I’m sure Robert Jenrick sincerely believes what he says about protecting our history and so on. I don’t think it’s mealy mouthed cant. I do think he is myopically low brow and philistinic, however, and also artful and a stirrer. (Even though he has three homes, or whatever, to dart around.) But he’s seemingly not one to know that every age rewrites history, even though that’s what he is trying to do.
But I also think that he knows, consciously or subliminally or both, that changing street names or questioning the immutability of some statues simultaneously raises questions about ruling class control right here in the here and now. The gaslights would be extinguished.
And in their stead, the essential truths about our so-called democracy would be revealed: a polity, economy and society where 1% of the population own 25% of the wealth, and where some half of the landmass is owned by less than 1% of the people. A peculiar country where plutocratic, parvenu finance capitalism is grafted onto a venerable aristocracy and where we commoners have the right to roam over just 8% of the nation.
A nation with a monarchy owning about one million acres of land as well as riverine and littoral rights. A nation with a Church of England with nearly £10 billions worth of property.
And in London? ‘You can walk from Sloane Square to Regent’s Park without leaving land owned by the aristocracy and the Crown.’
This is what these statues and street names protect: ruling class control in the present tense, while we are diverted with an invitation to celebrate ‘our history’. A history and present tense of exclusion, illusion and deference.
All lit by gas.
Even by the City of London Corporation.
Who Owns England? by Guy Shrubsole and The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes sources for paragraphs three, four and five. The quote is from Guy Shrubsole’s Who Owns England?
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