweets in support of the queen felt almost like people had forgotten about all the “loot and plunder” the British monarchy oversaw. “They built their empire on the backs of the so-called third world,” she added.

Just hours after her death, Indian social media lit up with renewed calls for the return of the famous Koh-i-Noor, the 106-carat diamond discovered in India that is part of the British crown jewels.

“If the king is not going to wear (the) Koh-i-Noor, give it back,” quipped one user.

Ever since gaining independence, India has moved to shed its colonial ties, including changing back the names of a clutch of cities that were renamed during British rule. In the 1960s, officials removed figures of British officials and royalty from public view — the statue of King George V, which stood tall under the canopy of India Gate, was moved to Coronation Park, a graveyard or final resting place for imperial symbols in the capital.

And under Modi, there has been renewed vigor to reclaim India’s past, which has seen the government scrub away colonial-era street names, some laws and even flag symbols.

Such gestures “represent a new India” which has nothing to do with the monarchy, said Archana Ojha, a professor of history at Delhi University. She added, though, that the country’s imperial history can’t be hidden away.

“We may not need to cherish some of the legacies, but we need to preserve them to teach our future generations. We cannot just erase it completely,” she said.

___

Associated Press journalist Rishi Lekhi contributed to this report.

After Queen's Death, Victims of British Imperialism Share Why 'We Will Not Mourn'

"This is Queen Elizabeth's legacy. A legacy of colonial violence and plunder. A legacy of racial segregation and institutionalized racism."


Tuvaluans carry Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh in canoes during

 a 1982 visit by the British monarch. 

(Photo: Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images)


BRETT WILKINS

September 9, 2022

As millions of Britons and admirers the world over mourned Queen Elizabeth II's death Thursday, others—especially in nations formerly colonized by the British Empire—voiced reminders of the "horrendous cruelties" perpetrated against them during the monarch's reign.

"Her legacy is colonialism, slavery, racism, loot, and plundering."

"We do not mourn the death of Elizabeth, because to us her death is a reminder of a very tragic period in this country and Africa's history," declared Julius Malema, head of the left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters party in South Africa.

"Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1952, reigning for 70 years as a head of an institution built up, sustained, and living off a brutal legacy of dehumanization of millions of people across the world," he continued.

"During her 70-year reign as queen, she never once acknowledged the atrocities that her family inflicted on native people that Britain invaded across the world," Malema noted. "She willingly benefited from the wealth that was attained from the exploitation and murder of millions of people across the world."


"The British royal family stands on the shoulders of millions of slaves who were shipped away from the continent to serve the interests of racist white capital accumulation, at the center of which lies the British royal family," Malema added.

Larry Madowo, a CNN International correspondent from Kenya, said during a Thursday broadcast that "the fairytale is that Queen Elizabeth went up the treetops here in Kenya a princess and came down a queen because it's when she was here in Kenya that she learned that her dad had died and she was to be the queen."

"But that also was the start of the eight years after that, that the... British colonial government cracked down brutally on the Mau Mau rebellion against the colonial administration," he continued. "They herded more than a million people into concentration camps, where they were tortured and dehumanized."


In addition to rampant torture—including the systemic castration of suspected rebels and sympathizers, often with pliers—British forces and their local allies massacred unarmed civilians, disappeared their children, sadistically raped women, and clubbed prisoners to death.

"And so," added Madowo, "across the African continent, there have been people who are saying, 'I will not mourn for Queen Elizabeth, because my ancestors suffered great atrocities under her people that she never fully acknowledged that."

Indeed, instead of apologizing for its crimes and compensating its victims, the British government launched Operation Legacy, a massive effort to erase evidence of colonial crimes during the period of rapid decolonization in the 1950s-'70s.


"If the queen had apologized for slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism and urged the Crown to offer reparations for the millions of lives taken in her/their names, then perhaps I would do the human thing and feel bad," tweeted Cornell University professor Mũkoma wa Ngũgĩ. "As a Kenyan, I feel nothing. This theater is absurd."

Aldani Marki, an activist with the Organization of Solidarity with the Yemeni Struggle, asserted that "Queen Elizabeth is a colonizer and has blood on her hands."

"In 1963 the Yemeni people rebelled against British colonialism. In turn the Queen ordered her troops to violently suppress any and all dissent as fiercely as possible," he tweeted. "The main punitive measure of Queen Elizabeth's Aden colony was forced deportations of native Yemenis into Yemen's desert heartland."


