the DON JONES INDEX… |
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|
GAINS POSTED in GREEN LOSSES POSTED in RED 9/17/22... 14,953.01 9/17/22... 14,903.37 |
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6/27/13… 15,000.00 |
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(THE DOW JONES
INDEX: 10/1/22… 29,431.73; 9/17/22… 32,151.71; 6/27/13… 15,000.00) |
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LESSON
for September 24, 2022 – “BEAUTY and the BEAST! (Part
Two)”
The first UK state funeral since Winston
Churchill’s in 1965 took place on Monday as Queen Elizabeth II was laid to rest.
A Guardian U.K.
timeline of the services (Attachment One) noted that “(a)t about 9:30am,
Westminster Abbey’s tenor bell started to toll once every minute 96 times”,
marking every year of the Queen’s life.
The coffin, carried
on the state funeral gun carriage from Westminster Hall to the abbey, was followed
by King Charles III and other members of the royal family – arriving at the
West Gate to the strains of the Sentences (“lines from the Bible verse
Revelation 14:13, set to music by William Croft” which have been used at every
state funeral since the 18th century.
After readings including a passage from John 14 by new Prime
Minister Liz Truss, and hymns, the sermon was delivered by the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Justin Welby. “People of loving service are rare in any
walk of life,” he said. “Leaders of
loving service are still rarer. But in all cases those
who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to power and
privileges are long forgotten.”
(Attachment Two)
More homilies were expressed until, at 11:55 AM (GMT – 5:55 EST)
the Last Post was played, followed by two minutes of silence.
Twenty minutes
later, “the late Queen’s coffin was carried from Westminster Abbey and placed
on the state gun carriage, from where it began the journey to St George’s
chapel in Windsor,” followed by Charles, the family and accompanying musicians,
dignitaries and “detachments from the armed forces of the Commonwealth” in the
traditional Long
Walk accompanied by bells, gunshots and bagpipers.
The Committal
service (which is a graveside service; “Committal” referring to the brief memorial service at the time you commit the body to the ground), attended by about 800 guests, was conducted by the dean of
Windsor, David Conner, with a blessing from the archbishop of Canterbury.
“After the service,
the Queen’s coffin was lowered into the royal vault as the dean read a psalm
and a commendation. At the same time, the Queen’s piper played a lament.”
The Queen’s coffin
will be laid to rest in George VI memorial chapel in St George’s chapel,
alongside Prince Philip and her parents, King George VI and the Queen Mother.
On the day of the funeral, world leaders, politicians, public
figures and those who worked with the Queen, as well as monarchs from other
countries, joined members of the Royal Family to pay their respects.
Westminster Abbey can hold up to 2,200 people. On the day of the
funeral, world leaders, politicians, public figures and those who worked with
the Queen, as well as monarchs from other countries, will join members of the
Royal Family to pay their respects.
The Queen’s four children – King Charles III, Princess Anne,
Prince Andrew and Prince Edward – will be present, as will Camilla, the Queen
Consort, and the monarch’s grandchildren – Princes William and Harry, Peter
Phillips and Zara Tindall, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, and Lady Louise
Windsor and James, Viscount Severn.
(Vanguard, Attachment Three)
Spouses of all close family were present too, including
Catherine, the Princess of Wales, and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. Prime Minister Liz Truss, Labour
leader Keir Starmer and other UK politicians also
attended.
Present, although not invited, was a small spider who hitchhiked
atop the commemorative card that Charles placed atop his mother’s coffin. Some maintained that the arachnid was a
harbinger of good fortune. Others said “Ewww!” (Article:
Attachment Four, video at https://people.com/royals/spider-queen-elizabeth-coffin-spotted-state-funeral-good-omen/
)
Members of Europe’s royal families, from countries including
Spain, the Netherlands, Monaco, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and Greece, are
likely to fly to London for the funeral, and about 500 foreign dignitaries are
also expected to attend. (A partial list
from Town and Country and last week’s DJI was included as
Attachment Five, re-attached below as... go figure!... Attachment Five)
The Guardian’s
Alexandra Topping explained the symbolism of the crown, orb and scepter atop
the Queen’s coffin. “Nestled among the flowers of the Queen’s funeral wreath was a
handwritten card by her son King Charles III, which read: ‘In loving and
devoted memory, Charles R.’” she wrote.
No symbolic legendermain attached to the spider (Attachment Six) –
except, perhaps, for some of the King’s prior misadventures.
With the conclusion of the
ceremonies, commentators (domestic: Attachment Seven and foreign: Attachment
Eight) said their pieces about the Queen, the new King and the state of the
Empire.
Much of the commentary was inspirational, but some was not
pretty.
Family, royals, commoners and
dignitaries had come to London to mourn the Queen but, as noted in last week’s
lesson, some were not invited. Dictators
like those in Russia and Iran were excluded – and responded with cold
castigatory platitudes (the Queen’s “Dark Legacy from Iran, Attachments Nine A and
B) or hot threats (the “Iron Doll”, a talking skull on Russia State media
stated that the pusillanimous Putin should have nuked QE2’s funeral “today,
when all the best people” were there, Attachments Ten A and B)
The Saudis were invited,
however... and sent a delegation... although a prudent King Salman probably
advised members of the still wealthy, still powerful Bin Laden clan to stay at
home – a consequence of the Nine Eleven, of course, and of another... more
recent kerfluffle.
People with arguments to argue, often
valid, contend that the world is controlled by its past... that history is
merely a tale of the oppressors and oppressed; ugly truths must be told,
revenge must be taken. There are places
where the rites of recrimination date back hundreds, often thousands of
years... the Balkans and the MidEast as well as other
locations where religion has set people against one another. The Uyghur oppression is attributable to
Chinese vengeance for centuries of Mongol domination, the Hindu-Buddhist-Islam
intrigues have plagued South Asia since before the time of Christ and the Islanic/Jewish hostilities preclude the coming of Mohammed
– dating back, as it were, to Old Testament accounts of God’s Chosen People,
the Egyptians and Babylonians. The
destiny of Europe may be attributable to the campaigns of Rome against Carthage
2500 years ago or the even earlier wars of Greece against the Persians and the
Trojans.
For all intents and purposes,
however, the “modern” cycle of victimization and vengeance can be said to begin
with the voyages of Europeans to the New World and, thereafter, the rise of
empires... where the colonial states of what is now The West divided up the
rest of the world in order to exploit and oppress. Anti-colonial revolutions... notably the
American, but insurgencies in the rest of the Americas against the Spanish and
Portuguese overlords, Africa, the Indian subcontinent (still divided and
hostile as a consequence of the partition of India and Pakistan after the
Second World War)... eventually led to political freedom, but economic liberty remains in the grasp of
multinational corporations in many places; fundamental religious fanaticism in
some others. The British Empire, though
diminished in clout, remains territorially alive and one of the primary tasks
of King Charles will be to deal with the anti-colonial sentiment of numerous
members of the Commonwealth.
Thanks to Crusader-hater Saladin,
Christian and European invaders were unable to maintain dominion over the
mutually hostile states of Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia. Instead, the political and economic rulers of
the powers concerned entered into commercial arrangements with one another...
the engagement of Iran and the West substantially retarded after the overthrow
of the Shah, but the more numerous Sunni states in and around the Gulf ably
balanced commercial engagement with religious discord well into and throught the Twentieth Century until the insurgence of
Osama Bin Laden shattered the concord on September 11, 2001.
The spark as ignited a new ethnic
and religious antagonism did not arise from the wretched of the Earth; it was
lit by Osama, a scion of one of the wealthiest familial empires in the Islamic
world.
For the ancestorship
and ongoing connections to the man adjudicated the greatest terrorist on the
planet since the end of the Second World War, remarkably little has been
written about the Bin Laden family and their black sheep save a perfunctory
biography in the Encyclopedia Brittanica (Attachment
Fifteen).
in 1957 as one of fifty some children by six wives to Muhamed bin Laden, a small-time contractor from Yemen who
became rich and powerful along with the Saudi oil boom of the 1970’s... but
glosses over particulars detailed in Bodansky’s book
- for example, his days as an economics student at Abdul Aziz University in
Jedda. There, as one of many privileged
and dissolute playboys who escaped the confines of Saudi Arabia for weekends of
debauchery and decadence in “cosmopolitan Beirut”, where he frequented “flashy
casinos, nightclubs and bars”, indulging in drinking, whoring and brawling...
always protected by privilege.
In the seventies, the Lebanese civil war curtailed his escapades and,
commissioned by his father to work on some of the magnificent mosques of Mecca
and Medina, regained an attachment to faith (which taught that the troubles of
the Lebanese were a God-imposed punishment for their wayward and dissolute
culture). The disasters of the Yom
Kippur War and the assassination of beloved King Faisal by “a deranged nephew”
who followed the lure of the West, coupled with the concomitant profligacy
engendered by the oil boom also created a culture war, of sorts, and the
orthodox preachers and teachers of Abdul Aziz declared, in no uncertain terms,
that: “only an absolute and unconditional return to the fold of conservative
Islamism” would protect the youth from “inherent dangers and sins of the West.”
By the time that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s legions overthrew the American
puppet, the Shah, in 1979, the young Bin Laden had become an enthusiastic,
perhaps fanatical, adherent of Islamic fundamentalism – advocating war against
the decadent West. But when conflict
came, it was in Afghanistan where Russian troops invaded and imposed a
Communist dictatorship – one which true believers found to be as offensive as
anything to be found in the United States, the United Kingdom or any colonialist
gang of heretics.
One of many foreign “freedom fighters” who went to Afghanistan to fight the Russians, the EB states that: “ Nairobi Kenya Dar es Salaam Tanzania Yemen
Perhaps he was assuaged by the Bin Laden clan’s dedication to capitalism.
So, inquiring minds have to wonder
whether it was a strange desire to re-establish relationships with one of the private
powers of the Islamic world, cupidity, or sheer dog-stupidity that possessed
Prince Charles to accept a bribe... a kinder, gentler bribe in the form of a million pound contribution to The Prince of Wales's
Charitable Fund (PWCF) charity... from the Bin Laden family.
Prince Charles accepted the money
from Bakr and Shafiq, two of Osama Bin Laden's half-brothers in 2013, two years
after the al-Qaeda leader was killed, the Sunday
Times reported. (Picked
up by the BBC: July 31, 2022, Attachment Sixteen)
The (PWCF) received the donation.
Clarence House said it had been
assured by PWCF that "thorough due diligence" had been conducted, and
the decision to accept the money lay with the trustees.
“Any attempt to characterise it otherwise is false," it told the BBC.
“False” characterizations,
nonetheless, spewed from the pens of tabloid terrorists like the ink from the
King’s malfunctioning pen:
A source at the Prince of Wales's Charitable Fund told the
BBC’s Royal Correspondent, Johnny Dymond, that
"the sins of the father" - that's Osama Bin Laden - should not
disqualify other members of the family from making a donation.
(BBC Attachment Twenty One)
Dymond allowed
that this makes sense but, once it was public – “however many checks were made
and rules were followed” - it was “always going to look horrible.”
A colleague, Security Correspondent Frank Gardner, concurred
(Attachment Twenty Two) stating that “to millions of
Saudis, the name Bin Laden is totally innocuous.”
And, across
the waves, the New York Post’s Michael Kaplan interviewed survivors and family
members of the Beast’s terror – the father of one deceased firefighter
declaring that he was “pissed off” at the Royal antics, while others attributed
the King’s folly to “greed”, called the proceeds “blood money” and the incident
“disgraceful.”
“It’s shocking and makes my skin crawl,” declared a Nine Eleven widow;
“I will never go to England. I thought they were our allies.” (8/2/22.
Attachment Twenty Three)
Cozying up to the terrorist’s
family has been the new King’s most egregious error, but Charles has
dis-endeared himself to the world and to his subjects in other ways which will
only swell in significance as the pomp and ceremony of the Royal Funeral fades
and the seven-decades of affection for his mother recedes.
The Royal Family was already in
the loo (to use Britspeak) over several incidents...
a young Prince Harry was once vilified for wearing a Nazi armband to a costume
party before, of course, marrying the... uh, darker-complexioned... Meghan Markle, provoking old racial
hostilities which, allegedly, included the King, and a break with brother and
heir apparent Billy – the escalation of which, or easing of which, was much
mentioned in the U.K.’s famous tabloid press.
And then there was Andrew’s wild
ride – revisited after a heckler reprimanded the Prince as a “sick old man” and
controversy flared up over the Queens revocation of his honours...
Randy Andy being forced to wear a common suit amidst his uniformed fellow
Royals during the ceremony. (Time, 9/13,
Attachment Twenty Four)
And then two more Charleshoppers surfaced after the funeral... the sick and
sordid story of long-time household retainers being unceremoniously booted out
of Clarence House and revelations that he, like the other royals, pays no
income tax at a time when the ordinary gobs and gals are struggling with inflation
worse than America’s.
Dozens of Clarence House staff
have been given notice of redundancies as the offices of King Charles and the
Queen Consort move to Buckingham Palace after the death of the Queen according
to the ubiquitous (and liberal) Guardian U.K.
(9/13/22, Attachment Twenty Five).
Up to 100 employees at the King’s
former official residence, including some who have worked there for decades,
received notification that they could lose their jobs just as they were working
round the clock to smooth his elevation to the throne.
Private secretaries, the finance
office, the communications team and household staff are among those who
received notice during the thanksgiving service for the Queen, at St Giles’
Cathedral in Edinburgh on Monday, that their posts were on the line.
A Clarence House spokesman said:
“Following last week’s accession, the operations of the household of the former
Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have ceased and, as required by law, a
consultation process has begun. Our staff have given long and loyal service
and, while some redundancies will be unavoidable, we are working urgently to
identify alternative roles for the greatest number of staff.”
Staff who are made redundant are
expected to be offered searches for alternative employment across all royal
households, assistance in finding new jobs externally and an “enhanced”
redundancy payment beyond the statutory minimum.
Pippa
Crerar and Caroline Davies of the GUK went out into the street
searching for reactions and encountered more than a few. (Attachment Twenty Six)
Podiatrist
Christhell Hobbs said of the staff facing redundancy:”I think it’s sad. They
have families they have to support.”
Hobbs,
who left Farilight near Hastings in East Sussex first
thing in the morning to see the Queen’s coffin arrive on Tuesday evening,
added: “Many of them have put in many good years of service and now they’re
told ‘we don’t want you’. You have to be human about this.”
These
firings yanked the chain of young and old, Conservative and Labour
alike. A political student commisserated: “[these are] people who’ve been working hard
and are faithful and loyal. Nobody deserves to be fired because someone dies.”
“I
don’t think this was a good time to do it right now,” seconded a fashion
student.
But
a fifty-something property developer self-identified as “an enthusiastic
royalist” conceded: “It is bad timing. It’s not what you would expect because
it’s so soon.”
If the precipitous sacking of the
new King’s staff engendered disappointment and sympathy, news that Charles III,
pays no taxes spawned anger.
“It is only proper that the new
King pays no inheritance tax,” observed the leftist GUK’s even leftier corresponden Aditya Chakrabortty,
saying (Thu 15 Sep 2022 01.00 EDT, Attachment Twenty
Seven) that the state (and, by inference King Charles) makes
citizens choose between heating or eating
“It has not been widely reported, but
King Charles won’t have to pay a penny of inheritance tax on the vast estate
passed to him by one of the wealthiest women in the world. Nor is he under any
legal obligation to pay income
tax;
he does so voluntarily. This has been the arrangement only since 1993. For
decades beforehand, the monarchy paid no tax at all.
“One law for King Charles the
billionaire, another for you. Bailiffs for the poorest in society, privileged
exemption for the very richest. A society with all the latest technology and
sophistication, yet still in the shadow of medieval feudalism. Except even John
of Gaunt couldn’t have counted on the unstinting support of the Daily Mail.”
Summing up the day, after the
funeral, a more thoughtful GUK meditation asked whether the personality of the
Queen (probably never to be repeated) overshadowed the evils of the
empire. Spare a thought/laugh for the many
puffed-up presidents and prime ministers and global bigwigs present in the
Abbey imagining their own future send-offs, and realising
that compared to this, those would tend toward the low-key,” appealed
correspondent Marina Hyde. (Attachment Twenty Eight)
“But still they pay obeisance,
with even the Japanese emperor submitting to the supposed indignity of
park-and-ride coaches to the Abbey,” Hyde added. “For all her celebrated lack
of vanity, one can’t imagine those image-conscious courtiers would ever have
let the Queen herself be just another figure emerging from an international
dignitary bus. So there remains something undeniably unique about her final
event, in a church whose building was begun by Edward the Confessor almost a
thousand years ago. All flags on public buildings in the United States have
flown at half-mast for a full 10 days. Landmarks around the world shone
red, white and blue (the English, as
well as American hues), or went dark. It is difficult to
imagine another figure for whom all these things would have been done.
“Was she, then, bigger than the
club? After initial scepticism about her youth on
accession, Winston Churchill very quickly came to believe that the Queen was
something more than merely special.”
Bigger than Charles, at least
according to another GUK dispatch (Attachment Twenty Nine)...
this by Stephen Bates, described as their “former religious and royal
correspondent” and author of “The Shortest History of the Crown”. Bates proposed five irreligious changes (some
serious, some not) that the King could make which, in his opinion and probably
that of most left-thinking Brits who take the Guardian along with their morning
quinoa and whatever passes for Starbucks’ frappes over there. They were...
Inheritance
and corporation tax (reform)
A
slimmed-down monarchy
Giving
up Buckingham Palace (he suggested selling it to Donald Trump for a hotel/casino)
Reforming
the honours system (CDC’s Jack Parnell suggested the
opposite... selling off American royal
titles to attack the deficit), and
Banning
leaky pens
And finally, the GUKsters surveyed press dispatches from around the
nation. Their own main image displayed
the bearer party taking the Queen’s coffin up the steps into the darkened
entrance of the George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle. The Financial Times looked
from above at the coffin in the nave of Westminster Abbey and chose a quote
from Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for
its headline: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders
of loving service are still rarer.”
The Telegraph homed
in on a tender moment for its main image, showing King Charles placing the
Company Camp Colour of the Grenadier Guards on the
Queen’s coffin. “An outpouring of love” was the headline, above Hannah
Furness’s five-column report on the day.
The Mail opted
for image of the coffin being lowered into the vault at St George’s chapel,
Windsor, with the headline: “Her final journey” for its bumper 120-page
edition.
Further afield, the timings
allowed Australian papers enough time to place their own poignant tributes on
their front pages. Amid debate about whether
Charles should be Australia’s head of state, Tuesday’s papers were united in
covering the occasion in subdued tones. The Age (“The final farewell”)
and Sydney
Morning Herald (“We’ll meet again”) both
showed the Queen’s coffin being guided into Windsor Castle, while the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph sought
to capture the feeling of readers with their headlines: “Thank you, our Queen”, and “Rest in peace, Ma’am”
respectively. Adelaide’s Advertiser went
with the headline “Eternal Queen”, and Queensland’s Courier Mail went
for “Thank you, our Queen”. National paper the Australian calls
the late monarch “Elizabeth the great” and focuses on the grief-stricken
expression of King Charles for its image, with the headline, another: “We’ll
meet again”, perhaps an echo of Welby’s reference to
Vera Lynn’s song, which the Queen used in a broadcast during the worst of the Covid pandemic (and, of course, during World War Two. (Attachment Thirty).
Iran and Russia chose a different
path, as above. China weaponized the
funeral to round up nostalgics and subversives; A Hongkonger who played a harmonica to a crowd outside the
British consulate during Elizabeth II’s funeral was arrested for sedition. After 2019’s democracy protests, China has
cracked down on dissent in Hong Kong using national security legislation and charges
of sedition.
The latter is a colonial-era law
that had fallen into obscurity for decades until prosecutors reintroduced it in
the aftermath of the protests. Police
said a 43-year-old man surnamed Pang was arrested outside the consulate for
“seditious acts”. A police source confirmed to AgenceFrance
Press (Attachment Thirty One) that the man arrested
was the harmonica player.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle headed
home to California, Vanity Fair reported on Thursday, after Queen Elizabeth’s death extended their visit
overseas. (Attachment Thirty
Two)
The royal couple flew home from
the UK on Tuesday following their mourning period, and one day after attending the late monarch’s funeral service; Harry highlighting the queen’s
commitment to serving the United Kingdom.
“In celebrating the life of my grandmother, Her Majesty The Queen—and in mourning her loss—we are all reminded of
the guiding compass she was to so many in her commitment to service and duty,”
the Prince wrote.
While
half the “Fab Four” were flying back to California, Kate and William, back at
home, expressed their appreciation for “those behind the scenes who facilitated
the Queen’s final televised funeral ritual” (unlike his father, giving them the
sack), and discussed the rainbows that had appeared over several of the
historic sites over the week, noted Thursday’s People Magazine (Attachment Thirty Three). “Her
Majesty was looking down on us,” Princess Kate replied.
Still, after the ceremonies, however, with the U.K.
and much of the world was still under the spell of the dead Queen and the
centuries-old trappings of power, ritual and pageantry as well as ancient
grudges – newly excavated. “So the Queen died, Lizzie kicked the
bucket, she’s out of here,” wrote an irreverent Danny Price from Hunger (Attachment Thirty Four...
presumably a publication or website of some sort). “Let’s be real, she was 96, she had great
innings, and this was expected. Was it sad?….for me,
no, but for a lot of people, it was devastating.”
During the course of the funeral,
he added, there was war in Ukraine, racial strife, economic hardship and, to
all intents and purposes, anarchy in the U.K. Climate change and Covid-19 deaths
are vastly ignored. And forget about
bringing up colonialism, as you would have surely been met with the response of
“now is not the time”. So, “when is the right time?” asked Mr. Price.
People in other countries and
media in other countries are saying that this is the beginning of societal
collapse in the UK. Earlier this month, a certain Professor
Eliot Jacobson stated that the UK is likely to be the
first world country to implode due to Brexit, government spending, corruption,
and inflation.
And the expense of sustaining the
royalty.
And Prince Andrew.
And, just yesterday, it became
apparent that the new King’s stumbling and fumbling regarding the character of
his charities continues apace. “In the
last two years, Charles has pretty much only done two things that have come to
the public’s attention: one, accepting millions of Euros from a suspicious
title seeker in a suitcase and/or carrier bag, and the other… accepting
millions of pounds from the Bin Laden family for his charity,” scowled the Man
from Hunger (above). “Charles will be a
fine King.”
The Bin Laden swag we have already
noted. But now, the Guardian (Attachment
Thirty Five) and... notably... the Kuwait Times
(Attachment Thirty Six) chronicled Charlie’s convening with either the Saudi
billionaire (GUK) or Qatari sheikh (Kuwait)... or both.
The Metropolitan
police confirmed
that on 6 September officers interviewed a man in his 50s and a man in his 40s
under caution in relation to offences under the Honours
(Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.
The
force launched the investigation in February after media reports alleged offers
of help were made to secure honours and citizenship
for a Saudi national.
In
September last year, the Sunday Times published claims that the
billionaire Mahfouz Marei
Mubarak bin Mahfouz paid tens of thousands of pounds to
fixers with links to Charles who had told him they could secure the honour.
