A bridge too far

Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor Ptang-Ptang Nickety-Nackety-Noo Die-Mummy-Die Saxe-Coburg-Gotha sneaked into Wales this week like a thief in the night to unveil a plaque in honour of himself. Surprisingly for a man with so many medals pinned to his chest, he wasn’t brave enough to have a public ceremony. Accompanied by his current mount, a non-runner in the 3.30 at Market Rasen, the ruddy-faced inbred blithering idiot stopped off unannounced to do the deed in a portacabin on the M4 before crossing Pont Hafren for the onerous week he is obliged to endure once a year in ‘his’ tin-pot fiefdom.

The plaque, which will be installed in a permanent position (being kept secret) at some future date (being kept secret), renames the Severn Bridge the ‘Prince of Wales Bridge’. This profoundly insulting, ignorant, unnecessary, undemocratic and provocative act was cooked up by England’s Tory government in London and implemented without even the smallest pretence of consultation by Tory ‘Welsh Secretary’ and Vale of Glamorgan MP Alun Cairns, the very personification of the simpering, fawning, effete, crawling, weasely, brown-nosing scab. He didn’t consult because even he, with his limited understanding of the Wales he has the impertinence to purport to represent, knew that the answer would have been something along the lines of “Fuck off Cairns you piece of stinking Brit shit”. So he went ahead regardless with the obscene charade, planned secretly last year, and only bothered to notify Wales’ First Minister Carwyn Jones when it was a done deal. Jones, a monarchist and fanatical British Nationalist, could only splutter his approval, concur with the lack of consultation, agree it should all be kept hush-hush, and pathetically plead with Cairns to be allowed to attend the ribbon-cutting as a fawning supplicant hovering in the background – a plea Cairns ignored with appropriate disdain.

Incidentally, earlier this year Jones promised that he would stand down as First Minister “by autumn”, and then re-scheduled his departure to “the end of the year”. What a tease! Tell you what Carwyn, if I help you pack your rostrum, chains of office, hair-gel and selection of grey suits, why not go now? Oh, hang on a minute, the only candidate to replace him that Welsh Labour has managed to rustle up from its talent-free ranks is Mark Drakeford, a highly unimpressive effort who has never been known to utter a single interesting or original remark and always seems to emanate the prissy umbrage of a drag queen on a night off. He makes Carwyn Jones look like Nelson Mandela…second thoughts Carwyn mate, can’t you please stay on as a pointless lame duck ineffectually paddling in ever-decreasing circles for another year or two?

Monarchists believe in hierarchy, nepotism, subservience, absolutism, authoritarianism, autocracy, inherited wealth, hereditary power, class division, inequality, militarism, might-is-right, status, deference and conservatism. Not one of those creeds can be found in the Labour Party’s constitution, even the post-Kinnock, post-Blair Labour Party that abandoned socialism and threw its lot in with the free market evangelicals and the fat-cat crony capitalists, let alone today’s ‘soft left’ Corbyn Labour Party of metropolitan England. Yet the likes of Carwyn Jones along with the witless ranks of Welsh Labour have no problem whatsoever signing up to monarchism’s odious principles. We expect this from Tories, a political party founded specifically in the 17th century as a royalist vehicle to restore the monarchy, but when Labour politicians crawl and fawn to the likes of Charles it is not just a stunning betrayal of the egalitarian values the Party was founded to promote, but confirmation that Welsh Labour has long been infiltrated by a fifth column of rightwing ideologues.

Even worse than this wicked monarchism is Welsh Labour’s cruel, callous contempt for Wales itself. Charles is the 22nd usurper to bear the illegitimate title ‘prince of Wales’ since Edward I (1239-1307) first bestowed it on his son the future Edward II (1284-1327) in 1301, following the murder of native ruler Llywelyn II (1223-1282) at Cilmeri near Builth and a vicious campaign of exceptional ferocity even for that time, in which it is estimated 25% of the Welsh people were slaughtered. It is on the back of Welsh corpses, the theft of Welsh land, the destruction of Welsh law, autonomy and freedom and the ultimate annexation and seizure of all Wales itself that the disgusting adulterer Charles is able to strut around with his title today. This is the equivalent of, say, pope Francis calling himself the Holy Roman Emperor and lording it from Constantinople to Colchester: not just ridiculous, but deeply offensive and wrong. Anybody with an iota of sensitivity, sensibility and wisdom would renounce the stolen title, but we’re talking about a Windsor here and, like all the vast, ever-growing clan of parasitic pampered freeloaders and brazen benefit scroungers, he is without shame or conscience. After he unveiled the plaque, Charles was whisked away to a banquet at Celtic Manor in Newport (to which a drooling Carwyn Jones received an invite – they needed someone on the brush to sweep the red carpet). There the tampon-fetishist bored the invited audience of toadies and crawlers with a characteristic speech. Talking abut Wales as if it were a faraway holiday resort, rather than an hour down the M4 from his Gloucestershire pile, and repeatedly using the feminine personal pronoun ‘her’ as if Wales were one of his private trains or stretch limousines or bits on the side, he intoned through the side of his mouth: “Over all these years, wherever I have been in Wales, my soul has never ceased to be stirred, and moved, by the majesty of her landscapes, by the richness and poignancy of her history, by the beauty of her ancient and precious language…but most of all I have come to love and admire the character of her people: their passion, tenacity, sense of fair play and, of course, their humour.” That “poignancy” is referenced as if it were an attractive tourist board feature, rather than an ongoing scandal brought about by his odious antecedents and perpetuated by himself; that “precious language” remains under sustained attack by his far-right pals in the London media; as for those “people”, he loves them so much that he won’t interact with the 99% of Wales who aren’t millionaires, lords lieutenant, creepy social climbers, dim yes-men or forelock-tugging peasants during his arduous week of garden parties, harp recitals, wandering around ancient monuments and exchanging banalities with a wide cross-section of archbishops; and I haven’t even mentioned his…ahh…”soul”! There’s some “humour” for you Charlie, just like you likes it.

Let’s get one thing clear: despite 700 years having passed since the original crime occurred this is still a pressing contemporary issue simply because it has yet to be dealt with and resolved. Apologists for Charles try to argue that Wales should forget the offence because it was all such a long time ago. But that in itself is reason enough for the position of prince of Wales as the gift of the English monarch to be abolished forthwith, since nothing else from the year 1301 has been retained into the 21st century. What’s more, in the scheme of things 700 years is actually recent: my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather was alive in 1301 and, considering that most of us straddle 150 years of experience from the elderly we meet as babies to the babies we meet when elderly, that makes 1301 virtually topical. But I wouldn’t expect the historically illiterate typical Britisher to grasp any of that.

Cowardly Cairns, Carwyn and Charles didn’t have the balls between them to face the people of Wales and deal with the widespread opposition to the sick symbolism of this supremely stupid renaming. However, one thing’s certain: nobody except grovelling lackeys will ever call the bridge over the Severn Sea by the name they seek to impose.

Hmm…I can tell I’m beginning to feel a little better: the vitriolic vituperation’s coming back!