The thing about the noughties that really sucked was the general sense that progress had been expected but that it had not been made. This was, after all, the Twenty-First century, the blackjack of centuries, the century when all the busts and unwelcome face cards of the twentieth century’s unceasing quests to double down and gamble were supposed to be paid off by a series of glorious, jetpack-fuelled tricks.
Why can’t I buy a delicious roast dinner in pill form? Why can I only plan a holiday in space if I’m willing to pay Richard Branson $200,000 for a half hour excursion? Why are people still working in supermarkets? In the sixties, people used to say that ‘millions now living may never die’ – in the noughties they just repeat some half-baked platitude about not wanting to live forever that they heard a c-list comedian say in the big brother jacuzzi because that is, literally, the full extent of their intellectual and philosophical ambition. In Britain especially, we’ve given up on the future because the future arrived and it was fucking orange.
Compounding the sense of dignity crushing futility is the fact that – when we sit down and take a long look at ourselves, our society and our place in the world – we have to acknowledge that all three are still, after all this time, still firmly underneath some onion-faced old lady who got to where she was by being born there.
The monarchy, the god damned fucking monarchy.
Of course this doesn’t feel like the future we were promised – you can’t live in a future with a queen unless that queen is wearing a silver bikini and is half wasp.
Issue 1, 2000 AD
When the first issue of 2000 AD rolled off the seventies presses and the young of the discontented winters paused to daydream of a Utopian and impossibly distant century, they might not have explicitly erased the monarchy from the picture – but it was a necessary assumption. A monarchy would be as out of place in the brave new world as burnt rock cakes or nicotine-stained net curtains. Its Abolition was a prerequisite for any kind of progress.
Perhaps because it was always so obvious that it would be gotten rid of at some point, no one ever actually got around to getting rid of it.
Instead, mind blowingly stupid arguments – “she does a good job though, dun’t she, the queen?” and “it’s good for tourism…” (as if the lack of actual torture victims and inmates had dented the profits of the Tower of London) – were allowed to waft fart-like and uncontradicted until they condensed into an intellectual shit-hive that was more than capable of resisting any advocate of change.
This has left us with a horrible paradox in received opinion: everybody knows that the hereditary principle is ridiculous but everybody also knows that there’s no need to abolish the monarchy. It is stupid and embarrassing. And it is retarding us as a nation as we languish, constrained by our chintzy head-of-state and left prostrate, quite unable to strive or let our wings take dream.
