Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

The control freaks of Tudor England

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Set aside your stereotypes of Tudor England. It wasn’t all heretics going up in flames and virgin queens wearing so much clothing that how could they help being virginal?. Tudor England also developed a level of control freakery that reached deep into society.

 

Clothes

The Tudors inherited sumptuary laws–laws dictating who had the right to wear what–from Edwards III and IV, but the Tudors went wild with them. Only the royal family could wear purple or cloth-of-gold. Except for dukes and marquesses, who could wear a bit as long as it didn’t cost more than £5 a square yard. Earls and upward could wear sable. Barons and upward could wear cloth-of-silver or satin. 

Other levels of society could wear silk shirts, gold or silver bordure (don’t ask; I’d guess trim but we don’t really need to know), crimson, blue velvet, scarlet, violet, and garments made “outside this realm.” The act listed the realm’s parts in case anyone wasn’t sure. Knights could wear this, lords’ sons could wear that. 

Irrelevant photo: Meadowsweet, which was once used to flavor mead.

Moving down the social scale, hose that cost more than ten pence a yard could only be worn by a husbandman, shepherd, or laborer if he owned goods worth more than £10. 

What’s £10 in modern money? Something along the lines of £5,000 in 1988 currency. Today it would be–um, more. 

What happened to people who broke the rules? The important people would be fined. The husbandman, the shepherd, and the laborer would be put in the stocks for three days, and they’d lose the offending piece of clothing. Half the value would go to the king (this particular stature was Henry VIII’s) and the other half to the informant.

Actors, foreign ambassadors, and a few others got a free pass. 

Servants, they weren’t supposed to wear blue, but blue became so common in servants’ livery that no gentleman would be seen in it. Which is enough to make a person wonder how much the laws were enforced.

All of that, though, was about men’s clothes. According to Jasper Ridley, whose book, The Tudor Age, I’m pulling this from, a woman who dressed “above her station” might be ridiculed, but she didn’t threaten the social order the way a man would and wasn’t legislated against. 

Being part of a despised group has its occasional small benefits. 

 

Hats, caps, and consumer protection

Along with the restrictions went some bits of consumer protection, dealing with cloth that shrank, overpriced cloth and caps, and a few other specifics. This led Parliament into some fairly intricate legislation limiting who could buy wool (middlemen pushed the price up), who could work as a weaver, and where weavers could set up their looms.

To protect the people who made hats and caps, though, Parliament limited imports: they had to be sold at the port where they landed and no one could buy more than twelve at a time. In 1571, a new act required anyone over the age of six to wear a woolen cap (made in England, thanks, with English wool) on Sundays and holy days unless they were traveling outside the town or village where they lived. 

Nobles and men who owned land worth 20 marks a year could ignore that business with the woolen caps, and so could “maidens, ladies and gentlewomen.” 

 

Wages & work

All this control stuff got serious when it came to work and pay. Two things led the government to at least try to keep a lid on wages: the plague (it hit England in the 14th century) and the gradual end of serfdom (also the 14th century). A series of pre-Tudor laws already capped wages and made it a criminal offense to pay more, although it was okay to pay less. When their turn came, the Tudors passed updated versions. The employer who paid over the maximum could be fined, and so could the person who accepted higher pay. Any unemployed artisan or workman who was offered work at those wages and refused it could be jailed until they agreed to take the job. 

And the workman who quit before his contract was out could be both jailed and fined–unless, of course, his master gave his permission to quit or if a man joined the king’s service. 

It wasn’t exactly serfdom, but it wasn’t what we’d call freedom either. 

I assume this applied to women as well, but once writers decide that the word man includes women, as writers did so casually a thousand years ago when I was young, it’s hard to tell who anybody’s talking about at crucial moments.

Hours were also fixed, because “artificers and labourers retained to work and serve waste much part of the day and deserve not their wages.” 

Whoever wrote that sentence wasted much part of a number of words (cut “retained to work and serve” and you haven’t changed the meaning) but probably didn’t dock his own pay. 

Summer and winter hours were fixed, along with meal breaks. 

Working people responded by refusing to enter into the usual work contracts, which ran for three months or a year. They became casual laborers, working from day to day, and could leave when they damn well pleased. That was outlawed in 1550, because that sort of people “live idly and at their pleasure, and flee and resort from place to place, whereof ensueth more inconveniences than can be at this present expressed and declared.”

More wasted words also ensued.  

Under this new law, craftsmen–shoemakers, weavers, etc.–who hired unmarried workers without a contract were risking a fine and jail time. And journeymen had to accept a contract if it was offered, and if they couldn’t agree on a wage, a justice of the peace would set it. 

All this seems to have been widely ignored, and under Elizabeth they tried again, but with wage rates that recognized inflation. Some other details changed, but they were reaching for the same thing: drive those lazy working people into the jobs that were going begging. I’ve heard contemporary politicians making pretty much the same noises, although the punishments have changed.

A few decades later, another act covered the same territory and complained that the earlier one wasn’t being enforced.

 

Pronunciation

If all that strikes you as too practical to count as control freakery, try this: Scholars disagreed about how a word should be pronounced in Greek. That was ancient Greek, mind you, so they couldn’t just hop on a cheap flight to Greece and ask around. The lack of any possible certainty left them free to argue, and the argument came with religious overtones (don’t ask). And since all religion was political, this mattered enough that it made perfect sense for the chancellor of Cambridge University to threaten any undergraduate using the pronunciation he disapproved of with a whipping.

I’m willing to bet the wrong pronunciation was whispered over many a pint of ale.

 

Warfare and sports

By the Tudor era, Europe had learned about explosives and figured out how to pour them into a tube so they could shoot projectiles–not just tubes the size of cannons but smaller weapons called arquebuses, which the English called hagbuts, and eventually pistols. But the longbow still had its uses. It was faster and it worked in the rain. 

Even then, the English knew a lot about rain.

What’s that got to do with control freakery? England needed to keep its archers in practice, so a 1487 act, after deploring the decay of the country’s archery skill, set a maximum price for longbows. By 1504, though, they’d decided that the problem wasn’t the price of bows, it was the popularity of the crossbow. So a new law made it illegal for the average person to shoot a crossbow. 

That must not’ve worked, because four more laws made it a crime for the average person to keep a crossbow at home or to carry one on the king’s highway. An exception was made for people living near the Scottish border, the sea, or several other areas that were considered lawless or vulnerable to attack. The small print said that if someone who owned land worth more than £100 a year saw the wrong person–basically, a poorer person–with a crossbow, they could confiscate it and have themselves a nice crossbow. Or the profit from its sale.

It was that kind of small print that made the Tudor control machine work. 

Every man between 16 and 60 had to keep a longbow and arrows at home. From 7 on up, boys had to have a bow and arrows so they could learn to shoot.

In 1512, the government decided that the problem wasn’t just the crossbow, it was sports in general, so it limited tennis, bowls, and skittles to the upper classes. It also banned football, a game that could’ve passed for unarmed warfare, with no limit on the number of players and damned few rules. If someone had the ball, they (it could be a man or a woman) could be stopped by hitting, punching, tripping–pretty much anything short of murder. 

Then in 1542 a new act noted that people were evading the older law by inventing games that hadn’t been banned yet (which is how shuffleboard got started) and it banned them, except at Christmas–and of course only for the lower classes. It added dice, cards, and quoits to the existing list. 

 

Vagrants

Vagrants were an ongoing obsession of Tudor government, so let’s ask who became vagrants. Some were sailors or soldiers who’d been discharged. Some had been retainers of noblemen but had been let go when Henry VII limited the number of retainers a nobleman could keep. Some were cut loose when Henry VIII closed the monasteries. Some were laborers of one sort or another who refused to work for the pay and conditions that were offered. Some were university students. Some were children. Many were people who’d been pushed off their land by the enclosure movement, and I won’t go into that here. If you’re interested–and it’s worth knowing about–here’s a link. The enclosure movement comes in about a quarter of the way through the post.  

Tudor laws also paint a picture of unauthorized physicians, solicitors (that’s one flavor of lawyer), palm readers, pardoners, actors, and players in unlawful games roaming the country and making trouble for the authorities. It’s enough to keep a sensible monarch awake at night.

Vagrants could be punished by whipping, by having their ears cut off, and by being returned to their home parishes. People who gave a vagrant food or shelter could be punished. Constables who refused to whip beggar children or cut off the ears of vagabonds could be punished, which hints that getting the laws enforced wasn’t a simple process, or necessarily a successful one. 

After a certain number of non-lethal punishments, according to one law, a vagabond could be hanged. A different law would force a vagrant to work for any master who’d have them–for pay if possible, for food and drink if not. If the vagrant refused, the justice of peace could brand them and keep them as a slave and mistreat them in an assortment of specified ways.

