by Mike Raddie
BSN co-editor, Mike Raddie, comments on Yasmin Brown’s piece on the Royals in The Independent: Why Do We Put up With the Royal Family?
Refreshing and bold from Yasmin Brown but, sadly, replete with ridiculousness. The royal family did not veto broadcast of BBC programmes – it was Charlie who refused broadcast permission of some private film footage which BBC producers assumed they would have unfettered access to.
The royals are no different when it comes to the media than any other powerful organisation – they threaten legal action, they cut off access and this leaves the plucky Journo without sources – who in the profession and employed by the corporate media would risk being cast so adrift?
Tony Blair has effectively stopped BBC from broadcasting a programme critical of his activities or did I miss the Chilcott report in all the Christmas excitement?
The penultimate paragraph is monumentally naïve; to suggest the rich are not subsidised by their nations is to unwittingly, or worse unforgivably, ignore the massive handouts and tax breaks given to our biggest corporations especially those in the financial sector.
By abrogating its responsibility to issue the nations money supply successive governments have been gifting huge subsidies to The City making private banks some of the most heavily-subsidised businesses in the world.
And as for freedom of speech and expression, we need only look back to the most recent royal wedding to see how even these sacred ‘shining British values’ can be exposed as pure illusion by anyone willing to test ‘whether their civil liberties are actually real.’
Reading beyond the scatological shock tactics – ‘social hieracrhies are profaned and overturned’ by use of the carnivalesque – and clicking the links within this piece will reveal the absurdity of such quaint notions.
