Let them eat swan...

The BBC recently told us that the British monarchy cost every man, woman and child in the UK £0.69 per year. This figure was meant to show us just how little our monarchy costs, and that this was amazingly good value. Just think of all the hand waving and ribbon cutting we get for our money.

But this isn’t the whole story, is it?

Firstly, this figure includes every man, woman and child in the UK. If we restrict the numbers to just us taxpayers, it then shoots up to £1.33 each. “But that’s still a tiny amount of money”, the monarchists cry. True, but it’s a whole lot of tiny amounts of money. If my underfunded education taught me anything about arithmetic, when you multiply a small number by a big number you end up with, approximately, a shit-load.

The total cost of the Queen and the civil list to the taxpayer was £41.5m in 2008, but it’s not enough - the Queen wants more! To show us that she’s ‘one of us’ and that, like her subjects, she’s not immune to the credit crunch, she apparently had to dip into her £330m reserve (excluding the £10 billion Royal Collection) and cough up another £6m just to balance her books last year. That’s either a major cocaine habit, ma’am, or one will need to consider shopping at Lidl.

And £41.5m is still not the whole picture. This number doesn’t include the cost of military or police security. It’s their duty, “for Queen and country”, so it apparently doesn’t count.

If you ask anyone currently being treated for MRSA they caught in an NHS hospital, the parent of any child who didn’t get a place in their closest school, any student going through the education system, or any pensioner trying to heat their home on their meagre winter fuel allowance this winter, I’m sure they could think of a couple of things that they might consider more worthy investments of £41.5m before they wonder who will fund the royal train, the royal garden parties and state banquets.

If we decide to look further afield than the UK, according to the adverts £2 a month could make a real difference imagine; help a eliminate avoidable blindness, or could help families in Africa feed themselves or could help to provide clean water to some of the poorest people in the world. Just think of the difference we could make to the world for the sacrifice of having to come up with a new picture for the £5 note.

Actually, there’s an idea. If we, as a nation, decide we will spend our £0.69 a year each on something more useful than an insanely privileged few, the Queen could feed her family through modelling. No, really! She could license her image to the Royal (or Federal) Mint, or Royal (Federal) Mail. If she got desperate enough, I’m sure Nuts or Loaded would pay a fortune for a couple ‘off the shoulder’ shots – and what would Playboy pay for a centrefold...

...actually, maybe that’s not the best idea, but it would certainly modernise the Royal family more than a stint on ‘It’s a Royal Knockout’.

This year for my £0.69 I’ll have a Greggs cheese and onion pasty. The blind kids can wait until next year.

Fuck the dwarves...

As any regular reader may have grasped already, I don’t aim, or profess, to be the most Politically Correct (PC) blogger on the web. However, there are times where I veer towards a socially unacceptable viewpoint. This is one of those times.

I don’t like disabled people.

I should possibly elaborate on this. I don’t dislike all disabled people, but I know a few disabled folk who are just pains in the arse so I can’t say I like disabled people – much in the same way I can’t say I like white people, black people, Christians or Muslims – I like and dislike individual people, not groups.

I have known a fair number of people who have a disability of one form or another; deaf-mute, blind, cerebral-palsy, autism, dwarfism, schizophrenia, Welsh, etc . The only thing that unites all of these people is not disability; it’s that they have the same range of diversity as the able population.

It is ridiculous to lump people together with any generic term. I’m short and fat, but I don’t speak for all short and fat people, I am not an example of a type of human epitomised by shortness and fatness. If you like me you don’t necessarily like all short, fat people – unless that’s your fetish, in which case, each to their own...

To give an example here, I know a dwarf. He is a racist, bigoted, angry little shitbag. He’s not a lot of fun to be around, and so, I try to avoid him. I couldn’t give a shit about his height, or lack of it, I just don’t like the views he espouses every time he opens his tiny little mouth. A prick is a prick, however high he can reach.

I suppose the point I am trying to make here is that while the PC PCs are patrolling our thoughts, they are forgetting the principal point of PC-ness – people with disabilities are just people. Some are fabulous, wonderful people who enrich the lives of the people around them and, conversely, some are cunts.