Do you get a sense of the lawmakers settling on wilder and wilder solutions to a problem that wouldn’t go away? 

In a fit of mercy and realism, the act proposing slavery was repealed in a few years and the country relaxed into mere ear-cutting and whipping–and taking away any children over the age of five and putting them to work without pay. Until a few decades later, when capital punishment was reintroduced on the third offense. 

Starting in 1550, some provision began to be made for people who couldn’t work–the aged and impotent poor, they called them. They would be sent to abiding places and put to working doing whatever they could. 

Welcome to the greatness of Tudor England. Your best bet is to hope you were born lucky.

 

Enforcement

Ridley calls the Tudor era despotism on the cheap. The government didn’t have hordes of civil servants–or what we’d call civil servants. What it had was a lot of enthusiastic but unpaid amateurs, and with the exception of Wales and parts of Northumberland, and of the occasional rebellion (Ridley counts eight) or riot, the country was pretty orderly. And the trains ran on time. None were scheduled for several centuries, so that was easy enough.

Local government was in the hands of sheriffs (and above them, lord lieutenants), mayors, justices of the peace, and on the lowest level, by constables, bailiffs, and officers of the watch. That’s not a  lot if you think about keeping a country within the bounds of all those rules.

But the general public had to turn out and help catch any fugitive and had good reason to actually do it: If a felony was committed in the parish and the baddie (or some plausible substitute) wasn’t caught, every last householder was fined. 

To keep criminals from escaping into Wales, ferries were banned from carrying anyone across the Severn at night. And the ferryman wasn’t to carry anyone unless he knew who he was and could report his name and address if he was asked. Which would’ve taxed the memory of anyone who couldn’t write.

In Northumberland, landlords could only rent land to people who found two men of property to vouch for them.   

How well did any of this work? It’s hard to say. When you see various versions of the same law passed time after time, it’s a hint that the first ones didn’t work. So they probably didn’t stamp out sports, working people did continue to push for better pay, and vagrants, beggars, and vagabonds continued to roam the land, since the conditions that had produced the first batch continued to produce even more of them. And although servants weren’t supposed to wear the color blue, it was such a common part of their livery that no gentleman would be seen in it.

Counter-elites and the shortage of doctors in Britain

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It’s been a boring old week or three here in Britain. I mean, it’s true that the government wants to fix the doctor shortage by shortening the time they spend studying medicine, but other than that we’re all just sitting here watching daytime TV and waiting for something to happen. 

Okay, we’re not supposed to call it TV. It’s the telly, but I’ve never been good at following the social cues, and whatever you call the thing, once you leave the safe harbor of the BBC it’s full of ads for incontinence underwear and chairs that can lift you to the heavens without any effort on your part.

But forget the ads. Forget daytime TV. I haven’t really been watchingit, even if everyone else has, so I’m only guessing at what they’re selling. What I want to talk about is medicine. It’s been in the news and if all goes according to the government’s plan, medical students will study for four years instead of five, but don’t worry, it’s all perfectly safe. The change will be accompanied by a simplification of the human body to make diagnosis less confounding and repair more efficient. 

A rare relevant photo, but you’ll have to read to the end to find out why: Gay Pride celebration in Bude, Cornwall

Why does that seem like a good idea to anybody? Because we’re short some 9,000 doctors, although (as the Japanese paper I’m linking to says, that’s surely an underestimate.

It also mentions an overall shortage of 124,000 people in health care.

Why do I have to go to Japan for data on the UK? Because that’s where I found it first and it’s not 8 am yet, so what the hell. 

The government’s also proposing a medical apprenticeship program to shovel new doctors into the system. Details seem to be scarce, although letting me know what’s going on isn’t anyone’s top priority, so maybe the details are out there but haven’t filtered down to my level yet. Either way, I’d love it someone would reassure me that they won’t be taking kids at sixteen, introducing them to the aorta and the colon, explaining why they shouldn’t mix them up, and then letting them practice stitching people back together.

The British Medical Association’s first reaction was–and I’m paraphrasing heavily–”Excuse me, but we’re a little short-handed just now. Who do you think is going to train these people?”

Its second reaction was to head for the pub in search of solace.

The government plans to deal with the shortage of nurses in pretty much the same way. Apprenticeships. The word has such a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-down-to-work sound. How could it possibly go wrong?

The government doesn’t plan to increase anyone’s pay so it keeps up with inflation or figure out why–it’s mysterious, I tell you–people have been leaving the medical professions in droves. It doesn’t plan to pour enough money into the National Health Service to make up for what it’s taken out. Because where’s the fun in that?

 

Elite overproduction

The plan to magic up extra doctors and nurses is–bear with me and the connection may make sense–related to a theory I read about recently: elite overproduction. This comes to us from Peter Turchin and his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which I’ll confess to not having read yet. What I did read was a longish and thought-provoking review. I’m linking to it. It’s worth your time.

Okay, it’s your time. What do I know about how it’s best spent? But the review’s from a British newspaper even if Turchin isn’t, so I’m still including a bit more Britain-based news here. Almost.

What Turhin argues is that rich families and elite universities are churning out more wealthy graduates than society has a use for. That means people who were expecting to be senators or MPs or CEOs get shoved aside in favor of–well, it’s hard enough if they get shoved aside by someone from a more or less identical background, but if it’s by some outsider that really stings. So since they couldn’t merge into the elite–since someone else stole the place that was rightfully theirs (and if you doubt it was, just ask them)–they become counter-elites: they channel the discontent of people who don’t have their wealth or connections and who have much better reasons to be pissed off, at least in my all-important opinion. Think Donald Trump. Think (if you’re in Britain) Nigel Farage. Think Boris Johnson. Think all the shouting by people who look to us like members of the elite about what’s wrong with the elite.

Is the surplus elite to blame for the National Health Service being so battered? Not entirely. The process started some time ago, by a section of the elite that swore taking money out of government services would make them more efficient, as would outsourcing government responsibilities to private companies. 

I seem to remember them saying, “You can’t solve a problem by throwing money at it.” Which may be true, but they’ve shown us that you can absolutely make a problem worse by taking money away from it. 

After they outsourced and took money out, though, the counter-elite came along to tell us Britain’s problems–exacerbated, remember, by taking money out, etc.–could be solved by leaving the European Union, which was keeping money from going to the NHS. So we left, and oddly enough money didn’t flow into the NHS. It not only didn’t get better, it got worse.

So they changed tunres. It was because of the immigrants coming here and using our services. What we needed to do was get rid of the immigrants, and we could if only the tree-hugging, immigrant-loving, avocado-eating courts and lawyers would get out of the way.

Meanwhile, funding’s fallen further and further behind inflation.

Sorry, I’m not managing to be funny about this, am I? 

The point is that raging against a combination of the most vulnerable and the elite gets people elected. Three rasberries for the counter-elite. On the evidence I’ve seen so far, they’re anything but competent. On the other hand, they’ll always find someone to blame. They’re very good at that.

 

Enough of that. How about a bit of Covid news?

Let’s not get too excited about this, because it hasn’t gone into clinical studies yet, but a drug called NACE2i shows promise as both a Covid preventive and a long-Covid cure. It keeps the virus from replicating and protects against reinfection. 

Professor Sudha Rao talks about it as boosting “the effectiveness of existing vaccines, providing long-lasting protection against any variant of the virus that tries to enter the cells.”

And long Covid? 

“We uncovered the pathway that the virus uses to induce the persistent inflammation which causes organ damage found in long COVID. This study shows our drug prevents that inflammation and even repairs damaged lung tissue in pre-clinical models. It is both a prevention and a treatment.”

How does it do that? According to the article I stole this from, it reprograms “the hijacked ACE2 receptor, which disarms the virus and stops it replicating. The reprogrammed ACE2 receptor is returned to the cell surface where it acts as a lock that prevents the virus from entering the cell. This process also reverses the inflammation COVID-19 causes in the lungs.”

But again, it hasn’t gone into clinical trials yet. We’ll see what happens.

 

Of airlines and pastries

Ryanair has managed to offend the government of the Balearic Islands. Two passengers got on board with an ensaimada each–a local, spiral-shaped pastry that tourists load up on as gifts for family members and cat sitters. 

Ryanair charged the passengers £45 each for going over the hand luggage limit. The passengers replied with some version of “are you kidding me?” and gave up their ensaimadas. Somehow or other the fuss went public and escalated into a flap about what’s hand luggage and what isn’t.

That led to Ryanair meeting with a collection of important people and announcing that it never had charged anyone for carrying pastries on board. Never. Not once. It hadn’t even dreamed about it. The people had hand luggage. You know: suitcase-y things. They were charged for those.

