The Royals, Peru, The Warring Wokery Battalions

 In Britain the queen is supposed to act on the advice of her government. The monarch, it is said, merely signs the laws that ministers bring her...

Britannia
John Thomas (1813-1862)
Photo Credit: National Railway Museum [CC BY-NC]

Yet documents in the National Archives reveal that Her Majesty managed, in secret, to get laws changed - in favour of her personal interest - before they were introduced. The Guardian found four instances between 1968 and 1982 where the palace had lobbied to get the law altered. In 1973 the Queen's lawyers intervened to allow her to hide her private wealth from the public.

The royal family clearly has significant power to influence the government behind closed doors before final decisions in parliament are made. The device used to do this is Queen's consent...

It is clear that an anarchic and mysterious convention affords a level of protection to the personal financial interests of the sovereign that no private citizen could dream of. This gives rise to a significant conflict of interest and ultimately damages the standing of the monarchy. Britain, at a minimum, should constitutionally operate with a higher degree of transparency... Locking away royal correspondence for beyond the lifetime of the monarch - and relying on Whitehall caprice to record Palace interference - does not inspire confidence in how Britain works.

(Guardian Editorial, 2021)

*More than 50,000 people have called for a parliamentary investigation into an "unfathomable" mechanism that allows the queen to vet draft laws before they are approved by the UK's elected representatives.

They have signed a petition supporting an urgent investigation by a House of Commons committee as they are concerned that the "royal family has a worrying and undemocratic ability to influence the government behind closed doors"...

The Guardian compiled a database of at least 1,062 parliamentary bills that had been subjected to the mechanism during the Queen's reign. It highlighted how the procedure had been exercised far more extensively than was previously believed.

The petition, delivered to MP's by the campaigning group 38 Degrees, urges the public administration and constitutional affairs committee to examine how "laws cannot be made" without her formal consent.

"It is unfathomable that in the 21st century, in a democracy, the Queen and the Prince of Wales hold such great power," it said.

The Queen and the government say the process is "purely formal".

(Rob Evans, David Pegg, The Guardian, 2021)

(See The Royals, Feb 26, 2021 The Royals, Dec 8, 2020) 

Peru

Peru's foreign minister has resigned amid uproar after a number of politicians were secretly vaccinated against the coronavirus before the country's healthcare workers, who have been battling a resurgence in the pandemic. The president, Francisco Sagasti, confirmed that Elizabeth Astete had stepped down.

He said Peruvians should feel "outraged and angry about this situation, which jeopardises the enormous effort by many Peruvians working on the frontline against Covid".

The scandal erupted last Thursday when the former president Martin Vizcarra, who was dismissed by the congress on 9 November for alleged corruption, confirmed a newspaper report that he and his wife had secretly received shots of a vaccine from the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm in October...

Sagasti tweeted that during Vizcarra's administration an extra 2,000 doses of the vaccine had been received from Sinopharm and that "some senior public officials were vaccinated"...

Astete, who led the Peruvian negotiations to buy 1m doses of the vaccine, said she received the first dose on 22 January. She said: "I am aware of the serious mistake I made, which is why I decided not to receive the second dose."

The pandemic has caused the deaths of 306 doctors and 125 nurses, with more than 20,000 doctors and nurses being infected.

(Associated Press, The Guardian, 2021)

 This woman claims she made "a mistake". Increasingly, when people have been found out for irresponsible acts they claim a mistake was made. There does not seem to be any sense of shame or genuine regret at what they have done. The word "sorry", in this context, has become more and more trivialised and is almost meaningless.

(See Vaccine Cheats, March 5, 2021)

*Ted Cruz, a Texas senator and strong Trump supporter with presidential ambitions, is trying to repair the damage to his reputation after scurrying home when he was spotted escaping the state's winter weather crisis by flying to a Mexican beach resort.

Cruz faced further opprobrium by blaming the jaunt on his young daughter's desire to go somewhere warm after their home in Houston lost power - like 350,000 others in Texas...

As word spread about Cruz's trip, the senator issued a statement claiming he had only ever planned to accompany his family to Cancun to make sure they arrived safely. "With school cancelled, our girls asked to take a trip with friends," he said. "Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon."