Bin
Mahfouz was awarded a CBE at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace in
November 2016.
Bin
Mahfouz has been one of the biggest donors to Charles’s charities and even has
a forest named after him, the Mahfouz Wood, at the 15th-century Castle of Mey, formerly the Queen Mother’s home and now one of
Charles’s Scottish residences.
When
the allegations surfaced, the Prince’s Foundation launched an internal
investigation, which in turn led to one of Charles’s former closest aides,
Michael Fawcett, 59, temporarily stepping down as the foundation’s chief
executive.
Fawcett, a former valet to the
Prince of Wales who has been close to Queen Elizabeth II’s heir for decades, is
alleged to have coordinated efforts to grant a royal honour
and even UK citizenship to Mahfouz. The
King, of course, denies that any quid pro Qatario
took place... and even if it did, it was legal.
Legal, but as one of the Nine
Eleven victims remarked, above (Attachment Twenty Three),
“blood money.”
The public affinity gap between Queen
and posterity (Anne, who did a lot of the hard work of the services excepted)
was, so it would seem, enormous.
Timeline (non-QE2) |
September 17th – September 23rd, 2022 |
|
Saturday, September 17, 2022 Dow: 32,151.71 |
QE2 security reports that the wait-in-line time is down to fourteen
hours as thousands of mourness mass to say goodbye
to the monarch. The funeral is set for
Monday at 11AM GMT (6 AM EST). In the aftermath of the
political “stunts” being pulled by Govs. Ron deSantis (R-Fl)... raiding the
plague settlement coffers to fly migrants to ritzy Martha’s Vinyard... and Greg Abbott (R-Tx)... busing them to Veep Kamala Harris’ house in Washington, the Mayor of El
Paso makes his case for extreme measures.
4,000 refugees from Venezuela alone have descended upon the West Texas
town, half of whom are unsponsored.
Without jobs or homes or places in which to hold them, many are
sleeping on the streets – terrifying residents. Also terrified are residents
of Puerto Rico, where Hurricane Fiona is taking aim at... the island’s power
grid still shaky five years after Maria stirred the pot. And on the other side of the continent,
Typhoon Merbok blasts the coast of Alaska. Weatherpersons call the storms “Historic!” |
|
Sunday, September 18th, 2022 Dow: Closed |
It’s POW/MIA Day. Also National Cheeseburger Day. Thousands of British security police mobilizing to protect five
hundred world leaders from, as the pundits put it, “protesters, pickpockets
and terrorists.” Some of the more
amiable pickpockets are the merchers who are
cashing in on thousands of Queenly pilgrims.
Hotels raise rates. The bobbies
warn people to stop coming to stand in the line, but they keep coming. Russians keep going... in
reverse. But in revenge for Ukrainian
military victors, Bad Vlad carpet bombs more civilian targets, including the
enemy’s second largest nuclear plant, raising more cries of nuclear
terror. So far, 34,000 war crimes have
been reported with more emerging as more bodies are dug up out of fields and
basements in liberated towns. After a two
year plague hiatus... and despite the power pinch caused by Angry
Russians, Germany resumes celebrating Oktoberfest. |
|
Monday, September 19th, 2022 Dow: 31.019.68 |
The Queen’s funeral begins early in the morning, even earlier American
time. Prince Harry is forbidden to
wear his military uniform but comes anyway, as do many thousands while an
estimated four billion watch the services on television. The Archbishop of Canterbury charges: “Go
forth, Christian sould.” King Charles cries. The piper who woke QE2 up mornings plays
“Sleep, Dearie, Sleep” and Queenly homilies are recalled such as the advice:
“Look up. Look out. Say less.
Do more.” And then, as mourners follow
the casket out of Westminster, the talkers on TV networks resume their
talking during “the long walk”... the three mile
procession from Westminster to Windsor.
Ian Pannell predicts “a void”.
Robin Roberts predicts that Charles will remain under the thumb of
Princess Anne, who has done most of the heavy lifting over the past week; he
leaves an inspirational note in an envelope placed atop the coffin (down
which a spider crawls). Everybody
sings: “God Save the King”. An ocean away, Puerto Rico is
devastated by Fiona – eighty percent of residents without power. And, although the services have been
remarkably free of crime and violence (perhaps due to the massive security
mobilization), the CEO of Beyond Meat is accused of biting a man on the nose. |
|
Tuesday,
September 20th, 2022 Dow: 30,706.23 |
Flags in the U.K. go back to full staff and the world goes back to
doing what it does... most, if not always best... making money. Ford announces a price increase, blaming
the supply chain. Russia officially annexes its
captured Ukrainian territory – quickly, it is said, before the people who
live there reclaim it. Iran, being
Iran, executes a woman for improper dress.
And the One Six Inquisition resumes with Judge Dearie (referred to as
Judge Drearie by some mediums) disappointing his
patron by telling Team Trump to “put up or shut up”. Doctors report that plague
infections and deaths are down but STDs are way, way up. Some of them blame the pandemic related
quarantines. |
|
Wednesday,
September 21st, 2022 Dow: 30,183.78 |
It’s World Alzheimer’s
Day. And the world is already
beginning to forget QE2 and get back to its business... which is, well, business. For decadent Westerners, the business
means money – who gains and who loses.
As expected, the Federal Reserve raises interest rates: gladdening
some, maddening others. For Mad Vlad Putin, the business means
doubling down on the Ukraine War; despite certainty that his move to call up
reserves and impose a sort of draft upon the population, the dictator pulls
the pin anyway – raising an army of 300,000 (including prisoners seeking
pardons and conscripted protesters) to fight the Ukes. Experts predict that they’ll be cannon
fodder for Zelenskyy’s experienced and desperate
troops. For President Joe, a trip to New York Cit y where he appears before the United Nations and
tells the assembled diplomats that Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons
against the Ukes is “irresponsible”. |
|
Thursday,
September 22nd, 2022 Dow:
30,076,68 |
It’s the first day of Fall.
First frost of fall manifests in Manitoba, and in Minnesota. Fiona spins away to the north, leaving
another massive Puerto Rican cleanup behind. Putin’s threats of escalation
sends gas prices rising again after months of
decline... just in time for winter and the heating fuel season. Fool season marches on as former President
Trump says that a President can declassify classified documents “just by
thinking about them.” When the courts
find that unlikely, Djonald Undeterred pivots and
says that the FBI planted fake, incriminating documents upon the real ones. Iran’s “morality police”,
facing accusations of murder, double down on illegal and irresponsible
fashion, with the result being that the mob follows Russians out in the
street to loot and riot. |
|
Friday,
September 23rd, 2022 Dow: 29,590.41 |
Fiona batters Bermuda and then heads due north, making another
landfall in the Canadian maratimes. Down in the Caribbean another storm, soon
confirmed to be Ian (even the hurricans have
British names in honor of the Queen) takes a path that might result in a
direct hit on Tampa. Experts predict a “mild”
recession with unemployment rising from 3.7% to 4.4% meaning that, with
Congress refusing to extend the plague benefits, a prognosis of hunger,
homelessness and a Republican sweep in the midterms. Early estimates are that pandemic fraud
raked in 45B in fake unemployment claims. Russia begins its own
elections – or, at least, imposes them on occupied Ukraine with a referendum
on being annxed by Putin or not. Russian troops go door to door to get out
the vote with machine gun totin’ soldiers following
to separate out the naughty and the nice. |
|
@ |
|
|
CATEGORY |
VALUE |
BASE |
RESULTS |
SCORE |
OUR SOURCES and COMMENTS |
|
|||||||||
INCOME |
(24%) |
6/17/13 & 1/1/22 |
LAST |
CHANGE |
NEXT |
9/3/22 |
9/17/22 |
SOURCE |
|
||||||
Wages (hrly. Per cap) |
9% |
1350 points |
9/17/22 |
+0.44% |
10/22 |
1,381.63 |
1,381.63 |
|
|||||||
Median Inc. (yearly) |
4% |
600 |
9/17/22 |
+0.03% |
10/1/22 |
603.79 |
603.79 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 36,010 020 030 |
|
||||||
Unempl. (BLS – in mi) |
4% |
600 |
9/17/22 |
-5.41% |
10/22 |
616.25 |
616.25 |
|
|||||||
Official (DC – in mi) |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
-0.14% |
10/1/22 |
315.86 |
315.86 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 5,620
6.015 014.911 |
|
||||||
Unofficl. (DC – in mi) |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
+0.03% |
10/1/22 |
286.22 |
286.22 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 11,829 519
514 |
|
||||||
Workforce Particip. Number Percent |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
+0.007% -0.007% |
10/1/22 |
299.72 |
299.72 |
In 158,356 756 767 Out 100,157 99.444 447 Total: 258,513 |
|
||||||
WP % (ycharts)* |
1% |
150 |
9/17/22 |
+0.48% |
9/17/22 |
150.48 |
150.48 |
https://ycharts.com/indicators/labor_force_participation_rate 62.40 |
|
||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
15% |
|
|
|
||||||||||||
Total Inflation |
7% |
1050 |
8/22 |
nc |
10/1/22 |
1010.64 |
1010.64 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.1 |
|
||||||
Food |
2% |
300 |
8/22 |
+1.1% |
10/1/22 |
289.34 |
286.15 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.8 |
|
||||||
Gasoline |
2% |
300 |
8/22 |
-7.7% |
10/1/22 |
221.46 |
238.50 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm -10.6 |
|
||||||
Medical Costs |
2% |
300 |
8/22 |
+0.4% |
10/1/22 |
293.45 |
292.28 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm
+0.4 0.8 |
|
||||||
Shelter |
2% |
300 |
8/22 |
+0.5% |
10/1/22 |
293.46 |
291.99 |
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm +0.5.7 |
|
||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
WEALTH |
6% |
|
|
|
|||||||||||
Dow Jones Index |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
-2.66% |
10/1/22 |
267.85 |
267.85 |
https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/index/ 32,151.71 30,822.42 |
|
||||||
Home (Sales) (Valuation) |
1% 1% |
150 150 |
9/17/22 |
-6.05% -2.93% |
10/1/22 |
154.06 309.58 |
154.06 309.58 |
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics Sales (M): 4.81 4.80 Valuations (K): 403.8
389.5 |
|
||||||
Debt (Personal) |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
+0.11% |
10/1/22 |
290.28 |
290.28 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 70,962 913
985 |
|
||||||
|
|||||||||||||||
NATIONAL |
(10%) |
|
|
|
|||||||||||
Revenue (trilns.) |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
+0.18% |
10/1/22 |
325.77 |
325.77 |
debtclock.org/ 4,456
763 827 |
|
||||||
Expenditures (tr.) |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
+0.30% |
10/1/22 |
332.14 |
332.14 |
debtclock.org/ 5,903
6019 6003 |
|
||||||
National Debt tr.) |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
+0.05% |
10/1/22 |
441.43 |
441.43 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 30,879 894
909 |
|
||||||
Aggregate Debt (tr.) |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
+0.16% |
10/1/22 |
436.83 |
436.83 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 92,572 716
861 |
|
||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||
GLOBAL |
(5%) |
|
|
|
|||||||||||
Foreign Debt (tr.) |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
+0.03% |
10/1/22 |
325.58 |
325.58 |
http://www.usdebtclock.org/ 7,413 412 410 |
|
||||||
Exports (in billions) |
1% |
150 |
9/17/22 |
+1.60% |
9/22 |
163.46 |
163.46 |
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 260.0 259.3 |
|
||||||
Imports (bl.) |
1% |
150 |
9/17/22 |
+0.29% |
9/22 |
153.99 |
153.99 |
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 340.4
329.9 |
|
||||||
Trade Deficit (bl.) |
1% |
150 |
9/17/22 |
-7.41% |
9/22 |
210.77 |
210.77 |
https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/index.html 79.6 70,6 |
|
||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
SOCIAL INDICES
(40%) |
|
|
|
||||||||||||
ACTS of MAN |
12% |
|
|
|
|||||||||||
World Affairs |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
-1.5% |
10/1/22 |
458.53 |
458.53 |
QE2 funeral set for 6AM EST on Tuesday. The coffin watching line drops to 14 hours,
but starts rising again. London
bobbies prepare for outbreaks of protest and pickpocketing. |
|
||||||
Terrorism |
2% |
300 |
9/17/22 |
-0.2% |
10/1/22 |
296.01 |
296.01 |
U.S. trades Afghan druglord for
Taliban hostage. Russians stop
shelling Zaporizhazha, but rain missiles on another
nuke plant. Iran’s “morality police”
kill woman for wearing headscarf wrong way.
Everybody riots!... Iranians burn hijabs, Russians burn Russian flags. |
|
||||||
Politics |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
+0.2% |
10/1/22 |
467.38 |
467.38 |
NY AyGee Leticia James calls Trumpish transactions “art of the steal.” Gini Thomas agrees to testify before One
Six Inquisitors. U.N. begins hearings
on Putin’s War but failure already assured due to Russian veto power. What will China do? |
|
||||||
Economics |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
+0.1% |
10/1/22 |
438.39 |
438.39 |
Fed raises interest rates 0.75%.
Ford raises prices, blames supply chain. Inflation causing decline in youth
sports. Target to hire 100K holiday
temps; WalMart only 40K, down from 2021. DOJ investigates Google as a monopoly
(well, 92% of one). FTC investigates
Amazon’s gobbling of iRobot. |
|
||||||
Crime |
1% |
150 |
9/17/22 |
-0.7% |
10/1/22 |
285.89 |
285.89 |
Dozens arrested (Brett Favre investigated) in $250M Miss. child
nutrition scam. Kidnapped Hawaiian
girl rescued, abductor nabbed.
Washington monument defaced with red paint. |
|
||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||
ACTS of GOD |
(6%) |
|
|
|
|||||||||||
Environment/Weather |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
+0.2% |
10/1/22 |
440.27 |
440.27 |
As Fiona heads towards Eastern Canada, typhoon Merbok pounds Alaska’s West Coast. New tropical storm gets named... Ian... and
heads for Tampa. |
|
||||||
Disasters |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
-0.4% |
10/1/22 |
440.94 |
440.94 |
7.6 EQ shakes Puerto Vallarta, Mexico followed by 6.8 aftershock
and mad typhoon bedevils Philippines.
Fentanyl OD survivor complains: “Nobody knows what they’re taking
anymore.” Newark to Brazil flight
catches fire but lands safely. |
|
||||||
LIFESTYLE/JUSTICE INDEX |
(15%) |
|
|
||||||||||||
Science, Tech, Educ. |
4% |
600 |
9/17/22 |
-0.3% |
10/1/22 |
616.66 |
616.66 |
Japanese invent Jetsonistic hover bike
that retails for only $777K. But
American flying car company Kittyhawk goes broke. Food scientists invent purple tomatoes,
said to be healthier. |
|
||||||
Equality (econ/social) |
4% |
600 |
9/17/22 |
-0.1% |
10/1/22 |
590.42 |
590.42 |
Alex Jones exasperated – refuses to apologize for calling Sandy
Hook a hoax and parents hoaxers. Climate warriors fight to ban natural gas
from furnaces and stoves... Now! Let
the bastards freeze in the dark! |
|
||||||
Health |
4% |
600 |
9/17/22 |
-0.1% |
10/1/22 |
486.96 |
486.96 |
To accompany plague, Monkeypox and flu season, doctors now say
that STD cases are out of control. Anxious
doctors say that everybody under 65 should get anxiety screening. Lemons for Leukemia raises money for bone
marrow donors. |
|
||||||
Freedom and Justice |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
-0.2% |
10/1/22 |
450.39 |
450.39 |
Border states groaning under refugee crisis – 4,000 Venezuelans
alone fleeing Communism in 2022.
Lawyers mobilize to address busing stunts. Boeing settles to air crash lawsuits. Angry judge raises sentence on
“manipulative” fake kidnap victim Sherri Papini
from 8 to 18 months. California
legalizes human composting. |
|
||||||
MISCELLANEOUS
and TRANSIENT INDEX |
(7%) |
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
Cultural incidents |
3% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
+0.1% |
10/1/22 |
465.62 |
465.62 |
Aaron Judge slams 60th homer, ties Babe Ruth. Vegas Aces beat Conn. to take WNBA
title. Celtics suspend Coach Udoka for having sex... with a female! Sir Elton
plays the White House and President Joe gives him a medal. Failing Hollywood trying to squeeze money
out of recycling old favorites like “Avatar” (One) and “The Bodyguard”. RIP Hollywood villain Henry Silva, base
thief Maury Wills |
|
||||||
Misc. incidents |
4% |
450 |
9/17/22 |
+0.1% |
10/1/22 |
461.44 |
461.44 |
“Beyond Meat” CEO bites man on the
nose. On the Continent, Germans prepare
for resumption of Oktoberfest after a two year
plague hiatus. |
|
||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||
The Don Jones
Index for the week of September 17th through September 23rd,
2022 was DOWN 6.76 points
The Don Jones Index is sponsored by the Coalition for a New
Consensus: retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate Jack
“Catfish” Parnell, Chairman; Brian Doohan,
Administrator. The CNC denies,
emphatically, allegations that the organization, as well as any of its officers
(including former Congressman Parnell, environmentalist/America-Firster Austin
Tillerman and cosmetics CEO Rayna Finch) and references to Parnell’s works,
“Entropy and Renaissance” and “The Coming Kill-Off” are fictitious or, at best,
mere pawns in the web-serial “Black Helicopters” – and promise swift, effective
legal action against parties promulgating this and/or other such slanders.
Comments, complaints, donations
(especially SUPERPAC donations) always welcome at feedme@generisis.com or: speak@donjonesindex.com.
ATTACHMENT ONE – from the Guardian U.K.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II’S FUNERAL: TIMELINE OF DAY’S KEY
MOMENTS
A guide to proceedings of first state funeral since Winston Churchill’s
in 1965
By Tobi Thomas Mon 19 Sep 2022 11.38 EDT
The
first UK state funeral since Winston Churchill’s in 1965 will take place on
bank holiday Monday for Queen Elizabeth II. Here
is a guide of what will happen at key moments throughout the day.
6.30am
(all times BST) – The Queen’s lying in state ended
The
Queen’s lying in state, in which her closed coffin has been placed on view to the
public at Westminster Hall since Wednesday, came to an end in the early hours
of Monday morning. An estimated 300,000 people queued to pay their respects,
with the wait time reaching an estimated 17 hours.
8am –
Westminster Abbey opened for the congregation
The
abbey opened to the congregation attending the Queen’s funeral. The event,
which will be one of the largest gatherings of heads of states and royalty the
UK has hosted in decades, will be attended by European royal families and world
leaders.
As
the abbey opened, the King’s Guard trooped through the gates of the building,
with two soldiers stationed at the metal gates awaiting the start of the
proceedings.
At
about 9:30am, Westminster Abbey’s tenor bell started to toll once every minute
96 times in the run-up to the funeral service, marking every year of the
Queen’s life.
10.30am
– The Queen’s coffin is carried by gun carriage to the abbey
The
coffin was carried on the state funeral gun carriage from Westminster Hall to
the abbey, towed by 142 sailors from the Royal Navy. The tradition dates to the
funeral of Queen Victoria in 1901.
Shortly
before, the King arrived at the Palace of Westminster after driving the short
distance from Buckingham Palace.
10.44am
– The royal family followed the coffin into the abbey
King
Charles III, joined by the royal family as well as members of the household,
followed the coffin as it made its journey from Westminster Hall to Westminster
Abbey, via gun carriage.
The
coffin was draped in the royal standard, and carries the imperial state crown
and a wreath of flowers containing plants from the gardens of Buckingham
Palace, Clarence House and Highgrove House.
The
procession was also led by 299 pipers and drummers of Scottish and Irish
Regiments, the Brigade of Gurkhas and RAF.
10.52am
– The procession arrives at Westminster Abbey
The
procession carrying the Queen’s coffin has arrived at the West Gate of
Westminster Abbey.
The
bearer party –comprising members of the Queen’s guard – have carried the coffin
from the gun carriage and into the funeral service.
The
procession from Westminster Hall took about eight minutes, and as the coffin entered
the abbey, the choir sang the Sentences, lines from the Bible verse Revelation
14:13, set to music by William Croft. The lines have been used at every state
funeral since the 18th century.
11am
– The service begins
The service, which is being led by the dean
of Westminster, Dr David Hoyle, has commenced.
The
First Lesson was read by Patricia Scotland, the secretary general of the
Commonwealth. The Lesson is taken from Corinthians 15.
The
first hymn – The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, is Ended –
was written by John Ellerton.
The
prime minister of the UK, Liz Truss, read the second lesson, from John 14.
The
second hymn – The Lord’s My Shepherd – was sung to the Crimond
tune.
The
sermon, delivered by the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby,
describing the Queen as having been “joyful, present to so many, touching a
multitude of lives”.
After
Welby’s sermon, the choir sang My Soul, there is a
country by Hubert Parry.
Subsequently,
a series of church leaders offered prayers.
The
Church of Scotland’s Reverend Dr Iain Greenshields begins by offering thanks
for the Queen’s “long life and reign” and her “gifts of wisdom, diligence and
service”.
The
archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, offered thanks for the Queen’s
“unswerving devotion to the gospel”.
The
leader of the Roman Catholic church in England and Wales, Cardinal Vincent
Nichols, gave thanks for “the rich bonds of unity and mutual support she
sustained”.
The
congregation then sang the third hymn, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, which
followed the Lord’s Prayer.
Welby has now given the
commendation, a prayer that entrusts the soul of the deceased to God.
11.55am
– The Last Post sounded
The
Last Post played, followed by a two-minute silence.
Noon
– The state funeral service came to an end
The
national anthem has been sung, bringing the state funeral service to a close. The
coffin is brought to the state gun carriage.
12.15pm
– Coffin carried to Wellington Arch
At
the close of the funeral, the sovereign’s piper and the late Queen’s coffin was
carried from Westminster Abbey and placed on the state gun carriage, from where
it began the journey to St George’s chapel in Windsor.
The
procession, following the coffin and led by the King, was made up of several
groups, with each accompanied by a service band. These groups included
representatives from the NHS and members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
as well as detachments from the armed forces of the Commonwealth.
Guns
were fired in Hyde Park by the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery every minute
during the procession, while Big Ben tolled every minute.
The
route of the procession included moving past the Cenotaph, Horse Guards Parade
and the Mall, continuing on to Buckingham palace.
1.30pm
– The coffin was placed in the state hearse at Wellington Arch
The
procession arrived at Wellington Arch, with the bearer party transferring the
coffin to the hearse before the car left for Windsor. There was a royal salute
and the national anthem was played.
The
King’s Guard turned out in the forecourt of the palace to give a salute to the
coffin at the Queen Victoria Monument.
3pm –
The state hearse reaches Windsor
The
hearse reached Shaw Farm Gate in Albert Road, Windsor, to join a funeral
procession already formed and ready to head up Long Walk to Windsor Castle.
Thousands
of people gathered in crowds to watch the journey from London.
Shortly before its arrival, the royal standard was raised above Windsor Castle,
signifying that King Charles III had arrived at the residence ahead of the late
Queen’s committal service.
Members
of the armed services joined police in standing guard along the route.
As
the state hearse reached Shaw Farm Gate, it joined the procession to make its
way up the Long Walk to Windsor Castle.