Whatever. Passengers can now officially bring up to two ensainadas on board without paying extra and the world is a safer place to live in.

 

Living in interesting times

You know that recent US Supreme Court ruling that makes it legal for businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ clients? Well, the request for service that the case (sort of) rests on may never have happened.

The denial of service started–or so the story goes–when a gay man asked a website designer to design invites and possibly a website for a gay wedding. The designer refused, citing her religious beliefs. 

What wedding needs a website? Beats me, but then there’s no amount of money that can’t be spent on a wedding, and LGBTetc, people can be just as silly about this as straight people. So paying someone to set up a website? Sure, why not? 

The interesting thing is that the man who requested this–his first name is Stewart and he doesn’t want his last name loose in public–never contacted the designer, although she listed his name, email address, and phone number. He’s not only straight, he’s already married. He doesn’t need wedding invites, never mind a website.

Does that invalidate the ruling? ‘Fraid not, but it does make the claim that Christians are under siege by hordes of gay people clamoring for wedding cakes and napkins look a bit silly.

The House of Lords: how it formed and what it does

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Britain’s House of Lords traces its history back to the 11th century, which means it predates the country itself, because although Britain did eventually show up at the party, it was unforgivably late.

The part of the 11th century that we happen to be talking about is the Anglo-Saxon part of the century, before the Norman invasion, when the king had a witan–a group of advisors to consult if and when he wanted to. It would’ve been made up of the king’s ministers plus the most powerful of the lords and religious leaders–you know, the country’s big bruisers–and a wise king sometimes made sure they’d support whatever he had in mind before going too far out on a limb.

Although having said that, there’s some debate about who got invitations to the witan and who got to stay home and sulk. A lot of Anglo-Saxon history is subject to debate, but we’re going to rampage through this quickly because we were looking for Britain, remember? And Britain isn’t here yet.

Irrelevant photo: morning glories, a.k.a. bindweed

Before we leave, though–have a drink while I’m messing around, why don’t you?–I should mention that whatever the Witan did (and that sounds a little hazy too), it did get to select the king. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t automatically go with the oldest son. 

 

Then the Normans invaded and everything changed…

…except for what didn’t. Kings still summoned the country’s big bruisers once or twice a year. Because in theory the kings might’ve been all-powerful, but they couldn’t govern without the backing from their lords–at least not well and not for long. It’s not hard to find examples of English kings offending the nobility more than they were willing to be offended and ending up in history’s large and unsentimental trash can. 

After one of those not-quite-all-powerful kings was forced into signing Magna Carta (1215, and yes I did have to look it up), he and all the kings who came after him were committed to asking the barons’ consent before they imposed taxes. This gave his proto-parliament–that yearly or twice-yearly gathering of lords–a well-defined power. 

As the thirteenth century wore on, locally elected representatives of counties, cities, and boroughs also began to be summoned when taxes needed to be approved. Among other things, this made the taxes easier to collect. 

Representatives of the towns and cities were called burgesses and tended to be rich lawyers and merchants. Representatives of the counties were called knights of the shire and were mostly from the landed gentry. I haven’t a clue what representatives of the boroughs were called. They may also have been called burgesses, since the root word looks the same and a borough was nothing but a town with a fancy hat. 

The burgesses outnumbered the knights and were paid two shillings a day when parliament met, but the knights (probably) dominated the proceedings because they were better connected and, as everyone at the time would’ve agreed, more important and better looking, and in recognition of all that were paid four shillings a day. 

After 1325, no parliament met without the commoners.

Now let’s get to the small print: When I said these assemblies could approve taxes, that doesn’t mean it was easy for them not to approve them. They had to go pretty far out on a limb to say no. In 1376, when they did refuse one, they had to claim that funds had been misappropriated by some of the king’s courtiers. 

Short of saying no, though, they could negotiate. They could drag their feet and sulk. They could, in general, be a pain in the neck. 

Never underestimate the power of being a pain in the neck.

Much to the monarch-of-the-moment’s annoyance, he (or the occasional she) needed Parliament. The monarchy’s income from its own lands had decreased over the years–hey, it’s tough up there at the top of the heap. And they kept taking the country to war, which is an expensive little habit. So however annoying parliament became, the monarch was constantly driven to call it back and ask for some new tax. 

Parliament was also the place where communities and individuals, high and low, could go to petition the king, and it was petitions involving the affairs of the country gradually drew parliament into a law-making role. At first, it was the king’s prerogative to initiate a law, but in the 14th century parliament began petitioning the king about this or that and making gradual moves into what the king’s territory.

 

The houses separate

But we’ve spent entirely too much time brushing our refined elbows against the commoners elbows. We should be talking about lords.

If we can duck back for a minute to the 13th century, we’ll see a forerunner of the House of Lords in a small group of councilors clustered around the king. And by councilors, of course, I mean important people, and by important people I mean nobles. By the 14th century, they’d become a larger group that began meeting separately. These were dukes, earls, barons, marquesses, viscounts, and the top layer of the clergy. They were called, collectively, the peerage. 

And I’m sure the peers were much happier meeting that way. The commoners had been getting too big for their little bootsies. An anonymous publication from the 1320s argued that parliament’s barons could only speak for themselves, unlike (as the BBC puts it) “the knights, citizens and burgesses who represented ‘the whole community of England’ . . . who alone should grant taxation on behalf of the people.”

Yeah. A pesky lot, those commoners. 

As the two groups separated, the king’s key officers–the chancellor of the exchequer, the treasurer, the senior royal judges and key members of the royal household–met with the lords, not the commoners, and the real business was done there, at the top. As someone put it in 1399, the commons were merely “petitioners and suitors,” and all judgments of parliament “belong solely to the king and lords.”

 

The mysterious shrinking peerage

This isn’t strictly relevant, but it’s interesting: during the Tudor period (start counting in 1485 and stop when Elizabeth I dies), the number of peers shrank. Part of that was the War of the Roses–the count dropped from 64 to 38–but nobles had always died in wars; under normal circumstances dead ones would’ve been replaced with live ones who were either their heirs or, if no heir was to be had, someone the king owed a favor to. Or liked or wanted to placate or hoped to control. Or whatever motivated that particular king at that particular moment. 

Henry VII, though–the first of the Tudors–didn’t replenish the stock, probably because he didn’t want a group of powerful nobles who might challenge him, starting another war. He’d seen enough of that, and the country was out of roses anyway. 

So start there, then run through the rest of the Tudor kings and queens and count the number of nobles executed for treason whose titles were taken from them, which meant their heirs didn’t inherit them. I doubt being a Tudor-era peasant was a barrel of laughs, but belonging to the nobility had its own dangers. Romanticize it all you want, the Tudor era was a dangerous time to be part of the nobility.

For the last 30 years of the Tudordrama, the country had zero dukes, in spite of the after-VII Tudors (not to be confused with After Eight Mints) having created some new peers as they went along, and most of the 16th-century nobility were of recent coinage. 

With the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the number of abbots in the House of Lords (no surprise here) shrank, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign there wasn’t an abbot to be found in the Lords, and only 26 bishops. For the first time, the secular lords formed a majority. Semi-relevantly, the secular lords were and still are called the Lords Temporal, because everything needs a fancy name.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled drama.

 

From the Civil War to the 19th century

From the Tudor period, it’s a short march to the Civil War, when Parliament seized power. In 1642, it excluded bishops from the House of Lords. Then in 1649, it abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords. I’m sure that made the bishops feel better about having been tossed out. Guys, the party ended just a few years after you left, so don’t feel bad.

When the monarchy was restored, everybody pushed the Reset button and Parliament was reconstituted in its old form–Commons, Lords, Church worthies–and when (you thought we’d never get there, didn’t you?) Scotland and then Ireland were folded into the batter that became first Great Britain and then the United Kingdom, the Scottish and Irish peers elected representatives to the Lords. 

Now we do a couple of fancy steps until we get to the 19th century, when the number of bishops in the House or Lords was limited to 26 and the monarch got to create life peers. That’s as opposed to hereditary peers. Once they’re appointed, they can put down roots and make themselves at home, but they can’t shoehorn their kids in after them.

 

20th century

In the 20th century, the story gets interesting enough that I’ll slow it down again. By the beginning of the century, it was standard for the prime minister to govern from the House of Commons, so basically the power had shifted. The last PM to govern from the Lords was the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902.

Then we get to 1906, when the Liberals won a big honkin’ majority in the Commons–132 seats–and figured they’d use it to introduce radical things like sick pay and old age pensions.

Horrors, the Lords said in one aristocratic voice. And double horrors because the programs would be paid for by a tax on the rich–especially on the landed rich: in other words, on the people sitting in the House of Lords.

