As mentioned in my previous post, I purchased Heathcote Williams’ Royal Babylon; the Case Against the Monarchy. The only way to do so without too much expense was through Google Play Books. Very unsatisfactory – none of the pleasure of an actual book and none of the advantages of, for example, a Kindle version. It was first published by Skyscraper Publications in 2016. As expected it is an excoriating, relentless tirade against greed, cruelty and injustice, meticulously researched and sourced.
Williams concentrates on many aspects of our regal system and family. The theatrical charade of the monarchy is laid bare, for it is no more than that, typified by the coronation of Charles III, which I described in Animal Wild as “a shiny but tacky and ridiculous affair, with its absurd costumes, some of which would not have looked out of place on the set of Flash Gordon.” I thought that the king, queen and clergy looked absolutely ludicrous. At least they had some sense of shame, substituting other diamonds for the stolen Koh-i-noor, one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, this time. It was presented to Queen Victoria by the East India Company after the defeat of the Maharajah of Punjab. Its true ownership is somewhat complex and obscure but it definitely shouldn’t be here. According to Williams, horses used in royal processions are drugged with acepromazine to keep them compliant.
Williams leaves no stones unturned in his expositions of the derangement historically exhibited by so many royals (all that inbreeding). Of our own royal family he lambasts the admirers of Hitler and Nazi sympathisers, many of the appalling people rewarded by the honours system, the arms dealing, the profiting from imperialism and colonialism, the media fawning, the literally untold wealth, the casual racism and of course the fake name “Windsor”.
I have written less artfully about much of this myself. I did not know, though, that the queen continued to approve and sign death warrants for prisoners in the Caribbean long after the death penalty had been abolished here. One of the victims was Michael de Freitas, also known as Abdul Mali and Michael X.
Williams naturally looks hard at the mass slaughter of wildlife and the involvement in the cruel ‘sports’ of horse racing, fox hunting and polo. The wildlife numbers are staggering. I had not realised how members of quite such a wide range of species were murdered for fun. Prince Philip’s killing of a tiger in India is well known. George VI and the queen mother hunted and slew a variety of antelopes, warthogs, jackals, a rhinoceros and an elephant*. Of the last George said, “I was very lucky as there are not many big ones left.” Introducing offspring to killing for pleasure at a very young age is a tradition which continues to this day. Prince Andrew took one of his daughters out shooting when she was just six years old. Prince Philip, by 1993, had killed over thirty thousand birds, two crocodiles, wild boar, and hundreds of Scottish stags as well as the tiger. Ex-prince Harry shot a sacred, endangered ibis in Kenya.
*I took the photo at the head of this post in Kenya in 2019.
There are two appendices, the first a collection of damning quotations by such luminaries as Thomas Paine, John Lennon, Andrew Morton, Sue Townsend, William S. Burroughs, Morrisey, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, Dante, E.M. Forster, Christopher Hichens, Johnny Rotten (of course), George Orwell and more.
The second appendix is on land ownership at the time of publication, the queen’s making her the richest individual on the planet. The fifth largest landowner on earth is the King of Saudi Arabia with 553 million acres. Fourth is the United States federal government, 760 million acres. In third place the Chinese state, 2,365 million acres. Second the Russian state, 4,219 million acres. The kings of Thailand and Morocco and the Sultan of Oman own 126 million, 113 million, and 76 million acres respectively.
So where did the queen feature in this league table? Not just number one, but number one by a country mile with a staggering 6,600 million acres. The main holdings are in Canada, Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and the UK (60 million acres here).
The poem is a brilliant, exhaustive and exhausting read.
Meanwhile as we wait fearfully for Rachel Reeves’ budget, it has transpired that the national debt has been overestimated by three billion pounds. Or so they say. Estimates have been out by between two hundred and five hundred million a month since January. That seems rather a lot to me. It apparently stems from tax office errors relating to VAT. Shouldn’t there be some sort of consequence, as there would be for any business, especially a small one, making the smallest of unintentional mistakes in its reporting?
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