The
procession, made up of the Household Cavalry and members of the Grenadier
Guards, will be joined by the King and other members of the royal family in the
castle’s quadrangle.
During
this time the minute gun will be fired every minute, and five seconds later the
Sebastopol Bell.
As
the procession has approaches the Cambridge gate, bagpipes played the Skye Boat
Song.
4pm
The
King, accompanied by other members of the royal family, joined the procession
at the Quadrangle in the castle grounds, with members of the royal household
being positioned at the rear of the coffin.
King
Charles, the Princess Royal, the Duke of York, the Earl of Wessex, the Prince
of Wales and the Duke of Sussex were among those who met the procession at the
Quadrangle, as it moved towards Engine Court.
Minute
guns were fired by the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery from a position on
the East Lawn as the coffin headed in the direction of the West Steps of St
George’s Chapel.
The
Castle’s Sebastopol and Curfew Tower bells also tolled as the state hearse
continued its journey.
Then,
the procession reached the west steps of St George’s chapel at Windsor Castle. The bearer party lifted
the coffin from the hearse and carried it into the chapel before the committal
service.
4:20pm
– The committal service begins
The
televised committal service began, attended by about 800 guests. The service
was conducted by the dean of Windsor, David Conner, with a blessing from the
archbishop of Canterbury.
The
service was opened by the choir singing Psalm 121, followed by the dean giving
the bidding.
The
late Queen’s three domestic chaplains from Sandringham, Balmoral Castle and
Windsor Great Park gave prayers.
4:50pm
– Queen’s coffin lowered into royal vault
“After
the service, the Queen’s coffin was lowered into the royal vault as the dean
read a psalm and a commendation. At the same time, the Queen’s piper played a
lament.”
7.30pm
A
private burial service conducted by the dean of Windsor, attended just by the
King and the royal family. The Queen’s coffin will be laid to rest in George VI
memorial chapel in St George’s chapel, alongside Prince Philip and her parents,
King George VI and the Queen Mother.
ATTACHMENT TWO – From archbishopofcanterbury.org
THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY’S SERMON FOR THE STATE FUNERAL OF HER
MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH II
19/09/2022
1 Corinthians 15:20-26, 53 – End
Psalm 42:1-7
John 14:1-6
Come Holy Spirit, fill us with the
balm of your healing love. Amen.
The pattern for many leaders is to
be exalted in life and forgotten after death. The pattern for all who
serve God – famous or obscure, respected or ignored – is that death is the door
to glory.
Her Late Majesty famously declared
on a 21st birthday broadcast that her whole life would be dedicated to
serving the Nation and Commonwealth.
Rarely has such a promise been so
well kept! Few leaders receive the outpouring of love that we have seen.
Jesus – who in our reading does
not tell his disciples how to follow, but who to follow – said: “I am the way,
the truth and the life”. Her Late Majesty’s example was not set through her
position or her ambition, but through whom she followed. I know His Majesty
shares the same faith and hope in Jesus Christ as his mother; the same
sense of service and duty.
In 1953 the Queen began her
Coronation with silent prayer, just there at the High Altar. Her allegiance
to God was given before any person gave allegiance to her. Her service to so
many people in this nation, the Commonwealth and the world, had its
foundation in her following Christ – God himself – who said that he “came
not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for
many.” 1
People of
loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders of loving service are
still rarer. But in all cases
those who serve will be loved and remembered when those who cling to
power and privileges are long forgotten.
The grief of this day – felt not
only by the late Queen’s family but all round the nation, Commonwealth and
the world – arises from her abundant life and loving service, now gone
from us.
She was joyful, present to so many,
touching a multitude of lives.
We pray especially for all her
family, grieving as every family at a funeral - including so many families
round the world who have themselves lost someone recently - but in this
family’s case doing so in the brightest spotlight.
May God heal their sorrow, may the
gap left in their lives be marked with memories of joy and life.
Her Late Majesty’s broadcast
during Covid lockdown ended with: “We will meet
again”, words of hope from a song of Vera Lynn. Christian hope means certain
expectation of something not yet seen.
Christ rose from the dead and
offers life to all, abundant life now and life with God in eternity.
As the Christmas carol says “where
meek souls will receive him, still the dear Christ enters in.” 2
We will all face the merciful
judgement of God: we can all share the Queen’s hope which in life and
death inspired her servant leadership.
Service in life, hope in death.
All who follow the Queen’s example, and inspiration of trust and faith in
God, can with her say: “We will meet again.”
1 Matthew 20:28, NRSV
2 O Little Town of Bethlehem
ATTACHMENT THREE – from Vanguard
QUEEN ELIZABETH’S FUNERAL: RUSSIA, BELARUS, MYANMAR, SYRIA, VENEZUELA,
AFGHANISTAN NOT INVITED
September 19, 2022
About six countries were
not invited to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral today, Monday. They are Russia,
Belarus, Myanmar, Syria, Venezuela or Taliban-ruled Afghanistan.
The Sky News gave
the reason that UK does not have diplomatic relations with Syria or Venezuela,
while the political situation in Afghanistan since the Taliban swept to power a
year ago means no representative has been invited from Kabul.
However, Iran, North
Korea and Nicaragua have been invited only at an ambassadorial level.
Attendance is by invitation only.
As they did as the
Queen’s body travelled from Balmoral to Edinburgh, thousands are expected to
line the funeral cortege route and millions around the world will watch at home
on TV.
Westminster Abbey
can hold up to 2,200 people. On the day of the funeral, world leaders,
politicians, public figures and those who worked with the Queen, as well as
monarchs from other countries, will join members of the Royal Family to pay
their respects.
The Queen’s four
children – King Charles III, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward –
will be present, as will Camilla, the Queen Consort, and the monarch’s
grandchildren – Princes William and Harry, Peter Phillips and Zara Tindall,
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, and Lady Louise Windsor and James, Viscount
Severn.
Spouses of all close
family are expected to be present too, including Catherine, the Princess of
Wales, and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
Prime Minister Liz
Truss, Labour leader Keir Starmer
and other UK politicians will also attend.
Members of Europe’s
royal families, from countries including Spain, the Netherlands, Monaco,
Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and Greece, are likely to fly to London for the
funeral, and about 500 foreign dignitaries are also expected to attend.
US President Joe
Biden and his wife, First Lady Jill Biden, were among the first to say they
would be there, and French President Emmanuel Macron has also confirmed his
attendance.
It is understood all
holders of the Victoria Cross or George Cross are able to attend and nearly 200
key workers and volunteers crutinize in the Queen’s
Birthday Honours list have also been invited.
ATTACHMENT FOUR – from GUK
SPIDER
CAMEO AND TINDALL’S MEDALS – SOCIAL MEDIA REACTS TO QUIRKY SIDE OF FUNERAL
COVERAGE
Twitter users were less reverent than those at the
Queen’s funeral, and had plenty of jokes and questions as the ceremony unfolded
By Martin
Belam Mon 19 Sep 2022 08.27 EDT
Not
all of the nation was gripped to the television in reverential silence during the state funeral of Queen
Elizabeth II, as the conversations
about the event on social media inevitably turned to observations about some of
the quirkier elements.
Even
before the event began some suggested it might be time for the royal family to
give a little back to the world of football, after all the tributes paid at
sporting events in the previous 10 days.
Much
has been made that over her long reign the Queen received 15 prime ministers,
four of them in the past six years alone thanks to Conservative party
leadership changes. Some suggested the sight of the nation’s former PMs didn’t
indicate there had been an improvement over time.
There
were some expressions of concern about Prince George and Princess Charlotte
having roles in such a public ceremony at a young age, and comparisons with the
appearance of Prince William and Prince Harry at their own mother’s funeral in
1997. However, there was a theory as to why Prince Louis was occupied elsewhere
on the day his great-grandmother was buried.
Louis
had, after all, provided one of the defining images of the Queen’s platinum
jubilee earlier in the year.
During
the service in Westminster Abbey itself, you wouldn’t have wished “dropping
your notes right next to the Queen’s coffin in front of a television audience
projected to be billions” on your worst enemy.
The
arachnid cameo did not go unnoticed.
In
fact, the spider benefited from better television coverage than some of the
people participating in the service.
And
at least the spider was actually there.
People
were disappointed that the attenders weren’t getting onboard with the spirit of
International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which has fallen on 19 September every
year since it was founded in 1995.
The
television captions weren’t always kind to the prime minister, Liz Truss, either.
The
appearance of Liz Truss also flummoxed Channel Nine’s Peter Overton and Tracy
Grimshaw in Australia, who suggested on live television that she might be “a
minor royal” after failing to identify her.
ATTACHMENT FIVE – from Town and Country (Attachment Five…
re-attached from last week’s DJI)
WHO’S ATTENDING QUEEN ELIZABETH’S FUNERAL?
Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral will take place on
Monday, September 19, 2022. Buckingham Palace has released specific details about the schedule of the funeral—which includes the
broad categories of people invited: heads of state, overseas government
representatives, foreign royal families, governors general, and realm prime
ministers. (More here on all the royals confirmed to attend the Queen’s funeral.) Invitations to the
funeral were offered to the head of state from each country, along with their
spouse or partner.
In addition, the
Palace shared, “Other representatives of the Realms and the Commonwealth, the
Orders of Chivalry including recipients of the Victoria Cross and George Cross,
Government, Parliament, devolved Parliaments and Assemblies, the Church, and
Her Majesty’s Patronages will form the congregation, along with other public
representatives.”
Ahead of the
funeral, King Charles will host heads of state and official overseas guests at
Buckingham Palace on Sunday. Here’s all
the politicians, world leaders, and others confirmed to attend Queen
Elizabeth’s funeral:
UK
leaders
Prime Minister Liz
Truss, who met with Queen Elizabeth just two days before the monarch died, will be in
attendance, as will the Labour party leader, Sir Keir
Starmer, First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon,
and First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford.
US
presidents
The White House
confirmed that President Joe Biden will attend Queen
Elizabeth’s funeral along with First Lady Jill Biden. Not all former presidents will be able to attend, but
there is speculation that some former, like Barack and Michelle Obama, may
receive private invites.
Commonwealth
leaders
·
Prime
Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia
·
Governor-General
David Hurley of Australia
·
Prime
Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand
·
Prime
Minister Andrew Holness of Jamaica
·
Governor-General
Patrick Allen of Jamaica
·
Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada
·
Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh
·
Prime
Minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea
·
Governor-General
Bob Dadae of Papua New Guinea
·
President
Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa
·
President
Ranil Wickremesinghe of Sri Lanka
·
President
Paula-Mae Weekes of Trinidad and Tobago
·
President
Droupadi Murmu of India
Other
world leaders
·
Taoiseach
(similar to ‘Prime Minister’) Micheál Martin of
Ireland
·
President
Michael D. Higgins of Ireland
·
President
Emmanuel Macron of France
·
President
Alexander Van der Bellen of Austria
·
President
Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany
·
President
Sergio Mattarella of Italy
·
President
Isaac Herzog of Israel
·
President
Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil
·
President
Sauli Niinistö of Finland
·
President
Hage Geingob of Namibia
·
President
Yoon Suk-Yeol of South Korea
·
President
Katalin Novak of Hungary
·
President
Egils Levits of Latvia
·
President
Andrzej Duda of Poland
·
President
Gitanas Nauseda of Lithuania
·
President
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey
·
European
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen
·
European
Council President Charles Michel
Other
attendees
All holders of the
Victoria Cross or George Cross will be able to attend, as will the nearly 200
people recognized at the Queen’s Birthday Honors in June. The birthday honors
recipients “drawn from across the UK were crutinize
for their extraordinary contributions in areas including the response to the
Covid-19 pandemic, people who volunteered in their communities, charity workers
and those who work in healthcare, education and the wider public sector,”
according to a spokesperson for the Prime Minister.
ATTACHMENT SIX – from GUK
A
HANDWRITTEN NOTE, A CROWN AND A WREATH: ITEMS ON QUEEN’S COFFIN AND WHAT THEY
SIGNIFY
From myrtle to the gem-encrusted cross on the orb, there
is a wealth of symbolism behind each object
By Alexandra
Topping Mon 19 Sep 2022 11.28 EDT
1.
Handwritten note
Nestled
among the flowers of the Queen’s funeral wreath was a handwritten card by her son
King Charles III, which read: “In loving and devoted memory, Charles R.”
2.
Flowers
At
King Charles’s request, the wreath on top of the Queen’s coffin contains
flowers and foliage from the royal properties of Buckingham Palace and Clarence
House, in London, and Highgrove House in Gloucestershire. Also
at the King’s request, the wreath was sustainable, and affixed in a nest of
English moss and oak branches.
The
wreath contains myrtle, the ancient symbol of a happy marriage, cut from a
plant that was grown from a sprig of myrtle in the Queen’s wedding bouquet in
1947. It also contains rosemary as a symbol of remembrance and English oak, a
national symbol of strength, in a nod to the Queen’s constancy and steadfast
duty. Other foliage includes pelargoniums, garden roses, autumnal hydrangea,
sedum, dahlias, and scabious.
3.
The imperial state crown
The
late Queen’s sanctified body is represented by the crown, orb and crutin. The crown, representing the sovereign’s power, has
2,868 diamonds, 269 pearls, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds and four rubies. It
contains some of the crown jewels’ most precious gems, including the black
prince’s ruby, the Stuart sapphire, and the Cullinan II diamond. The St
Edward’s sapphire, set in the centre of the topmost
cross, is said to have been worn in a ring by St Edward the Confessor and
discovered in his tomb in 1163. The crown has been damaged previously – during
the transportation of the body of George V, the diamond-encrusted globe which
tops the crown, along with the cross and sapphire it supports – snapped off and rolled into a gutter.
The
Queen wore the crown when she left Westminster Abbey after her coronation in
1953. The monarch wears the crown for state occasions, including the state
opening of parliament.
4.
The orb
The
golden crutin ball created, like the crutin, in 1661, is topped by a gem-encrusted cross. It is
meant to remind the monarch that their power is derived from God.
5.
The crutin
The
crutin was created for the coronation of King Charles
II, and has been used to represent the crown’s power and governance in every
coronation since 1661. In 1910, the Cullinan I diamond was added to the crutin. Weighing 532.2 carats, it is the largest colourless cut diamond in the world. Cullinan I is the biggest stone cut from the magnificent Cullinan
diamond. Discovered in South Africa in 1905, it is the largest uncut diamond
ever found.
6.
The royal standard flag
The
royal standard represents the sovereign and the United Kingdom. The modern
incarnation of the flag has four quarters: England (three lions passant) in the
first and fourth quarters, Scotland (a lion rampant) in the second quarter and
Ireland (a harp) in the third quarter. In Scotland, a different version of the
royal standard is used, with Scottish arms in the first and fourth quarters and
English arms in the second. Wales is not represented, as its special position
as a principality was crutinize by the creation of
the Prince of Wales long before the incorporation of the quarterings for
Scotland and Ireland in the royal arms.
AND ALSO (from GUK, and from last
week’s Lesson, Attachment Nine)...
SPIDER CAMEO
AND TINDALL’S MEDALS – SOCIAL MEDIA REACTS TO QUIRKY SIDE OF FUNERAL COVERAGE
Twitter users were less reverent than those at the
Queen’s funeral, and had plenty of jokes and questions as the ceremony unfolded
By Martin
Belam Mon 19 Sep 2022 08.27 EDT
Not
all of the nation was gripped to the television in reverential silence during the state funeral
of Queen Elizabeth II, as the conversations about the
event on social media inevitably turned to observations about
some of the quirkier elements.
Even
before the event began some suggested it might be time for the royal family to
give a little back to the world of football, after all the tributes paid at
sporting events in the previous 10 days.
Much
has been made that over her long reign the Queen received 15 prime ministers,
four of them in the past six years alone thanks to Conservative party
leadership changes. Some suggested the sight of the nation’s former PMs didn’t
indicate there had been an improvement over time.
There
were some expressions of concern about Prince George and Princess Charlotte
having roles in such a public ceremony at a young age, and comparisons with the
appearance of Prince William and Prince Harry at their own mother’s funeral in
1997. However, there was a theory as to why Prince Louis was occupied elsewhere
on the day his great-grandmother was buried.
Louis
had, after all, provided one of the defining images of the Queen’s platinum
jubilee earlier in the year.
During
the service in Westminster Abbey itself, you wouldn’t have wished “dropping
your notes right next to the Queen’s coffin in front of a television audience
projected to be billions” on your worst enemy.
The
arachnid cameo did not go unnoticed.
In
fact, the spider benefited from better television coverage than some of the
people participating in the service.
And
at least the spider was actually there.
People
were disappointed that the attenders weren’t getting onboard with the spirit of
International Talk Like a Pirate Day, which has fallen on 19 September every
year since it was founded in 1995.
The
television captions weren’t always kind to the prime minister, Liz Truss, either.
The
appearance of Liz Truss also flummoxed Channel Nine’s Peter Overton and Tracy
Grimshaw in Australia, who suggested on live television that she might be “a
minor royal” after failing to identify her.
One
man who caught the eye of social media users was Matthew Magee. Appointed by
the Queen as her assistant private secretary in 2018, at 7ft 2in (2.18m) Magee
notably towered over those around him during the procession.
After
days of odd corporate tweets – Playmobil Queen anybody? – National Rail made a
late bid for glory with the suggestion everyone go down the pub after the
funeral rather than actually get on their trains.
There
was the eternal mystery surrounding some of the more obscure ceremonial aspects
of the day.
Chess
jokes inevitably got another airing.
And
the question came up of why former rugby player and non-military man Mike
Tindall, who is married to the daughter of Princess Anne, now has medals.
The
actual answer is that Tindall was wearing his MBE awarded for his contributions
to rugby, and also medals for the late Queen’s diamond and platinum jubilees.
Would
the Queen have appreciated people making jokes during her funeral? Well, the
royal family often spoke about her sense of humour. At least she
spared us this …
ATTACHMENT SEVEN – From GUK and Sources Noted
‘THE
FINAL FAREWELL’: WHAT THE PAPERS SAID ABOUT THE QUEEN’S FUNERAL
Powerful images dominated the newspaper front pages
after a nation gathered to say goodbye to its longest-serving monarch
By Graham
Russell Mon 19 Sep 2022 22.56 EDT
After
10 days of national mourning, remembrance and no small amount of expectation,
newspapers around the world gave their front pages over to Queen Elizabeth II’s
final journey back to Windsor.
The Guardian’s main image displays the
bearer party taking the Queen’s coffin up the steps into the darkened entrance
of the George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle, above a report from
Caroline Davies on the most intimate part of the day: a family farewell. Other pieces from Jonathan Freedland, Esther Addley and Marina Hyde assess the future, past
and present of the monarchy.
The Mirror chooses a
similar image in a poster front page for its tribute edition, displaying
the cherished items on top of the coffin to full
effect. A subdued headline in small font says simply “… until we meet again”.
The Times again chooses
a wrap front page, showing the coffin entering Westminster Abbey with the
headline: “Carried to her rest”. The back page carries a quote from Hubert
Parry’s From Songs of Farewell: “Leave then thy
foolish ranges, For none can thee secure But one, who never changes, Thy God,
thy life, thy cure.”
The Express uses its wrap
to signal a farewell to the past and a look at the future. The Queen’s coffin
dominates the front page alongside the headline “God rest our Queen”, while a
tearful, saluting King Charles III adorns the
back, with the exclamation: “God save the King”.
The Financial
Times looks
from above at the coffin in the nave of Westminster Abbey and chooses a quote
from Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for
its headline: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders
of loving service are still rarer.”
The Telegraph homes in on a
tender moment for its main image, showing King Charles placing the Company Camp
Colour of the Grenadier Guards on the Queen’s coffin.
“An outpouring of love” is the headline, above Hannah Furness’s five-column
report on the day.
The Sun stays with its
royal purple colouring and is one of few papers to
feature the crowds that gathered for the farewell. Across a picture of the
funeral cortege processing along the Long Walk to Windsor, the upbeat headline
is “We sent her victorious”. The back page of its wrap features the coffin
being lowered into its final resting place.
The Mail opts for image
of the coffin being lowered into the vault at St George’s chapel, Windsor, with
the headline: “Her final journey” for its bumper 120-page edition.
Metro captures King Charles’s cruti expression as he gazes at the flower-strewn hearse on
its arrival at Windsor Castle. The crowds lining the Long Walk form the back
page of its wrap.
The façade carries a historic
note in its headline: “The end of the Elizabethan age” and describes in its
trademark bullet points how Monday’s “spectacular military display” brought
London to a standstill.
The Northern
Echo shows
proceedings in London and opts to use a quote from BBC presenter Kirsty Young
for its headline: “She made history, she was history”.
The National in Scotland gives
its front page to Pipe Major Paul Burns of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, who crutini the end of the Westminster Abbey funeral service
with a powerful rendition of Sleep, Dearie, Sleep on the bagpipes.
The Daily
Record showed
the Queen’s coffin being taken into Windsor Castle, with the headline “Rest in
peace, Queen Elizabeth”.
Further
afield, the timings allowed Australian papers enough time to place their own
poignant tributes on their front pages. Amid debate about whether Charles should be Australia’s head of state, Tuesday’s papers
were united in covering the occasion in subdued tones. The Age (“The final
farewell”) and Sydney Morning Herald (“We’ll meet again”) both
showed the Queen’s coffin being guided into Windsor Castle, while the Herald
Sun and Daily
Telegraph sought
to capture the feeling of readers with their headlines: “Thank you, our Queen”, and “Rest in peace, Ma’am”
respectively.
Adelaide’s Advertiser went with the
headline “Eternal Queen”, and Queensland’s Courier
Mail went
for “Thank you, our Queen”. National paper the Australian calls the late
monarch “Elizabeth the great” and focuses on the grief-stricken expression of
King Charles for its image, with the headline: “We’ll meet again”, perhaps an
echo of Welby’s reference to Vera Lynn’s song, which
the Queen used in a broadcast during the worst of the Covid
pandemic.
ATTACHMENT EIGHT – from GUK
END OF
AN ERA’: HOW THE QUEEN’S FUNERAL WAS SEEN AROUND THE WORLD
From Melbourne to Paris, New York to Delhi, the
solemn events in London resonated around the globe
By Cait
Kelly, Kim Willsher, Adam Gabbatt, Caroline Kimeu, Hannah
Ellis-Petersen, David Smith and Georgina Maka’a Mon 19 Sep 2022 10.24 EDT
Melbourne
As
the doors to Westminster Abbey opened to allow guests to take their seats, across
the other side of the world, Australians sat down in front of their TVs to
watch the historic event.
English
pubs in the central business district of Melbourne were largely empty as they
broadcast the funeral on big screens.
Rick
Tonk, from West Yorkshire, was watching at the
Charles Dickens Tavern with his parents. “We’ll spend some time here just
taking in the atmosphere and we’ll be able to say goodbye,” Tonk
said. “It’s been very solemn, for a lot of people around the world. They’ll be
watching.”
He
said it had been strange to be so far away from home as such a historic event
unfolded, and while the Queen’s death was not a complete shock, it still felt
like it had come out of nowhere.
