So when Paul Sheehan over at the Sydney Morning Herald quixotically insists that Elizabeth must follow Beatrix and bring in a new generation, we need to understand the true motivation here: "the media has a vested interest in change. It is good for circulation and ratings." Indeed Professor Flint, but let us go through a couple of his assertions:
[Queen Beatrix] is stepping aside to refresh the monarchy and keep it vital. In contrast, the British monarch, by staying on, and on, is making the monarchy appear solid but ossified. Elizabeth may have a private wit, but her public personality has become stultifying. Her speeches are scripted into corporate caution and are delivered with a woodenness devoid of vivacity.What is ossified is this very statement - one wonders if he plagiarized any of it from Lord Altrincham's 1957 critique of the monarch, who famously said exactly the same thing when the Queen was still young and glamorous. In fact, her public personality has remained remarkably the same all these sixty plus years.
If the Queen stays on until she is 90 it will be a vote of no-confidence in her eldest son, invite infirmity into the image of the monarchy, and confirm a sense of insecurity around the royal succession. The last time a British monarch abdicated it created a national trauma, when Edward VIII chose love over duty and abdicated in 1936 to marry an American divorcee.It has nothing to do with confidence in her son or insecurity around the royal succession, but everything to do with the traditional role and function of our reigning monarch. If the role of monarchy is to be essentially symbolic and exemplary in nature, as Scotland’s Ian Bradley has written, “it would be hard to think of any Head of State in the world who has more consistently and faithfully embodied the principle of selfless, even sacrificial devotion to duty” and who has stood “as an exemplar of probity, decency and incorruptibility while in other respects moving with the times and never appearing stuffy or censorious.”
For a great read on why the Queen will never abdicate, I highly recommend Robert Hardman's wonderful article in the Daily Mail.
"The media has a vested interest in change": absolutely true. And even more than that, it relies on a business model these days that is based on instability. To grab people's attention and increase ratings and circulation they have to create crises, which most of the time are less than a storm in a teacup.
ReplyDeleteQueen Beatrix's abdication is a case in point. English-speaking media are making it sound like the British monarchy is the exception when it comes to abdicating when in reality it behaves like most other monarchies in Europe. How comes all these media people are not asking for the old monarchs of Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Norway to also step down and let new generations take over?
Answer: because they don't really care about the issue. They're just selling newspapers and filling up airtime. As Maria Carey once said: today it's printed in a newspaper page, tomorrow someone will wrap fish with it (or fish and chips in the case of UK media)...
If our head of state is important, then we the people should have a better system of choosing him/her than the randomness of a lucky sperm meeting with a lucky egg. Put in those terms it is easy to see how stupid and farcical the present arrangment is. There is another less obvious observation, the wife of phil the greek knows what a wally Charlie the T'ird is so is doing all she can to avoid having to hand over in life or in death to this utter waste of space.
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