Panem et Circenses

"Roll Up! Roll up! Roll up for the event of this generation, the furthering of one of the great institutions of our age!

On the 29th of April every single one of you is warmly invited to witness a ROYAL WEDDING!

I'm certain all of you are excited about the forthcoming union of one of the fine heirs to our throne, none other than the Prince William, and the wonderful and totally middle-class woman Catherine 'Kate' Middleton, showing that all of you proletarian scumbags middle-class women out there can too eventually fulfil what I am sure is the ultimate dream of all of you pretties, and become a princess! In fact, we're sooo sure that you'll want to join us in our jubilation, that we've made the event a special day off just so you can be a part of it! I mean sure small-businesses and the like will suffer from it... but who cares about them? It's a Royal Wedding!

So roll out the bunting, gather up some food and grab everyone you know, because you really don't want to miss this piece of history, quite possibly the most important event this year! Who cares about those people who did that walk? Or that thing about electoral reform (which is soooooo boring, although you should totally vote no to AV, your minds are too feeble to cope with it it's stupidly complicated)? Or those people off in the Middle East kicking off and ruining our oil supplies? And what's that about welfare reform? You do realise that they're all scrounging scum, right? Yes, the Royal Wedding is the single most important thing that will happen this year, it's history in the making, and you can be a part of it!

Even though we, alas, have to reserve spaces at the event itself for esteemed democratic figures (although, sadly, our good friends, the rulers of Bahrain, cannot attend due to people kicking-off over there scum-bags), and great icons of British culture, and as such you cannot directly attend the wedding (it'd be a bit of a tight squeeze to get all 60-odd million of you in the abbey after all) but don't worry! Our wonderful, unbiased, media knows exactly what you want and so has graciously decided that, as all of you can't come to The Wedding, The Wedding can come to you! Our esteemed newspaper institutions - The Mail, The Telegraph and The Express - are sure to have wonderful coverage! And that's not the best part! The BBC, ITV, Sky and five have all dedicated themselves to covering this once in a lifetime event! And the other option's another sodding episode of that Gypsy wedding show on Channel 4. So fuck that and WATCH THE WEDDING! It's like you're there. In HISTORY! AS IT HAPPENS!

Heck, this means that you can celebrate the Royal Wedding even more than those schmucks who can only have the shitty view from the ground! You get the best damn seats in the house! And it gets better!! You can have street parties! Can those schmucks have street parties? No, so let's get the bunting, paper hats, and lukewarm cherryade out and celebrate the all important event of the year! I mean sure the deadline has been and passed, but who cares about the red-tape conspiracy by our evil, bureaucratic, faintly Communist, councils to stop you having fun?! Have a street party! Have fun. This isn't an order, since you are celebrating the Royal Wedding already. Everyone is.

Of course there is the chance that you are one of the incredibly small minority of leftist-republican-anarchists who hate Britain and its culture. In which case, you are evil, and bad, and wrong, and quite probably the sort of scumbags who would throw a protest solely to ruin the day for this wonderful couple. Don't give me that load of fecal matter about how 'monarchy is privellidge', and 'monarchy is unfair' and 'why do we have to pay', and 'waa, wa, wa, our wonderful allies in the Middle East are totally dictators because they rough up their opposition' (like we don't). You're in it this solely to be a jerk. Jerk. And no you can't have your petty street-party. Fun is only for nice obedient sheep people. Not jerks. Any you are a jerk because otherwise why would you oppose the esteemed rights of our Royal Family. Incidentally, any of you scum-bags who attack the wedding need to expect no mercy. Stuff like protesting against our wonderful monarchy has no place in a democracy.

If you aren't one of those minority lefty-anarchist scum-bags on the other hand, come along it's free* and, most importantly of all British. You aren't a jerk, so celebrate. Have fun. Have fun.

*'Free' does not include the £20million security costs. Or the few-billions it will cost the economy. But the Royals bring in cash-monies anyway that will cancel it out. They do. Honest."*

*Actually, I can't find anything to counter this (although I swear that the Royals don't bring in that much tourism money).

I'm so confiscating my grandparents' Daily Mail...

 EDIT (02/11/2012): In hindsight, I don't feel like I should have posted this. Gonna leave this up though since I only Orwell stuff if I have really good reasons to - ultimately pretending it never happened seems at the very least odd to my moral compass. Also, none of the links in this work anymore since itsyotsy got shut down and I really cannot be bothered to track them down again.

