Where are you, Grampa?

Americans in general, and American media in particular, are shocked to their foundations by the UK's riots against 300 percent tuition hikes. I'm afraid my undiluted, aboriginal British y-chromosome is delighted. I've been racking my brains, trying to recall the last time Britons stepped out of queue to this extent. I keep returning to the period of social unrest that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and culminated in the Peterloo Massacre. I doubt that one American in 10,000 ever heard of this event, or could even imagine their pet English behaving in such a way.

My Welsh grandfather, an unreconstructed British radical socialist, would have understood and applauded the current unrest in all of its manifestations. At a certain point in her life, so would my grandmother. However the further way she got from actually being ruled by a royal family and permanent upper class, the more sentimental she got about the whole business. She tended to forget the permanent disadvantages that go with a system based upon inherited privilege, and go for the trappings and panoply.

The trappings are good, because they help the unruly identify their targets. And at last we discover the benefit of having a royal family. If they didn't exist, people might have to direct their anger at the government instead.

What say we let the people run the UK, and hire out the royal family and hangers-on as performers? This idea works very well at Renaissance fairs in the USA.