And I watched a video yesterday that perfectly encapsulated everything that is wrong with Britain. The whole thing. A lifetime of systemic failure, of grotesque inequality, of ruling-class contempt disguised as concern, all of it distilled into a single glittering, nauseating image.
There he was. King Charles III. Dressed in his finest robes, the Imperial State Crown on his head (this is a solid gold construction studded with 2,868 diamonds, 17 sapphires, 11 emeralds, 269 pearls, and four rubies). The Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross contains the largest clear-cut diamond in the world, weighing in at 530 carats…was present but not in the shot. The crown jewels are estimated to be worth up to $8 billion in total. And this man, wearing a hat that could solve homelessness in London, who holds a stick that could fund the NHS for a year, draped in robes worth more than most people will earn in a thousand lifetimes, was telling the British people to ‘weather the storm’ of the cost of living crisis.
Crosspost from https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11612563
The crown jewels are state-owned and might as well be part of the UK's gold reserves worth 30 billion. Given the historical, cultural, and symbolic value, I'd say they should dip into the gold reserves first to solve homelessness and fund the NHS.
You can certainly have a debate about where some of those rocks came from and their ongoing possession by the UK tho!
Then any ol' brit can just go wear it for, say, a low budget music video?
Can they do that with the gold reserves?
Ok ok, put it in a museum.
Or... Return jewels, PMs to those from whom they were stolen.
Debate about what? Whether theft is theft?
They keep those jewels away from the brokers because they're all hot and the countries they were stolen from will make a fuss and ruin that overinflated valuation of that cheap looking gaudy shit. Cultural reasons is a convenient cover.
Depends on whether or not you live on stolen land, buy products made with stolen labour, use services run on stolen resources, or enjoy entertainment expressing stolen voices on devices manufactured with stolen minerals, if your life is completely free of benefit from the human exploitation that permeates every aspect of the modern world, then sure I have nothing to say to that.
If not, well there's usually at least a little debate to be had about when and how people should reconcile and recompense such tainted benefits they have but for which they don't feel personal responsibility for because it was someone long in the past or far away.
Just to be clear, I think people and nations do bear responsibility for the legacy of their past/forears. I think the stolen jewels should be returned, but I'm also not in possession of them and I'm not British or from one of the places where the jewels were stolen from.
I also don't think it's realistic for the US government and non-indigrnous population to just return all the land to indigenous nations. So against a debate about when and how.