You might have already figured out that the House of Lords had a built-in Conservative–and lower-case conservative–bias. So predictably enough, the Lords refused to pass the budget. After a bit of back and forth, including a general election, the Lords did pass the budget, though, along with the Parliament Act of 1911, which limited  the Lords’ power. 

Why’d they do that? Because the government threatened to flood the house with 400 new Lords, all of them Liberals. 

The bill left the Lords with the power to, at best, delay money bills by a month, and it completely lost the ability to veto bills. It could delay non-budget bills for two years, but that was the limit.

The two years have since been reduced to one.

That takes us to 1958 and the Life Peerages Act, which poured in a group of life peers, including experts in various fields and for the first time–gasp; horrors–women. It was a gesture in the direction of counteracting the house’s built-in rightward tilt. 

Then we skip forward again. Tony Blair had a three-stage plan that would fold the House of Lords into a paper airplane, sail it out to sea, and replace it with a fully elected house. 

How did that fare? Well, the House of Lords started 1999 with 758 hereditary lords and ended the year with 92, but then it all bogged down. The plan’s probably still stashed on some governmental shelf, gathering dust, and we still have 92 hereditary peers. They’re chosen by all the country’s hereditary peers, making the aristocrats, in a nice little piece of irony, the only elected members of the Lords.

People who think seriously about these things, along with people who don’t but who shoot their mouths off anyway, have suggested all sorts of ways to reform what’s clearly an antiquated system, including setting a limit on the number of lords, but tradition allows outgoing prime ministers to shovel in new members, and we’ve been through a lot of prime ministers lately. Each one got a shovel of their very own. A committee’s supposed to weed out anyone who’s inappropriate, but the committee doesn’t get the final say. 

At the moment, 779 people sit in the House of Lords. Or don’t sit there. Nothing says they have to show up. 

Why a Member of Parliament can’t resign, and how they do it anyway

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Since we’ve seen a handful of MPs resign from the House of Commons lately, this might be a nice time to talk about what an MP has to do to escape MPdom. Because like everything else in Britain, it’s wrapped up in tradition and more complicated than you’d think.

Officially speaking, MPs can’t resign. A 1624 law locks them into their jobs unless they’re expelled, disqualified, or dead. Since relatively few politicians are willing to squeeze their feet into those uncomfortable shoes–I’m not a politician, but the dead part would make me hesitate–and since over the course of a long and complicated history some MPs were deeply committed to getting out of the job, a workaround was invented: they can be appointed to one of two “paid offices of the Crown. These are the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.” 

The small print says that accepting either position disqualifies them as MPs. So without dying or being expelled, they get to push open the fire exit without setting off alarms. Neither position is paid, but they do become the recipients of a shitload of capital letters. 

Irrelevant photo: roses in a nearby town.

What does a former MP have to do if they’re  appointed to one of those positions?

Nothing. The jobs are long past their best-before date and have been kept alive only to allow MPs an exit that doesn’t involve death, expulsion, or uncomfortable shoes, although MPs–especially those of the female variety–are free to wear uncomfortable shoes if they so choose. I disapprove, but hey, who asks me? They’re not my feet.

 

What are the Chiltern Hundreds?

The hundreds are divisions of government and taxation–or at least they were back in the Anglo-Saxon long ago. In terms of size they stand somewhere between a village and a shire.

What’s a shire? 

It’s the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a county.

The Britannica says the hundred was probably an Anglo-Saxon area of a hundred hides, with a hide being the amount of land it took to support a family. Each hundred would have a court to settle  criminal cases and disputes between neighbors. Originally, everyone who lived within the hundred would be expected to attend, but gradually they came under the control of the lords. By the time you get into the medieval period, if a crime was committed, the hundreds were collectively responsible unless they could cough up the perpetrator, or someone who’d pass for the perpetrator.

The hundreds weren’t formally abolished until 1894, although by then they’d pretty well lost all relevance.

 

A bit more history

I’m not clear on whether the 1624 resolution established the rule against resignation or built an escape hatch. Parliament’s website seems to be arguing both sides. On the one hand, it says many MPs saw serving in Parliament as an obligation, not an honor or opportunity to be chased after. So members weren’t encouraged to step down. On the other hand, Parliament didn’t usually stay in session for more than a few weeks, so ”a procedure for resignation was hardly necessary.”

Take your pick. 

It goes on to say that if an MP accepted a paid office from the crown, he (and at this point he would’ve been a he) could no longer be expected “to scrutinise the actions of the Crown or the Crown’s government,” so he’d have to step down.

Did I say “step down”? It was nothing so gentle: “All Offenders herein shall be expelled this House.”

So take that, you offenders.

Once upon a time, lots of crown stewardships roamed the land and could be used this way. They paid actual money and had actual responsibilities. Only two survive and they exist only as a back door out of the House of Commons. You can think of them as a nearly extinct species. They only surviving pair are preserved in the zoo that is the Parliament.  

 

Are there any other ways out of the job?

Yup, and although some are appealing and some are not. An MP can bail out of Commons:

  • By becoming a member of the House of Lords. 
    • A couple of the MPs who left with Boris Johnson were hoping for that promotion, and when their names were crossed off the list felt–okay, I’m speculating here, but it looks to the casual observer like they felt cheated. Here they’d been expecting a job that pays £332 plus travel expenses and access to subsidized restaurants on any day they show up, plus the occasional loan of an ermine robe, and then they’re told they didn’t get the job? Hey, that’s hard on the old ego. https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-do-house-of-lords-expenses-work/ 
  • By becoming a police and crime commissioner or a member of the National Assembly for Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly, or a non-Commonwealth legislature (except the Houses of the Oireachtas of the Republic of Ireland). 
    • The Houses of the Oireachtas? That’s Ireland’s parliament. Exactly why you can be a member of that and not be disqualified as a British MP is way over my head.
  • By being “sentenced to be imprisoned or detained indefinitely for more than a year in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, or the Republic of Ireland; or if they are convicted of treason.”
    • Sometimes, you know, you’re better off just showing up at the goddamn job you already have, no matter how much you hate it. 
  • By going bankrupt, but only under some circumstances.
    • Please don’t ask which circumstances or why those and not others.  
  • Or, as we’ve seen, by accepting “one of a number of offices which are incompatible with membership of the House of Commons.”

So on the off chance that you wake up some morning and find that against your will and despite all your protestations you’ve been made a Member of Parliament, don’t despair. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence. The Chiltern Hundreds would be happy to act as your host, for however short a time.

How do members of the House of Lords resign? By writing a nice little note to the Clerk of Parliaments and then going out for a cup of tea. Or, of course, they can get their mothers to write the note: “Please accept Lord Supper-Dish’s apologies for withdrawing from the House of Lords. His time is currently occupied helping the police with their inquiries.”

But once the door slams behind the ex-lords, they’ll find that champagne’s more expensive on the mean streets of the real world than it is in the Lords’ subsidized eating and drinking establishments. The transition’s a tough one.

*

And having nothing to do with any of that, if you’ve read or will be reading my new novel, A Decent World, it would really help if you’d leave a review on Goodreads of Amazon. Or if you have a blog and want to review it yourself, that’d be great. Anything that makes it visible, from social media to graffiti, helps.

Except possibly the graffiti.

Politics, phones, and pandemics: or, normal life in Britain

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Before we get going, could we have a brief moment of thanks to Britain’s recent governments? Through several recent prime ministers, their ongoing strength has been their ability to give satirists and unofficial wiseacres an endless supply of material.

[   ] 

Are we done being grateful? Good. Let’s get down to business.

Many and many a month ago. Boris Johnson set up a commission to look into how the government had handled the Covid epidemic. 

Why did he do that? Probably because it wouldn’t meet for a long time and wouldn’t report back for an even longer time, and meanwhile it would look like he’d done something, thereby allowing him to tell  those pesky relatives of the pandemic’s dead that he’d taken care of the problem. And also possibly because he was deluded enough to think the commission would give him an A+, or at least if he took the pandemic pass/fail, a passing grade.

Either way, the thing about long times is that eventually even the longest of them will end, and the commission is now in high gear and has demanded the unedited versions of Johnson’s notebooks and WhatsApp messages. Johnson, of course, is no longer prime minister–in fact (see below), since I started writing this, he’s put the lid on the trash can that was his career as an MP and is just some private schmuck of a citizen, like the rest of us–so it was the current government that responded to the demand.

No, the government told the commission, you can’t have the full versions. Too many irrelevancies to trouble your little brains. We’ll sort through them for you and give you edited versions. You’ll like them better. They’re shorter. 

To which the commission replied, Are you fuckin’ kidding us? 

The italics there are to show–in case you managed to wonder–that those aren’t actual quotes. Both sides have been more diplomatic and to have kept sober and serious faces when they said whatever it was they actually said.

