Paying Respect to Queen Elizabeth.
RMT Pays Respect.
The Queen was a decent person devoted to public service.
Friday (update) one of the best commentators:
Now is the moment for quiet republicanism. Respect for the person of Elizabeth II, respect for the grieving family and the millions who mourn. Opposing Monarchy as the new Crown takes the throne and Capital reigns over her ministers in the House of Commons. Rejection of the pseudo-‘anti-imperialists’, fighting, the day before yesterday, the League of Empire Loyalists.
Tendance Coatesy 
So the unions aren’t about to call for a revolution tomorrow, I guess …
Richard Harris
September 8, 2022 at 7:13 pm
Not a monarchist but she was widely respected and admired. People on the Left obviously need to refrain on posting any knee jerk ‘brain farts’ on social media especially if British based (could be repercussions). Also be wary too of any ultra left/red brown/anarcho provocations. If in doubt, stay silent.
IainF
September 8, 2022 at 7:15 pm
The RMT have got it right.
Paying respect for the person not the institution.
Andrew Coates
September 8, 2022 at 7:31 pm
Andrew Coates
September 8, 2022 at 10:12 pm
That’s No Brainer. It would be a brave soul to tries to act up publicly in the coming week or so. Can’t imagine the Police being too accommodating.
IainF
September 9, 2022 at 12:48 am
Andrew Coates
September 9, 2022 at 7:31 am
[…] Labour movement reactions to the Queen’s death have been collated by Coatesy, here. […]
“A prop for privilege”: Tony Benn on why we must abolish the monarchy – Shiraz Socialist (Second Run)
September 9, 2022 at 8:20 am
Andrew Coates
September 9, 2022 at 8:31 am
‘Now is the moment for quiet republicanism. Respect for the person of Elizabeth II, respect for the grieving family and the millions who mourn.’
I don’t think you have anything to worry about Andrew – the media is not going to be banging any republican drums. I don’t see the requirement to join them.
But what exactly does ‘respecting the person’ mean? This is ALL about respecting her as the Queen; that is a loathsome, feudal relic designed to keep the plebs in their place. As the Queen she deserves no respect.
Lots of old ladies died yesterday but their person will receive no media gushing.
As for the grieving family! The living feudal relic that continues to represent all the worst slavish attitudes inculcated into the working class. Charlie, Andrew etc! Which one of those deserves any respect?
As for the millions who mourn; what they need is some education in their class interests, not sympathy for their ruling class they never knew and who wouldn’t let them darken their door. Some people are in the gutter but looking at the stars. Mourning these royal parasites is looking down the drain.
Today the NHS put out a statement saying lots of communications will stop, which one must assume includes lots of training of staff. This is not something to keep quiet about.
irishmarxism
September 9, 2022 at 10:39 am
Which is why I said respect for the “person” and the “family” and those mourning.
Love the sinner, not the sin…
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2022/sep/09/crowds-gather-to-mourn-queen-elizabeth-around-the-world-in-pictures
I never met the Queen …..but the editor of the diaries of my good friend Adrian wrote her own lightly fictionalised recollections:
Andrew Coates
September 9, 2022 at 10:54 am
Dave Spart writes:
Andrew Coates
September 9, 2022 at 10:58 am
I sold the “Parasite marries Scrounger” Socialist Worker issue outside a Tube Station in the mid 1980s at the time of Prince Andrew’s marriage to Sarah Ferguson. Got a great reception and sold out quickly. Usually you’d be left with loads of unsold papers but not on that occasion. Most people laughed and bought it for the novelty value. Cannot recall any negative reaction.
IainF
September 9, 2022 at 10:59 pm
I am at a loss to understand how people who never knew the Queen can claim she was a “decent” person. How do you know? Lots of people thought Jimmy Saville was a “decent” person with all of his charity work, his OBE from the Queen, and so on. What we do know is that the Monarchy itself is a thoroughly indecent institution that is an affront to all civilised society, and so its hard to see how anyone who is prepared to occupy that position, and so defend it, support it, and ensure its continuance can be said themselves to be “decent”. A decent person would refuse to occupy the position to begin with!