"This is Queen Elizabeth's legacy," Marki continued. "A legacy of colonial violence and plunder. A legacy of racial segregation and institutionalized racism."

"The queen's England is today waging another war against Yemen together with the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and the UAE," he added.

Melissa Murray, a Jamaican-American professor at New York University School of Law, said that the queen's death "will accelerate debates about colonialism, reparations, and the future of the Commonwealth" as "the residue of colonialism shadows day-to-day life in Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean."


Numerous observers noted how the British Empire plundered around $45 trillion from India over two centuries of colonialism that resulted in millions of deaths, and how the Kohinoor—one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, with an estimated value of $200 million—was stolen from India to be set in the queen mother's crown.

"Why are Indians mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II?" asked Indian economist Manisha Kadyan on Twitter. "Her legacy is colonialism, slavery, racism, loot, and plundering. Despite having chances, she never apologized for [the] bloody history of her family. She reduced everything to a 'difficult past episode' on her visit to India. Evil."


An Indian historian tweeted, "there are only 22 countries that Britain never invaded throughout history."

"British ships transported a total of three million Africans to the New World as slaves," he wrote. "An empire that brought misery and famine to Asia and Africa. No tears for the queen. No tears for the British monarchy."

Negative reaction to the queen's passing was not limited to the Global South. Despite the historic reconciliation between Ireland and Britain this century, there were celebrations in Dublin—as a crowd singing "Lizzie's in a Box" at a Celtic FC football match attests—and among the Irish diaspora.

"I'm Irish," tweeted MSNBC contributor Katelyn Burns, "hating the queen is a family matter."

Welsh leftists got in on the action too. The Welsh Underground Network tweeted a litany of reasons why "we will not mourn."

"We will not mourn for royals who oversaw the protection of known child molesters in the family," the group said.

"We will not mourn for royals who oversaw the active destruction of the Welsh language, and the Welsh culture," the separatists added.


Summing up the sentiments of many denizens of the Global South and decolonization defenders worldwide, Assal Rad, research director at the National Iranian American Council, tweeted, "If you have more sympathy for colonizers and oppressors than the people they oppress, you may need to evaluate your priorities."

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Europe's Energy System Is a Scam Against Its Own People

"If this sounds complicated, it is because it was intended to be complicated so that the citizens of Europe do not understand that this is a scam against them."


"The UK doesn't need Russian gas, doesn't need Texan LNG, it doesn't need to import anything."

(Photo: Shutterstock)

YANIS VAROUFAKIS

September 13, 2022

 by DiEM25

LONG READ

Amid a growing energy crisis, political leaders across Europe want to divert attention away from their own role in its exacerbation and instead make citizens focus on one thing only: Russia. However, it is far more complex than that.

During our recent panel discussion on the energy crisis, Yanis Varoufakis laid out the workings of the European energy market that exists today, one which has long been designed to favour the oligarchy above the people.

Varoufakis begins by explaining the Thatcherite model that subsequently extended to the rest of Europe, before outlining the corrupt practice of energy auctioning, followed by the Greek government scam that Ursula von der Leyen wants to implement across the continent, and ended by offering solutions to overhaul this injustice system.
The United Kingdom case

"If you really want an indication of what the matter is besides the fact that prices are going up, that there's a war in Ukraine, supply chains have been interrupted… look at the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a very good case in point because it is self sufficient.

"More than 50% of Britain's electricity needs are covered by wind power… producing electricity at zero marginal cost—just the cost of maintaining the windmills and nuclear. As for the gas reliance, which is around 35% of British electricity, UK electricity is produced using natural gas. All of it comes from the North Sea, more or less.

"So in other words, the UK doesn't need Russian gas, doesn't need Texan LNG, it doesn't need to import anything. And yet you'll see that the new Thatcher look-alike, prime minister Liz Truss, is promising to do something to cap the cost of electricity. Now, why is the cost of electricity in the UK rising as fast as it is rising here in Greece where we have no natural gas that we produce or Italy for that matter?