Irrelevant photo: A lily. The name starts with a Z, but that’s as close as I can get.

The two sides tossed messages back and forth over the fence a few times until the commission changed tactics and threw over a subpoena and the government went to court to keep the commission–which its own party set up, remember–from getting its hands on what we can only assume is something juicy, since as soon as someone says you can’t see something, every last one of us thinks it’s worth seeing.

Before the courts had a chance to consider the issue, never mind rule on it, though, Johnson offered the commission his phone, complete with its unedited WhatsApp contents. 

Why would he do that? Could it be because he’s not the prime minister anymore and the person who now is helped trigger his downfall? 

Is anyone really that petty?

You bet your overworked word processing program that some-unspecified-one is.  

How much does Johnson’s offer mean? It’s hard to say. He had a different phone early in the pandemic, and it’s–um, I’ve lost track of who has it. Johnson? The government? The tooth fairy? Does it matter? It can’t be turned on because of security issues: because the phone number had been publicly available for years, it’s a security risk and can only be turned on in a secure location. Turn it on in the wrong place and children throughout the land will be told, inaccurately, that the tooth fairy does not, in any literal sense, exist.

The government also has Johnson’s notebooks (unless the tooth fairy’s grabbed them too) and isn’t anxious to release the full version of those either.

If Johnson’s willing to turn over his phone, why does our prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, have a problem with handing over the rest of it? Well, it sets a precedent, see. The commission might ask for his–that’s Mr. du Jour’s–notes and messages next. Besides, who knows what Johnson said about him? Or anyone and anything else. Johnson’s not known for his discretion. 

The more official argument is that ministers should be able to discuss policy freely, without the fear of being overheard. They need to say–as Johnson did–things like, “Let the bodies pile high in their thousands,” without worrying that they might offend the delicate sensibilities of people whose bodies might end up in those piles.

 

The Sunak part of the picture

It seems fair to guess that Sunak has no problem with the commission unraveling Johnson’s reputation (if he still has one) but doesn’t want his own tangled up with it. Sunak  likes to present himself as having heroically saved the economy during the pandemic. 

“I successfully helped 10 million people protect their jobs and the economy from Covid,” he said, apparently not noticing that he set up that sentence so he needed 10 million people to help him do that.  

Part of Sunak’s heroic effort was the Eat Out to Help Out program, which may well have given the virus a nice bump by tempting unmasked people into public spaces where they could share both appetizers and germs. That one thing (the bump in case numbers) follows another (the program) isn’t proof that the Thing 1 caused Thing 2, but it might make a person look at the possibility that it did. And the commission could just be moved to.

Should he have known at the time that the program was risky? I dunno. I spotted the problem, and I didn’t have his access to epidemiologists. I’m just some damn fool with a computer and an internet connection.

A deep dive into the unedited messages and notes may also show other ways Sunak–along with Johnson and the rest of the government–ignored scientific advice. And may not. At this point, for all we know they could show that the entire government was taken over by shape-shifting lizards bent on the destruction of the planet for reasons that we don’t need to make clear because we’re moving the plot along so fast no one will notice.

I think I stole that lizard thing from a Dr. Who episode, so don’t blame me if it’s not entirely convincing.

 

Johnson’s resignation

Now let’s come back to that MP business: Boris Johnson is not only no longer Britain’s prime minister, he’s no longer a Member of Parliament. He didn’t exactly leave of his own free will–an investigation (different investigation; if investigations were wheels, we could catch any bus we wanted right now)–

Where were we? Johnson saw the report of an investigation into whether he misled parliament about breaking the Covid regulations the rest of the country was expected to follow, and having seen it, he resigned. If he’d waited around, he’d have gotten pushed, so this wasn’t exactly a free choice. 

That will trigger a by-election–a local election to replace him–and that will give Rishi du Jour a pretty sharp headache, because numbers aren’t looking good for the Conservatives just now. 

A couple of Johnson supporters have also resigned as MPs, which will trigger more by-elections, but it’s hardly been a flood. In fact one of them, Schrodinger’s MP–having said she was stepping down with “immediate effect,” which means right this second, you hear me?–hasn’t officially stepped, at least not at the moment I’m writing this. It’s anyone’s guess whether she’ll bail out or not. Stalling like this makes life marginally more difficult for the prime minister, who’d like to clear all those nasty by-elections out of the way at once so he can go about Tthe business of convincing the country that he leads a marginally sane political party.

The tooth fairy was expected to step down but has made no statement as yet.

 

Politicians, government officials, and phones

All this raises the question of why politicians don’t set up their WhatsApp groups to delete messages after seven days, and if that’s a question (it’s not exactly, but let’s not quibble) it’s not one I can answer. Maybe they have an exaggerated sense of their own importance, and therefore of their messages’ importance. And of their phones’ importance, because they hold historic documents, after all. They mustn’t fall into the wrong hands, but heavens to an ice cream sundae, they do have to preserve those messages.

If we’ve established that, I’m about to cheat and tell you the story not of a politician but of an food inspector in India who was taking a selfie at a reservoir (he was on vacation, so he wasn’t doing this wasn’t on government time) and managed to drop his phone in the reservoir. 

It happens. I once dropped mine down the toilet. I wasn’t on a call at the time, so I missed my chance stick my head into the opening and yell, “Can you hear me now?”

The food inspector ordered the reservoir drained. Once enough water to irrigate 1,500 acres of land had been wasted during scorchingly hot weather, he got his phone back. 

It was unusable.

As soon as I’m done here, I’m going to see if he’s eligible to be our next prime minister. He’s in the wrong country, but I’m not sure that rules him out. See, we have this unwritten constitution here in Britain, so who knows what it actually says? 

 

But if we’re talking technology, what about chatbots?

They’re harder to drop down the toilet, being immaterial and all, but they can drop their users down the pan easily enough, which is what happened to a lawyer who asked ChatGPT to help him prepare a case. His client was suing an airline, and the chatbot cited Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines.

Are your sure those cases are real? the lawyer asked.

Oh, yeah, the chatbot said. Absolutely. It even cited a source.

Into the brief they went. 

The airline’s lawyers couldn’t find any trace of the decisions, though, and being on the opposing side they were less willing to take anyone’s word for their existence. 

Not one of them turned out to be real.

 

But back in Britain…

That was in New York, where the improbable happens every day, so let’s go back to Britain, where nothing improbable happens. Except possibly at the Gloucester Cheese Rolling, where this year someone won the race while unconscious. 

The race–actually, it’s a series of races–involves chasing a wheel of cheese down a very (very, very) steep hill. No one catches the cheese or is expected to. Cheeses don’t have any sense of self-preservation and humans aren’t round, so the winner is the first person who reaches the bottom after the cheese.

In this case, the winner tripped, went airborne, hit her head, and rolled out in front of the other runners while unconscious. She woke up in the medical tent, and is now the proud owner of a three-kilo wheel of cheese.

Don’t make fun of her for falling, because almost no one stays on their feet all the way down. The winner of a different race said, “I don’t think you can train for it, can you? It’s just being an idiot.” 

The race dates back to no one’s sure when and local authorities have (sensibly and unpopularly) been trying to shut it down for years. Six people ended up in the hospital this year, which may help you understand why, if a person’s job involves projecting some semblance of responsible judgment, it also involves disapproving. The problem is that the race is an unofficial event, and the organizers are unofficial organizers–well, it just sort of happens. Year after year. Magically. Even the cheese is a volunteer.

Police, fire, and ambulance services don’t attend the event–they’re afraid, I believe, of seeming to support it–but they are on standby.

 

Book banning and word unbanning

You’ve been reading about books being banned from US schools and libraries because someone thinks they’re not appropriate for kids, right? The books that’ve been given the boot include a lot ofL LGBTQ literature, a lot of Black and antiracist literature, and a lot of books about sexuality, grief, loss, poverty, puberty–you know, things kids wouldn’t have a clue about if those books hadn’t shoved their noses right up against the shop window.

How do you fight back against book banning? Well, in 2022 Utah passed a law banning “pornographic and indecent” books from the schools, and now some genius has challenged the Bible as having content inappropriate for young kids. It’s vulgar and violent, apparently. 

One school district has already pulled copies from its shelves.

This should be fun.

*

Meanwhile Apple has unbanned a word that its autocorrect used to change to “duck.” As Craig Federighi, Apple’s software chief explained, “In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too.” 

Users could always turn off autocorrect, and they could do it without having to drain the reservoir, but a lot of us, ahem, never get around to it and send out ridiculous texts because we don’t bother to proof them. 

A Guardian letter writer claims that her phone routinely changes angry to seagull, although it’s always let her type fuck as often as she wants. 