Its like saying that a public executioner is a jolly fine and decent person on an individual level, its just that their day job is routinely killing people they don’t know on behalf of the state! Or as we used to chant at the police as they defended the fascists and broke picket lines “Only doing me job”, which seems to be your approach to the Monarchy.
After all that job is to act as titular head of the capitalist state, which is our immediate enemy – though you seem to think that is Vladimir Putin. Remember the removal of Gough Whitlam’s Labour Government in Australia by the Queen’s representative; remember when sections of the British ruling class considered a coup against Wilson’s Labour government and chose the Queen’s cousin , and close adviser Lord Mountbatten to be its figurehead? Had that been an actual Workers Government, leading to an actual coup attempt, and with the army being constitutionally the Queen’s army, do you think any such “decency” would have stood in the way of the Monarchy fulfilling its function of mobilising the state to violently slap down the working-class?
The revolutionary bourgeoisie in the 17th century realised the need to deal not just with the institution in the abstract, but its personification, when they chopped off Charles Stuarts head. The revolutionary French bourgeoisie did the same thing with Louis XVI, whose predecessor Louis XIV had made the position clear in his statement I am the state. You seem to have taken a considerable step backward even compared to the liberal bourgeoisie. And, of course, the Bolsheviks understood that even if the Tsar had been “decent” – he wasn’t – and no matter how “decent” his children might have been, the reality was that they would act as an inevitable figurehead for the counter-revolutionary forces ranged against them, and who had no such qualms about shooting, hanging or otherwise murdering the workers and peasants that were seeking to overthrow their oppressors.
It seems social chauvinism and social imperialism is morphing into social cretinism.
Boffy
September 9, 2022 at 12:49 pm
Sure, and Boffy is joining both the Sparts, the campists, and the US-led liberal left in fighting yesterday’s battles.
The phrase “fighting, the day before yesterday is an adaption of :a quote from the positivist (and supporter of the Paris Commune) Frederick Harrison in 1872 that appears in the chapter Quiet Republicanism, Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: “The Republican Club ..is really engaged, not in encouraging the day after tombolo, but in accelerating the day before yesterday” (Page 389)
Andrew Coates
September 9, 2022 at 4:03 pm
To be honest, Andrew, I have no idea what your cryptic response is actually supposed to mean, though, to be honest trying to navigate through all of the multitude of money-making adverts, mixed in with the pasted twitter comments, makes your entire site rather difficult to deal with.
What the handful of largely individual words and phrases “Sparts”, “Campists”, “Liberal Left” hurled as abuse seems to be seeking to achieve is the old Stalinist amalgam, as an alternative to a rational response, or any kind of argument at all. Does the statement about fighting yesterday’s battles, in this context of the Monarchy, for example, mean that despite your claims in response to your quiet Republicanism, your separation of the person and institution of the monarch, has now led you the position in which you think fighting to replace monarchy, is “yesterday’s battle”?
But, if your method of arguing is now that of the amalgam – and an examination of my arguments on this as on other things would show no identity between them with any of the groups you list – then I would suggest you begin by removing the plank from your own eye, in looking at your bedfellows from the ranks of the bourgeoisie, the CIA, let alone those of reactionary nationalism, the corrupt Ukrainian regime, and the Nazis of the Azov Battalion and Right Sector.
Boffy
September 10, 2022 at 12:51 pm
What’s this? A bit of dissent on Sky News this morning?
“… and what did you think when you heard the Queen had died.”
“I was full of joyfullness”.
Little girl outside Balmoral.
Arwyn Thomas
September 9, 2022 at 1:27 pm
There was no need to be so gushing and cringeworthy. Mark Drakeford managed to go through the motions without compromising his republican sympathies too much. He said she served the monarchy and its principals rather than “the country”.
The leader of the English Royalist
Party of Scotland Ian Blackford on the other hand wins the bower and scraper of the day award.
Kowtowing to the aristocracy. Got up in highland dress for the occasion he gets right down to tap his forehead four times against the floor.
Arwyn Thomas
September 9, 2022 at 1:47 pm
Is Iain Blackmore a Muslim? The feudal form of salutation in these islands is to tug your forelock. If the man is bald, perhaps that explains why he has to bash his head against the floor. Does seem a strange thing to do though
Sue R
September 9, 2022 at 2:09 pm
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