“It’s
really the turning of a page, the dawning of a new age – just saying goodbye to
the one person who has been our monarch for so long,” Tonk
said.
The
tavern’s owner, John Davie, said the coverage leading up to the funeral had
“watered down” interest in Australia. “The coverage it’s had leading up to
probably the most important day of the lot, it’s probably not done it a
service,” Davie said. “Whereas in the UK people are queueing for days to pay
respects. I think people here are just a little bit burnt out. It’s a lot to
take in.”
The
pubs might have been quiet but Australians across the country – both
monarchists and republicans – tuned in to watch. Some wanted to just “watch the
historical moment” while others crutini at the
ceremony.
“Imagine
having responsibility for the seating plan for this,” tweeted Ebony Bennet, the
deputy director of the Australia Institute.
Earlier
in the day, some churches crutiniz small services so
they did not clash with the funeral.
Priest
Jennifer Furphy, 68, of St Agnes Black Rock, led her
congregation in prayer for the Queen, read out snippets from some of her
Christmas speeches and talked about what her death meant.
“We
talked about how we really wanted to honour her
memory and her Christian faith, and how she had lived a life of service to her
country and the commonwealth,” Furphy said.
“Parishioners here are migrants from England, they have family there and real
connections with the culture. I think it was important to honour
that.”
Furphy said it was a
moment in history she wanted to respect, while also acknowledging that for many
First Nations Australians, the crown and its handover recalled a painful past
of colonialism.
For
many Australians in her generation, especially working women, the Queen was
also a symbol of strength, juggling her role as monarch and mother. “I’ve
always felt the Queen was a good leader, and I’ve always felt it was good to be
led by a woman,” Furphy said. “It’ll be quite
different to have a king now.” Cait
Kelly
Paris
The
French republic has shown remarkable interest in the death and funeral of Queen Elizabeth II over
the last 11 days. Emmanuel Macron paid an emotional and respectful tribute to
the British monarch, saying that for the French she was simply “the” Queen, and tweeted a black and white film of
Elizabeth at the Élysée and with successive
presidents, with the simple message: “Thank you, Your Majesty.” The film began
with the Queen wishing long friendship between the two countries.
TF1,
one of the main French TV channels, broadcast a special edition called L’Adieu covering the entire funeral with
solemn French translation and a British commentator, who admitted singing God
Save the King in the studio when it was sung in Westminster Abbey. The channel
had several reporters along the route of the procession.
The
Paris Metro station George V was temporarily renamed Elizabeth II 1926-2022.
Many
people in France felt the French
reaction to the Queen’s death laid to rest the question that Liz Truss, the UK
prime minister, seemed incapable of answering: is Macron “friend or foe”. Peter
Ricketts, a former British ambassador to Paris, was on French television saying
Truss had made a “serious error”. “It’s time to rectify this and confirm that
we are friends and allies,” he said.
Several
national and local newspapers once again devoted their front pages to the royal
farewell. The headline in Le Parisienwas “Elizabeth
II: the funeral of the century”. The newspaper said: “The whole word looks to
London today where the funeral of the Queen will be held.”
Le
Figaro’s front page had a picture of the coffin and the headline “The Whole
World Gathers in Memory of Elizabeth II”.
French
journalists interviewed people outside the abbey, on the route of the funeral
cortege and in pubs along the route.
It
did not escape commentators’ notice that the funeral cortege came to a halt at
Wellington Arch, a reminder of the Duke of Wellington and his defeat of
Napoleon Bonaparte and the French at Waterloo.
Some
remarked with clear admiration on British phlegm and the ability to queue
patiently for long periods. Kim Willsher
New
York
It
has been almost 250 years since the US announced its independence from the
British monarchy, but in New York City on Monday morning there was plenty to
suggest that some affection remains.
A
mix of American royal family enthusiasts, flag-bearing British tourists and
scurrying local TV journalists filled the Churchill Tavern, a British bar a few
blocks south of the Empire State Building, to watch the Queen’s funeral, the
crowd observing an hour of hushed silence as the monarch was sent on her way.
Despite
the early hour – the Churchill opened at 5.30am – seating was in short supply,
with standing room only as people continued to arrive. Mourners were welcomed
by a lifesize beefeater figurine outside, and a cruti, respectful atmosphere.
“I
don’t think I’ve ever seen the bar quiet for an hour and 10 minutes before,
ever – nor would you ever really want it to be – but there was something quite
surreal about that, and very respectful, and deeply moving, actually,” said
Sinead Naughton, an Irish woman who owns the Churchill with her British
husband.
A
typical midtown Manhattan establishment, with a long wooden bar stretching down
one side and scattered seating opposite, the Churchill is set apart from other
watering holes by its swathe of Queen Elizabeth photos and paintings.
Naughton
said many regular customers were British, and the bar has been open for every
major British event since it opened 11 years ago. Naughton said she felt “we
had to” open for the funeral.
Early
on, there was chatter among the customers, but as the Queen’s coffin was
carried towards Westminster Abbey the bar fell silent. By 6am, when the service
started, there was only the occasional clink of coffee cups from the bar as
staff kept the patrons fuelled.
Some
of those present had dressed for the occasion, including Jean Shafiroff, who was sporting a large black hat. Shafiroff, an American who serves on the board of several
charities, said she had met Prince Harry in 2019 at a charity event in London.
She attended Margaret Thatcher’s funeral in 2013, but she said “the Queen’s
funeral is a harder invitation to procure”.
She
said: “Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth II was a great role model for all
people around the world. Her 70 years of service was extraordinary. We need
more role models such as she.” Adam Gabbatt
Kenya
Queen
Elizabeth II’s funeral on Monday was met by a fairly muted response in Kenya, a
stark contrast to the flurry of reactions that followed news of her death,
which elicited both mourning and anger in the east
African country.
Kenya’s
president, William Ruto, joined other world leaders
in attending the Queen’s funeral, and the service was streamed on major news
networks. But while her sending-off seized the attention of much of the world,
it didn’t garner much national interest. On the streets and online, it was
mostly business as usual.
Britain’s
longest-reigning monarch became Queen in Kenya after she received news of
her father’s death while on royal tour with her husband, Prince Philip. Some
Kenyans remember the Queen’s “fairytale” first visit fondly.
“It’s
the end of an era,” said Paul Ochieng, 49. “We grew up watching the Queen, and
she became Queen here, so there’s a bit of a soft spot for her.”
But
for others, she was a painful reminder of Britain’s brutal colonial past, when
nearly 1.5 million Kenyans were forced into detention camps and subjected to torture
and other atrocities in the 1950s during the British empire’s crackdown on the
Mau Mau – Kenyan freedom fighters who opposed
colonial rule. The violent suppression of the Mau Mau
took place at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, and many of the crimes were
committed in her name. Faced with legal pressure, the UK government agreed, in 2013, to pay £20m pounds to Kenyan torture
victims.
“We
are being gaslit to mourn someone who watched over our collective suffering,”
said Suhayl Omar, 24, a Kenyan researcher with the
Museum of British Colonialism. “The fact that Kenyan leaders saw it fit to
declare national mourning is an indication of the continued cycle of colonial
violence that we continue to face.” Caroline
Kimeu
India
Just
as response to the death of Queen Elizabeth II was muted in India, there was
little commotion around her funeral. Unlike other countries in south Asia that
sent their heads of government to attend the funeral, India’s prime minister,
Narendra Modi, did not attend, and instead the ceremonial head of state,
President Droupadi Murmu,
travelled to the UK. The funeral was not broadcast on any Indian networks and
there were no public screenings.
However,
there were some in India who watched it online from the privacy of their own
homes. Alexander Balakrishnan, 24, a student in Delhi, who was born in the UK
but moved back to India when he was four, said he had always been an avid
watcher of all royal events, from the weddings to jubilees, as it gave him a
sense of connection to where he was born.
“I’ve
been glued to the television for the past 10 days, watching coverage of the
queue and all the people sharing their memories of the Queen,” said
Balakrishnan. ‘“I thought the funeral was very moving and simple, which I guess
is how she wanted it. There was a sense of finality; you really felt that this
was the last goodbye. It was sad but you also know that she lived this great,
full life.”
Balakrishnan
said the British monarchy remained a divisive institution in India. “I think
50% of people see the royal family as just a symbol of the empire; they think
we are done with them, there’s no patriotism or connection left to them in
India. The other 50% see them as ultra-celebrities. So
some people here are mourning the Queen as the most famous person in the
world.”
The
muted response to the Queen’s funeral in India was in part due to this complex
legacy, said Balakrishnan, but he believed it also had more cultural factors.
“I think one of the reasons there has been so
little response to the funeral here is because people in India are so used to
getting funerals done so quickly,” he said. “It’s either the same day or the
next day, so this idea that it’s 10 days later is hard for people to relate
to.”
Yasmin
Kaura, 43, a pilates
teacher in Delhi, was among those who had been moved by the Queen’s death and
who watched the funeral privately at home.
“I’ve
felt very sad the last few days when I was watching people pay their respects,”
she said. “But today during the funeral, I felt like everybody was ready to say
goodbye. Even in that cathedral, which usually seems so large and intimidating,
somehow it felt small and cosy, like a very intimate
funeral.”
Kaura added: “Through
wars and pandemics and tabloid nonsense, she never let it provoke her and she
stood strong through it all. And let’s not forget, Queen Elizabeth was always a
woman in a man’s world but she never let it show. It’s hard not to admire that.
There’s not going to be a queen for at least another generation, and I don’t
know if anyone will do it as well as her again.” Hannah
Ellis-Petersen
Jamaica
Bishop Herro Blair, who met the Queen twice, woke up at 3.30am on
Monday to make sure he did not miss a minute of her final send-off.
“I
was touched by the crutinize of the moment,” the
76-year-old said by phone from Kingston. “It didn’t matter who it was from,
whatever country it was, everybody was so dignified. Everybody paid homage;
everybody honoured her the way she should be honoured.
“I could have shed a tear; my eyes were wet
because I was touched, not just by her hands but by her life.”
The
Queen ascended to the throne in 1952, a decade before Jamaica gained
independence from Britain. Many on the Caribbean island now want to sever ties
with the monarchy. Given that Jamaica’s time zone is six hours behind the UK’s,
the state funeral was mainly a draw for early birds and diehard royalists.
Blair,
the president and founder of the Deliverance Evangelistic Association, added:
“I would take a guess that most Jamaicans woke up for it this morning. I
believe that although we are moving to a republic some time sooner or later,
the majority of Jamaicans still, if they do not love the monarchy, love the
Queen.”
However,
Carrol Richard, a spiritual life coach, noted that many associate
the royal family with British colonialism and slavery. She said: “There are a
lot of people who are still disappointed – and disappointment goes to varying
degrees of anger – with what they felt the Queen stood for and what they felt
she should have stood for. People like that would probably not even look at the
funeral.”
Richard,
63, did tune in and was awed by the spectacle. “Royalty is such an amazing
experience. It’s all the pomp and the order and discipline. Everybody is just
extremely controlled and doing their part, but more than that, it’s the
reverence that so many paid to the Queen that really stood out to me.”
Mikael Phillips,
50, an opposition member of parliament who in 2020 filed a motion backing the
removal of the monarch, said: “It was an excellent send-off
for someone who has served all her life as a queen and as a mother. It was done
with precision and fitting for the life that she lived.
“But in my mind I wondered what it would have been like if we had taken
that step towards republicanism, and what does the future hold for us. It’s the
end of an era for us as a country, the Commonwealth and for the British people,
just considering what does the future hold and what approach the new king will
take towards what is ahead of him.” David
Smith
Solomon
Islands
Residents
of Solomon Islands with TV sets paid their final
respects to its head of state, watching events in London and Windsor from the
former British protectorate in the Pacific. While some people went out for
their usual social activities and to enjoy the sea breeze, big screens were set
up at the Anglican church compound in the capital, Honiara, for its members to
pay their respects, while others went to the Pacific casino, a popular venue in
the city.
One
of those watching was Connie Grouse, 67, who was working for the Solomon
Islands Broadcasting Corporation at the time of the islands’ independence in
1978.
“As
someone who grew up when the Queen started to reign, this is very emotional for
me because I sat tonight reminiscing about my younger days, as I have high
respect for the Queen,” she said. “May our Queen Elizabeth, the
longest-reigning monarch, rest in peace. I am very happy that I get to witness
the funeral procession of our head of state and I’m glad that I get to see this
historical moment.”
The
sense of history was also running through other viewers at the casino. Timothy Asi, 40, described the funeral service as a historic moment
and said he felt privileged to watch. “Today is a day that I earmark as a day
that will go down in history for me. I am very proud to say that when I grow
old, I will sit back and gladly tell stories about the funeral to my future
grandchildren.” He said he held the late Queen in high respect as head of the
Commonwealth.
Wasi Vaekesa,
27, said: “Today is a sad day and a historical one for me as well.”
ATTACHMENT NINE (A) – from the Tehran Times
·
·
HOW CHARLES
WILL RULE AFTER QUEEN ELIZABETH’S DEATH
·
Thu September
22, 2022
·
TEHRAN- Queen Elizabeth’s death
follows a record 70-year reign that reflects to a large degree Britain’s
declining global influence, from an empire that once dominated large swathes of
the world to what is now a middle-ranking economy.
She was head of state of the
United Kingdom and 14 other countries, some of whom have considered switching to
a republic. The role of the monarchy outside of the UK is controversial as
countries won their independence with revolutions against British colonial
rule.
That’s not to say the role of the
monarchy inside the UK has not been contentious. The death of Queen Elizabeth,
aged 96, has been met with praise, but her reign was more than often
overshadowed by scandals involving her family.
These varied from public anger
over taxpayer money going to the royal institution to the many cases of
infidelity among the Queen’s family to the series of racism reports.
One of the biggest scandals
involves her second son Prince Andrew, who faced allegations of sexual assault
by a minor. The child accused Andrew and his billionaire friend, Jeffrey
Epstein of keeping her as a slave. In an infamous TV interview, Andrew said
that he had no regrets about his association with Epstein. This statement
received enormous public backlash.
The Queen’s grandson Harry and his
wife Megan launched a devastating attack on the Queen’s family in a TV
interview, which included allegations of racism which linger on today and
Meghan saying she had been pushed to the brink of suicide.
There have been scandals involving
infidelity, including Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister Princess Margaret, allegations
surrounding her husband Prince Philip and her eldest son and heir to the throne
King Charles when he was married to his former wife Diana.
The revelations of King Charles’s
infidelity during his marriage to Diana made him extremely unpopular in the
public eye.
In June expensive celebrations in
the UK marking the Queen’s 70 years on the throne came against the backdrop of
soaring bills for families across the country, with inflation rising to record
levels and energy and fuel prices sky-rocketing.
While ordinary Brits have been
forced to cut their spending, the budget of senior British monarchy members
such as the late Queen and King Charles have continued to rise over the years.
Last year taxpayers forked out
£102.4 million to fund expenses such as travel, the upkeep of palaces and the
family’s official duties that involve shaking hands with the public and flying
abroad. The figure is up more than 17 percent on the previous year with
campaigners saying the family’s finances are indefensible.
The campaign group Republic
denounced the expenses saying “as always, while the rest of us face a
cost-of-living crisis and continued squeezes on public services, the royals
walk off with hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money. We need to
put the monarchy on a proper budgetary footing, just like any other public
body. We need to slash that budget down to below £10m, and only fund
what’s required for the functions of the head of state.”
The accession of King Charles to
the throne has put the spotlight on the 73-year-old’s own finances. Charles
flew between his royal homes at an average cost of £15,000 a time for the
taxpayer. This is despite being seen in public campaigning on environmental
issues.
King Charles has controversial
links to the terrorist al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s family. Reports show
Charles sat down with Bin Laden’s brothers and accepted a one point
two-million-dollar donation. The meeting is said to have taken place shortly
after Bin Laden died.
Charles is reported to have agreed
to the donation toward his charity despite objections from his advisers.
The news came just a month after
King Charles was accused of accepting bags of cash amounting to more than 3
million dollars from a senior Qatari politician.
It is still not clear what exactly
this money was used for; the charity claims the money was passed on to another
account immediately. Reports say the King’s advisor hand counted the cash.
In February police said they had
begun an investigation into another of Charles’s charities after reports
emerged that honors were offered to a Saudi national in return for donations.
King Charles’ accession has also
led to renewed calls for former colonies in the Caribbean to remove the monarch
as their head of state and for Britain to pay slavery reparations. There are
doubts in the region about the role a distant monarch should play in the modern
day.
The chair of the Bahamas National
Reparations Committee, Niambi Hall-Campbell, says “as
the role of the monarchy changes, we expect this can be an opportunity to
advance discussions of reparations for our region.”
European nations forced more than
ten million Africans into the Atlantic slave trade up until the 19th
century. Those who survived the brutal voyage were forced to labor on plantations
in the Caribbean and the Americas.
Jamaican reparations advocate Rosalea Hamilton said an acknowledgment by King Charles at
the Kigali conference about slavery offered “some degree of hope that he will
learn from the history, understand the painful impact that many nations have
endured till today” and address the need for reparations.
Charles make no mention of
reparations in the speech he made at Kigali. The Advocates Network, which
Hamilton coordinates, published an open letter calling for “apologies and
reparations”.
Last year, Jamaica’s government
announced plans to ask Britain for compensation for forcibly transporting an
estimated 600,000 Africans to work on sugar cane and banana plantations that
made British slaveholders extremely rich.
Jamaica has signaled it may soon
follow Barbados in ditching royal rule. A survey showed the majority of
Jamaicans favor ditching the British monarch.
Mikael Phillips, an opposition
member of Jamaica’s parliament, in 2020 filed a motion backing the removal. “I
am hoping as the prime minister had said in one of his expressions, that he
would move faster when there is a new monarch in place,” he said.
To get a picture of how King
Charles will possibly rule, one of the clearest ideas comes from secret memos between
the new king and senior government ministers released in 2015 after a long
legal battle won by the Guardian newspaper.
They revealed the extent of
lobbying King Charles had pursued with the government of then Prime Minister
Tony Blair in 2004 and 2005.
The memos show how he demanded
Blair and other top government figures take immediate action to improve
recourses for the British army fighting in Iraq, 18 months after the UK joined
America and invaded the West Asian country.
Other lobbying attempts revealed
in the memos led to criticism over the heir’s meddling in politics but also
indicate how Charles plans to be more outspoken than Queen Elizabeth.
The same year, another legal
battle paved the way for the release of government papers that showed Charles
has been receiving secret cabinet papers for decades, making him privy to the
government’s inner workings.
At a time of growing inequality,
many are asking why does Britain have a wealthy, controversial royal family?
Over the years the public opinion, especially among the younger generation, has
shifted towards abolishing the undemocratic institution.
AND...
ATTACHMENT NINE (B)
QUEEN’S
DARK LEGACY STILL LIVES ON
By Saeed Azimi, September 10, 2022 – 22:1
TEHRAN— Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving
monarch of the Great Britain, died on Thursday. Since then, British media is
trying to whitewash and rebrand her colonialist efforts in a complex psycho-op
consisting of various stages.
Phase 1:
Whitewashing
The
whitewashing phase began by giving the Queen a semi-divine stature, indicating
that she is resting peacefully in heaven and is looking at her loyalists from
up. It all began with Daily Mail posting an article saying, “A cloud formation
resembling Queen Elizabeth appeared above an English town just an hour above
her death.”
“Leanne
Bethell, who lives in Telford in England’s west Midlands, shared a photo to
Facebook of a cloud formation resembling Queen Elizabeth just an hour after her
death,” Daily Mail wrote in an article.
The article cited
anonymous Facebook users commenting on the picture, saying, “You only see it if
you look for it. Maybe it is a sign or maybe we are just looking for a sign
from above, who really knows.”
“All I do
know is this lady devoted her life to us so with the utmost respect. R.I.P
Queen Elizabeth II,” another user seemingly commented according to the English
media.
“My girly Liz
always watching over us,” another anonymous Facebook user commented as per
Daily Mail.
The article was
published while some photojournalists and experts are on the belief that the
snapshot is heavily edited.
I consulted a
prominent photojournalist and graphic designer. He told me on the condition of
anonymity that the pictures are taken with two different cameras, but he is
almost certain that the pictures are edited.
“The shape of
the leaves cannot remain the same in two different pictures taken by two
different cameras,” he said, adding, “The only thing different in the pictures
that is real is the change of cars.”
The same
article continued, “Rainbows appeared above Buckingham Palace and Windsor
Castle as the death of the Queen was announced,” posting a video and several
images.
Daily Mail
quoted several Twitter users as saying that the rainbow made them cry and
indicated that the Queen has sent them “a sign.”
“The rainbow
at Windsor Castle made me cry. The rainbow Queen sent us a sign,” it wrote,
quoting an anonymous Twitter user.
The article
cited another Twitter user, which is of course anonymous, saying, “A rainbow
breaks out, as the Union Jack is lowered to half-mast at Windsor tonight. A
remarkable image. Farewell, Ma’am.”
The efforts
of the highest-circulated daily in the UK to whitewash the efforts of a
monarch, who was heavily engaged in the colonization of African countries.
According to the statistics published in May 2020, the paper had an average
daily readership of approximately 2.180 million. Obviously, the royal family
was thinking of how to make an instant impact regarding the old monarch’s
death, and what opportunity better than publishing what you desire in the most
read daily across the UK?
Phase 2:
Rebranding colonialism
The Western
mainstream media attempted to imply that the entire world is in mourning for
the 96-year-old monarch, and that she was the “Queen of Hearts,” but this is a
far-fetched reality. Certainly, some leaders, such as Indian Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, have referred to Queen Elizabeth II as a “stalwart of our
times”, France’s Emmanuel Macron referred to her as “The Queen”. But there are
many people in Africa, Argentina, and other countries who are celebrating her
death and jubilantly voicing their happiness on social media.
Ironically,
the BBC spoke of Queen Elizabeth’s “longstanding relations” with Africa. Apparently,
the wording has now changed! Colonialism has turned into “longstanding
relations”!
Posting a
video on BBC News Africa’s Twitter account on Friday, the BBC social media team
captioned it: “We take a look back at Queen Elizabeth II’s longstanding relationship
with Africa.”
If the BBC
wants to coin a new term, that’s fine, but they can’t deviate the truth.
History speaks for itself.
Ironically,
the team decided to warn the audience against exercising freedom of speech,
cautioning in a later tweet, “While we encourage a robust debate on our page,
we would like to ask everyone to be respectful and to follow our community
guidelines. Any posts which do not meet this criteria
will be removed.”
Obadele Kambon,
an associate professor at the Institute of African Studies at the University of
Ghana, told The Africa Report that the decision to honor Queen Elizabeth’s
memory in Ghana betrays the struggles of Africans for freedom from colonial
rule.
“For us to
decide to honor this woman, I would say that in many ways it is a betrayal all
of those Africans who have perished at the hands of the British,” Kambon said. “Per the records of the Brits, I am not
someone who will celebrate her. She was an enemy to Black people.”
Recent
polling from Afrobarometer shows that only 46% of
people surveyed said that former colonial powers are having a positive economic
and political influence on the continent. That is less than China (63%) and the
United States (60%) but more than Russia (35%).
