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King Charles III

gintonic said:
I don't know anyone who didn't watch any coverage
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I didn’t. I avoided all terrestrial TV and just watched US politics and my usual music, audio and retro-computing geekery on YouTube. I didn’t catch even a second live. All I’ve seen are clips of Johnson getting refused entry, Kwatang pissing himself laughing/having a cocaine reaction or whatever the hell he was doing, and that is about it aside from a few anti-monarchy clips on US ‘lefttube’.
 
Mrs D and a few friends left the house at 6am to get a speck, it's about 25 mins walk from home to Parliament Square. They went out of a well it's not something you see everyday rather than a crippling sense of grief and homage.
As they were being marshalled around Parliament Square in the direction of Whitehall, past the tourists who had queued all night and longer, there was a security alert. Opposite Churchill's statue the police cleared the crowds due to a suspect package. Due to the one way ped. system those who had been in place were moved up Whitehall and not allowed back with Mrs D's party forced to take up prime positions on the south east corner of the square. I'm told that the crowds were rather weird and weepy.
 
ks.234 said:
The monarchy is antithetical to democracy, support for one diminishes support for the other.
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Wrong again.

Your little piece of binary logic only works in the case of an absolute monarchy which is a long way from the UK's constitutional arrangement so it doesn't have to be one or the other.

The public support for the monarchy consistently runs at between 60-70% - in other words the majority of the people by a ratio of over 2 to 1 choose to have a figurehead decided by birth and an series of historical antecedents - weird I know.

Read 'em and weep KS.

That is the reality you are stuck in and it will outlast you by a long, long time. There's more chance of Boro winning the Champions League than the British overthrowing the monarchy.
 
I was with a group of chaps last night - one of them claimed that he had figures that more than 5Bn people around the world watched the funeral and that some 28M of the UK population watched it too. No source to verify those numbers with mind you.

I largely missed it - we were cruising down the Solent on a yacht, returning from the Isle of Wight - a very long ago organised trip that we were not going to change for the funeral. Virtually all of our friends, acquaintances and family, all watched it - generally rather a lot. My wife and I heard the Windsor chapel part on Radio 4 whilst driving back from Southampton -so I guess that counts.
 
Spraggons Den said:
Wrong again.

Your little piece of binary logic only works in the case of an absolute monarchy which is a long way from the UK's constitutional arrangement so it doesn't have to be one or the other.

The public support for the monarchy consistently runs at between 60-70% - in other words the majority of the people by a ratio of over 2 to 1 choose to have a figurehead decided by birth and an series of historical antecedents - weird I know.

Read 'em and weep KS.

That is the reality you are stuck in and it will outlast you by a long, long time. There's more chance of Boro winning the Champions League than the British overthrowing the monarchy.
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Oh don’t be a such a chump. An institution built on hereditary power, that is above the law and celebrates the superiority of one person above others due to their birth is clearly at odds with the democratic principle of equality and equal worth. The two are at ideological odds.
 
1st: Norway (Head of State: King Harald V)
2nd: New Zealand (Head of State: King Charles III)
4th: Sweden (Head of State: King Carl XVI Gustaf)
6th: Denmark (Head of State: Queen Margrethe II)
9th: Australia (Head of State: King Charles III)
11th: The Netherlands (Head of State: King Willem-Alexander)

Those are placings from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index for 2021. (The UK is 18th).

The argument that support for a monarchy is incompatible with democracy does not hold. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems with the influence the House of Windsor has over some government decisions (especially the concerning use of the Royal Prerogative to sidestep taxation or regulation of the Royal estate), but those would be British Monarchy problems, not “Monarchy” problems.
 
Joe Hutch said:
Mrs H watched most of the funeral stuff, whilst muttering about how much it must have cost.
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I recently read the figure of 8 million. To me this figure looks very low - the custom-built Mercedes alone is a couple of 100k, and I don't think it will ever be driven again except to the junkyard once this is all forgotten.

Soldiers, guards, marines etc. could well have been cheap, they just were there instead of goofing around somewhere else. But all those security measures, oh my, I don't think they were free.
 
andrew d said:
I'm told that the crowds were rather weird and weepy.
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That’s what sticks in my memory of the Diana RIP Zombiethon. I remember cycling round to Kensington Palace to have a look out of pure curiosity as, as you say, it just isn’t something one sees everyday (I’d have gone for a cycle past this one too if I was still in That London). One of the most strange examples of human behaviour I’ve ever seen and it kind of shows the other side of the mass manipulation of crowds by fascists like Hitler, Trump, religious leaders etc. The same collective mass hysteria, but unified in an abstracted parasocial “grief” rather than weaponised as hatred for political power. I do still view the way the state has milked it as a tool for normalising elite power and archaic structures though, there is something deeply uncomfortable about the whole thing. It is thought-policing/programming.
 
I think being brought up in a vaguely Irish RC home and attending schools with the same sort of ethos meant I was immune to all the Royal Family/Rule Britannia gubbins. Then at university almost everyone I knew was a leftist. Most fervent supporters of the Monarchy seem mildly bonkers to me.
 
A lot of people just want to be a part of the group, and believe what they are told regarding the size/importance of said group. Be on the "winning" team etc.
I myself regularly feel like August Landmesser.
 
I'll echo the thought that viewership does not necessarily correlate with monarchist tendencies.

I watched pretty much the lot on Monday. For the music.
 
I missed all of the coverage 'live' as I travelled as a foot passenger on the o/n Birkenhead 2 Belfast ferry - found Belfast completely closed down after walking into the Europa bus station where I learned of my host testing positive for COVID - caught the Cavan bus to Armagh and then the Dungannon bus to Moy where I'd booked accommodation weeks back - dropped my bags off at the B&B and went to the pub where I sat in the beer garden and read my kindle... quite an extraordinary day!
 
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