Queen Tried to Use State Poverty Fund to Heat Buckingham Palace
September 24th, 2010Via: Independent:
The Queen asked ministers for a poverty handout to help heat her palaces but was rebuffed because they feared it would be a public relations disaster, documents disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act reveal.
Royal aides were told that the £60m worth of energy-saving grants were aimed at families on low incomes and if the money was given to Buckingham Palace instead of housing associations or hospitals it could lead to “adverse publicity” for the Queen and the Government.
Aides complained to ministers in 2004 that the Queen’s gas and electricity bills, which had increased by 50 per cent that year, stood at more than £1m a year and had become “untenable”.
The Royal Household also complained that the £15m government grant to maintain the Queen’s palaces was inadequate.
Typical British subject quote regarding Queen Elizabeth II: “The Queen? Evil? But she’s just a figure-head!”
You get this response even from people who went to Oxford and should know better. These same people have never heard of a D-Notice, now a DA Notice.
The Queen now rules far more efficiently than before through corporate entities than royalty ever did by brute force. Plus, she’s convinced people she know longer exists as a queen through the process of mythopoesis, as exemplified in the film, “The Queen.”
nemo, could you explain the link (just the search terms) between the notice and her majesty?
I looked on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DA-Notice and there it states the MOD is the issuer of the notices. Yes I can see that everything is intertwined on the island, but there are surley interesting links.
you mean http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436697/ ?
The link would be an example of their selective indoctrination / brainwashing. Rule through overt oligarchy went out of vogue. The latest trend is for the oligarchs to brainwash the population into believing that they do not govern as an oligarchy. I say oligarchy because I subscribe to the “iron law of oligarchy” in the sense it at least takes an oligarchy to govern, and that no true dictatorships have ever existed. The Roman emperors ruled with the tacit consent of the Praetorian guard, etc.
This example arose out of conversations I had with a journalist who worked for the BBC and was educated at Oxford, along with another individual who was studying to be a professor of history of Oxford. For the journalist not to have heard of the D-Notice was ridiculous. The ability of the government to spike press stories over bogus national security concerns should be central to any journalist’s understanding of their profession, especially one educated at a supposedly elite institution. It also follows from my own experience at graduate school and general clueless-ness that prevailed at this so-called elite institution.
In my opinion, many people who go to these so-called elite institutions tend to be even more clueless about things because they’ve been indoctrinated their whole life, and they go to these institutions in part because of their ability to be indoctrinated. That’s right, not everyone can be propagandized effectively. Sure, you can get people to believe Obama is a terrorist-Muslim (maybe he is, who knows for sure), but in order to make really effective foot-soldiers and desk-soldiers for the Empire, you have to get a considerable amounts of supposedly intelligent people to believe laughably outrageous lies. Despite what people think may have been told, according to Jacques Ellul, an authority on propaganda, intellectuals are most vulnerable to propaganda because they read a lot and have to have an opinion on everything, including things on which they have no first-hand knowledge or experience. That’s what school trains you to do. The people who get the A’s really demonstrate their ability to internalize the official lies sanctioned by the system. That’s how my cousin can get a master’s degree in international affairs at Yale university, be offered a fellowship in Berlin, but have absolutely no clue about the US involvement in illegal drug distribution, even though it is well-documented, and in fact, a natural follow-up of the British Imperial involvement, not to mention the history of legalized human trafficking, war-mongering, and other nefarious activities.
I had a University History professor who put it well:
“The elites of the world learned a very important lesson from the French Revolution: that they needed to hide their wealth, not flaunt it. Throughout the rest of modern history we see that lesson being embraced…which means, conversely, that those who flaunt it are not the one’s in charge.