Few deny that
the British colonial empire profited itself by plundering the resources of
other countries, oppressing minorities, and utilizing excessive violence. As a
result, the delight of Africans and Black people is completely justified. After
years of oppression, they were finally given the chance to express
themselves.
“I heard the
chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her
pain be excruciating,” tweeted Uju Anya, an associate
professor of second language acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University. She later
deleted her post.
The tweet,
however, caught the eyes of Jeff Bezos, eccentric billionaire who owns The
Washington Post, saying, “This is someone supposedly working to make the world
better? I don’t think so. Wow.”
Anya later
replied to Bezos, saying, “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain
for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that
massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those
alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep
wishing upon a star.”
Someone
should question Bezos about what he has done to make the world a better place.
Bezos is the billionaire who became 57% richer during the Covid-19 outbreak,
when everyone else was losing money, according to CBS. He enriches himself by
stealing other people’s assets, much like the late British monarch. He is in no
position to talk about “making the world a better place.”
Many people
in England’s former colonial regions, such as Africa, India, and the Caribbean,
are recalling a brutal past and lamenting the monarchy’s role in the slave
trade.
The Economic
Freedom Fighters (EFF) broke bridges with the rest of the world hours after
Queen Elizabeth II’s death was announced, saying that they will not be among those
grieving the British royal. The party, led by Julius Malema, said she would be
remembered for her role in a tragic moment in South Africa, a former British
colony, and Africa’s history of colonialism.
The South
African party further stated that the monarchy serves as a reminder of a
particularly terrible chapter in African history.
“Elizabeth
Windsor, during her lifetime, never acknowledged the crimes that Britain and
her family in particular perpetrated across the world. In fact, she was a proud
flag bearer of the atrocities because during her reign. When the people of
Yemen rose to protest British colonialism, Elizabeth ordered a brutal
suppression of that uprising,” the party said in a statement.
The Red
Berets, as the party’s members are nicknamed, says that South Africa’s
association with Britain has been one of agony, misery, death, despair, and
dehumanization for black people under the leadership of the British royal
dynasty.
“She
willingly benefitted 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,” it added.
In 1913, the
British Empire commanded 23 percent of the world’s population at its peak.
In an opinion
piece in The Washington Post published hours after the 96
year-old monarch’s death, Karen Attiah, a
Ghanaian-American writer and editor, wrote, “Black and brown people around the
world who were subject to horrendous cruelties and economic deprivation under
British colonialism are allowed to have feelings about Queen Elizabeth. After
all, they were her ‘subjects’ too.”
The statement
is totally true. The British public and the mourners of the queen are ignorant
about Britain’s colonial past.
Elizabeth
Graham, a professor at University College London, wrote in The Guardian about
this issue, saying, “I’ve talked to students in various classes over the years
and they say that they do not learn about British colonial history – either in
Asia, Africa or the Americas (other than the US) – in school. I carry out Maya
research in Belize – a British colony until 1981, yet few people in England
know of the existence of Belize. Even when big media companies that create
documentaries contact me to ask about the ancient Maya, they always arrange
trips to Mexico and Guatemala, and are ignorant that a third of the ancient
Maya world lies in Belize.”
She then
questioned a politician’s legitimacy in making informed decisions regardless of
the past experiences, writing, “How can any politician make an informed choice
about, say, immigration to Britain from former colonial territories when they
have learned little about the British empire and its far-reaching impact? In
addition to political and commercial activity, the empire acted as a vehicle
for spreading the idea of the superiority of everything British: language,
literature, schooling, governance, etc. It should not be surprising that one
consequence is that many people in the world choose to come to Britain.”
Social media
users from historically colonized countries such as Pakistan, India,
Bangladesh, Barbados, Ireland, and others have frequently referenced to the
British colonial empire’s history of violence and criminal actions, saying that
these battles made their country hazardous.
As the royal
family announced the queen’s death, anti-monarchy tweeters took a more direct
approach. They emphasized not only the sordid history of British rule, but also
the queen’s role in exacerbating it, whether through history-obscuring
initiatives, direct orders for violent military crackdowns on colonial dissent
in Yemen, or her other efforts to halt the mass secessionist movements that
occurred, and succeeded, during her reign.
Slave trade
atrocities, heartbreaking pictures of poverty and neglect caused by hundreds of
years of exploitation are among the many observations these folks have made
over the years. Even if they have not witnessed these situations, their
grandparents have told them about these heinous insights. All of this cannot be
abandoned overnight in favor of compassion for someone who aided the violent
British colonization.
The inclusion
of an iconic Indian jewel on Elizabeth’s crown (which Camila now wear), as well
as the bleached remnants of empire officials who were murderous bigots, were
never properly addressed, with apologies, trillion-dollar reparations, or even
basic admission.
Never in her
life had the old monarch apologized or even publicly admitted to the
oppression, torture, dehumanization, and expropriation inflicted on people in
the British colonies prior to and after her rise to the throne.
If Britons
are dissatisfied with the monarch now, what do they think their previous
colonial “subjects” have felt during their entire lives? Especially after the
central palace panicked after Prince Harry married Black woman Meghan Markle?
It’s no surprise that inhabitants of Barbados avoided William and Kate on their
March visit, much to the displeasure of royal subjects.
You may
believe that one lady cannot compensate for decades of injustice, oppression,
and severe brutality. I agree with you, but here’s the truth. In that regard, Queen
Elizabeth achieved almost nothing.
She
repeatedly covered up the Commonwealth’s misdeeds with measures like Operation
Legacy, as she lounged in the luxury offered in large part by international
thievery. Does anyone believe that Britain’s following rulers will fare any
better after 70 years of this?
What the
media should do
Now is the
moment for the media to educate the public about the queen’s dark side and
shine light on certain important topics that the royal family has purposefully
covered.
Hours after
the old monarch’s death, notable media personality Jemele
Hill tweeted, “Journalists are tasked with putting legacies into full context,
so it is entirely appropriate to examine the queen and her role in the
devastating impact of continued colonialism.”
She later
said on Twitter, “The Queen as a symbol means many things to many people — and
that is fine. It’s fine to write about, discuss, analyze, critique or
celebrate.”
The Queen’s
record is riddled with enough ambiguity, action, and passivity that it’s easy
to see why people of color could perceive her differently than the devoted
crowds weeping outside Buckingham Palace.
While the
queen’s involvement in colonialism and its disastrous impact on Black people
continues to bite, the current generation has an up-close look at her
connection with her mixed-race daughter-in-law Meghan Markle.
Markle said
that she began having suicide thoughts when pregnant with Archie, her son in
early 2019.
“I just
didn’t want to be alive anymore,” Markle told Oprah Winfrey in one of the most
viewed interviews of all time. “And that was a very clear and real and
frightening constant thought.”
During the
same interview, Prince Harry expressed his dissatisfaction with the family’s lack
of support when British media members and many others hurled racially charged
insults at Markle.
“For us, for
this union and the specifics around her race, there was an opportunity – many
opportunities – for my family to show some public support,” Harry stated.
Earlier, many
people in the United Kingdom and throughout the world urged the queen to deal
with the repercussions from concerns that Buckingham Palace had made no formal
response to George Floyd’s murder and the global Black Lives Matter movement.
It’s
difficult to envision the queen supporting BLM — or anti-racism in general —
when, in her 69 years on the throne, she failed to address the institutional
racism that persists in the British monarchy.
Documents
uncovered in a 2021 probe in The Guardian shed light on Elizabeth’s continuous
exemption from race and gender discrimination legislation.
David Pegg and Rob Evans, investigative journalists, said they
uncovered files at the National Archives as part of an ongoing investigation
into the royal family’s use of an ancient parliamentary procedure called
queen’s consent to surreptitiously influence the wording of British laws.
They describe
how the queen’s chief finance officer once advised government servants that “it
was not, in reality, the habit to assign colored immigrants or foreigners” to
clerical posts in the royal family, despite the fact that they were allowed to
work as domestic staff.
“The
exemption has made it impossible for women or people from ethnic minorities
working for her household to complain to the courts if they believe they have
been discriminated against,” the journalists found.
Buckingham
Palace, surprisingly, did not contest their results. Instead, officials stated
flatly that there is a distinct procedure for hearing discrimination
allegations.
When Antigua
and Barbuda celebrated 40 years of independence from Britain in 2020, calls for
reparations for slavery became bolder. Frustration with the queen and with
colonization became evident.
“I think most
Antiguans would want to replace the queen now,” historian Ivor Ford told BBC
News during the celebration.
Makeda
Mikael, an Antiguan businesswoman, recounted how, as a kid, she was forced to
attend queen-celebrating festivities unknowingly and against her will.
“We didn’t
know as much about our history then as we do now,” Mikael related. “In school,
I wasn’t taught African or Caribbean history. So I
knew everything about British and European history and nothing about ours.”
She told the
BBC she and others would continue to demand reparations.
“England has
enjoyed the benefit of our slave labor right up to today, and they need to be
honest, admit it, and find a way to reconcile,” Mikael said. “Most people
couldn’t care less if [Elizabeth] is head of state or not. The queen is not a
significant part of anybody’s agenda.”
Queen
Elizabeth II, who possessed a projected net fortune of approximately $12
billion, never publicly discussed restitution.
“Along with a
number of colonies in North America, the Caribbean formed the heart of England’s
first overseas empire,” explained David Lambert, professor of Caribbean history
at the University of Warwick.
Lambert
explained in a white paper for the British Library that people from various
European powers, including France and England, began to settle in the Caribbean
in the early 17th century.
“The English
settled St Kitts in 1624, Barbados, Montserrat, and Antigua in 1627, and Nevis
in 1628,” Lambert wrote. “Around the same time, France established colonies in
Martinique and Guadeloupe. In this way, the Caribbean came under the control of
many competing European countries, joining Spain, which had established its
first colonies in the region more than a hundred years before.”
Slavery was
abolished in the early nineteenth century, according to Lambert, and the
enslaved were granted freedom throughout the British Caribbean in the 1830s.
Will the
world expect King Charles, the next ruler, to atone for the harsh experiences
of British colonization? Without a doubt. Is it even possible? Obviously not.
Brits never change. History has repeatedly proven us correct.
Elham Abedini, an expert on international affairs focusing on UK
affairs, told the Tehran Times correspondent on Thursday, “I suppose the UK
would face some challenges, and public opinion against the monarchy would
increase. King Charles has a scandalous background, including his (alleged)
role in Princess Diana’s death, and some other issues regarding his financial
activities. In recent years, we witnessed an increase in the number of people who
are demanding an end to the monarchial system in the UK. The decreasing
popularity of King Charles and his wife worsened their position among the
Britons.”
On the future
of the UK after the monarch’s death and challenges the new Prime Minister Liz
Truss might face, the expert told the Tehran Times, “The UK faces fundamental
domestic and international challenges such as the energy crisis, inflation, and
the Ukraine war. These are the most critical challenges for Liz Truss, and what
we are witnessing is that she is committed to fixing these and has prioritized
such issues. Her main challenge is convincing the British public opinion that
sanctions against Russia are vital. At the same time, it creates important
challenges for the UK regarding energy and food supply necessary for their
interest if they want to continue Boris Johnson’s policies in supporting
Ukraine.”
ATTACHMENT TEN (A) – From The Independent
VLADIMIR PUTIN’S ‘IRON DOLL’ SAYS RUSSIA SHOULD HAVE NUKED QUEEN
ELIZABETH II’S FUNERAL
See video at: https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/jamie-raskin-january-6-ray-epps-v2bc727f0
A Russian propagandist has
claimed Vladimir Putin should have nuked Queen Elizabeth II’s
funeral, while all the “best people” were gathered in London.
Olga Skabeyeva,
dubbed the Kremlin’s “Iron Doll”, made the claims on Monday during a
discussion with Andrey Gurulev, a military commander
and Member of the State Duma.
“Why should we
bomb Ukraine or Germany? There is Britain – the root
of all evil,” Gurulev said, sparking a shocking
response from Skabeyeva.
“Then we should have done it
today, when all the best people were at the [Queen’s] funeral... God forgive
me.”
AND… ATTACHMENT TEN (B) – From the Daily Express
‘SCALE OF THE DELUSION!’ RUSSIA’S PLAN TO NUKE QUEEN’S FUNERAL
RIDICULED
Vladimir
Putin’s propaganda machine continues to make threats as a number of British
prisoners in Ukraine are released.
By CATHERINE MEYER-FUNNELL 00:14, Thu, Sep 22, 2022 | UPDATED: 07:01, Thu, Sep 22, 2022
GB News presenter Dan Wootton has hit back at Russia’s claims that they should have nuked Queen Elizabeth’s funeral on Monday in order to target
all the Western leaders gathered there.
On his show on Wednesday evening,
the host blasted the “scale of the delusion” being shown on state TV as Russian
propaganda continues to threaten the UK.
In a segment taken from Russian
state TV, reservist military commander and MP Andrey Gurulev
argues for Putin’s right to use nuclear weapons alongside anchor Olga Skabeyeva.
He says: “If there is a real
threat to Russian territory, we are fully entitled to use nuclear weapons.
“Why should we bomb Ukraine or
Germany? There is Britain – the root of all evil.”
Ms Skabeyeva
then retorts: “Then we should have done it today [Monday] when all the best
people were at the [Queen’s] funeral...God forgive me.”
Mr Gurulev
adds: “When Britain is turned into a Martian wasteland, what will NATO’s
Article 5 be about?
“Defending the Martian wasteland?
There will be nothing left there.
“An unshakable island – it will be
shakable. I assure you they would all back off.”
Mr Wootton responds to the clip by
saying: “That, ladies and gentlemen, is the scale of the delusion that we’re
dealing with.
“But I don’t believe that anyone
on that TV set actually believes what they were spouting.”
In more positive news for the UK,
five British citizens being held by the Russians have been released as part of
a prisoner swap achieved through mediation by Saudi Arabia.
ATTACHMENT ELEVEN – From Time
THE FUTURE OF THE BRITISH MONARCHY IS MORE UNCERTAIN THAN EVER
BY YASMEEN
SERHAN/LONDON
SEPTEMBER 9, 2022 5:00 PM EDT
A near-universal refrain in the
commemorations for the late Queen Elizabeth II, who died Thursday at the age of
96, has been her role as a symbol of stability in Britain as well as a constant
in an increasingly inconstant world. She was “a changeless human reference
point in British life,” former Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in his tribute to the
monarch on Friday. More than just a symbolic face of the nation, the Queen was
also Britain’s lodestar and a source of comfort at a time of
seemingly unending turbulence. The challenge now facing the country is how to
move on without her.
While the path forward for Britain
is clear (it has, after all, done this many times before), the future of
the British monarchy feels less certain. King Charles III inherits the throne
at a time when the monarchy as an institution is still broadly supported in
Britain, with a slight majority of 62% in favor, according to a June poll. But the outpouring of
support and admiration for the Queen should not be mistaken for unwavering
support for the Royal Family as a whole, especially after recent fallout over
the treatment of Prince Harry and Meghan as
well as the sexual-assault allegations facing
her son, Prince Andrew. The biggest test facing the new King is whether he can
emulate his mother’s image of stability and preserve the institution that she
spent so much of her life trying to protect.
The Queen, who ascended the throne
at just 25 years of age, had a lifetime to prove herself. Charles, who at 73 is
the oldest monarch to ascend the throne in British history, will not have the
same advantage. So much of Charles’s public image has been shaped by his time
as the Prince of Wales, including salacious periods of his private
life—including his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, who as his wife now takes
the title of Queen Consort, and his high-profile split from Princess Diana—as
well as his vocal positions on issues as wide-ranging as climate change, hedgerows, China, and the British
government’s controversial tactics to
stymie immigration. Whereas the Queen maintained a reputation of impartiality,
opting to stay above the fray and leave the politics to the politicians, Prince
Charles did the exact opposite, even going so far as to wade into the highest levels of politics when
he wrote a series of letters in 2004 and 2005 known as the “black spider
memos,” lobbying government ministers on a number of issues, in a clear
violation of the monarchy’s neutral and ceremonial role in British politics.
“Charles has activist tendencies,”
says Richard Fitzwilliams, an expert on the Royal
Family. Perhaps because, for the vast majority of his life, his primary job was
to pursue his interests through his various foundations and charities.
“He doesn’t have the same level of
mystique that Queen Elizabeth II cultivated very successfully over her life,” Brooke
Newman, a historian of early modern Britain at Virginia Commonwealth University
tells TIME. Beyond her love of corgis and horses, “she was very careful not
to articulate a position on really much of anything. She became an icon around
the world because people could project their hopes and dreams and fantasies and
outrage on her and on the institution because she embodied the Crown in a way
that I think is going to be impossible for Charles to do because he already
represents certain things.”
But for the monarchy to continue
to be seen as a source of national unity and for the King to be able to carry
out his ceremonial duties without inviting allegations of
partisanship—something that even occasionally dogged his mother’s strictly-impartial reign—Fitzwilliam
said that the new monarch will need to keep his opinions in check. Charles
has acknowledged this reality in
the past and, in his first national address since ascending the throne,
conceded that as his role changes, “it will no longer be possible for me to
give so much of my time and energies to the charities and issues for which I
care so deeply.”
Preserving the Royal Family’s
symbolic value is only part of the new King’s challenge. Ensuring that the
institution remains fit for purpose at a time when monarchies and heredity
privilege seem increasingly anachronistic, is another. Here, Charles and his
mother were largely in lockstep. Both recognized the imperative of slimming
down the Royal Family—both in cost to the taxpayer and public appearance—in line
with public opinion. Under Charles, that
effort is expected to be taken even further by shrinking the Royal Family down
to just seven active working royals—who
are tasked with participating in official engagements, meeting foreign
dignitaries, and representing the monarch in their absence—down from the current 10.
But the greatest challenge facing
Charles will be his ability to match the popularity of his predecessor, which
was largely untainted by the scandals of those around her. When TIME spoke with
mourners gathered in the immediate aftermath of the Queen’s death, it was clear
that no one expected Charles’s reign to rival that of his mother’s. “It will
never be the same,” one civil servant, who requested anonymity to speak freely,
told TIME outside Buckingham Palace. “Every monarch creates their own
impression on the country.”
This doesn’t necessarily diminish
the pressure he stands to face, nor will it provide any consolation should the
monarchy’s perception take a turn for the worse. “Charles has had a lot of ups
and downs,” Warren Cabral, who went to Buckingham Palace on Thursday to pay his
respects to the Queen with his wife and son, told TIME on Thursday, “but he’s
inheriting the Crown at its peak.”
Under Charles, the monarchy is
unlikely to remain at its Elizabethan heights. Quite aside from his own
popularity—which could take a hit when Netflix releases its next installment of
“The Crown,” which is expected to retell the story of the disintegration of his
marriage to Princess Diana, later this year—Charles will have to contend with a
flurry of other challenges, not least the potential breakup of the United Kingdom,
the unraveling of the Commonwealth, and
reckoning with the unsavory parts of the Royal Family’s past and
its colonial legacy.
But unlike his mother, Charles
will not bear the burden of shepherding the Crown for the next 70 years. He
just needs to do so long enough to pass it on to the next generation in one
piece.
ATTACHMENT TWELVE – Also From Time
AFTER QUEEN ELIZABETH II’S DEATH, MANY INDIANS ARE DEMANDING THE RETURN
OF THE KOHINOOR DIAMOND
BY CHAD DE
GUZMAN SEPTEMBER 9, 2022 7:31 AM EDT
Shortly after British monarch
Queen Elizabeth II passed away on Sept. 8, the word “Kohinoor” began trending
on Indian Twitter.
It was a reference to one of the
world’s most famous gems. The Kohinoor diamond is just one of 2,800 stones set
in the crown made for Elizabeth’s mother, known as the Queen Mother—but the
105-carat oval-shaped brilliant is the proverbial jewel in the crown.
In India, it is notorious for the
way in which it was acquired by the British.
The history
of the Kohinoor
When it was mined in what is now
modern-day Andhra Pradesh, during the Kakatiyan
dynasty of the 12th-14th centuries, it was believed to
have been 793 carats uncut. The earliest
record of its possession puts it in the hands of Moguls in the 16th
century. Then the Persians seized it, and then the Afghans.
The Sikh Maharajah, Ranjit Singh,
brought it back to India after taking it from Afghan leader
Shah Shujah Durrani. It was
then acquired by the British during the annexation of Punjab. The East India
Company got hold of the stone in the late 1840s, after forcing the 10-year-old
Maharajah Dunjeep
Singh to surrender his lands and possessions.
The company then presented the gem
to Queen Victoria. Prince Albert, her consort, asked for it to be recut and it
was set in the crowns of Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary before being placed in
the Queen Mother’s crown in 1937.
The Queen Mother wore part of the
crown at her daughter’s coronation in 1953. The Kohinoor has been among the
British crown jewels since then, but governments in Iran, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and India have all laid claim to the diamond.
Britain’s controversial
possession of the Kohinoor diamond
While no plans for the future of
the gem have been disclosed, the prospect of it remaining in the U.K. has
prompted many Twitter users in India to demand its return.
“If the King is not going to wear
Kohinoor, give it back,” wrote one.
Another said the diamond “was stolen”
by the British, who “created wealth” from “death,” “famine” and “looting.”
It is not the first time that the
diamond’s return has been sought. Upon India’s independence in 1947, the
government asked for the diamond back. India made another demand in the year of
Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. These demands fell on deaf ears, with the U.K.
arguing that there are no legal grounds for the
Kohinoor’s restitution to India.
British-Indian author and
political commentator Saurav Dutt says
the chances of the U.K. returning the jewel are slim.
True, the British recently
facilitated the return of the Benin Bronzes—72
artifacts looted by British soldiers in the 19th century—to the
Nigerian government. But Dutt says the British royal
establishment is still “married to this romantic version of empire, even though
it is long dead, and has lost its power.” The Kohinoor is a symbol of that
power, Dutt argues, and in turning it over, he
believes the Royals “would essentially be eviscerating themselves.”
At the very least, King Charles
III must acknowledge the “black history” of the Kohinoor diamond, Dutt says.
“A recognition of the fact that it
was obtained through stealth and deception would be a significant step at this
stage, that lays the groundwork for the next generation to be able to give it
back,” he tells TIME.
Many Indians may not have that
patience. In the wake of the Queen’s death, there is only one demand on Indian Twitter:
“Now can we get our #Kohinoor
back?”
ATTACHMENT THIRTEEN – Once Again, From Time
SCENES FROM AROUND THE WORLD IN THE AFTERMATH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II’S
DEATH
BY CHARLIE
CAMPBELL/EDINBURGH SEPTEMBER 9, 2022 6:07 PM EDT
Braving strong wind and rain, a
silent line of mourners snaked to the wrought iron gate of Edinburgh’s Holyrood
Palace on Friday, patiently waiting their turn to read the official notice
announcing Queen Elizabeth II’s passing. To
one side, flower bouquets piled against the granite wall of an improvised
memorial garden—most with heartfelt messages attached to the only monarch most
Brits have ever known.
