Who says politics have to be grim and boring? When Reform UK took control of the Kent County Council earlier this year, it decided to make the national anthem great again. Or maybe it decided to make patriotism pay. Or– 

Oh, never mind the motivations. Let’s stick with what it did. It amended the constitution to make sure full council meetings would open with the Lord’s Prayer and end with the national anthem. This would, admittedly, take time away from debating things like potholes and the county’s recurring water crises, but they’d thought of that: The council would make up the time by giving opposition parties less time to talk. They didn’t have enough votes to accomplish anything, so why make the majority listen to them? 

Would the council’s leader cut the amount of time he’d been allotted?

Well, no. That would be unreasonable. 

 

But wasn’t all this divisive?

Of course not. The Lord’s Prayer, the council’s leader said, is a “profound unifier.” 

“We are Christians at the end of the day,” another Reform councillor said after rambling a bit about whether he was or wasn’t a Christian since he didn’t go to church but did pray to win the lottery.

The underlying assumption in all this is that Britain is Christian country, and technically it is. It has its own church. You can’t get much more Christian than that. If you want to measure by what people believe, though, the argument gets weaker. In the 2021 census, less than half the population of England and Wales called itself Christian. Christian did lead the list at 46%, followed by No Religion at 37%, Muslim at 6%, and Hindu at 1%. Jewish? That gets messier, since people could be Jewish on the religion question, on the ethnicity question, or on both, but for whatever the number means, .5% of the population is Jewish.

The second underlying assumption is that everyone at the meetings is Christian or willing to pretend in the face of social and political pressure. If I’d been on the council, I’d have felt called upon to stand up and recite the Shema, one of the Jewish prayers, while they were reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I don’t speak Hebrew, I don’t pray, and I’d have to learn the words syllable by syllable, so this wouldn’t come to me easily (or well), but some things are worth the effort. I have a loud voice, which might make up for my lack of Hebrew and piousness.

Sadly, I don’t live in Kent and I’ve run for office exactly as often as I’ve prayed, so the prayer passed off with no events odd enough to make the news.

 

The anthem

Eventually the meeting ended, as all good meetings must. And all bad ones. The council members sang “God Save the King” and the Reform councillors began packing up their toys to go home but the Greens and some members of other opposition parties kept singing. It turns out the song has six verses and no one knows the last five. No one even knew they existed until the Greens handed song sheets out to opposition councillors. 

On they sang. They were admirably awful, and since the meetings are livestreamed, their performance went out to–oh, I don’t know, an audience of five or six, surely, and it was accompanied by subtitles from an automated system that make the meetings accessible to the deaf, the hard of hearing, and anyone with a Mute button. 

The Reform councillors shuffled feet and papers but couldn’t bring themselves to walk out because this was, after all, the national anthem, even if they no longer recognized it. The chair interrupted several times, trying to get control of the meeting, which either was or wasn’t over, but on they sang, while the automatic caption gizmo, for reasons no one will ever understand, switched from the words they were singing to the lyrics of the “Star Spangled Banner.”  

Politics don’t get any better than that. 

And now the bad news: The link to the meeting’s end has disappeared into the morass we know as the internet. I did see it, I can testify that it’s real, but all I can find now is an official version that cuts off before the fun starts. If anyone stumbles over it, send me a link, will you? I’ll insert it for the benefit of any latecomers.

 

All six bloody verses

People who are serious about what they sing in public have been known to stand visibly silent when the song’s sung. They’re not royalists, they’re not religious, or maybe they just like a bit of poetry with their music. Surely at least some of the people belting out the extra five verses in Kent would normally have stayed silent. But when you know that someone you dislike will be deeply annoyed if you do exactly what they told you to do, wouldn’t you make an exception?

Let’s look at all six verses. It’ll help us understand why the last five have fallen into hard-earned obscurity. Even if you can forgive the lyricist for trying to rhyne arise with enemies (or ene-myes) and laws and cause with voice, it still thumps through its stanzas on lead-weighted boots. Its shift from bloodthirsty to let’s-all-be-brothers and then back again is enough to cause whiplash. And then there’s that business about Marshal Wade and the rebellious Scots. 

Marshal who? The Scots? Aren’t they British these days? 

Stay with me. It’ll all be explained.

Verse 1: God save our gracious King, long live our noble King, God save the King! Send him victorious, happy and glorious, long to reign over us, God save the King.

Verse 2: O Lord our God arise, scatter our* enemies, and make them fall! Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks, on Thee our hopes we fix, God save us all.

Verse 3: Not in this land alone, but be God’s mercies known, from shore to shore. Lord make the nations see, that men should brothers be, and form one family, the wide world over.

Verse 4: From every latent foe, from the assassins blow, God save the King. O’er his thine arm extend, For Britain’s sake defend, our Father, prince, and friend, God save the King.

Verse 5: Thy choicest gifts in store, on him be pleased to pour, long may he reign. May he defend our laws, and ever give us cause, to sing with heart and voice, God save the King.

Verse 6: Lord grant that Marshal Wade, may by thy mighty aid, victory bring. May he sedition hush, and like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush. God save the King!

My London, which kindly dragged me through all six verses, notes that “Verse 6 is often omitted. It was added as a prayer for the success of Field Marshal George Wade’s army, which was assembling at Newcastle in 1745 to defend against the Scottish Uprising, led by Bonnie Prince Charlie.”

Nope, sorry. You have to respect tradition. Once in the national anthem, always in the national anthem.

 

A quick note from the Research Department

Since we’re doing absurdity today, I can’t leave you without noting that when I asked Lord Google for the lyrics, AI elbowed its way to the top of the page, as it always does these days, and gave me a version of “God Save the King” that started out with “God save our gracious Queen.” It went on merrily from there, saving the now-dead queen, not noticing that she never had been a king, and missing several of those unmissable verses. 

On the other hand, since it didn’t hack any neighboring countries’ anthems, no real harm was done, and I was able to move on to a more reliable version.

*

* Finally, I have no idea what the asterisk in verse two is about. It didn’t lead to any footnote, explanation, or alternative text that I could find. Let’s call it a typo. I’ve left it in because it fits so well with today’s theme. And in verse four, “O’er his thine arm extend” is probably another typo. My best guess is that it’s supposed to be “O’er him.” I could check it against some other version if I dug deep enough but how many of us really need to know?

 

And since absurdity isn’t limited to the UK . . . 

. . . the United States Department of Agriculture’s online tariff tracking site listed the fictional nation of Wakanda as one of the US’s free trade partners. It seems to have been added sometime after June 10 and was taken down after software engineer Francis Tseng noticed it and and went public.