"The reason is Thatcher—because Thatcher privatised the electricity system in the UK and introduced the idea that privatisation is a good thing for the people—not for the oligarchs, but for the people, the idea being that the market knows better how to reduce costs than the state—state bureaucracies, state owned and run electricity grids and power stations are stuck at high costs. Better betting on looking after the workers more than looking after the customers, the electricity consumers—that was the line. And privatisation in the United Kingdom is crucial because the model of the United Kingdom was then extended to the rest of the European Union."
How the Thatcherite energy system works

"The first step was to say: 'Okay, what's your price now? How much are you paying for your electricity? You pay 50 pounds per—I don't know how many—kilowatt hours? Okay, fine, we are going to cap it. We're not going to allow the price to go beyond what you're paying and then we're going to privatise and we will allow competition to bring it down. So you've got nothing to lose, you only have things to gain.'

"That was a very powerful argument. If you add to that the fact that they were giving away shares to the people who then of course sold them to the oligarchs, it was impossible to stop privatisation of gas initially and then electricity.

"The second phase was to say: 'But who am I, as a politician to be deciding what a cap of the prices would be?' Why should politicians decide that? Let the market do it? So that's phase two, the more toxic phase of privatisation which is responsible for the fact that we are going to have bouts of energy poverty, and more general poverty in Europe.

"The second phase was to say: instead of having ministers or bureaucrats deciding the maximum price, what we're going do is we are going to simulate a market. We can't have a market when it comes to electricity. We need to simulate, to pretend to have a market.

"Privatisation in the United Kingdom is crucial because the model of the United Kingdom was then extended to the rest of the European Union."

"Why can't we have a market when it comes to electricity? Well, the only way we could have a market of electricity is, imagine if there were 30 or 50 different cables, electrical cables coming into your home and you could choose which one you're going to take your electricity from, then it would be a market. Then it would be some kind of competition between different providers. But of course it would be stupid to have 50 grids going through every house and every state in every country. So there's one.

"So they simulate the market, and how do they do that? They say: 'Ok, we're going to split electricity, the electricity company that used to be the state owned electricity company. We're going split it in at least three parts.'

"First will be power generation. Each one of them (coal, gas, solar etc) becomes a company or is owned by some company that may own more than one.

"And these companies compete with one another in the wholesale market. So they compete to provide the system, with a wholesale price. That's one part.

"The second part is the network, the grid, that belongs to another company. And then there is the part where electricity leaves the grid to go into your home.

"And that's where you create 10, 5, 8, 20 electricity providers, who compete with one another in the market of buying the electricity from the grid, which has been bought from the producers and then selling it to us consumers, firms and households, competing with one another.

"So you simulate competition between the producers. The idea there is to allow competition to shrink the distance between the wholesale price and the retail price. That was phase two privatisation. And this is what is now prevailing in Europe, in the European Union. They copied the Thatcherite phase two model.

"Now, when you simulate a market—because it's not a real market, it's a pretend market—you need to have certain government imposed rules simply because you don't have a real market, you have a government simulating a market.

"So the EU has agreed on their intergovernmental decisions—effectively France and Germany agreeing it amongst themselves—and then imposed it on the rest of the European Union."

Explaining the corrupt EU energy market auctions

"Let me give you an example of what these rules are. So today there was an auction in the Netherlands. The producers supposedly bid amongst themselves about who's going to provide the system, but the interesting thing is that it is exactly the opposite of what common sense would tell you should happen when it comes to a proper auction.

"You would expect that the company or the person offering the lowest price wins, right? No, in this market, the company offering the highest price wins, and then the price is the same for everybody, as long as the sum of the electricity that they have provided is no more than a certain amount, which is what the market demands—it's madness. It's called marginal cost price. And then supposedly the providers compete with one another to reduce the retail price to that maximum marginal wholesale price.

"Now, if this sounds complicated, it is because it was intended to be complicated so that the citizens of Europe do not understand that this is a scam against them, even during the good times.

"Proof of this is that, since privatisation, the difference between the cost of producing an average kilowatt hour and the retail price has trebled, so don't believe anyone who tells you that the problem has nothing to do with the system and that the problem is that the cost of production is going up.

"Yes, the cost of production is going up because the price of natural gas is going up, but the war in Ukraine does not explain why the profit margins of the firms are getting larger."

Greek energy scam that is spreading across Europe

"Why should the rest of you [Europeans] care? Because Ursula von der Leyen announced that the Greek government's scam will be Europeanised."

"Yesterday, I spoke in the Greek parliament and I exposed a scam of the Greek government, a particularly odious scam. Under pressure from MeRA25, DiEM25's electoral wing in Greece, the government made a move months after the pressure came from us.