Conscientious Objectors in World War I Britain

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Let’s wriggle into a small, dusty corner of British history and see what someone left behind. In other words, let’s talk about Britain’s (as far as I can establish) first conscientious objectors: the men who refused to serve in the military during World War I. 

But–as usual–we have to take a step back before we go forward. To have conscientious objectors, a country needs a draft–a system of conscription that forces all physically fit men between certain ages into the armed forces. Without that, there’s nothing to object to, conscientiously or otherwise. 

From the information I’ve found, World War I marked the first time Britain introduced universal conscription. The fighting was on an unprecedented scale and it called for an unprecedented number of fighters.  

The war started out with brass bands and a tide of patriotism, working the country into the kind of fever you need to recruit soldiers. Men and boys signed up, and at some point some number of women–it was probably a small number but they’ve been written into history in bold-face type–began handing white feathers to men who looked able-bodied enough to be soldiers but who visibly weren’t to publicly shame them.

Irrelevant photo: campion and stitchwort growing by the roadside

But the number of volunteers wasn’t high enough. The war was turning soldiers into dead bodies on a massive scale: 6% of the adult male population died in the war–12% of serving soldiers. They had to be replaced, so the country introduced a draft.

 

The conscientious objector category

It’s against that background that we take our snapshot of Britain’s conscientious objectors–or COs, since (a) they were often called that and (b) my fingers are convinced conscientious is spelled some other way.  

From the time conscription was introduced (1916, two years after the war started, first for those who care, first for single men between 18 and 40, then for all men, married or otherwise) until the end of the war, 20,000 men applied for CO status, and that tells us two things. The most obvious is that it wasn’t a massive number of people but it wasn’t an insignificant one either, but the more interesting and less obvious thing is that a category had been created. If you either naturally or with some contortion could fit yourself into it, a recognized way had been made for you to refuse military service.

The Military Service Act–the same one that introduced conscription–set up tribunals where men could argue that they shouldn’t be drafted on the grounds of hardship, illness, education, essential work, or–pay attention here, because this is the point–a conscientious objection to military service, which could be religious or more generally moral.

The tribunals included someone from the military along with local men–and we can count on the local members being drawn from the area’s, ahem, important people, because class comes into everything in Britain. And elsewhere, but oh-so-visibly here. So if you showed up to argue that you shouldn’t be drafted, they were the ones who’d decide whether you had a legitimate reason or were just a coward–you know, the kind of lowlife who objected couldn’t see the patriotic joy in climbing out of a trench and running through a hailstorm of bullets. 

Some people’s objection to the war was political, and the act allowed no space for that. You could have a moral or religious objection or you could pick up your damn rifle and go fight.

The panels’ questioning was (no surprise here) often hostile. One CO described his hearing this way:

“They put me through the usual sorts of questions that these tribunals did. They had certain routine questions. A favourite one was, what would you do if your sister was threatened with rape by some German soldier or something like that? And I can’t quite remember what I answered but it was to the effect that that had nothing to do with being a CO against the war. I think that I said that I didn’t know what I would do and that it didn’t matter in the present context in the least what I would do. The thing was this was a protest against the war, that the war was wrong.”

If your argument was accepted, you were shunted off into the Non-Combatant Corps, and my fingers don’t object to the spelling there but it was called the NCC anyway. Let’s save a few of the keystrokes I’ve wasted explaining that and use the acronym. It was created by the same act that established the draft.

If it wasn’t accepted–and most weren’t–you were drafted and had to decide whether to serve or to refuse, leading to tales such as that of a rifleman who refused to load his rifle for target practice and another one who refused to put on his uniform.

 

The NCC

If your argument was accepted and you were shunted into the NCC, you  were expected to accept military discipline. You were also expected to accept acronyms. I can’t tell you any tales about what that was like in Britain, but I met an American World War I CO (he was the brother of an uncle-by-marriage–that’s how old I am) and he was sent to an army camp in the Midwest somewhere. Let’s randomly say Kansas. When he got there, conscientious objectors were rare enough they weren’t sure whether to lock him up (he might be a conscientious objector) or salute him (he might be a commissioned officer). His paperwork didn’t make it clear.

After a few days, unfortunately, they figured it out and the quality of his food went down sharply.

I had to slip that in. I never have found a spot for it before.

In the NCC, you might end up building, cleaning, loading or unloading anything that wasn’t munitions, and you might do it in Britain or where the fighting was. You might carry stretchers–a job that was as dangerous as being in the infantry–or work in the medical tents. You were subject to military discipline.

 

The refuseniks

On the other hand, you might join the hard-core COs and refuse to follow the NCC’s military discipline, in which case you’d be court martialed and end up in prison. 

As an alternative to prison, you could join the Home Office Scheme, which offered imprisoned COs the choice of doing “work of national importance under civil control”–building roads and reservoirs, say. You’d live in a camp, and if you weren’t in the military your life still wasn’t your own. In some camps, you’d be treated decently and in others badly. In one camp, the COs went on strike.

Or you could join the handful of COs who took an absolutist stance. For them, working on a road or a reservoir benefitted the government in wartime and was an acknowledgement that the government had a right to dictate to them. They were court martialed, sometimes repeatedly. Some went on hunger strikes and were force fed. Many were underfed. Seventy-three died of poor treatment either in prison or shortly after their release. And the abuse that COs faced often fell on their families as well.

Just short of 6,000 men were sentenced for resisting military authority. 

 

Legacy of the COs

After the war, some former COs went into politics and a few ended up in Parliament. Others struggled to find work and rebuild their lives. All continued to have acronym-haunted dreams.

A Decent World

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It’s time to announce a new novel.

(Sorry, did you want a regular post? Come back next week.)

A Decent World is the story of  Summer Dawidowitz, who’s spent the past year caring for her grandmother, Josie — a lifelong Communist, a dedicated teacher, and the founder of an organization that tutors schoolchildren. When Josie dies, everything that seemed solid in Summer’s life comes into question. What sort of relationship will she have with the mother who abandoned her? Will she meet with Josie’s brother, who Josie exiled from the family? Does she really want to go back to the non-monogamous household she was part of before she moved in to take care of Josie? And finally, does she still believe a small, committed group of citizens can change the world, and if so, how?

A Decent World is about grief, family, and love. It asks the broadest of questions about the form of society we live in. It will be in UK bookstores from June 15 or can be ordered now, in the UK or abroad, from Waterstones, Swift Press, or–inevitably–those folks I work hard to avoid, Amazon.

 

It’s never the big things: small scandals in British politics

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The real scandals aren’t the ones that bring politicians down. It’s the little ones that get them. The stupid ones. The ones we understand. So Suella Braverman, Britain’s home secretary and my nominee for this year’s Wicked Witch of the West Award, isn’t likely to lose her job over abusive treatment of immigrants and refugees or for cranking the national racism dial a few notches higher. Instead, it’s her handling of a speeding ticket that’s put her job in danger.

Braverman got nailed for speeding last summer, and if you’re not too far over the speed limit the law allows you to take a speed awareness course instead of paying a fine and getting points on your license.

Points? You don’t want those. If you rack up twelve, your license disappears in a puff of smoke, and if you try to drive after that you disappear in a much larger puff of smoke. 

And your car turns into a ham sandwich.

Irrelevant photo: A neighbor’s flowering bush. No idea what it’s called, although more than one person has told me.

Braverman was eligible for the course but didn’t want to rub shoulders with the kind of lowlifes who show up at a speed awareness course. People might confuse her for one of them, and that would have been politically embarrassing. So she allegedly asked civil servants to see if they could arrange a personalized course for her own important self.

They (allegedly) replied with the diplomatic version of, “Fuck, no,” so she asked a political advisor to see what sort of wiggle room could be made for her. When the answer (apparently) was “none,” she paid a fine and got three points on her license instead of taking the course. 

In case you need help with this, three is several points short of twelve, so no smoke and no ham sandwich.

What’s the problem? Ministers aren’t supposed to involve civil servants in their personal lives. Civil servants aren’t there to pick up ministers’ dry cleaning, park their cars, or mediate between them and the speed awareness course people. 

The flap has only recently emerged into the light of public disapproval, and Rishi Sunak, our prime minister of the moment–we burn through them quickly these days–is having to answer awkward questions, like whether he’ll launch an investigation into what happened. Initially he said things like, “I know she’s expressed regret” and that he’s “availing” himself of the information.

I’m not sure what you do when you avail yourself of information. Is it like when I buy the paper but don’t read it? It’s available on my kitchen table. It’s not available in my brain, but it could be. Easily. 

Braverman’s said things like, “[I’m] content that nothing untoward happened.”

