This week saw the official state opening of parliament. This is a strange ceremony which sees a posh bloke and his wife arrive in a horse-drawn carriage, with his magic hat following behind in a carriage of its own because, apparently, only three people are allowed to touch it (presumably in case the magic wears off or gets imparted to the wrong person). The procession is followed by people responsible for sweeping up the inevitable results of parading horses through the streets. When they get to parliament, the posh bloke sits in a posh seat, wearing his magic hat, and his wife sits in another slightly less posh seat deliberately placed at a lower level so that no-one ends up looking taller than the posh bloke himself.
He then gets handed a speech, written on goatskin parchment
which contains no trace of goat, which he is obliged to read out to an audience
comprising as of right several hundred legislators who have not been elected to
the role, including the hierarchy of a single sect of a single religion of only a part of the UK as well
as a group which are only there because some ancestor or other did something or other
which pleased one of the posh bloke’s ancestors. The officially humble elected legislators are summoned
to attend whether they like it or not and forced to stand, which is not entirely strange to them because the legislature has never considered it necesary to provide enough seats for its members anway. The speech contains details
of things that the government might or might not do during the next twelve
months: there is no obligation on the government to do something just because
they’ve forced the posh bloke to say that they would, and there is nothing to
stop them doing things which they didn’t even tell the posh bloke about. It
also contains party political propaganda which the posh bloke is obliged to
read out whether he agrees with it or not.
Apparently, the UK’s
so-called modern parliamentary democracy cannot operate without this pantomime being
performed before each session. But who, in their right minds, would ever invent
a process which placed such a dependency on the alleged powers of that magic
hat?
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