Across the United Kingdom, the death
of the Queen has left a chasm. At Balmoral Castle, where Britain’s
longest-serving monarch died aged 96 on Thursday afternoon, floral tributes continue
to amass. At London’s St Paul’s Cathedral, a service of prayer and reflection
on Friday was attended by 2,000 members of the public as well as London Mayor
Sadiq Khan and U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss, who
last saw Queen Elizabeth on Tuesday when she asked to form a government. Truss
is the 15th Prime Minister the Queen had met; the first was Winston
Churchill.
Arriving at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday
evening, the unhappy news hit Britons hard.
Most were home or crowded into pubs to enjoy an after-work libation. Within
hours, a crowd of thousands gathered outside Buckingham Palace in London in
solemn remembrance, finally breaking into muffled cheers of “God save the King”
when Charles III arrived Friday to
a home he has known for 70 years as prince but now entered as sovereign for the
very first time. Accompanied by Queen Consort Camila, the new King, dressed in
a dark suit, greeted the throng as he examined the tributes left to his
revered, departed mother.
“[Queen Elizabeth] encompasses so
much of what is Britain,” Eleanor Allingham, from Edinburgh, told TIME outside
Buckingham Palace on Thursday. “She was a huge role model for everyone, every
woman, every British person.”
But the Queen was in fact the
constitutional head of state for 14 other nations, including Canada, New
Zealand, Australia, Belize, Jamaica, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon
Islands. All have also been paying their own tributes. In a statement, Canadian Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau said, “For most Canadians, we have known no other
Sovereign. She would proclaim ‘it was good to be home’ when returning to her
beloved Canada. She was indeed at home here, and Canadians never ceased to return
her affection.”
See
photos at https://time.com/6212321/photos-queen-elizabeth-ii-world-mourning/
ATTACHMENT FOURTEEN – From G.U.K.
‘A BRUTAL LEGACY’:
QUEEN’S DEATH MET WITH ANGER AS WELL AS GRIEF IN KENYA
Politicians pay
warm tributes but memories of colonial atrocities prompt fierce criticism too
By Caroline Kimeu, September 11, 2022
But many on
the streets in Nairobi were indifferent or unaware of the news. Some younger
Kenyans spoke of it in detached tones. To a number of them, she was a distant
figure, better known through fictional portrayals of her on popular TV series
such as The Crown.
A wave of
criticism also flooded online spaces. During her reign, British soldiers
committed widespread atrocities against Kenyans at the height of Mau Mau uprising between 1952 and 1960. Roughly 1.5 million
people were forced into concentration camps where they were subjected to
torture, rape and other violations. Reports later showed the British had
made concerted efforts to destroy and conceal official
records of their brutal crackdowns.
Observers say
the erasure of history had consequences that have stretched on to the present.
“I don’t remember learning about the ills of the colonial empire,’’ said Dr Njoki Wamai, an assistant
professor in politics and international relations at the United States
International University-Africa. “Many of us have had to educate ourselves in
public spaces, and because of the legacy of colonial education in Kenya, the
Queen has been venerated and treated as an iconic figure.”
Even so,
harrowing tales of British colonial rule have been passed on through
generations. “When you sit with your grandparents and they tell you their
stories, the pain is almost tangible. You can feel it,” said Nyambura Maina. “I refuse to centre the pain others are feeling over the pain our people
went through.”
Kikonde Mwamburi, 33, said:
“Death should not be used to sanitise her brutal legacy.
I’m glad this obtuse culture is being questioned by younger generations.”
Rather than
pay tribute to the Queen, a number of Kenyans chose to honour
the independence movement. The words “Mau Mau” and “Dedan Kimathi”, the leader of the uprising, trended through
the early hours of the morning.
Of high
praise from the country’s leadership. “Political elites benefitted from the
empire either through political or economic power,” said Wamai.
She believes the British legacy of violence is downplayed for economic reasons.
Kenya has
strong economic and trade ties with the UK and is a part of the Commonwealth,
membership of which bolsters countries’ lobbying capacity and provides business
and education opportunities.
But the
association’s geopolitical relevance has been challenged in recent years and King Charles III
will be pressed to strengthen ties with Commonwealth countries and solidify
Britain’s soft power. Earlier this year, the royal family’s efforts to do so
were subverted in Jamaica, after leaders and the public
called for slavery reparations and an apology for crimes against humanity.
The Queen
maintained strong relations with leaders of Commonwealth countries over her
70-year reign, including many of Kenya’s presidents. Experts say King Charles
may face an exacting task in sustaining those ties amid criticism of the
British empire in former colonies across the globe, and that he can expected to
face growing calls to address colonial injustices.
ATTACHMENT FIFTEEN – From the Encyclopedia Brittanica
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
RiyadhSaudi Arabia
AbbottabadPakistan
Riyadhal-Qaedaterroristsuicide bombingColeAdenSeptember 11, 2001, attacksWorld Trade CenterNew York CityPentagonWashington, D.C
Saudi ArabiaYemenSaudi royal familyairplaneMiddle East
Soviet UnionAfghanistanIslamAfghan resistancecollaboratedenhanceddatabaseAfghan War
Saudi ArabiadeniedSaddam HusseinIraqPersian Gulf Warcountry’sSudan
Muslim world1993 bombing of the World Trade CenterNew Yorkinfrastructurecitizenship
Talibanfatwāholy warArabian Peninsula
terroristNairobiKenyaDar es SalaamTanzaniacruise missilestargeted the USS ColeYemen
charismarhetoricaldiverseLibyaBosniaChechnyaPhilippines
al-QaedaSeptember 11 attacksUnited Statesoverthrew the Taliban in AfghanistanAfghanistanPakistanU.S. presidential electionGaza StripBarack Obama
See all videos for this article
compoundAbbottabadIslamabadhelicoptersDNA
Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings of early 2011
ATTACHMENT SIXTEEN – From ABC News
ATTACHMENT SEVENTEEN – From Reuters
ATTACHMENT EIGHTEEN – From PBS “Frontline”
|
|
ATTACHMENT NINETEEN – From Devex.com
ATTACHMENT TWENTY – From the Sunday Times via the BBC
PRINCE
CHARLES ACCEPTED £1M FROM OSAMA BIN LADEN'S FAMILY - REPORT ·
Published 31 July, 2022 ·
·
The Prince
of Wales accepted a payment of £1m from the family of Osama Bin Laden, the
Sunday Times reports. ·
Prince
Charles accepted the money from two of Osama Bin Laden's half-brothers in
2013, two years after the al-Qaeda leader was killed, it
adds. |
The Prince of Wales's Charitable
Fund (PWCF) received the donation.
Clarence House said it had been
assured by PWCF that "thorough due diligence" had been conducted, and
the decision to accept the money lay with the trustees.
"Any attempt to characterise it otherwise is false," it told the BBC.
Clarence House also said it disputed
a number of points made in the newspaper's article.
Bin Laden was disowned by his family
in 1994 and there is no suggestion that his half-brothers had links to his
activities.
·
No inquiry into cash donation to
Charles charity
·
Charles suitcase of cash 'would not
happen again'
·
Prince Charles 'accepted a suitcase
with 1m euros'
According to the Sunday Times of
London, Charles met with Bakr (above) and Shafiq bin Laden, the half-brothers
of Osama bin Laden, in London in 2013, to broker the payment.
·
Bakr bin
Laden (born 1946) succeeded Salem as
the chairman of the Saudi Binladin Group; major
power broker in Jeddah.
·
Shafig bin Laden,
the half-brother of Osama, was a guest of honour at
the Carlyle Group's Washington conference at the Ritz-Carlton
Hotel on September 11, 2001, and was among the 13 members of the bin Ladin family to leave the United States on September 19,
2001 aboard flight N521DB.
The heir to the throne took the
money despite objections from advisers at Clarence House and PWCF, the Sunday
Times reports, citing multiple sources.
However, Sir Ian Cheshire, chairman
of PWCF, told the newspaper that the 2013 donation was agreed "carefully
considered" by the five trustees at the time.
"Due diligence was conducted,
with information sought from a wide range of sources, including government,"
Sir Ian added.
"The decision to accept the
donation was taken wholly by the trustees. Any attempt to suggest otherwise is
misleading and inaccurate."
The PWCF awards grants to
UK-registered non-profit organisations to deliver
projects in the UK, Commonwealth and overseas.
After it was revealed
this week that Prince Charles’ personal charity, the Prince of Wales Charitable
Fund, accepted $1.2 million from the
family of Osama bin Laden, 9/11 families are
“pissed off” — and questioning whether the royal should ever be a monarch.
“I don’t think he should be king of
anything,” Jim Riches — who lost his 29-year-old firefighter son, Jimmy Riches,
in the attack — told The Post. “He is an incompetent. A regular person
would see what they did … yet he turns around and takes their money. I’m pissed
off. He should put himself in my shoes. If it was his son [who died in the
World Trade Center], he would be completely different.”
Charles, 73, met with
Bakr and Shafiq bin Laden, the half-brothers of Osama bin Laden, in London on
Oct. 30, 2013, to broker the payment, according
to the Sunday Times of London.
Dispatches from
the BBC’s sultans of Briticism were quick to follow...
ATTACHMENT TWENTY ONE – From the BBC (dymond)
No rule has been broken, no law has been broken. All
appropriate checks were carried out and even the Foreign Office was called upon
to give its opinion - it cleared the donation.
So
how is this front page news?
A
source at the Prince of Wales's Charitable Fund told the BBC that "the
sins of the father" - that's Osama Bin Laden - should not disqualify other
members of the family from making a donation. Which
makes sense.
But
equally, did Prince Charles or his inner circle really think it was a good idea
to take money from the Bin Ladens? Or did they think it
was fine so long as it was never made public?
Because
once it was public - however many checks were made and rules were followed - it
was always going to look horrible.
Just
like the enormous cash donation from a former Qatari Prime Minister or the letter
from Prince Charles's close friend and aide promising a knighthood to a Saudi
citizen who had promised and made substantial donations.
Ministers
and members of parliament are, in the end, governed by the ballot box. The
Royal Family derives its position and authority from a different place, from a
settled acceptance by the public that overall they
bring credit to the country.
Does
a donation from the Bin Ladens - however remote from
the evildoing of a disowned son - fit into this model of monarchy?
Osama
Bin Laden was top of the US' "most wanted" list. He is believed to have ordered the terror attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 - which killed almost 3,000 people - including 67
Britons.
He
was killed by US forces in 2011.
A
PWCF source told the BBC that "though the name [Bin Laden] has very
unhappy history, the sins of the father should not be visited on the rest of
the family, which is an eminent one in the region."
The
source added that the donation had been cleared by the Foreign Office.
Osama
Bin Laden was disowned by his family nearly 20 years before the reported
donation
This
is not the first time that Prince Charles or his charity have been scrutinised over its donations.
It was reported last month that Prince Charles accepted a suitcase containing a
million euros in cash from a former Qatari prime minister - one of three cash
donations totalling around £2.5m. (See below)
Clarence
House said at the time that donations from the sheikh were passed immediately
to one of the prince's charities and all the correct processes were followed.
The
Charity Commission later decided against launching an investigation into the donation.
In
February, the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims the charity offered honours
help to a Saudi citizen.
Turns
out... they did. (See Attachments Thirty Five and Thirty Six, below)
Clarence
House said the prince had "no knowledge of the alleged offer of honours.”
ATTACHMENT TWENTY TWO – From the BBC (gardner)
"To
millions of Saudis, the name Bin Laden is totally innocuous. In the West and
much of the rest of the world, it will forever be associated with the 9/11
terror attacks of 2001.
But in Saudi Arabia,
it is a byword for the Jeddah-based construction firm that used newfound oil
wealth to fund mosques, palaces and other buildings by royal decree.
The family
were not originally Saudi: they came from a part of southern Yemen, the
Hadhramaut, that has produced many of Jeddah's most successful and wealthy
entrepreneurial families.
Osama, one of
the many sons of the company's founder, who emigrated from Yemen in the early
20th century, was long known as the "black sheep of the family".
He spent much
of the 1980s in Afghanistan helping the mujahideen fight the invading Soviet
army, so essentially he was on the same side then as
the CIA and Pakistan.
But by the
1990s, he had become a radical Islamic extremist and the family disowned him in
1994. Osama Bin Laden then moved first to Sudan, and soon after to Afghanistan.
The rest is history.
ATTACHMENT TWENTY THREE – From the New York Post
9/11 FAMILIES ‘PISSED
OFF’ PRINCE CHARLES TOOK $1M FROM BIN LADEN’S BROTHERS
By Michael Kaplan August 2, 2022 4:39pm
MORE ON: KING CHARLES III
·
King Charles III carries out new royal duties while in
mourning for Queen Elizabeth II
·
Prince William, Harry reunion needed ‘extended
negotiations’ after Queen’s death
·
Putin congratulates King Charles despite past Hitler jibe
·
‘One day I will lead the family’: Prince William steps up
to his new role
After it was revealed
this week that Prince Charles’ personal charity, the Prince of Wales Charitable
Fund, accepted $1.2 million from the family of Osama bin
Laden, 9/11 families are
“pissed off” — and questioning whether the royal should ever be a monarch.
“I don’t think he should be king of
anything,” Jim Riches — who lost his 29-year-old firefighter son, Jimmy
Riches, in the attack — told The Post. “He is an incompetent. A regular
person would see what they did … yet he turns around and takes their money. I’m
pissed off. He should put himself in my shoes. If it was his son [who died in
the World Trade Center], he would be completely different.”
Charles, 73, met with Bakr and
Shafiq bin Laden, the half-brothers of Osama bin Laden, in London on Oct. 30,
2013, to broker the payment, according to the Sunday
Times of London.
According to the Sunday Times of
London, Charles met with Bakr (above) and Shafiq bin Laden, the half-brothers
of Osama bin Laden, in London in 2013, to broker the payment.
“I’m personally surprised that
anyone would take blood money connected to the person responsible for murdering
3,000 lives,” said Monica Iken, whose husband Michael
Patrick Iken, died in the Twin
Towers on 9/11. “It’s
shocking and makes my skin crawl … I will never go to England. I thought they
were our allies but I would not support what he supports.”
By the same token, Iken added, Charles should steer clear of the 9/11 Memorial
Museum: “The families would be in an
uproar if he went there.”
Prince Charles’s advisers reportedly
warned of outrage if word of the transaction leaked. But Gordon Haberman, whose
daughter Andrea Lyn Haberman perished in the Trade Center attack while on her
first business trip to New York City, wonders if the bin Laden brothers
actually wanted the news to get out.
“He should give the money back and be
investigated for any other money he’s received from sources such as this one,” Eagleson told The Post. “I think it’s a good question as to
whether or not he should be made king. Maybe [not receiving the kingship] will
be a consequence of the investigation.”
Taking the funds, Eagleson added, “is disgraceful to the lives lost on 9/11 and
the lives lost through terror funding.”
A former firefighter himself, Jim
Riches told The Post that he “picked up body parts for eight months [at the
Trade Center] after 9/11.”
As he sees it, “This is all about
greed and a willingness to take money from anyone. It’s a horrible thing.
Taking that money soils them.”
The royal family, Riches added,
“have money and yet they are for sale. Three thousand people are dead [because
of the attack planned by bin Laden] and you take money from the guy’s brother?
It’s a shame and it’s horrible.”
ATTACHMENT TWENTY FOUR – From Time
PRINCE ANDREW'S HOPE OF ROYAL REHABILITATION MAY HAVE DIED WITH QUEEN
ELIZABETH II
BY CHAD DE
GUZMAN SEPTEMBER 13, 2022 7:26 AM EDT
A heckler’s arrest in Scotland Monday
afternoon has thrust an estranged Prince Andrew back into public view, and cast
an awkward shadow on the royal family as it mourns the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
The heckler called Prince Andrew a
“sick old man” as the disgraced royal walked behind the Queen’s coffin during a
solemn procession to St. Giles Cathedral in the Scottish capital Edinburgh.
The appearance was one of the rare
public sightings of Andrew since his fall from grace over his friendship with
convicted sex offender the late Jeffrey Epstein. Earlier this year, Prince
Andrew settled out of court in a civil case brought by
Virginia Guiffre, a victim of Epstein’s sex
trafficking ring when she was 17. She had accused Andrew of sexual assault and battery.
Andrew may have joined his
siblings last Thursday at the Queen’s Scottish summer residence Balmoral, as
they gathered at her bedside before she passed away. But the royal family is
keen to draw as little attention to him as possible, says Giselle Bastin, an associate professor and a British royalty expert
at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.
“They don’t want it to be about
William and Harry’s feud,” she tells TIME. “They don’t want it to be about
Prince Andrew, and his potentially allegedly shady dealings with Jeffrey
Epstein and so on.”
Prince
Andrew’s future
The palace revoked Prince Andrew’s
military titles and royal patronage last January, in the wake of Guiffre’s assault allegations. This meant that at the
Edinburgh procession, he was the only child of the Queen in civilian attire.
King Charles III, Princess Anne, and Prince Edward all wore military uniform.
Prince Andrew will be allowed to
wear a uniform at the Queen’s final vigil at Westminster Hall but not at the
funeral on Sept. 19 or any other proceedings. (The Queen’s grandson Harry, who
renounced his royal title and duties in 2020, must also wear civilian clothes
at the funeral.)
This marks a departure from the
way in which the Queen protected the image of her second son during the last
months of her reign.
At Prince
Philip’s funeral in March 2021, the Queen reportedly ordered
no military uniforms to be worn to avoid embarrassment for Prince Andrew. He
was also given visibility during the memorial at Westminster Abbey, escorting
his mother in and out of the church—a prominence widely
noted in the British
press.
According to
conservative U.K. broadsheet the Telegraph, Andrew
reportedly talked to the Queen in June about reinstating his royal status. He
also wants his daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, to become working
royals.
King Charles III will now have to
decide whether to fund his disgraced brother. After leaving the Royal Navy in
2002, Prince Andrew has not had any full-time paid job, although he acted as
the U.K.’s special representative for
international trade for
10 years and has been receiving
a £20,000 ($23,000)
annual pension.
When Prince Andrew was a working
royal, he made as much as £250,000 ($292,000) yearly. His
reinstatement would run counter to King Charles III’s long-reported inclination
towards paring
back the
royal family to only a few key members to save on cost.
At the
Queen’s Platinum
Jubilee, she was flanked only by working royals during her appearance at the
Buckingham Palace balcony—a stark
contrast to the scene 20 years prior. Prince Andrew was not there due to a
coronavirus infection.
“Who we saw at the final balcony
appearance of Queen Elizabeth II, during her Jubilee, will be what we see going
forward [without her],” says Bastin.
ATTACHMENT TWENTY-FIVE – From the Guardian U. K.
KING CHARLES’S STAFF
NOTIFIED OF REDUNDANCIES DURING CHURCH SERVICE FOR QUEEN
Exclusive:
Employees said to be livid and shaken as up to 100 Clarence House employees
told they could lose jobs
By Pippa Crerar and Caroline
Davies Tue 13 Sep 2022 13.24 EDT
·
Dozens of Clarence
House staff have been given notice of redundancies as the offices of King
Charles and the Queen Consort move to Buckingham Palace after the death of the
Queen, the Guardian has learned.
Up to 100
employees at the King’s former official residence, including some who have
worked there for decades, received notification that they could lose their jobs
just as they were working round the clock to smooth his elevation to the
throne.
Private
secretaries, the finance office, the communications team and household staff
are among those who received notice during the thanksgiving service for the
Queen, at St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh on Monday, that their posts were on
the line.
Many staff
had assumed they would be amalgamated into the King’s new household, claiming
they were given no indication of what was coming until the letter from Sir
Clive Alderton, the King’s top aide, arrived. One source said: “Everybody is
absolutely livid, including private secretaries and the senior team. All the
staff have been working late every night since Thursday, to be met with this.
People were visibly shaken by it.”
In his
letter, seen by the Guardian, Alderton wrote: “The change in role for our
principals will also mean change for our household … The portfolio of work previously
undertaken in this household supporting the former Prince of Wales’s personal
interests, former activities and household operations will no longer be carried
out, and the household … at Clarence House will be closed down. It is therefore
expected that the need for the posts principally based at Clarence House, whose
work supports these areas will no longer be needed.”
The King’s private secretary added: “I appreciate that this is unsettling news
and I wanted to let you know of the support that is available at this point.”
He added that
certain staff providing “direct, close, personal support and advice” to Charles
and Camilla would remain in post. No final decisions are understood to have
been taken, as a consultation period, which will begin after the state funeral
next Monday, needs to be completed first.
Staff who are
made redundant are expected to be offered searches for alternative employment
across all royal households, assistance in finding new jobs externally and an
“enhanced” redundancy payment beyond the statutory minimum.
A Clarence
House spokesman said: “Following last week’s accession, the operations of the
household of the former Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have ceased
and, as required by law, a consultation process has begun. Our staff have given
long and loyal service and, while some redundancies will be unavoidable, we are
working urgently to identify alternative roles for the greatest number of staff.”
It has not yet been confirmed whether the King and Queen Consort will
eventually live at Buckingham Palace. At present, only parts of Buckingham
Palace are habitable as it is undergoing major reservicing works that are
expected to last years.
There is
speculation that the King, who is rumoured not to be
particularly fond of the palace, would use it for official purposes such as
receptions, audiences, investitures and banquets, while retaining nearby
Clarence House as his London home.
When his
office was asked about this in 2017, when he was still Prince of Wales,
officials said that Buckingham Palace would remain as the headquarters of the
monarchy and official home of the sovereign. No detailed information about his
likely living arrangements have been given recently.
According to
Clarence House’s annual review earlier this year, the King employed the
full-time equivalent of 101 staff. There are 31 in the private secretaries’
office, including private and assistant private secretaries, research,
administrative and equerry staff.
A similar
number work in his treasurers’ department, while he employs 12 in his
communications office. The 28 members of his household staff include four
chefs, five house managers, three valets and dressers and a couple of butlers. According
to the most recent sovereign grant report, the Queen employed 491 full-time
staff.
There is also
the question of whether the King would retain use of Windsor Castle for
weekends, and Sandringham House in Norfolk, which the late Queen visited over
the Christmas period. The King and Queen Consort also have a residence at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate, Highgrove in
Gloucestershire, and Llwynywermod, a cottage in
Wales.
The new
Prince and Princess of Wales have recently relocated to Windsor, and moved into
Adelaide Cottage, while retaining their Kensington Palace apartment for
official purposes.
When the
Queen Mother died, the Duke of York took over Royal Lodge at Windsor. While
some of her 83 members of staff were redeployed within other royal households,
others were let go.
The headline and
introduction of this article were amended on 14 September 2022 to clarify that
staff were notified of redundancies, rather than being given individual notices
of redundancy, as the rest of the article made clear.
ATTACHMENT TWENTY SIX – Also from the Guardian U. K.
COMMENTS upon the ABOVE
Podiatrist Christhell
Hobbs, 57, is a regular attendee at royal events and was in the throng for Kate
and William’s wedding.
He said of the staff facing redundancy:”I think it’s sad. They
have families they have to support.”
Hobbs, who left Farilight near Hastings in East Sussex first thing in the
morning to see the Queen’s coffin arrive on Tuesday evening, added: “Many of
them have put in many good years of service and now they’re told ‘we don’t want
you’. You have to be human about this.”
Korina Massicat,
22, from east London, is studying politics at Durham University. A student:
“[these are] people who’ve been working hard and are faithful and loyal. Nobody
deserves to be fired because someone dies.”