After the requisite amount of dithering, Sunak decided he was also content and the issue didn’t need investigation. So for the moment, officially speaking, nothing untoward happened. Watch this space, though. Watch several other spaces. In one of them, surely, something interesting will happen.

*

Okay, what’s my problem with Braverman?

I’ll refrain from the full-blown documentation my Wicked Witch nomination requires. Sorry. I did include in when I sent in the paperwork, but for the purposes of this blog–well, she’s beyond anything I can be funny about. I will say, though, that she seems to be  positioning herself as the rightest of the right wing candidates for next leader of the Conservative Party.  Political gossips–at least the ones who don’t like her–hold that she’s not known for her competence, but as recent history demonstrates, that doesn’t disqualify her for a top job.  A former and carefully unnamed minister who worked with her provides the best quote: “I don’t often say people are completely useless, but if her desk had not been occupied I wouldn’t have noticed.” 

 

And from the Department of Marie Antoinette Reincarnated comes this

Ann Widdecombe–once a Conservative MP, once (in the full spirit of irony) a Member of the European Parliament for the Brexit Party, and now a member of the post-Brexit creation Reform UK–was asked, on a BBC politics show, what she’d say to people who couldn’t afford the ingredients for a cheese sandwich. 

“Well, then, you don’t do the cheese sandwich,” she said. Compassionately.

She went on to remind us that we had no right to simply expect prices to stay stable and that if wages rose they’d only add to inflation. She didn’t advise people not to eat until prices come down, but it is the logical conclusion.

 

Meanwhile, the Diplomacy Department’s been busy

In a precedent-setting move, Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, showed up at the coronation–that’s the recent coronation, in case I haven’t been clear–bringing along his partner, Matt Barrett. So make that two precedent-setting moves: Ireland shows up at the coronation of a British king and a political leader brings his same-sex partner.

Not content with that, though, Barret–that’s the partner, in case you got lost in the last paragraph–set a precedent of his own, posting throughout the show to the 350 followers on his private Instagram account.

“Holy shit,” he wrote from the car before they got to the abbey, “I think I’m accidentally crowned king of England.”

During the ceremony itself, he posted about Charles’s crown, “Was genuinely half expecting it to shout ‘GRYFFINDOR.’”

About the Right Rev. James Newcome’s title, Clerk of the Closet, he said, “Had this job until my early 20s.” 

Of course, private account or not, it all went public. 

The taoiseach said, ““We’ve spoken about it and it won’t happen again.” 

He has not confiscated Barrett’s phone or grounded him for six months. In fact, his response is refreshingly sane: Barrett’s a “private individual and [whether he apologizes] is obviously up to him.”

Barrett has apologized. Unreservedly. 

 

Lost any luggage lately?

Have you ever wondered how many pieces of luggage the aviation industry lost, delayed, or damaged last year? We’re talking globally here, and the answer is 26 million, or 7.6 bags per 1,000 passengers. That’s not quite double the year before, but it’s close enough for a numerophobe like me. 

Covid’s getting the blame, which works well since it’s in no position to defend itself.

That may explain why James Cleverly, our foreign secretary, chose a private jet for his eight-day tour of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Okay, maybe political honchos all fly private jets. They need room for their briefcases and their aides and their security details. But Cleverly cleverly chose “the creme del la creme of private business jets,” which rents for more than £10,000 per hour and comes with a master suite that includes a queen-size bed, a private toilet, and a shower. Anyone who’s left to suffer in the lounge area at least has a big-screen TV. 

I’m not sure who I’m quoting on that creme de la creme comment. It was unattributed in one of the articles I read, and I know I could’ve stolen the accent marks along with the quotation, but as a writer I have strong feelings about plagiarism. 

In the interest of accuracy, I should mention that a second source lists the cost as £12,000 per hour, including fuel, and that when one source asked the rental company for a cost estimate for a similar trip, it came out at £348,000. 

I’m reasonably sure Cleverly’s luggage, aides, and security entourage were not lost in transit.

Bathrobes, political scandals, and crime: it’s the news from Britain–and elsewhere

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Liz Truss–best known as Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister–was back in the news after the Cabinet Office sent her a £12,000 bill for her use of Chevening house. Chevening’s a grace and favor home, which means it’s owned by the state but used by–well, sometimes the foreign secretary and sometimes the prime minister. If they use it for work, the government pays. If they host friends and family, it’s on their dime. 

Or not their dime. Britain doesn’t have dimes. That’s me going American on you again. They’re expected to foot the bill. Britain does have feet. 

How much hosting can you do for £12,000? By my standards, enough to outlast the time Truss was in office and possibly our time on this earth, but then I’m not prime ministerial material. 

The bill includes £120 for  missing bathrobes and slippers. Much to my disappointment, no one’s saying how many bathrobes and slippers that covers.

Truss disputes parts of the bill. The argument is over the line between a work event and a party (some work events are said to have turned into parties), and between government business and Conservative Party business. No one seems to dispute the missing bathrobes and slippers. Someone must’ve mistaken them for work papers and taken them to the office.

Why is this worth mentioning? Because the real scandals are never the ones that hold our attention. They’re too damn hard to follow. Stealing government bathrobes, though? We all know someone who’s packed up motel towels and taken them home, right?

Irrelevant photo: A poppy about to open.

Meanwhile, in France

France’s version of the silly scandal is that the economy minister has published a novel with a sex scene that’s sometimes described as steamy and sometimes as toe-curling. I’ll confess to not having gone looking for the full scene. The sentence-long snippets I’ve seen are enough to put me off, and I’ll spare you even those. Apply to Lord Google yourself if you’re really interested. He may decide you’re tough enough to survive them with your interest in sex intact.

People would have made fun of the book anyway, but since its publication coincided with a political meltdown over raising the retirement age, a lot of people thought he should maybe be spending his time thinking about the economy, and they’re furious. 

He, on the other hand, says it’s all part of keeping a decent work/life balance.

They, on the other hand, think retiring at the age they expected is part of a decent work/life balance. 

 

Getting to the roots of crime

In an effort to stamp out crime, Romford, in east London, has banned hoods, motorcycle helmets, and ski masks, although to be fair you can have a hood hanging down your back, you just can’t pull it up over your head. You can probably put your ski mask over your hand and pretend it’s a sock puppet or carry a motorcycle helmet like a birthday cake and sing “Happy Birthday.” You just can’t have them on your head.

 

Getting to the royalties of crime

And just when I think I haven’t found enough odd stories to make up a post, I stumble over this: A Utah widow who, after her husband’s death, wrote a kids’ book on grief is now suspected of having poisoned him.

Guys, I’ve struggled through long stretches of writer’s block, so I know what it’s like to feel you’ve run out of anything to say, but this is not the solution.

 

What is art?

A South Korean student went to a museum displaying an art installation by Maurizio Cattelan and ate it. 

Not the museum. He ate the art installation, which was a banana duct-taped to a wall. Then he taped the peel back on the wall.

Why? He told museum officials that he’d skipped breakfast and was hungry, but he told a broadcaster that “Damaging a work modern art could also be artwork.”

What the hell, the banana’s replaced every few days anyway. When the artist was told about the incident, he said, “No problem.”

The banana–okay, the banana and the duct tape, or the concept, or maybe that’s the artwork. Anyway, whatever you want to call it, it’s sold twice now, each sale being called an edition, once for $120,000 and once for $150,000. For that, I assume you get a banana, a piece of silvery duct tape, and permission to tape it to a wall.

 

What is crime?

In Old Bridge, New Jersey, someone dumped more than 500 pounds of unboxed pasta in the woods. Or since it’s important to get the facts right, more than 500 pounds of ziti, spaghetti, and other noodles.

The township doesn’t have a bulk trash pickup–you have to pay to get big items hauled away and not everyone can afford to. Local people say they know who did it but aren’t saying. It’s a sensitive situation, and I guess it’s worth saying that it’s not an art installation.

The coronation bling: what does it all mean?

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Now that those of us who live in Britain can once again turn on the news without fear of getting mugged by coronation news, let’s sneak into the space that’s opened up and review a bit of the bling that’s been put back in storage.

But before we do, I have to remind you–I believe it’s a legal requirement–that every bit of that bling signifies something. The king’s scepter? It signifies his temporal power (such as it is). The orb? That symbolizes that his power’s derived from god. If you doubt that, feel free to ask either the king or god, whichever one you figure is more likely to give you an answer.

Sadly, explaining what things signify goes against all my writerly instincts, which insist that if symbols work at all, they’ll explain their own damn selves. So my explanations will be, at best, sporadic.

Yes, the headline was just a touch misleading. I should be ashamed.

The Photo of Irrelevance

 

The stone

The Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, making it sound like a prop from an Indiana Jones movie, isn’t what you’d call bling. It’s roughly carved sandstone and the size of three pillows piled on top of each other. It weighs 152 kilos. That’s 335 pounds, or 23 stones.