That story became unsustainable when leaked text messages from his wife to friends showed that he planned to stay for several days. Cruz admitted as much to Fox News saying: "I had initially planned to stay through the weekend and to work remotely there, but as I was heading down there I started to have second thoughts almost immediately because the crisis here in Texas."

As he arrived back in Houston on Thursday, Cruz was contrite: "It was obviously a mistake. In hindsight I wouldn't have done it."...

Jeff Leach, a Republican member of the Texas House of Representatives said: "It was a mistake. In this country we have got a lot of challenges. I believe our biggest problem we have to address is the lack of trust that the people have in their elected officials."

(David Charter, The Times, 2021)

Another "mistake"!

The Warring Wokery Battalions

Zusammenbruch
Ludwig Von Hoffman (1861-1945)
Photo Credit: Leicester Museums and Galleries [CC BY-NC-SA]

...There are now three warring battalions. First, the woke, who demand equality, challenge power and upend established myths; second the un-woke, who oppose all that the woke want. In this brigade are Tories, populists and crotchety commentators such as GP Taylor who wrote in The Yorkshire Post last week: "If you do not like the history of the country that gives you shelter, protects, feeds you and allows you free speech, then get out. Go!"

Less crude anti-woke warriors, are both censorious and capricious. Piers Morgan, for example, whose new book Wake Up, rails against "hysterically woke liberals". Last week, this roaring GMB lion went for ex-Blue Peter presenter Anthea Turner because she retweeted an offensive cartoon implying that obese and disabled people had made themselves vulnerable to Covid-19. This was, I think, not a spasm of liberal wokefulness but a smart tactic to show the anti-woke are not uncaring rogues.

The third regiment can be described as the un-woke-woke, freedom fighters who cannot bear challenges to established but questionable narratives. They avow free speech while slamming and "cancelling" dissenters, listening out for treacherous and unpatriotic views. What the philosopher and journalist Kenan Malik describes as "reactionary, reflexive un-wokeness" is the real threat to free speech today...

(Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The i, 2021)

  

Can't you agree with and argue for some of the sentiments of all three groups? Can't you disagree with and argue against some of the sentiments of all three groups?  All of this business with "wokery" is extremely confusing. I refuse to join any of them!

*I was taking part in an online seminar with several hundred public servants recently when one of them started his question with an earnest apology:

"I am a man of white privilege..." I found it hard not to laugh out loud. Things have come to a pretty pass when people prostrate themselves in public for having a prostate gland, not to mention dumping on their parents for being the wrong colour...

Personally I find the appeal of this brand of ethno-masochism hard to fathom, but then I'm not white. Yet increasingly, such "woke" thinking is flooding our workplaces, schools and universities...

Much of this turmoil began with the best of intentions: a long overdue focus on ethical behaviour in corporate and public life... But the drive for decency is steadily being highjacked by extremists, bringing a dark edge of censoriousness to the quest for better workplace behaviour. JK Rowling, infamously, has been threatened with "cancellation" for sardonically pointing out that there is such a thing as a woman. Kevin Price resigned from Cambridge city council and faced pressure to leave his post as porter at the university because he refused to sign a statement that "trans women are women"...

In Scotland, the SNP government plans to outlaw speech, "stirring up hatred", even in private homes; if I lived in Edinburgh I imagine my own columns on race or religion out loud in my kitchen would provoke a visit from the police, ready with the handcuffs...

The advance of wokedom is made even more unsettling by the fact that the rules are a moving target, driven by a bewildering array of changing sensitivities and shifting language: should we talk about BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic - so yesterday), BIPOC (or Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, as they say in California) or people of colour (so whites are some kind of transparent creatures?). Confusion abounds...

In her excoriating resignation letter from The New York Times, Bari Weiss defined woke as "a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality and the therapeutic mentality". But it's hard to pin down a movement which so far has no leader, or even a single cause, other than to condemn pretty much anything that somebody, somewhere considers offensive...

The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the gurus of wokedom have persuaded thousands of idealistic young people who rightly want to change the world into supporting what is actually a deeply reactionary movement...

(Trevor Phillips, The Times, 2020)

(See Trans Pronouns, Oct 20, 2020,  BAME, Nov 6, 2020, Tokenism, Nov 24, 2020 )