"Back in March, we presented in parliament a proposal on how to shield consumers from skyrocketing prices. What we said was this: as the price of electricity produced from natural gas is skyrocketing because the price of natural gas is skyrocketing, it's crazy that electricity coming out of solar panels, which costs nothing to produce, is being sold by the private company at the same price (per kilowatt hour) that it would've been had it been produced from the most expensive natural gas.

"It is mad. And you don't need to subsidise electricity prices. All you need to do is to eliminate these super profits by those idiots. Actually they're not idiots, they're very smart. We are idiots.

"So we proposed something really very simple, that every kilowatt hour, the price of it should be set by the state equal to its average cost plus 5%. We're saying, 'okay, nobody should lose money. Even those capitalist entrepreneurs who are profiting—okay, don't lose money'.

"If you do this and you sum up over all sources of power, of electrical power, we would've had back in March a reduction in the average price of electricity of more than 50%, without any subsidisation, without the state borrowing money without taxing people, without anything. All that would happen is the super profits of the firms with the lowest level of marginal cost would be eliminated by a price cap.

"Now between you and I, sometime in the middle of August, I was a little bit worried because the Greek government, it turned out, on the 6th of July, had legislated something that seemed very much like what we were proposing.

"And I was bit worried. I thought, oh my God, do I have to come out now and thank the government for doing the right thing? They introduced a maximum cap for electricity produced by hydro—low, solar—a little bit higher, [and] the same with wind power. And then for lignite and for natural gas, they had a formula which effectively gave the average cost of producing through lignite or through natural gas, plus a small percentage. It was perfect. I thought my God, our proposal has gone through, it's been legislated.

"I was getting ready to stand in parliament and thank the government for doing the right thing until I discovered that it's a complete and utter fraud.

"Why should the rest of you [Europeans] care? Ursula von der Leyen announced that the Greek government's scam will be Europeanised. So, comrades in Germany and France, in Portugal, in Spain, expect the same scam to be coming your way immediately. The European Union council may be deciding to agree with what Von der Leyen said yesterday, which is a copy of what the Greek government is doing.

"Now, listen to what the Greek government is doing. The first inkling we had at MeRA25 that this is a scam is when it mentioned that the daily auction for the wholesale price continues. This stock exchange in which wholesale producers are competing with one another in an auction, continues.

"Now, the human mind cannot wrap itself around that. If you have a maximum price that is imposed by government on every different power station, why do you need the auction? Isn't that the obvious question to ask? This is what they do.

"Remember, the price for every megawatt hour that the government imposed from hydro was 85 euros. I looked at what the auction yielded, the price—it was 700 [euros] during this period. The price cap was meant to be for those kilowatt hours produced by hydro works, it was meant to be 85 [euros], or 112 [euros] for some other ones.

"So this is how it works. The producer of that kilowatt hour or megawatt hour receives the 700 euros that has been determined by the auction in the Netherlands. But then they have to give back to the Greek state the difference between the 700 and the price cap of 112, which is 588. So they give it back to the government. So far you think it's stupid, I mean, why do this, why don't you just ask them to receive 112 instead of receiving 700 and then have to return the 588.

"So far, no scam, just stupidity, just bureaucracy. Well, here's where this scam comes. The government does not take this money in order to give it to consumers. No, the government takes this money to give it to the retail companies. Now, if you look at almost every market in Europe, the same shareholder that owns the producer owns the retail company.

"So it is as if I have a company that is producing electricity and I have a company that is a retail company. So what the government does is let the pseudo-auction determine the price at 700, then they force me to return to the state from my left pocket, which is my pocket as a producer, 588 euros to the government, and the government puts it in my right pocket.

"Now is it any wonder that a consumer feels no relief? None. Zero. Then what the government does, to 'help you' dear consumer, [will] borrow money, add it to the government budget, to subsidise your electricity bill. In other words, to allow you to give the oligarchs the money in my pocket that the government has taken from one pocket and put it in another pocket."

"Now, if this is not a scam, I do not know what the word scam means. This is the definition of a scam.

"This is happening in Greece, this has been happening since 6th of July, and now this is the proposal by the European Commission in all its glory and greatness for how we're going to deal with [this crisis].

Complexity is in the interest of the oligarchy

"Why are they doing this? Because complexity is in the interest of the oligarchy. I just took 23 minutes to explain this to you. No media are going to give me 23 minutes in Greece to explain this to people out there. Nobody's going to allow the people of France, the people of Portugal, the people Slovakia, 23 minutes in order to have somebody explain this to them. You get 20 seconds and then you are interrupted.