Lexi, 26, a fashion student at
Central St Martins in London who was right outside the palace gates, said:
“It’s quite shocking. I don’t get it, she only just passed away. It’s more important
to get the funeral done – I don’t think this was a good time to do it right
now.”
Gary Taylor, 54, from Gray’s End,
is a property developer and an enthusiastic royalist. He kept a royal scrapbook
as a child but conceded: “It is bad timing. It’s not what you would expect
because it’s so soon.”
A sizeable contingent in the crowd
refused to believe the news, even when shown online. “That’s scaremongering,
that is”, said one woman, looking disgusted. Another said “people aren’t prepared
to hear negative stuff at the moment”.
ATTACHMENT TWENTY SEVEN – And furthermore, from the Guardian U. K.
IT’S ONE LAW FOR KING
CHARLES THE BILLIONAIRE AND ANOTHER FOR HIS STRUGGLING SUBJECTS
It is only proper
that the new King pays no inheritance tax – says the state that makes citizens
choose between heating or eating
By
Aditya Chakrabortty Thu 15 Sep 2022 01.00 EDT
·
During that soggy afternoon when
the Queen was still said to be only ill, the BBC’s Clive Myrie
was filling time. Only hours before, he noted, Liz Truss had been making “a
rather important statement” on just how families would pay their heating bills
this winter. All was now “insignificant”. It was, the usually excellent
presenter later admitted, “a poor choice of word”.
Except it
wasn’t. If anything, it was painfully on the nose. The man on the TV
unwittingly but precisely anticipated how the financial crisis engulfing
millions of Britons would be treated in the coming days: as a matter of no
consequence. In Tuesday’s Daily Mail, it took until page 28 to crop up. In that
day’s Sun, page 20. The Times and the Telegraph yawned it off altogether.
Our MPs have been worse. Last Thursday, the new prime minister set out a plan
to cap energy costs. Tagged at £150bn, it’s easily
the single biggest fiscal intervention by any government since the second world
war – a vast sum that these Tory tailenders seem
determined to spend as badly and unfairly as possible. To take one example:
the 4.5 million people on pre-pay meters will get zero extra help
from Truss. And another: the churches and community centres
hosting the food banks that will be a lifeline to millions this winter will
only get a few months’ help.
Rather than scrutinise these measures, MPs spent two long days
delivering tributes to the monarchy, such as this from the former
minister Tracey Crouch:
“Our six-year-old took my hand in his and said, ‘Don’t worry, Mummy: the King
will look after us now.’ He is right. God save the King.” Thus
were you served by your representatives – and now parliament is shut for 10
days, and the next month will be dominated by party conferences.
As
youngsters, both the prime minister and Keir Starmer were in favour of abolishing the monarchy. They have first-hand
knowledge not only of republican feeling but also of the wider ambivalence that
often greets the royal family. Yet they haven’t even tried to represent this
pluralism of opinion, which is one of the defining features of any democracy.
Instead what we get is a grand show of state power, complete with the army, the
navy and the BBC’s Nick Witchell.
During this
period of enforced mourning everyone is told what to think, even while millions
of people worry over how to eat. The official mood is an ersatz mawkishness.
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, instructed Auden. Today’s
equivalent is Norwich City Council closing bike racks, and Morrisons turning
down the beeping at its checkouts – while Center Parcs was all set to turf out
holidaymakers for the day of the funeral. Would Her Majesty really have minded
if kids went on a waterslide or, come to that, Poundland
shut this Monday? I assume she wasn’t a regular.
Away from
such performances, the isle is full of noises – a sense of chaos suspended. For
an idea of the devastation to come, speak to Paul Morrison. A policy adviser at
the Methodist church, he has been analysing the
financial diaries recently filled in by visitors to food banks, debt clinics
and other church-based projects.
Right now, he
finds, a little over half of respondents – 56% – can carry on without falling
into debt. It may mean walking an hour to the job centre,
rather than taking a bus; it can be thrown off even by the smallest accident,
but with luck it can be done.
Scroll
forward two weeks, though, and add in higher energy prices, and everything
changes. Even with Truss’s new measures, just 2% of his group can survive financially.
The other 98% are wiped out. Years of reporting have shown me that the very
poor are the best budgeters in the country – better than any pinstriped
auditor. They can account for every pound in and every pound out. Come 1
October, they will have no margin to cushion them.
And so they will sink into the depths beneath any safety net.
Meanwhile, others will float above the law of the land. It has not been widely
reported, but King Charles won’t have to pay a penny of inheritance tax on the
vast estate passed to him by one of the wealthiest women in the world. Nor is
he under any legal obligation to pay income tax;
he does so voluntarily. This has been the arrangement only since 1993. For
decades beforehand, the monarchy paid no tax at all.
When that
came to light, the public outcry, coupled with the anger of ordinary taxpayers
asked to stump up for repairs to Windsor Castle, forced the Queen and her
eldest son to rethink their affairs. When John Major announced this deal in the Commons, he defended the lack of
inheritance tax as being in the service of “the overwhelming wish of people in
this country”. The people in this country were, of course, never asked.
When Dennis
Skinner asked on which portion of her assets – which, in today’s figures,
include the £16bn crown estate, the £650m
duchy of Lancaster, and the estates at Balmoral and Sandringham – would be
taxed, Major saw red. Only the fact that it was Skinner’s birthday, he replied,
stopped him from responding “in the beastly way in which I would otherwise have
responded to the ludicrous question that he asked me”. The self-styled boy from
Brixton has, inevitably, placed himself at the very forefront of this week’s
National Grovel.
Yet the
former MP for Bolsover asked exactly the right question, about how far the
constitutional monarchy was answerable to her democracy – and the real answer
is that, despite what the textbooks say, our parliamentary democracy remains
accountable to the royal family. As my colleagues Rob Evans and David Pegg have revealed over the years, more than 1,000 laws
have been vetted by the Queen or Charles before they were even put in front of
parliament.
Under the
procedure of Queen’s or King’s consent, ministers alert the monarch to any
draft bill that might affect their private wealth. Since their assets span
everything from country estates to housing, much of which the public don’t even
know about, that grants them a huge amount of power over the very process of
drafting the laws that govern the rest of us.
Prefer not to
sell your houses, Charles? Then your
tenants will just have to tolerate this 21st-century feudalism. Don’t want
those pipelines running through your land in Scotland, ma’am? Then you will be
exempt from the law covering everyone else – and no one at Holyrood will be
told, until they read it in the Guardian.
“Do you know
that there is a duke in Scotland who can ride ninety miles without leaving his
own estate?” asks a character in Victor Hugo’s 1869 novel The Man Who Laughs. “Do you know that Her Majesty has £700,000
sterling from the civil list, besides castles, forests, domains, fiefs,
tenancies, freeholds, prebendaries, tithes, rent, confiscations, and fines,
which bring in over a million sterling?”
“Yes,” comes
the reply. “The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor.”
One law for
King Charles the billionaire, another for you. Bailiffs for the poorest in
society, privileged exemption for the very richest. A society with all the
latest technology and sophistication, yet still in the shadow of medieval
feudalism. Except even John of Gaunt couldn’t have counted on the unstinting
support of the Daily Mail.
ATTACHMENT TWENTY EIGHT – Now, yet another from G.U.K.
AFTER THE
FUNERAL, THE BIG QUESTION: WAS THIS QUEEN BIGGER THAN THE MONARCHY ITSELF?
For
70 years, the institution was moulded in her image.
Today’s outpouring reflects that legacy – and the problem King Charles will
face
By
Marina Hyde Mon 19 Sep 2022 09.53 EDT
For
70 years, the institution was moulded in her image.
Today’s outpouring reflects that legacy – and the problem King Charles will
face
Thousands
of words may have been spoken and sung at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II,
but the most intensely eloquent moment of all was a silence. It came after the
mournful last post had sounded, and before the rousing, cheery notes of the
reveille, itself followed by God Save the King. That’s quite a key change. In
that silence hung the scale of what is being orchestrated, and the eternal
fragility of it, too. For all the tears shed, all the moving personal respects
paid, all the pilgrimages to London, all the uncomplaining hours
queued, all the streets lined, all the flowers reverentially laid, these things
are not allowed – cannot be allowed – to overwhelm the essential premise of
royalty: the idea that no one is bigger than the club.
Every
royal rite of passage is choreographed to create a sense of renewal. From
births to weddings, the populace is encouraged not simply to celebrate, but to
take the sense that the institution of the crown is being revitalised
and strengthened. Even funerals are not allowed to be any different. We can
never quite work out whether we want royals to be just like us or nothing like
us, but in this they are wholly other. Among ordinary people, a funeral is a
funeral, and doesn’t end with the apotheosis of the living.
In
part, the nine-year-old Prince George and his seven-year-old sister,
Charlotte, joined the procession behind the Queen’s coffin
as it entered Westminster Abbey today to show love for a great-grandmother. But
courtiers also welcome the children’s high-profile presence as a reminder to
the people that the Windsors are long and strong in
heirs. It’s a family show, and sons and daughters have to be put on the stage.
A handwritten card on the Queen’s coffin today bore the inscription “In loving
and devoted memory. Charles R”. Twenty-five years ago, at the funeral of Diana,
Princess of Wales, an envelope on the coffin had read simply “Mummy”.
But
those at the palaces who coordinate these stunningly beautiful, matchless
spectacles – who spend years and even decades rehearsing for them – know there
is always jeopardy. The magic sometimes doesn’t work. Barely four years ago,
you couldn’t move for knowing commentators explaining that the marriage
of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle had dazzlingly
renewed the House of Windsor, as part of a brilliant strategic modernisation by the crown. Those takes were soon retired,
either quietly, or loudly and viciously. Meanwhile, the Abbey today contained
plenty of representatives of former royal families for whom the ineffable trick
at some point stopped working. Fit your own air quotes, but the funeral guest
list included people who style themselves as the Prince of Venice, the
Custodian of the Crown of Romania, and Tsar Simeon II of Bulgaria. Underpinning
much of our crown’s bravura pageantry is the painstaking sense that nothing,
ever, can be taken for granted.
In
this abiding enterprise, silence often remains golden. US politicians, a Disneyfied White Rabbit, the mindfulness coaches of today –
at different times, all these have uttered a line the Queen never spoke but
seemed to spend her life of service embodying: “Don’t just do something – stand
there.” The mourning period and funeral have seen the institution giving a
masterclass in enduring and mostly wordless spectacle. Big guns have been
brought out, figuratively and literally. Ordinary people who revered her sense
of duty have felt it their own duty to pay her their respects. Many have surprised
themselves by feeling far more emotional than they’d imagined (though without
question this is not universal). They were not ready for a 96-year-old
sovereign to go.
At
the funeral of his agent in 1999, the actor Bill Murray fixed the Hollywood audience
with a deadpan stare. “There are so many people here today,” he began, “that I
would so much rather be eulogising.” He then moved to
looking directly into the eyes of certain members of the audience. “Like you.
And you. And you. And you. And you.” You can’t do this at a state funeral, of
course, despite today’s congregation boasting several candidates for getting
“the look”. Fortunately, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman seems to
have discovered a diary clash at the last minute, while
13th fairy Vladimir Putin was never on the list. But the Chinese
vice-president, Wang Qishan, made the cut, as did Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and the
authoritarian Egyptian prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly.
Spare a thought/laugh for the many puffed-up presidents and prime ministers and
global bigwigs present in the Abbey imagining their own future send-offs, and realising that compared to this, those would tend toward
the low-key.
But
still they pay obeisance, with even the Japanese emperor submitting to the
supposed indignity of park-and-ride coaches to the Abbey. For all her
celebrated lack of vanity, one can’t imagine those image-conscious courtiers
would ever have let the Queen herself be just another figure emerging from an
international dignitary bus. So there remains something undeniably unique about
her final event, in a church whose building was begun by Edward the Confessor
almost a thousand years ago. All flags on public buildings in the United States
have flown at half-mast for a full 10 days. Landmarks around the world shone red, white and blue, or went dark. It is difficult
to imagine another figure for whom all these things would have been done.
Was
she, then, bigger than the club? After initial scepticism
about her youth on accession, Winston Churchill very quickly came to believe
that the Queen was something more than merely special. “All the film people in
the world, if they had scoured the globe, could not have found someone so
suited to the part.” For 70 years, Elizabeth II created a version of the
monarchy that many of her supporters came to worry would work only with her at
the centre. For the past 10 or 20 years of her life,
this was something that could be said, and was. Over the past 10 days, the hush
has descended. As her son ascends to the throne at the age of 73, all manner of
people hold their breath to see if her youth policy
will be borne out.
For,
unprecedented in most living memory, the period of national mourning since the Queen’s
death has been tinged with a sense that it could never be this way again. There
is something in the sheer longevity of reign and the breadth of historical
upheaval in which she nonetheless remained an iconic constant that feels simply
unrepeatable. Do they make them like they used to? To many, today felt not just
like watching a moment in history, but watching the embodiment of a
now-vanished past pass finally into history. From David Beckham to non-famous mourners to
foreign politicians to local mayors, it’s striking that so many different
people found themselves in front of cameras over the past 10 days producing
exactly the same phrase: “We’ll never see her like again.”
This
article was amended on 20 September 2022. An earlier version said the Egyptian
president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, attended the funeral.
While previous reports said he had intended to do so, in the end Egypt was
represented by the prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly.
·
Marina
Hyde is a Guardian columnist
ATTACHMENT TWENTY NINE – And finally, Monday’s last from the GUK
DEAR
KING CHARLES, IF YOU’RE SERIOUS ABOUT REFORMING THE MONARCHY, THIS IS HOW TO
START
The
hard work of being monarch now begins – and here are five things you can do
right now to improve things
By Stephen Bates Tue 20 Sep 2022 09.25 EDT
Dear
King Charles,
The
captains and the kings have departed, the last presidents and princes are heading
for the airport. After the funeral, the hard work of being monarch begins.
The
red boxes are piling up, and Liz Truss will be dropping by for a weekly
audience, smugly patronising you. So
what should your priorities be? If you are truly serious about reforming the
monarchy, here are five issues, helpfully offered, to which you might (but
probably won’t) bend your brain.
Inheritance
and corporation tax
If
you really want to express solidarity with your subjects, particularly at a
time of economic hardship, you could add some additional tax payments. All
right, yes, you have paid income tax voluntarily since the age of
21, but large amounts of the royal resources are exempt. The royal family have
generally been extremely reluctant to pay tax – they avoided income tax
entirely from 1910 to 1994, usually pleading poverty – and they still don’t
have to pay inheritance or corporation tax.
It
is very difficult to separate state assets – the stuff the royals cannot sell
like the crown jewels, the Rembrandts, the Rubenses
and the 7,000 other paintings in the royal collection, to say nothing of George
V’s stamp collection, which is valued in excess of £100m – but you do have
private resources, such as those professionally managed for you. And you do
have the sovereign grant, currently £86.3m, and 25% of the £312m current revenue of the crown estates,
which gets paid back to you by the government for carrying out your royal
duties.
But
you have private assets too – and those are the ones we can only estimate, like
Balmoral and Sandringham with their large estates. The Sunday Times Rich List
reckoned this year that the Queen was worth £370m (way below the likes of
Richard Branson and Paul McCartney but not to be sneezed at). That would make
for a tidy inheritance tax bill on assets worth more than £500,000, but the
royals are exempt and the Queen’s will will be sealed
– so we’ll never know exactly what she’s passed on, unless you let a little
light in on the magic. You could call it levelling up.
A
slimmed-down monarchy
You
have vowed to get rid of some of the flunkies, hangers-on and minor royals,
though that did not get off to a particularly good start when your staff at
Clarence House received notice of redundancy in the middle of last week , just as they were
working flat out on the transition arrangements for you. But slimming down
usually refers to the part-time royals who bulk out attendances at events and
get paid when they do so. The trouble is, there’s a bit of a labour shortage at the moment, what with Prince Andrew sunk
below the waterline and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in voluntary exile in
the US. It puts a lot of work on the royals who are left, such as you and
Camilla, the Queen Consort, the Prince and Princess of
Wales, Prince Edward and Sophie and Princess Anne. Maybe you will just have to
cut back on royal visits.
Giving
up Buckingham Palace
Why
not? It’s draughty and cold, falling to bits with chunks of masonry dropping
off. Grand but, well, just not very homely. There are 775 rooms, hundreds of bedrooms and bedroom suites, 92 offices, 19
state rooms and a swimming pool and the central London position would make it
perhaps not a shelter for homeless people, but an ideal luxury hotel. Trump
Green Park, perhaps? It can’t actually be sold, but perhaps could be leased out
and hired back for special balcony occasions and state dinners. Or, if that’s
too drastic, why not open it to the public all year round instead of just in
the summer? There are hints you may turn Balmoral into more of a museum than it
is already.
Reforming
the honours system
Do
we really still need the Order of the British Empire, or other imperial relics?
Couldn’t they be renamed something more inclusive? And while we’re at it, could
awards be given solely on merit, not to party donors, chief executives and
cronies of the prime minister? Such people don’t really need it to enhance
their status and stature (nor do film stars, sports heroes or other eye-catching
recipients, nice though it is to see their smiling faces in the media in the
dog days after Christmas). Longstanding nurses and cleaners may be less
glamorous, but more of them would certainly be worthier candidates, especially
for a government that supposedly wants to enhance their status without
necessarily paying for it.
Banning
leaky pens
That’s
something you could definitely do, and an inky-fingered nation would rejoice.
If it’s true you take your pillow and toilet seat with you whenever you’re away
from home, surely you could take your own pen? You used a fountain pen for
those spiky black spider memos you used to write privately to ministers, but
perhaps you could have a decent ballpoint pen for those sudden signing sessions
without the risk of a pen malfunction incident. No one would notice. Promise.
·
Stephen
Bates is the Guardian’s former religious and royal correspondent. His latest
book is The Shortest History of the Crown.
ATTACHMENT THIRTY – From the Guardian U,K.
‘THE FINAL FAREWELL’: WHAT THE PAPERS SAID ABOUT THE QUEEN’S FUNERAL
Powerful images dominated the newspaper front pages after a nation
gathered to say goodbye to its longest-serving monarch
By
Graham Russell
Mon 19 Sep 2022 22.56 EDT
After 10 days
of national mourning, remembrance and no small amount of expectation,
newspapers around the world gave their front pages over to Queen Elizabeth II’s
final journey back to Windsor.
The Guardian’s main image displays the bearer
party taking the Queen’s coffin up the steps into the darkened entrance of the
George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor Castle, above a report from Caroline
Davies on the most intimate part of the day: a
family farewell. Other contributions from Jonathan
Freedland, Esther
Addley and Marina
Hyde (See
Attachment Twenty Eight) assess(ed) the future, past and present of the
monarchy.
The Mirror chooses a similar image in a
poster front page for its tribute edition, displaying the cherished
items on top of the coffin to full effect. A subdued headline in
small font says simply “… until we meet again”.
The Times again chooses a wrap front
page, showing the coffin entering Westminster Abbey with the headline: “Carried
to her rest”. The back page carries a quote from Hubert Parry’s From Songs of Farewell: “Leave then thy foolish ranges, For
none can thee secure But one, who never changes, Thy God, thy life, thy cure.”
The Express uses its wrap to signal a
farewell to the past and a look at the future. The Queen’s coffin dominates the
front page alongside the headline “God rest our Queen”, while a tearful,
saluting King
Charles III adorns
the back, with the exclamation: “God save the King”.
The Financial
Times looks
from above at the coffin in the nave of Westminster Abbey and chooses a quote
from Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for
its headline: “People of loving service are rare in any walk of life. Leaders
of loving service are still rarer.”
The Telegraph homes in on a tender moment
for its main image, showing King Charles placing the Company Camp Colour of the Grenadier Guards on the Queen’s coffin. “An
outpouring of love” is the headline, above Hannah Furness’s five-column report
on the day.
The Sun stays with its royal purple colouring and is one of few papers to feature the crowds
that gathered for the farewell. Across a picture of the funeral cortege
processing along the Long Walk to Windsor, the upbeat headline is “We sent her
victorious”. The back page of its wrap features the coffin being lowered into
its final resting place.
The Mail opts for image of the coffin
being lowered into the vault at St George’s chapel, Windsor, with the headline:
“Her final journey” for its bumper 120-page edition.
Metro captures King Charles’s sombre expression as he gazes at the flower-strewn hearse
on its arrival at Windsor Castle. The crowds lining the Long Walk form the back
page of its wrap.
The i carries a historic note in its
headline: “The end of the Elizabethan age” and describes in its trademark
bullet points how Monday’s “spectacular military display” brought London to a
standstill.
The Northern
Echo shows
proceedings in London and opts to use a quote from BBC presenter Kirsty Young
for its headline: “She made history, she was history”.
The National in Scotland gives its front
page to Pipe Major Paul Burns of the Royal Regiment of Scotland, who signalled the end of the Westminster Abbey funeral service
with a powerful rendition of Sleep, Dearie, Sleep on the bagpipes.
The Daily
Record showed
the Queen’s coffin being taken into Windsor Castle, with the headline “Rest in
peace, Queen Elizabeth”.
Further
afield, the timings allowed Australian papers enough time to place their own
poignant tributes on their front pages. Amid debate about whether
Charles should be Australia’s head of state, Tuesday’s papers were united in
covering the occasion in subdued tones. The Age (“The final farewell”)
and Sydney
Morning Herald (“We’ll
meet again”) both showed the Queen’s coffin being guided into Windsor Castle,
while the Herald
Sun and Daily
Telegraph sought
to capture the feeling of readers with their headlines: “Thank you, our Queen”, and “Rest in peace, Ma’am”
respectively.
Adelaide’s Advertiser went with the headline
“Eternal Queen”, and Queensland’s Courier Mail went for “Thank you, our
Queen”. National paper the Australian calls the late monarch
“Elizabeth the great” and focuses on the grief-stricken expression of King
Charles for its image, with the headline: “We’ll meet again”, perhaps an echo
of Welby’s reference to Vera Lynn’s song, which the
Queen used in a broadcast during the worst of the Covid
pandemic.
ATTACHMENT THIRTY ONE – From Agence
France-Presse
HONG
KONG ARRESTS HARMONICA PLAYER AT QUEEN VIGIL FOR SEDITION
Man played British national anthem and pro-democracy
protest song to crowds gathered during funeral
Agence
France-Presse in Hong Kong Tue 20 Sep 2022 09.49 EDT
A
Hongkonger who played a harmonica to a crowd outside
the British consulate during Elizabeth II’s funeral was arrested for sedition,
according to police and local media
Crowds
of Hongkongers have queued to pay tribute to Britain’s late monarch this week, some expressing
nostalgia for the city’s colonial past at a time when Beijing is seeking to
purge dissent.
Hundreds
gathered outside the consulate on Monday evening as Britain was holding a state
funeral, sharing live streams on phones as well as laying candles and flowers.
At
one point, a man started to play songs on a harmonica, according to an AFP
reporter on the scene, including the British national anthem and Glory to Hong Kong, a popular song
during huge, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in 2019.
The
mourners outside the consulate applauded the performance and shone their phone
lights, with many later shouting the protest chant “Hongkongers
add oil” and singing Glory to Hong Kong.
