Just rewatching The King’s Speech now that its being shown on Sky and once again I’m torn. The story of Prince Albert struggling to meet the expectations of those around and dreading the ultimate promotion should his feckless brother let him down is one of the more interesting psychodramas of Britain’s first family. Firth as the Prince and Geoffrey Rush as his speech therapist Lionel Logue are utterly convincing in the majestic patient-common doctor dynamic. So convincing that one can forgive the many pieces of dramatic license taken to maintain forward momentum and keep the plot simple.

Where the film falls down badly is when it comes to the crunch point of the Abdication.

Actually, it’s not so much the Abdication itself that is mishandled but the role of Winston Churchill within it, a deliberate distortion of the truth that shifts the film into the nonsensical World War Two cult that we’re all doomed to endue. In the film Churchill is shown to be a close confidant, even giving the King his new moniker of George VI. This is not just disregarding the known facts but deliberately going against the truth. Everyone who has read anything about Churchill, the Abdication or World War Two knows that Churchill’s attempts to move moderate opinion against Appeasement and rebuild his career were almost totally destroyed by his romantic support for Edward VIII. Going much further than constitutionally proper he dreamed of himself as the Prime Minister of a King’s Party, even daring to imagine what his Cavalier Cabinet would look like. Not that you would know from watching the film.

The rationale behind Churchill’s anti-historical is to set the stage for the final third of the film where the emphasis is very much on the need to get the new King ready for his role as the great tribune of his people. This is simple not credible. Every child who has set through years of obsessive teaching on the subject  and their intellectual equals who put together cheesy documentaries for Channel Five on the topic knows that George VI made no such rallying speeches. Ironically while Michael Gambon’s gruff King George V’s warning that the wireless will mean that Kings have to do more than look plausible on their horse was true in the long run, George VI’s genuinely meaningful public contribution amounted to looking plausible in his Palace and on the streets of London. The inspiring speeches were left to Churchill and other politicians.

Whether its demanding to watch newsreel footage of Hitler’s advance or Baldwin resigning because he recognized Appeasement had failed (he didn’t and it hadn’t) the film is a boring attempt to ratchet up the tension until the whole world waits to hear HRM’s War and Peace. This rather boring attempt to fit the story into the ‘Very Well Alone’ narrative again goes completely against the facts. George VI didn’t come to the throne determined to resist Hitler – indeed so grateful was he for the Munich Agreement that he invited Neville Chamberlain to appear on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in front of actual cheering crowds.

What makes this nonsense all the sadder is that there’s a real story to be told about the Abdication. How Baldwin in the most genius piece of Prime Ministerial brinkmanship rid himself of a troublesome King in favor of a far more compliant model. Dedicating more time to the Abdication would place the true themes of the film at the forefront – the sibling rivalry with Edward VIII (brilliantly played by Guy Pearce), the conservative Yorks instinctive revulsion at what Wallis Simpson represented and the scheming courtiers looking to exert complete control over whoever was King (best shown by Derek Jacobi’s Archbishop of Canterbury). It would even have given the producers the excuse they were looking for to place Winston Churchill in a prominent role.

And most importantly the film would have ended on what feels like the true ending anyway, the successful Coronation of King George VI after he finally and decisively places his trust in his Australian speech therapist. Even that may not have been the full truth but it wold have been closer to it than pretending that George VI was a warrior-King.

It’s another sad attempt to equate the economics of the governance of modern, highly developed economies such as America with an individual citizen struggling to balance their incomings and outgoings as justification for the sado-monetarist. This is very stupid nonsense. The existence of Government is the recognition that people are interdependent and need an outside agency to coordinate, regulate and protect this civil society. Therefore to pretend that the Government an island unto itself, whose only legitimate preoccupation is balancing the national check book  is wrong. Government cuts to spending does not exist in a vacuum, the Government is after all the biggest single employer, customer and benefactor in all western economies. So you cut Government spending you cost workers their job, businesses their contracts and citizens their entitlements. That loss of economic output then echoes through the economy as a magic bullet, reducing private sector activity and tax receipts.

Or to use the same household analogy, a family diligently pays down its debt by cutting back on the money it spends on the high street, something that diminishes the revenue of those shops. If enough people do that then the shop may be forced to reduce its orders which would hurt its suppliers. Ultimately people both in the high street shop and the suppliers would lose their jobs due to lack of business. Its for this reason why Keynes once famously said he would pay people to dig holes at the side of the road and why Dave Cameron had to scramble to remove a reckless call on families to save rather than spend from his conference speech.

]]> http://willcooling.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/dont-trust-household-economics/feed/ 0 willcooling BUDGET http://willcooling.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/lets-try-this-again/ http://willcooling.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/lets-try-this-again/#comments Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:27:03 +0000 willcooling http://willcooling.wordpress.com/?p=99 ]]> Howdy folks. You may have read my articles on boxing, mixed martial arts and pro-wrestling over at http://www.insidefights.com or Fighting Spirit Magazine but this is going to be something slightly different. Basically this is my personal site with a blog attached. No set remit for the blog but its essentially anything but combat sports. Let’s see how we go.