"And in the meantime, nobody can understand what's going. People think 'okay, they are imposing a price cap, they are subsidising the public, so the government is doing something'. No, the government's doing nothing. The government are agents of the oligarchy. They are crooks and they are thieves.

"And this is a clear cut case of destroying the capacity of the majority of Europeans to make ends meet in the interest of an oligarchy combining two things: on the one hand, the market fundamentalism of Thatcher that creates the simulated market which has failed us, especially now that energy prices have gone up, with stateism—the state borrowing, increasing public debt, so that the state can subsidise the oligarchs, but not the consumers.

The solution?

"The only solution to this is the immediate abandonment of the market model—the closure of the auction house in the Netherlands.

"The first step is we need to have a proper price cap, both at the wholesale level and at the retailer [level], so that the price that people pay reflects average cost plus a small percentage, a little bit of profit, for whoever is running the show.

"That's number one. End market fundamentalism, end the delusion of markets—blow up markets. There can be no market when it comes to electricity because there's only one electricity cable coming out of your wall and there can be no market. When they try to create a simulated market with one cable coming out of the wall, they are scamming society.

"Point number two: We need an energy union, a green energy union. We can no longer sustain this fallacy of the market which allows the German government to have its own plans about the green transition, the Greek government its own plans…

"Nobody's investing in green hydrogen properly. Nobody's investing in solar panels and windmills that are actually owned by communities. They are doing everything for the oligarchs. So, the second plank of the DiEM25 policy, I think, should be one of a socialised green energy union incorporating within the system this network of green energy production and distribution with ownership rights at the municipal level, the regional level, socialised, overseen by citizen assemblies by juries of randomly selected citizens and so on and so forth.

"And the third thing that we must do, and I know that that sounds controversial, but it would be my proposal: End sanctions on Russian energy. The only people who benefit from the sanctions on Russian gas and oil are the Russian oligarchs and the European oligarchs.

"It is not helping Ukraine, it is not undermining Putin, it is enriching Putin and his oligarchs, it is enriching our own [European oligarchs], end the sanctions that are only in the interest of the united oligarchies of Russia, of Ukraine, of Germany, of Italy and of Greece. Thank you."

YANIS VAROUFAKIS
 is a Greek economist and politician. A former academic, he served as the Greek Minister of Finance from January to July 2015 under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. He has been Secretary-General of MeRA25, the political party he founded in 2018.

Canceling All Student Debt Would Cost About as Much as The Pentagon's F-35 Boondoggle

When it comes to military spending in the United States, money is no object—even for programs like the F-35, which has been criticized for many years as an expensive failure that should be phased out altogether.


Student loan borrowers and the Too Much Talent Band thank President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris for extending the student loan pause and now demand that they cancel student debt at a gathering outside The White House on January 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.

 (Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for We, The 45 Million)


ASHIK SIDDIQUE

September 12, 2022

 by National Priorities Project


The Biden administration has eliminated a major chunk of federal student debt, extending forgiveness up to $10,000 for all individual borrowers who earn under $125,000 annually, and up to $20,000 for Pell grant recipients.

Where there's a will, there's a way.

That's a big deal—tens of millions of people can benefit from this debt relief. According to the Student Borrower Protection Center, 41 million Americans are eligible for up to $10,000 in debt relief, while 25 million are eligible for up to $20,000. And 20 million could have their entire debt canceled, going from negative wealth to positive for the first time in their lives.

The debt cancellation policy could go even further. As The Debt Collective pointed out in response to the news, this relief proves that the White House has the authority to cancel all federal student debt.

Total student loan debt in the United States amounts to $1.75 trillion, including federal and private loans. That may seem like a lot of money, but the federal government already spends comparable amounts on plenty of items with much more questionable value.

The Pentagon is already set to spend $1.7 trillion on its most expensive weapon system, the F-35 jet fighter.

When it comes to military spending in the United States, money is no object—even for programs like the F-35, which has been criticized for many years as an expensive failure that should be phased out altogether.

That just shows that where there's a will, there's a way. Organized student debtors and their allies successfully pressured the government into providing this much relief. Now we know it's possible to win instant relief to all the rest of the millions of current and former students who are struggling with debt.

Copyright © 2021 National Priorities Project / Institute for Policy Studies



ASHIK SIDDIQUE is a research analyst for the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.