Local
reporters later photographed the harmonica player being questioned by police
and detained.
On
Tuesday, police said a 43-year-old man surnamed Pang was arrested outside the
consulate for “seditious acts”. A police source confirmed to AFP that the man
arrested was the harmonica player.
After
2019’s democracy protests, China has cracked down on dissent in Hong Kong using
national security legislation and charges of sedition.
The
latter is a colonial-era law that had fallen into obscurity for decades until
prosecutors reintroduced it in the aftermath of the protests.
The
song Glory to Hong Kong contains the popular protest chant “liberate Hong Kong,
revolution of our times”, which has been declared by the courts to be a threat
to national security.
A
man in his 60s was charged earlier this year for performing without a licence after playing the song on his erhu, a Chinese two-stringed
instrument, at a bus terminus.
Oliver
Ma a Filipino-Hong Kong buskerwas arrested three
times in 2020 and 2021 when singing the English version of the protest song on
Hong Kong streets.
Hong
Kong was a British colony for more than 150 years and while the financial hub
was returned to China in 1997, the past is engraved into its landscape, from
street names and the ubiquity of English to the common law legal system.
In
the week since the Queen’s death more than 13,000 people signed a condolence book
in the city’s British consulate.
ATTACHMENT THIRTY TWO – from Vanity Fair
PRINCE HARRY AND MEGHAN MARKLE RETURN TO CALIFORNIA AFTER QUEEN
ELIZABETH’S FUNERAL
The royal couple was originally in
Europe to support a number of charities they work with when the monarch died.
BY Emily Kirkpatrick, 9/22/22
Prince
Harry and Meghan
Markle finally
headed home to California this week after Queen Elizabeth’s death extended their visit
overseas.
The royal couple flew home from
the UK on Tuesday following their mourning period, and one day after attending the late monarch’s funeral service. The Duke and
Duchess of Sussex happened to be in Europe at the time of her death as they
were on a scheduled trip overseas to attend a number of events in support of
the charities they work with, including the One Young World Summit and the lead-up
celebrations for the Invictus Games taking place in Düsseldorf next year. So,
when the queen suddenly took ill, Harry was able to rush from Scotland to be
with the rest of his family. He and Meghan then stayed through Monday in order
to attend the state funeral and committal service before Queen Elizabeth’s
private burial. In the lead up to the funeral, the Sussexes
also attended a number of events in remembrance of the monarch. On September
10, they joined Prince William and Kate
Middleton in greeting mourners and well-wishers gathered outside Windsor Castle to
share their remembrances of the late royal.
In his first statement about his grandmother posted
to the Archewell website following her passing, Harry
highlighted the queen’s commitment to serving the United Kingdom, writing, “In
celebrating the life of my grandmother, Her Majesty The Queen—and in mourning
her loss—we are all reminded of the guiding compass she was to so many in her
commitment to service and duty. She was globally admired and respected. Her
unwavering grace and dignity remained true throughout her life and now her
everlasting legacy.” He also added on a personal note, “Granny, while this
final parting brings us great sadness, I am forever grateful for all of our
first meetings — from my earliest childhood memories with you, to meeting you
for the first time as my Commander-in-Chief, to the first moment you met my
darling wife and hugged your beloved great-grandchildren. I cherish these times
shared with you, and the many other special moments in between. You are already
sorely missed, not just by us, but by the world over.” Harry concluded, “Thank
you for your commitment to service. Thank you for your sound advice. Thank you
for your infectious smile. We, too, smile knowing that you and grandpa are
reunited now, and both together in peace.”
While on this extended trip, Harry
and Meghan left their two children, 3-year-old Archie and 1-year-old Lilibet, back home
in Montecito with the Duchess’s mother, Doria Ragland. The pair have been living in the
ritzy California neighborhood popular with celebrities since 2020 when they officially stepped down from their positions as senior royals.
ATTACHMENT THIRTY THREE – from People
KATE MIDDLETON SAYS QUEEN ELIZABETH WAS ‘LOOKING DOWN ON US’ WHEN 5
RAINBOWS APPEARED OVER BALMORAL
The Princess
of Wales said the royal family felt the presence of the late monarch when five
rainbows graced the sky above the Queen’s beloved escape in the Scottish
Highlands, where she died Sept. 8
By Janine Henni Published on
September 22, 2022 02:57 PM
“In Scotland, how many rainbows turned
up?” Prince
William asked his wife at Windsor Guildhall on Thursday. “You hardly ever see rainbows up
there, but there were five.”
“Her Majesty was looking down on
us,” Princess Kate replied.
Rainbows similarly broke through
the crowds at two other historic U.K. landmarks in recent days. Shortly
before Queen
Elizabeth’s death was announced on Sept. 8, a double
rainbow broke through the clouds over Buckingham Palace.
The day before her funeral, on Sept. 18, another
rainbow ignited the sky over the Palace of Westminster,
as the Queen’s coffin was lying in state.
Kate Middleton
and Prince William Step Out Following Queen’s Funeral to Thank Staff and
Volunteers
As the royal family continues
mourning, the new Prince and Princess of Wales made their first
appearance Thursday
following the state
funeral at Westminster Abbey and committal service at
St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, showing appreciation for those behind
the scenes who facilitated the Queen’s final televised funeral ritual. “Her Majesty was looking down on us,”
Princess Kate replied.
Rainbows similarly broke through
the crowds at two other historic U.K. landmarks in recent days
Around 800 people attended the
committal, and the rite had a more intimate feel than the state funeral. The
pews were filled with some of the people who knew the Queen best — in addition
to members of the family, the congregation was made up of past and present
members of the Queen’s Household, including from the private estates. Also in attendance were governors-general and prime
ministers from Commonwealth nations. IAN
On Monday evening, Queen Elizabeth
was laid to rest in the King George VI Memorial Chapel alongside husband Prince Philip,
father King George VI, mother Queen Elizabeth the
Queen Mother and sister Princess Margaret.
For the young woman never
meant to be monarch, the end brought a quiet homecoming.
“She had no wish to see a statue
of herself or to even have a separate burial chamber within St. George’s
Chapel,” historian Robert Hardman, author of Queen of Our Times: The
Life of Elizabeth II, tells
PEOPLE in this week’s cover story.
“As her cousin Margaret Rhodes
once said to me, ‘She wanted to make her father proud.’ “
ATTACHMENT THIRTY FOUR – from Hunger
OPINION: WHETHER YOU LIKE THE QUEEN OR NOT, THIS HAS BEEN MASS HYSTERIA
By Danny Price, 21 September 2022
So the Queen died, Lizzie kicked the
bucket, she’s out of here. Let’s be real, she was 96, she had great innings,
and this was expected. Was it sad?….for me, no, but
for a lot of people, it was devastating. We’re talking about the person whose
head is on every coin and every banknote. People genuinely believe that there
was some sort of connection between them and the monarch.
But however
you feel about Queen Elizabeth II, it is impossible to deny that this is the
end of an era. It’s the end of an era that in all honesty seems a lot like a
great big indoctrination scheme. And let’s be clear, it still is.
The Queen’s passing didn’t shock the
world but make no mistakes about it, we are shocked. On one hand, we have
extreme royalist loyalists, and people who are genuinely saddened by this
situation, and on the other hand, we have everyone else. In 2021 a YouGov
survey indicated that only 31% of people aged 18 to 24
thought that we should have a monarch. The country has now been divided again.
But that’s nothing new, is it? Brexit, the pandemic, strikes, immigration,
race, class, sex… The list goes on.
The UK has never been more
separated than in recent times. The country is pretty much an analogy of that time
some of us saw “the dress” in different colours,
except that our divides actually affect people’s lives. We are split. And we’re
not talking about even splits or logical splits.
Right now
it seems like it’s the most irrational sides that are the ones getting what
they want. We had wall-to-wall 24-hour coverage in relation to the Queen’s
passing/funeral/the ‘Queue’, yet very little on the other important issues.
There’s beem hardly anything in regards to the
millions of people affected by the floods in Pakistan. There’s nothing much
about the Russians retreating from Kharkiv. Climate
change and Covid-19 deaths are vastly ignored. These are important things that
affect us, yet we have been reduced to some sort of opt-in system.
If we want to know about other
issues, we had better go looking for those stories ourselves because the news
channels have only been interested in reporting on the monarchy and this
extravagant 12-day mourning period we’ve just experienced. Post funeral, too,
this attitude appears to have been milked as much as possible. Even two days
after the funeral, the headlines are more focused on Phillip Schofield and
Holly Willoughby ‘skipping the Queue’ to see the Queen’s coffin. The majority
don’t want this, but the minority is telling us we’re having it. How very
democratic.
What we are seeing right now, with
our eyes is nothing short of cult crutini.
We’ve had BBC reporters call the
cost of living crisis — something that will see thousands of people die this
winter because of the government’s inaction — “irrelevant” in comparison to the
Queen’s passing. We’ve had hospital appointments, some for cancer patients,
being rescheduled or cancelled. Theme parks were closed, flights were
cancelled, and an amateur Sheffield football team are being investigated for
playing a match in the days after her death… Center Parcs was initially
planning on turfing out paying customers on the day of the funeral until due to
backlash they reconsidered. Bike racks and kids’ rides were closed, and
supermarkets removed the ‘beeps’ from self-service scanners. Whether you like
the Queen or not, this has been mass hysteria.
When people rightfully pointed out
exactly how ridiculous it all is, they were crutin
“disrespectful”. When people exercised their right to free speech, they were
arrested. One woman filmed authorities following her around Edinburgh because
she was holding a sheet of white paper. It was insanity: “Mourn the monarch or
face persecution”, seemed to be the sentiment of the day.
Climate change and Covid-19 deaths
are vastly ignored.And
forget about bringing up colonialism, as you would have surely been met with
the response of “now is not the time”. So, when is the right time? When will it
be the right time to talk about all the people who died at the hands of our
monarchy? When will it be the time to discuss a formal apology to the ancestors
of the brutally murdered — that is, people who were killed without dignity for
not handing over their land in name of the Queen? And when are we finally going
to put a lid on this insidious racism spawned from the monarchy? If not now then when?
Because let’s be straight, the
actions of the monarchy have played a huge role in the existence of racism in
this country. The crutinizeion of black and brown
colonies invaded by British soldiers set a standard for how many citizens have
viewed and treated those with different ethnic backgrounds ever since. The
damage caused by this has been vast. Racism is unfortunately not a rare
occurrence in Great Britain — racism is rife. Discrimination is everywhere, and
it has descended from the top. You could even go as far as to say that racism
is the only working example of the ‘trickle-down’ economics system that is now
being championed by our unelected Prime Minister, Liz Truss.
On the 5th of
September, Chris Kaba was shot and killed by a
metropolitan Police Officer. Police believed that the soon-to-be father, Chris
was “armed and dangerous” — he wasn’t. What we have here is a case of history
repeating itself — when Mark Duggan was murdered by police in 2011, it was
headline news. Thousands took to the streets in protest. Back then people said
that it would happen again, and 11 years later, it has, but the response has
been very different.
There’s been a blasé
investigation, a delayed suspension of the officer, a lack of arrests, and even
an unsettling amount of authorities who are threatening to quit in protest if
the officer responsible loses his job — yes, you read that correctly. Coverage
has been sparse, and I can guarantee that the Met and their PR were sighing in
relief that the pressure was taken off them in light of the Queen’s death.
Equality is really not our strong point in the UK; the Queen coverage is more
important than justice, but we could have guessed that.
People in other countries and
media in other countries are saying that this is the beginning of societal
collapse in the UK. Earlier this month, Professor Eliot Jacobson stated
that the UK is likely to be the first world country to implode due to Brexit,
government spending, corruption, and inflation. There’s also the fact that
global businesses are simply not investing and are instead actively withdrawing
business… This should be terrifying. With an estimated cost of over £6bn spread
across the 12 days of mourning, a state funeral, a coronation, and the
rebranding that comes with having a King, we, as a country simply can’t afford
to mourn to this extent.
And just when you think it
couldn’t get any worse, there came Prince Andrew, gliding down into the grounds
of the proverbial ‘secondary school’ of the public eye, ready to serve under
the new King Charles III. In the last two years, Charles has pretty much only
done two things that have come to the public’s attention: one, accepting
millions of Euros from a Qatari sheikh in a suitcase and/or carrier bag, and
the other… accepting millions of pounds from the Bin Laden family for his
charity. Charles will be a fine King.
But back to Andrew, who was
presented with a sexual abuse lawsuit by Virginia Giuffre, and had ties to a
notorious sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein. He is probably the most hated royal in
the country, but we can’t be surprised that he’s looking to make a comeback. It
was always said that he would be gradually reintroduced to “public service”, we
just never thought it would be this soon after the scandal. People are being
called disrespectful for expressing how they feel… But when it comes to Meghan
Markle, it’s a completely different kettle of fish.
At the end of last week, The
Daily Mail has run 15+ stories specifically about Meghan. Avid Mail readers
are saying that her crutini was a contributing factor
to the Queen’s death, and she’s even been crutinize
for holding the hand of her husband, Prince Harry. Twitter is a flood of Daily
Mail patriots creating the hashtag #GOHOMEMEGHAN, and they even elevated it to
‘trending status’ on Twitter last week.
Then there’s the funeral itself,
broadcast on pretty much every terrestrial television channel (bar channel 5) in
an attempt to achieve maximum grieving. Really? Did we really need every
channel to show the exact same thing? Of course, we didn’t.
Make no mistake about it, what is
happening right now in the United Kingdom is a deep hyper-madness that I fear
we will never recover from. A weird patriotism that has severely blinded anyone
who lacks the most basic common sense. Thousands of people have been sentenced
to death this winter due to our government. Hundreds of thousands of people are
homeless whilst the person who owns the most land on the planet lay in
state.
News networks are ignoring the
institutional racism stemming from the people who are meant to keep our streets
safe. There’s no attention to our new Prime Minister Liz Truss’ plan to burden
the British taxpayer with £130bn to try and solve the energy crisis. The EU,
meanwhile, is going ahead with their windfall tax on big energy
companies.
It’s a shame and it’s a joke.
What we need is real honest media
to be asking the right questions and reporting the right issues. We need to crutinize the Conservative government for their draconian
actions. We need to ask why is it right that the government, which costs the
British public in excess of £54.6 million per year, have only been in session
for 5 days out of 61. Whether you voted for the Tories or not, it’s simply not
right and it needs fixing. But in order for that to happen, things need to be
discussed and reported.
On the World stage, the UK has
looked bad for a while now, but with the passing of the Queen, and the
country’s reaction to it, we’re heading towards dangerous territory in terms of
our reputation and our functionality. In the end, it will only be the citizens
who will suffer.
ATTACHMENT THIRTY FIVE – from the G.U.K.
TWO MEN QUESTIONED IN CASH-FOR-HONOURS
INQUIRY LINKED TO KING CHARLES’S CHARITY
Met confirms
two men interviewed under caution over allegations linked to Prince’s
Foundation
By Jamie Grierson and Robert Booth Fri 23 Sep 2022 11.30 EDT
Two men have been questioned under
caution by officers investigating cash-for-honours
allegations linked to King Charles III’s charity the Prince’s Foundation.
In a brief
statement, the Metropolitan police confirmed that on 6
September officers interviewed a man in his 50s and a man in his 40s under
caution in relation to offences under the Honours
(Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.
The force
launched the investigation in February after media reports alleged offers of
help were made to secure honours and citizenship for
a Saudi national.
In September
last year, the Sunday Times published claims that the billionaire Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz paid
tens of thousands of pounds to fixers with links to Charles who had told him
they could secure the honour.
Bin Mahfouz
was awarded a CBE at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace in November 2016.
When the
allegations surfaced, the Prince’s Foundation launched an internal
investigation, which in turn led to one of Charles’s former closest aides,
Michael Fawcett, 59, temporarily stepping down as the foundation’s chief
executive.
On Friday,
the Met provided a short statement to the Guardian, which said: “On Tuesday, 6
September, police interviewed a man aged in his 50s and a man aged in his 40s
under caution in relation to offences under the Honours
(Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.”
The Met
previously said it had received a letter in September last year relating to the
media reports and, after further inquiries, launched an investigation into
allegations of offences under the Honours (Prevention
of Abuses) Act 1925.
Bin Mahfouz
has been one of the biggest donors to Charles’s charities and even has a forest
named after him, the Mahfouz Wood, at the 15th-century Castle of Mey, formerly the Queen Mother’s home and now one of
Charles’s Scottish residences.
The donations
of more than £1.5m helped fund renovations of residences used by Charles, and
other charitable ventures. The Prince’s Foundation publicly lists Mahfouz as a
patron.
The Met said
officers had liaised with the Prince’s Foundation about the findings of the
independent investigation into fundraising practices.
ATTACHMENT THIRTY SIX – from the Kuwait Times
BIN LADEN FAMILY DONATED £1M TO PRINCE CHARLES CHARITY
London: Prince Charles, the heir to
the British throne, accepted a £1 million ($1.19 million, 1.21 million euro)
donation to his charitable trust from the family of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin
Laden, The Sunday Times reported.
Although there is no suggestion of
any wrongdoing by the Saudi family members, the revelation increases scrutiny
on the 73-year-old prince’s charity organisations,
which have been rocked by allegations of criminal wrong doing.
Several of his advisers urged
Charles not to take the donation from family patriarch Bakr bin Laden and his
brother Shafiq — half-brothers of terror leader Osama — according to sources
cited by the paper.
Charles, 73, agreed to the
donation to the Prince of Wales Charitable Fund (PWCF) when he met with Bakr,
76, at Clarence House in London in 2013, despite objections of advisers from
the trust and his office, the paper reported.
Ian Cheshire, chairman of PWCF,
said the donation was agreed by the five trustees at the time.
British police in February
launched an investigation into another of Charles’s charitable foundations over
claims of a cash-for-honours scandal involving a
Saudi businessman.
The head of The Prince’s
Foundation resigned last year after an internal investigation into the
allegations.
Michael Fawcett, chief executive
of the foundation, had initially agreed to suspend his duties following
newspaper revelations about his links to a Saudi national.
The man, tycoon Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, had donated large sums to
restoration projects of particular interest to Charles.
Fawcett, a former valet to the
Prince of Wales who has been close to Queen Elizabeth II’s heir for decades, is
alleged to have coordinated efforts to grant a royal honour
and even UK citizenship to Mahfouz.
Mahfouz reportedly denies any
wrongdoing.
The Charities Commission, which
registers and oversees charities in England and Wales, said in November it had
opened a formal probe into donations received by Mahfouz’s charitable trust
which were intended for the prince’s foundation.
The Prince’s Foundation, set up in
1986, is not regulated by the Charities Commission but is registered with the
Scottish Charity Regulator.
The Scottish body in September
launched its own probe into reports that the foundation accepted cash from a
Russian banker previously convicted of money laundering.
ATTACHMENT THIRTY SEVEN – QE2’s PEANUT GALLERIES
Unsurprisingly, these and other articles
on the Queen’s funeral generated an enormous buzz from their Peanut
Galleries... a few of which we mention; many, many others (some sad and
nostalgic, others angry and dismissive) on the assorted websites.
The
Guardian’s study of the Queenly “power of pageantry: (Tuesdsay
after the service) declared that “No country other than the UK could put on
such a spectacle (Queen Elizabeth II: from
public pomp to a private family farewell, 19 September).” Some of the peanuts shelling for Elizabeth
included these...
Not
a single person out of step. Trumpets, drums, bagpipes, all heralding the end
of an era. Cannons firing, bells ringing, Big Ben chiming, choirboys singing.
Row upon row of servicemen and servicewomen, faces etched in solemn regard.
Columns of guardsmen, helmets gleaming, plumes wafting, bearskins bobbing. Line
after line passes soberly by – a river of scarlet and gold in an ocean of
black. The crowds bear witness to it all, a nation joined as one in solidarity
for a queen the like of which we will never see again. Unforgettable.
Jon Goldney
Gawler, South Australia
I
am on vacation from the US in the UK. While not normally a royal follower, I
decided that I had to do the British thing and watch the Queen’s funeral. It
was impressive. I am glad I live in a world that still has pageantry. I am glad
I live in a world that can still have things that serve no practical purpose,
such as kings and queens, and soldiers who have swords on their belts, fur on
their hats, and move like trained dancers. I hope that there will always be
room in this world for soldiers who aren’t carrying guns.
Emily Anne Lyons
Annandale, New Jersey, US
Charlotte
Higgins (It was a gilded royal
funeral, an event that will only heighten our self-delusion, 20 September) pretty much said
what I feel, and the historical details she added – about the disastrous
funeral of George IV, for example – were fascinating. Let us hope that there
will be far fewer feathers the next time. I was particularly impressed by her
careful use of the word “fulsome” to describe the BBC’s commentary. A shame she
felt that she had to add the words “and mawkish” after it in order not to be
misunderstood.
Michael Bulley
Chalon-sur-Saône, France
If
Charlotte Higgins was reminded of RSC productions of Shakespeare’s history
plays, the image may have been reinforced by the BBC camera picking out the
portrait of one king in the abbey: Richard II.
John Pelling
Coddenham, Suffolk
The
mood of gritty realism that describes life in modern Britain (unemployment,
food bank visits, unplanned pregnancies) was briefly punctured in Ambridge on
Monday when a funeral was briefly mentioned in The Archers, after the actual
event had taken place in a parallel unreal world. At least the whole of the BBC
did not succumb to royal overkill.
John Petrie
Leeds
How
do you explain to granddaughters aged 10 and eight why not a single girl
chorister was included in the three choirs represented at the Queen’s
obsequies? There was one woman among the altos at St George’s chapel in
Windsor, presumably brought in to beef up that line a bit. Girls sing the
treble line just as beautifully as boys do, and it is high time we scrapped
this ridiculous Anglican cathedral tradition, as they have already done at a few
cathedrals.
Tully Potter
Tonbridge, Kent
Farewell
to the Queen. The funeral was emotional; it made us proud of our country. It
also felt like the last hurrah of the British empire. The last hurrah of
a former world power.
Hubert Schmitz
Brighton, East Sussex
Noted author Quentin Crisp was among the peanuts of the New York Post
who defended... sort of... the King’s fiscal congress with Bin Ladens.
Quentin Crisp
2 August, 2022
I'm extremely sorry
for the losses of our brave heroes and citizens but please stop going after
everyone except our own Government. If you had any real commitment you would be
protesting everyday in front of the White House &
Capitol! This country deals in billions of dollars with Saudi's annually.
He had allies, too...
“I couldn’t agree
more,” posted ET. “Our government is extremely corrupt and deal with blood
money constantly and disrespect many who have lost their lives for this country
and in all types of tragedies.”
“Bush protected Saudi's in this country,” TF
recalled, “by getting them out of the country after 9/11 happened.”
“Osama Bin Laden was
but one of 12 sons in the Bin Laden family and was basically disowned by them
due to his radical politics,” apologized MF. One son, Salem, was active in the
United States prior to his death while flying an ultralight airplane. The Bin Ladens were investors and owned properties all over the
world.
Outside of the Queen and her late husband, this family is very dysfunctional.”
|
Ye forgot to mention Trump.”