FraserWords

A couple of weeks ago Brother Fiddle received a letter – more of a decree, really – informing him that if Prince Charles decides to intrude his royal person upon the good brother’s nether regions, Fiddle will jolly well have to put up with it. Or something like that.

The Duchy of Cornwall, Prince Charles’s multi-million-pound reward for unwittingly making a return journey between the right pair of parted thighs, has been busily asserting its mineral rights over vast tracts of Cornwall, rights granted in obsolete medieval fashion dating back, in some cases, hundreds of years.

The bowels of the earth beneath Brother Fiddle’s acres are among the tracts. All the tracts concerned lie underground. The Duchy’s rights are the rights to the mineral wealth the earth contains. And the Duchy is concerned to ensure its right royal snout is firmly ready in the trough as soon as that vulgar Mr Cameron gives the Americans the go-ahead to blast our sorry English arses to smithereens in search of shale gas.

The whole thing is, of course, utterly absurd.

For starters, Duchy lands should belong to the nation, not to an accident of birth. For another thing, to frack or not to frack is a decision to be taken democratically, not at the whim of an aristocrat who’s a bit worried he might be down to his last few billion. For another, is there seriously one single person in this country so cretinously tiny-minded he thinks it’s safe to let a few Tories and venture capitalists set off massive bombs deep beneath our homes? Really? And another thing: isn’t this business of burning fossil fuels a bit passé? Possibly even a bit risky? And another thing: one planning application for a little light fracking will make all the fuss about those farmers’ subsidies – you know, the taxpayers’ cheques written in the shape of giant windmills – look like a storm in a teacup.

But I can’t get angry about Prince Charles. He’s not the problem, he’s the result of the problem. Part of me thinks he’d rather like to be a lentil-wearing hippy really, so long as he had a servant to wash the lentils first.

What I’m angry about is a), the assumption that we’re all going to bend over and let the establishment have its wicked way with us yet again and b), the assumption that we’re all in favour of fracking anyway.

Well no we’re not.

And now that the outrage has reached the Daily Mail, we could be on the verge of one of those quintessentially English revolutions here, a la poll tax. Because the Duchy’s clumsy, heavy-handed, ill-judged manoeuvring – protest if you like, but you’ll fail and you’d better do it to our deadline, peasant – hits two of the things most cherished by the Mail readers, their money and their property. Possibly the only things cherished by Mail readers.

I would like to note for purposes of clarity and to avoid being sued for defamation of character that Brother Fiddle does not read the Mail, by the way. He, and I, would join the revolution, for different reasons no doubt but adding our lefty voices to the growing revolt.

It could make a lethal combination: right and left with one voice telling the establishment that we’re not here to have our nether regions plumbed without a by-your-leave – and don’t wave anachronistic centuries-old pieces of parchment at us to say you have the right.

Special measures

If they didn’t by some bizarre fluke still get their manicured never-known-a-day’s-work hands on the country’s tiller, you’d have to love the Tories. They’re like a boisterous toddler, rushing around insisting they’re perfectly alright and it’s perfectly sensible to gorge themselves on those sugary sweets and then refusing to admit they’re vomiting all over the country’s carpet when they’re vomiting all over the country’s carpet. Me? being sick? Noooo, you’re imaging things.

Step forward that staggering dickweed, that smirking tossbiscuit Michael Gove. Who would have thought that taking democratic accountability away from the school system would lead to problems, eh? Who would have thought removing local authority control and scrutiny would lead to difficulties? And who could not be moved by the drooling cockweasel’s anger that some schools were segregating the sexes? You wouldn’t get that sort of behaviour at Eton, would you….. oh. Teaching one faith to the exclusion of all others? Hang on, wasn’t it some malicious Tory midget who was driving new free schools, including new free faith schools, as a cornerstone of his education ‘policy’?

Christ, we’re being asked to listen to the twin judgments of the worthless Ofsted and its clumsy, bullying half-wit leader ‘Sir’ Michael Wilshaw, and of Michael Gove, who is a national laughing stock, even among senior Tories. I would sooner listen to the educational judgment of Wayne Rooney and Katie Price.

The whole Trojan Horse farrago reeks of racism and bigotry, reeks of chickens coming home to roost, reeks of the crass vandalism with which this wretched petty-minded Government has treated that once magnificent, magnificent engine of social justice, our education system.

Special measures, 2

I’m very fond of those random comments and recommendations that appear on the internet. They tell us much about the world in which we live.

For example.

From the Daily Telegraph’s website on Saturday: “My girlfriend’s genitals smell strongly and I don’t know what to do”. Really?

Special pleasures

In the same newspaper, AN Wilson wrote a piece in praise of Cornwall. He noted: “In Redruth, Bodmin or St Austell, as in non-picturesque inland villages, you quickly become aware that you are, in fact, in one of the poorest counties in England. On one level, there is something grotesque about the fact that tourism is now the chief source of wealth in the Duchy. It is a gut-wrenching parable of capitalism. Without the second-home-owners with their different voices, the life of the Cornish poor would be even poorer. Those who could not dream of getting on the property ladder, because the newcomers have ratcheted up the price of houses, would be even poorer if the middle classes did not visit the Duchy for those extravagant half-term weeks and drizzly August fortnights.”

What a patronising twat.

The headline? “Go west, to the fantasy land of Cornwall”. Whose fantasy?

And one big surprise

So the United States of America, the environment-destroying free-market-loving right-wing-voting health-care-denying gun-totin’ anti-abortion anti-gay anti-union religious fundamentalist USofA, doesn’t like the idea of an independent Scotland as espoused by that pacifist Alex Salmond, providing free health care, free care for the elderly, free education, environmental responsibility and social justice. What a surprise. What a fucking surprise.