The Queen Mum Is Not Pleased

Ok, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, despite the multitude of titles and crowns which perch on her 83 year old head, is technically not the Queen Mum although she is the queen and she is a mum.

She won’t be granted that overly-familiar, unofficial Queen Mum title until she steps down and Prince Charles gets the nod and the crown. That’s not likely to occur soon mainly because she doesn’t seem like to like Bonnie Prince Charlie very much, with good reason, but she does like all those trappings of queenship.

If she ever does decide to abdicate, retire, be put out to pasture, and Prince William or Harry ascends to the throne, will that make Liz the Queen Grand Mum? Then again, Harry is the offspring of Lady Diana and the queen really didn’t like her!

More to the point, does anyone care about all this crap?

Well, not much on this side of the Pond but in merry old England many, not all, care about the queen mumship and all the other folderol surrounding the anachronistic House of Windsor.

Now Liz has gone on record to demonstrate that she cares about the shenanigans going on involving everything from M.P. toilet seats to country homes being charged to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, i.e. the British purse.

Don’t you just love those titles?

An earlier British monarch was said to have expressed her upsetment with the line, “We are not amused,” using that royal “we” as American politicians do to deflect from the egoistical “I” when they actually mean “I.”

Anyway, good Queen Liz is not pleased with the ongoing scandal in Parliament or as she put it to her inept Prime Minister Gordon Brown, she is “deeply troubled:” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1183468/The-Queen-tells-Gordon-Brown-deeply-troubled-MPs-expenses.html.

Crude Americans would just say they were pissed.

Brown responded that he is “appalled and angered” over the profligacy of some fellow parliamentarians, expressing an indignation comparable to Nancy Pelosi’s over waterboarding when she knew about it for years.

Gordo undoubtedly knew what was going on as well since billing the government had for years been the ruse Brit pols employed to convince the rabble they were not greedily seeking pay hikes and instead merely asked that they be compensated for necessary expenditures. Like toilet seats and country homes.

As Reuters reported, “Britain’s 646 legislators receive an annual salary of almost 65,000 pounds and claimed 93 million pounds in expenses last year, an average of 144,000 pounds each:” http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090516/wl_nm/us_britain_politics_expenses. For the math-challenged, that’s 210,000 pounds or around $300,000 a year–for blustering.

British commoners are suffering though the same recesssion/depression/fiscal chaos/bank failures/financial upheavals as we are but nothing seems to bother the elites since they are above it all. That sort of rings a bell with regard to America’s overpaid blusterers in Congress, no?

Blimey! Charlie Rangel couldn’t cheat any better. We must admit, though, British pols have centuries more experience with this stuff so they should be better at it even if our guys are rapidly catching up. The Windsor clan doesn’t cheat like that. They don’t have to. They get allowances, and hefty allowances they are!

Even with their allowances, Liz and the other royals don’t seem to be in the same stratosphere as Americans Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, or George Soros, who is an American in name only. Nor do they seem to approach in compensation the likes of British billionaires J.K. Rowling or Richard Branson or Arab oil potentates.

However, allowances are deceiving and a significant difference is that Gates, et al. worked to achieve their wealth; the Arabian kings may have worked at one time even if they are now wallowing in the oily fruits of the Western world’s dependency.

The Windsors, well, they’re just there, at times going through public motions, bloody charades for the most part, of being productive and useful but most often functioning or not functioning, comparable to rarified pieces of old and very valuable unusable furniture but devoid of any practical utility.

They’re just there and for being there Liz sits on a fortune of $650million. On the surface that would appear to be a meager share of the national wealth as contrasted with other world potentates. However, when we scratch beneath the royal patina, the underlying Windsor opulent hoard is mind boggling. . .
(Read the rest at http://genelalor.com/)