You actually couldn’t make it up
The right here in the United Kingdom like to extoll their virtues as champions of freedom. Anyone should be allowed to do anything all of the time, because nothing matters.
Matt Hancock giving government contracts to his buddies? Sound. Jacob Rees-Mogg suggesting that the people who died at Grenfell weren’t intelligent? No hassle. Boris Johnson overseeing the worst handling of the pandemic in Europe? Hey, he tried his best.
This is all bullshit of course. The Tories don’t want the UK to be free. They want it to be free for them.
They want to ensure that people in this country cannot protest. They want to limit the chances of the working class – whether it’s education or any form of social mobility – so that their place atop the British class system remains unthreatened.
They want to do what they want, while we stand by, grateful for a little crumb that has rolled off the table.
People believe them, for some fucking reason, when they say they are free speech champions. But when the mask slips, it slips completely, and the entire faux outrage over BBC presenters Naga Munchetty and Charlie Stayt is just the latest example of this.
What did the two presenters do?
Well, during an interview with housing secretary Robert Jenrick, Stayt said a Union Jack placed next to a picture of the Queen, was “not up to standard size”, adding “I think it’s just a little small, but that’s your department, really” – prompting laughter from Munchetty.
After no response from Jenrick, Munchetty said: “Always a flag, always a flag.
“Did have a picture of the Queen there too, though.”
Now, in a normal country where people’s brains haven’t become pickled by lies and reality warping tactics for a decade, most people would laugh this off. You’d get a few strange people complaining, but most people would move on with their actual lives fairly quickly.
But the UK is not a normal place. We all know this, even if we’d rather not say.
Instead, it’s the kind of place where ‘free speech champion’ Members of Parliament complain to the national broadcaster about jokes made by supposedly unpatriotic TV presenters.
A group of 17 MPs, including Bassetlaw MP Brendan Clarke-Smith, have demanded action over the, erm, joke which they considered ‘inappropriate’.
In a letter, the MPs said: “We have been inundated with complaints from constituents on this matter. We feel that the hosts need reminding that the B in BBC stands for British and that the comments and attitudes on display towards both our flag and our Queen were inappropriate and also disrespectful.”
It’s exhausting, isn’t it? And what’s even more exhausting is that it might actually work. The BBC are so afraid of angering people who detest its very existence, that they might actually get their way.
But please, before you go and write an angry comment under this piece, please remember something: this is a tactic.
Tories don’t really care that much about the flag, or even the Queen. They aren’t patriotic, and they don’t love the UK.
But they know that by going absolutely buck wild every now and then over a statue, or a joke, or the Royal Family, that they might just distract from the fact that they are destroying the real freedoms of a country that many people do actually love.
Churchill is dead. A flag is an inanimate object that, as we all know, you cannot eat. And the Royals don’t need anyone defending them. It’s a distortion of reality, to disguise the very real, painful one we’re living in.
