Sickbed Doodles, Sickbed Logic

I drew this one at 5.30am when I'd finally given up attempting to sleep and decided that I might as well do something more productive with my time. I'm not going to claim it's satire or art when it's really just the feverish scribbling of a man stick of listening to the dawn chorus. I think I should have spent more time on the chin. It's too fat, though that's what I wanted but not to this extent.

All I can say is that at least there are no spelling mistakes. It's a sign of how little sleep I had last night that the heading to my previous article was 'Becow' instead of 'Bercow'. Sounded more like an abbreviation Bart Simpson might use...

The oddest thing about it is that I actually quite like Prince Charles, though I know you're not supposed to mutter such confessions too loudly. It's the old Jeremy Clarkson syndrome: I know I should have plenty of reasons to dislike the man but there's something that holds me back.

My attitude to the monarchy swings with every argument that's made. My mind tells me that I'm a Republican because I don't like systems in which elites hold an advantage at birth. Yet, at the same time, I'm not so naive to assume that all Republics are without their elites. America, our supposed great model of egalitarianism, is regularly ruled by dynasties at all levels but the Roosevelt, Bush, Adams, Kennedy, and Clinton dynasties are the most memorable. A constitutional monarchy feels like a good compromise. If we're going to have a ruling dynasty, we might as well stick with just one and strip them of all power. You could argue it's a cruel duty to impose on somebody but, really, there are far more cruel duties that life imposes on all of us.

In that sense, I'm generally in favour of our monarchy and the alternative would be a dozen times more irritating. It's rare the Queen does anything to piss us off and even if Charles is a little too quick to offer advice to governments, it's a damn sight less headache inducing that having a system like America where there'd be an elected second trough around which we could line up twice as many high-priced pigs.

Even if you accept Charles' meddling, there are other reasons to dislike him which I'm sympathetic to but largely choose to ignore. His support for holistic medicine is one. Another is the nonsense about defending all faiths, given that half the world is in flames because of faiths contesting for the soul of every Joe Pigfarm scraping a living out of the land.

So, yes, Charles is a somewhat bonkers relic of an outdated system which perhaps doesn't represent a modern nation. Yet human life isn't always run by logic alone. There should always been room for a little craziness in the world. We all have to take a one too many nips of the cough syrup and start to draw pointless things at 5.30 in the morning. Charles is anti-modernity, he's never been hip in his life, and he wants to be highbrow and believe in highbrow things. He's a bit like Clarkson: likely to piss of a lot of people who don't believe in his values. Yet it's good to know that there are people who still believe in certain things like British engineering and a kind of rebellious swimming against the tide. It might make us uneasy to defend people like that but he alternative would be a rush for the bottom and a wholesale ubiquity.

Republican Talk

I’m not exactly a republican but neither could I be called a monarchist. I don’t want to be ruled over by anybody, so if somebody is going to presume to do so, I guess I prefer it if that person isn't some vampish celebrity troll voted in by the British people. I’m not happy that our ruler is the descendant of some brutish psychopath who in the dark ages of English history used their might to seize power and oppress the people but, when the alternative is Vernon Kay, it really doesn't seem that bad.

Yet I read this morning that HMQ is about to come into some money. The Times reports that the Queen is to receive ‘£37.89 million from the State, a 5 per cent increase on this year’s Sovereign Grant of £36.1 million.’

Yesterday our Chancellor changed the rules so that jobseekers would have to wait seven days, not the previous three, before claiming benefit. It seemed spiteful, mean, and calculated yet typical of the man who once belonged to the Bullingdon Club where an entry requirement was supposedly to burn a £50 note in the face of a tramp.

The disparity here is of course a matter of scale. In terms of government spending, even £37.89 million is a sniff whereas Osborne will no doubt say that the changes to the rules will save the country hundreds of millions. To give it some scale: in 2006, the British Army bought 67 Apache helicopters for £2.5 billion, which works out at about £37 million each. So, one year of monarchy costs the same as one gunship.

It all makes me deeply angry, of course. As austerity bites the poor around the ankles, those at the top continue to get even more. Here in the north, we feel austerity more because the Tories know that locally their votes don’t matter. St Helens (which is my electoral constituency) has voted in successive Labour candidates since 1983 when the constituency was first created. Tories can squeeze us until we no longer have the energy to squeal and they know it won’t affect their vote in the rest of the country. In fact, it might make them even more popular among many who increasingly think that London and the South West should declare independence from the poorer parts of the UK.

Fractures like these become more obvious when times are tough. We’re all told to tighten our belts because a few pounds saved here and there will make a difference. Yet, a few million extra slipped to the Queen isn't supposed to count…

But there is, of course, an obvious solution.

We could simply replace the Queen with an attack helicopter. Not only could an Apache hold its own flyovers, it has a certain natural awe attached to it, plus it has more firepower than an 87 year old lady. Not only that, at £37 million a year, we could have a brand new Apache each year. And it’s surely a truer representation of what monarchy is about: an artificial sense of belonging imposed by a privileged few whose ancestors were at one point willing to back up the force of their arguments with the sharp end of a stick.