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Jeremy Corbyn was in trouble today for not having sung along to “God Save The Queen”, which seemed a bit desperate to be honest. Luckily we don’t live in North Korea so we can choose to sing or not sing songs about fictional characters looking after the most heavily protected old woman on the planet. As much as I think it was a bit six-form and short-sighted of Corbyn not to just slightly move his mouth (it reminds me of my refusal to join my family at the Christmas service from the ages of 22 to about 44- sometimes it’s actually better to put your principles aside for a second and think about the bigger fight), whilst not singing the song, they would have gone for something else (or the headlines would have been, “Hypocrite Republican” if he’d heartily joined in). I think I would just have sung “God Bum the Queen” and no one would have know any better, apart from lip-readers. And possibly God. But if we’re able to influence God in song form then surely is enough people sing that then He has to do it. Might be worth it.
If you think about it, it’s a bit arrogant of the establishment and all right-thinking people to be telling God what He has to do at all. He’s God. He makes the decisions here. If I was Him, I would find it very annoying constantly being interrupted by songs and prayers telling me all the stuff I should be doing when I was pretty busy keeping the Universe going round in some massive version of spinning plates. God seems to enjoy the repetition, but if people kept singing “God Save the Queen” at me and I was God, I’d be like, “Yeah, I heard you the first time. I’ve been doing it. She’s still alive isn’t she? Leave me alone. You distracted me with the constant reminders to save an old woman and I didn’t spot that tsunami and thousands of people died."
You might argue that for God to save the Queen, the Queen first needs to be put into some kind of peril. So all those people are basically asking for the Queen to be endangered, in the hope that the song will encourage God to rescue her again. It’s basically a trapeze act. We want God to catch the Queen, but there’s a part of us hoping that she’ll fall. We are testing God and God does not like that. He will save the Queen under His own terms, if that’s what he wants. The people who think they can tell God what to do are the ones I’d like to see pilloried in the media.
Also no one actually cares about this. Not the people taking the photos (whilst as ace comic Boothby Graffoe pointed out, they were no doubt also not singing the national anthem), not the people publishing them, not the people reading about it. It’s just an excuse to be cross and again what we should be so cross about is having one of the most utterly shit national anthems in the world. Terrible tune, awful lyrics, about a redundant head of the country rather than about the place we live, immediately excluding anyone who doesn’t believe in God (or believes in one of the gods that thinks the Queen is a dick) or who doesn’t want a monarchy. Which has to be more than half of us. Let’s have a national song that unites the nation. I think the Laughing Policeman might work. Everyone likes that one and it would be terrific fun to sing at football matches and royal funerals. Plus we all know it and it will satisfy the traditionalists who care about institutions like the police and more revolutionary elements who will enjoy the way it makes the fascist bully-boys a benign force in a satirical manner. Plus, as far as I recall there are no racist verses in it that we would now have to leave out through shame at our past mistakes.
It’s enjoyable watching Corbyn shake things up a bit, though it feels like a fragile rebellion from a man who secretly believes he is asleep and all this is a weird dream.I think politics does need a huge shake-up and modernisation so as much as I appreciate a lot of what he’s doing, I am not sure this slightly reactionary step backwards is the right way to go. But it might work out, or be the first step in changing the way we do things. It was surreal to see a polite PMQ, even though I think it possibly suited Cameron this time. Ultimately it might subtly undermine the whole process if it carries on. I’d say we needed someone young, forward-looking who understood how to mobilise social media rather than an old man on a bicycle. But maybe the old man on a bicycle can galvanise the feeling that I think many of us have that things need to change, from the national anthem, through the Etonian, Oxbridge old-boys debating society, through to society being fairer and democracy being actually democratic.
The interesting thing about watching PMQs for the first time in ages was how shit the jokes were. The MP for Corby made a terrible now joke about being from Corby not Corbyn which meant nothing and didn’t even get a laugh from his own side and then, I think, heralded his town for having invented the DVD cover. Not the DVD. For a second I thought it might be Lee Nelson doing another of his characters, but he didn’t throw money at anyone so I doubt it.
Whatever else happens and it will be interesting to see if it’s political suicide for the Labour party or the start of something new. If nothing else politics is briefly interesting again. And the Labour party was pretty likely to lose the next election anyway, so let them lose it with a bit of dignity. For a party banging on about security, I think secretly the Tories are a bit insecure about all this. No one really knows where it will lead, even if it is likely to be back to normal business in two years time with a new, groomed and spun labour leader. But what if it’s not?
Cool.
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