A stone? As an out-of-fashion way to measure weight. One stone equals 14 pounds, and it does seem sensible to measure the weight of a stone in stones, even if it makes for confusing sentences.

The Stone of Scone was seized from Scotland in 1296, back when England and Scotland were two separate countries with two separate monarchs and an enduring habit of going to war with each other. It was a symbol of the Scottish monarchy, which is one reason the English wanted it. The other reasons were: 

2) That legend connected it back to the biblical Jacob of Jacob’s ladder, who was supposed to have used it for an extremely uncomfortable pillow. People took that stuff seriously back then. 

3) That taking it really pissed off the Scots and gave the English bragging rights.

The earliest written record connecting a Scottish king to the stone comes from 1249, when Alexander III was kinged at Scone Palace, which was not a cafe serving tea and baked goods but a palace with, um, you know, a stone. An important stone. Legend and poetry trace it back further but we’ll move on, reminding ourselves as we go that the English hauled this 23-stone stone south at a time before railroads had been invented and possibly before the wheel had been.That’s how badly they wanted it.

The English then proceeded to crown their own kings on it. Edward I (1239 – 1307) was so pleased with the thing that he had a coronation chair built to hold it, and 26 monarchs have put their kingly butts on it while being crowned. Everyone took it seriously enough that during World War II it was buried for safekeeping. Because if the Nazis took over the country, at least they wouldn’t get their hands on the stone, right? Just imagine if they had. All those 1950s World War II movies would’ve had the Nazis talking with Scottish accents instead of German ones.

In the 1950s, four Scottish students stole it, breaking it in the process. Or else, they discovered that the Suffragettes had already broken it when they bombed the chair in 1914. Either way, the students ran off with both pieces. Or not exactly ran. Even in two pieces, it was still a hefty hunk of rock. They hid them in odd places–a garage; a factory, a hole in the ground (it’s a stone; who’d notice it?)–before finally getting it to Scotland, where it stayed briefly before (the point having been made) it was returned to England. The students were never prosecuted.

In 1996, England gave it back to Scotland, which means it had to be hauled south again for Charles’s coronation.  

So that’s 335 pounds of sandstone being schlepped north and south so it can sit under a chair for a few days, looking like the lump it is, while people run all around it wearing fancy costumes.

Maybe you have to be British for that to make sense to you.

 

The swords

You need five swords to be kinged, apparently. The sword of offering, the sword of temporal justice, the sword of spiritual justice, the sword of mercy, and the sword of state, which was originally one of two swords but somewhere along the line the other one was covered with a cloak of invisibility and no one’s seen it since.

One sword gets blessed by a bishop and given to the newly minted king, who lays it on an altar then buys it back for 50 shillings, which no one uses anymore so they’ve substituted newly minted 50-pence coins. I don’t know if the king has to cough those up himself or if someone hands him the money the way a parent slips a kid some money in a candy store so they can think they’re paying for their own candy. 

Each of those moves symbolizes something, but you have to keep a straight face to explain it all, so I won’t try.

 

The bracelets

The bracelets of sincerity and wisdom have been around so long that no one knows quite what they’re supposed to do–other than make you sincere and wise, of course. Didn’t Wonder Woman’s deflect bullets? I can’t help wondering if anyone’s tried using them that way. 

Anyhow, since no one’s sure what their powers are, they’re given to the king, who “acknowledges” them, then they’re put back on the altar. He doesn’t wear them.

Back in the dark ages, when I was in my teens, women were expected to wear lipstick and– 

This is relevant, so stay with me. 

–women were expected to wear lipstick and I spent some time trying to figure out what to do with the stuff and ended up doing more or less the same thing as the king does with the bracelets: I acknowledged the Lipstick of Adulthood by smearing some on my lips, then looking in the mirror, deciding it was ridiculous, and rubbing it off. Since we didn’t have an altar, I put it back in the medicine cabinet and went out into the world a quick smear closer to adulthood and with no one any the wiser. 

 

The glove

Yes, singular. The king has one coronation glove. He puts it on, then he takes it off. That makes it a bit like the Lipstick of Adulthood, only more expensive. Much more expensive. It symbolizes that the king thought it might be cold in the church and then decided it wasn’t. 

 

The gold spurs

Once upon a time, they were buckled onto the king’s legs. I’d have though ankles, but what do I know? The article says legs. Anyway, these days they’re only tapped against his ankles. They symbolize that in a ceremony this long, it might be wise to make sure the main character stays awake.

 

The crown

English kings before the Norman conquest might (it’s unclear) have settled for a relatively simple ceremony and a blinged-up helmet instead of a crown, but as a usurper William the Conqueror had a point to make–I’m your legitimate king, not some nobody who arrived in a small boat–so he went all out with both his crown and his coronation ceremony. So much so that the ceremony included having the people in attendance call out in unison that they accepted him as their king, and they were noisy enough that they spooked the soldiers Will had left outside, who did what any group of sober, armed men would do in that situation and set fire to the place. William stuck around long enough to get the holy oil poured on his head, giving the church’s seal of approval to his hairstyle, as the church went up in flames around him.

Since he didn’t end up getting deep-fried, the business with the oil is still with us. It now has its own special spoon. 

It would take J.K. Rowling to make this stuff up. 

The front and back of the current crown look so much alike that one of the past kings–I’ve lost track of which–was never sure he had it on right. And if he’d gotten it wrong, all the other kids would’ve made fun of him.

 

Gold Stick in Waiting

The tradition of the Gold Stick in Waiting dates back to Henry VIII. There really is a gold stick involved, but as soon as we introduce capital letters we’re not talking about the stick itself but about the bodyguard who rides behind the royal coach after the coronation, carrying a gold-tipped stick with which to protect the monarch from, um, bling-phobic assassins and whatever else you can ward off with a gold-tipped stick. I’ll experiment with one someday. 

Anyone got a gold-tipped stick I can borrow? 

For the recent coronation, the role went to the king’s 72-year-old sister, who’s almost as fearsome (and almost as old) as I am.

The article I stole this from thought it had to mention that the role’s now symbolic, but honestly, I’d guessed that already.

 

Other stuff

Over the centuries, no coronation’s been complete unless someone added a new bit of ceremony. Let’s settle for talking about just one: Medieval kings prepared for their coronation by bathing. That must’ve been unusual enough to get a mention. So iIn 1399, when someone introduced the idea of turning a few marginally normal humans into knights on the eve of the coronation, it only made sense to call them Knights of the Bath.

Settle down in back. It’s not that funny.

Okay, it is that funny but put away the rubber ducks, please. 

 

Money and protest

How much did the coronation cost this time around? A thousand civil servants are still punching numbers into their computers and palace officials are looking embarrassed and saying some of the published estimates are “more fanciful than others,” but Lord Google informs me that it’s in the neighborhood of £100 million.

Or by another Lord Google estimate, between £50 million and £100 million. Or by the estimate a friend mentioned this afternoon, £150 million.

Whatever the figure is, it’s been paid out of taxes. 

Fifty-two anti-monarchist protestors were arrested along the coronation route under a newly passed law that criminalizes not just causing a public nuisance but being prepared to cause one. Or fixin’ to get ready to harbor the intent to be prepared to cause one. The police have since “expressed regret” about six of those arrests. One of the six, a leader of the anti-monarchy group Republic, said he’d spent months working out legal tactics with the police only to be arrested on the day. He’s not in the mood to  accept an apology, which is good because he hasn’t exactly gotten one.

 

Souvenirs

If you’ve read all that and still a little something to remember the mayhem by, what’s available? The Guardian’s list of souvenirs includes a lifesize cutout of the king that sells for £36.99. You never know when you might need one, but you don’t have to settle for that if it doesn’t match your lifestyle. Heinz made some commemorative ketchup. The recipe’s the same-ol’, same-ol’, but the packaging’s different. Hug (they make pet food) came up with a special dog food. Our dog’s not a royalist, so we didn’t buy any. 

Celebrations (they make candy) made a bust of the king out of their very own chocolates. It weighs 23 kilos, or 3.6 inedible stones, and (sorry) you can’t buy it. They only made one. It’s pretty strange looking but better than the beauty-queen busts the Minnesota State Fair carves out of butter. 

I’m not sure what they’ll do with it now the coronation’s over. Would it be disrespectful to eat it? Is there a respectful way to throw it out?

You can also buy the more pedestrian mugs, tea towels, plates, paperweights, and teddy bears. Or flags or–well, whatever someone can find a way to slap a crown or a face on, it’s for sale. Remember kids, today’s cheesy souvenir is tomorrow’s treasured keepsake. Or next week’s landfill.