You know the stereotype of old people being conservatives of both the big 'C' and small 'c' types? Well I think my paternal grandparents may well conform to that (I think my dad is also a Tory). Well, my grandmother certainly does, at least, going off a conversation I had with her yesterday. In a bullet point list, here are a few views she expressed. Whilst reading this I ask you to bear in mind that she's actually British Chinese (I think her father was a second-generation Chinese immigrant) :

• 'Enoch Powell was right when he said he didn't want all of those coming in here' I'm paraphrasing slightly, but the first part is what my grandmother said word for word.
• Schools should bring back Christian assemblies as they teach people morals (I didn't even realise she was a practising Christian).
• We'll soon be majority non-white-British.
• The Muslims will be taking over with their Diwali and what have-you (yes, Muslims, I actually face-palmed at this, I feel quite bad as this was my Grandma I was talking to, I did point out the mistake).
• Christians are oppressed and can't express their beliefs (like that electrician who was transferred to another depot for having a cross in his van), whereas Muslims can (related to the one above, I can't actually remember what she cited, or even if she did).
• Children of immigrants don't count as British
• Immigrants have taken all of our jobs
• They've also taken all of our university places
• Basically immigrants are bad and are ruining this country
• We shouldn't bail-out <insert other country here> as there's no money left (note: I agree with her, kind of, but more due to me thinking that the imposing of economic shock therapy measures on 'bailed-out' countries is wrong,)

There was also the general implicit feeling that this was Labour's fault (my grandfather at least has never voted Labour, excluding in 2005 (I'm inferring this based off a reference to Gordon Brown)).

By way of reference, here's a sampling of what comes up on a search for 'immigration 2011' on the site- all links go direct to the website to istyosty, for best effects read the comments*:

• Boom in immigration helped cause the economic crisis, says Cameron (Jan-2011)
• White children in Birmingham 'a minority' this year due to immigration (Jan-2011)
• Tony Blair changes tune over immigration saying it produced a 'challenge' (March-2011)
•  UK will NOT hit its target to cut immigration in 2011 due to Irish influx, coalition warned (Dec-2010)
• Immigration is too high, say four in five Britons (Jan-2011)
• Migrant cover-up: Reports kept secret by Labour show mass-immigration cut wages, raised tensions, and that too many stayed too long. (March-2011)
• Immigration DID hurt wages and Labour 'under-estimated significantly' the influx, admits Milliband (Feb-2011)
• Schoolgirl, 15, dies from TB after Government warns immigration has caused disease to soar (Jan-2011) 

Not found on the site is their egregious coverage of David Cameron's speech on the subject.

 And the results for 'Muslims 2011':

• Number of British Muslims will double to 5.5m in 20 years (Jan-2011)
• 'Muslim Eton' at centre of Channel 4 hate-preaching allegations is forced to shut over far-right safety fears (Jan-2011)
• 4 men slashed teacher's face and left him with fractured skull for 'teaching other religions to Muslim girls' ( Feb-2011)
• How 100,000 Britons have chosen to become Muslim... and average convert is a 27-year-old white woman (Jan-2011)
• Extremist cleric to lead White House protest calling for Muslims to 'rise up and establish Islamic state in America' (Feb-2011)
• 'We need to be a lot less tolerant towards Islamic Extremists': Cameron calls for immigrants to respect British core values (Feb-2011)
• Mlitant Muslim warns Royal Wedding terror attack is 'highly likely' (April-2011)
• While Muslim sexual predators have been jailed, it is white Britain's hypocritical values that are to blame (Jan-2011, by Melanie Phillips)
• Shame of Britain's Muslim schools: secret filming shows pupils being beaten and told Hindus 'drink cow's p***' (Feb-2011)

Gee, I wonder where my grandma got her views from. And you know what the terrifying thing is? MailOnline is the second largest English language news website in the world. It had 39.6 million readers in March, and chances are not all of them were there to mock it. It is the largest news site in Britain. Regarding the dead-tree copies, according to the Wikipedia, the Daily Mail has a circulation of 2.1million. And this is the sort of stuff they're reading (okay, this and a ton of shallow show business stuff), yeah, likewise, some people take Melanie Phillips seriously. Hell, I think that I used to take Melanie Phillips seriously in my Daily-Mail reading days (I dismissed Littlejohn as being less funny than Clarkson though, and my maternal grandma put me off Jan Moir). Although, in the Mail's defence, they did dedicate 1/3rd of a page to this story concerning 'Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs' standing up for the electrician I mentioned earlier (I did read out the headline to my Grandma...), it's no wonder the far-right are so popular (even if the Mail does pretend to not support them), when we have a media (I've picked on the Mail as I have the most experience with it) which makes it sound like we're under attack from 'Muslamic rape gangs'.

*In order to make sure the results were recent, I put '2011' in. I can't remember the name of the Daily Mail proxy, and I'm only quoting the headlines here - the actual story may show them to be misleading (which probably helps my point here). All headlines come from the articles themselves (there are two headlines visible sometimes) as I'm assuming these were the ones they were printed under. The 'other headline' as it were is visible in the URL the header of the page. I used Google to find them by doing a 'this site only' search, since I couldn't find MailOnline's search function. The results received using this may be different and more positive (or negative, the Mail could just about conceivably be worse than this).,

EDIT: Have istyosty-ified the links.