Russell Brand Reacts To Meghan & Harry Interview

a lot of people have asked me what i think about harry and megan's interview with oprah winfrey regarding the royals of course any revelations around racism mental health scarcely need any further comment i would treat them as seriously as i would from any person serious issues that need to be treated respectfully and gently but what else does that interview reveal to us about the nature of power monarchy and the establishment a little over an hour ago a statement was released on behalf of the queen the whole family is saddened to learn the full extent of how challenging the last few years have been for harry and megan the issues raised particularly that of race are concerning while some recollections may vary they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately i suppose one of the things they emphasize is the idea of family family is a recognizable identifiable thing i recognize some of you won't have families who have unusual relationships with your family and you perhaps will yet be susceptible to the notion of a collective family that we can all identify with that's why we have soap operas that's why we have fear that's why we have drama that's why we have royalty harry megan and archie will always be much-loved family members the monarchy is a fascinating institution because it has to be simultaneously traditional because without tradition there's no reason for it to exist and progressive because if it becomes too irrelevant then people will think well what's the point in having a royal family each generation of royals has this kind of unique responsibility to make the royal family seem mysterious elusive potent and alluring while still making them accessible if you think in a number of times you see um like royals leaving hospitals and showing pictures of their babies or you see they get engaged their ceremonies their weddings all these things are utilized to keep the royal family relevant what is the royal family other than a living symbol of nationhood what is the uk it is a kingdom it's a united kingdom it is under the dominion and domain of the queen and largely it's been thought of as a figurative powwow that they have as opposed to a sort of a constitutional one but recent revelations primarily in the guardian have spelt out just how much power the royal family continue to have the queen is pretty much an unassailable figure already surviving some pretty remarkable fluctuations in the social order most obviously of course the tragic death of princess diana which in a way as that brilliant film the queen sort of demonstrates was a schooling in how to handle a public relations disaster i'm interested in the monarchy because i feel like i read this article once it was beautiful in the guardian also actually that sort of said like that when her majesty the queen of england dies people will experience unanticipated feelings it's impossible like to have a monarch that has lived as long as she has whose face is on your money whose presence is everywhere in a kind of non-evasive but ubiquitous manner to not evoke feelings of maternity or literal matriarchy this is a presence in all of our lives you know i grew up in like the 80s so i remember margaret thatcher and the queen being these kind of twin matriarchal figures one benign one more an aggressor and one of them is faded into sort of history and somewhat nostalgia though many of the ideas of thatcher are still sort of prevalent and occasionally resurrected where the queen is actually still present what i suppose this interview represents uh perhaps aside from the serious issues that i've already listed which have their own separate discrete and very important conversations being conducted very well elsewhere is a kind of intergenerational collision which is at the heart of the monarchy's power establishment tradition versus establishment progression how do you maintain hegemony when you have to seem relevant how do you justify an antiquated institution that costs a lot of money and really is a symbol of privilege for privileges sake without eventually reaching the point in a progressive culture where there are you know let's face it even as a result of recent revelations conversations about equality how can you talk about equality without also looking at economic equality now here's some facts about the wealth of the royal family the royal family collectively worth 88 billion dollars i don't know if that includes the land and the castles and the palaces and the influence and of course the queen is the richest woman in the world i know why you would consider wealth along lines of gender is a bit of a mystery to me but also as was recently discovered the queen has more power over law than we thought britain's queen elizabeth is being accused of lobbying the government to hide her vast private wealth in a scheme that ran for decades queen's consent gives the queen a possible vo that can be exercised in secret over proposed laws its workings have previously remained hidden from public view it allows the monarch to see bills in advance and withhold approval if the content affects crown interests thomas adams a specialist in constitutional law at oxford who reviewed the documents said the queen has the kind of influence over legislation that lobbyists would only dream of so i suppose the royal family have symbolic actual and financial power while they have to engage in a continual dance of public relations and i suppose what this kind of brings to a head is the fragility of that situation it's no coincidence that the titular character in the emperor's new clothes is a monarch that once you see that the emperor is naked i.e all of the power that is on the monarch is imaginary once those robes are stripped away then what stands before you is a naked monarch and you recognize that all the power that you've given is an investment that they are ultimately at the level of dna ordinary people and to keep that truth from being recognized requires pageantry mythology belief and faith it requires us to literally sing god save the queen our head of state god then her majesty the queen of england and i suppose as the the queen gets older it becomes more likely that we're going to have to transfer this allegiance and loyalty to another person that's going to be a hard trick to pull off when there's almost no one who has living memory of another head of state what i feel mostly about this interview aside from the important issues that are raised which i consider distinct from this particular conversation is that while many things are being questioned what we're not questioning is privilege itself the idea of having an emblematic wealthy family as the figurehead for an entire nation even if you don't have one in a republic the ideas of privilege are still engendered in the same way witness the dynasties of the clintons potentially the trumps going forward the bushes already you know and the sort of political influence historically say of the kennedys the idea of dynasty is appealing to simplistic human beings human animals such as us and of course powerful people have a vested interest in concentrating celebrating and continuing power given that so many of the things that were revealed in that interview talk about kind of ordinary prejudice and regular suffering that could happen to anybody with those particular criteria in the modern world doesn't it further reveal that when we're talking about the royals what we're really discussing is a group of people who are no different from you or me other than what we endow them with through belief and that that belief is used to bolster systems of privilege not only in the direct case of the monarchs and monarchy themselves but privilege and elitism elsewhere the monarchy i suppose are the bullseye of the dartboard of elitism they are the neatest most clear encapsulation of ideas of privilege myself i don't have strong ideas on monarchy or anti-monarchy because the power that is represented through those figureheads is endemic and found elsewhere outside of monarchies but i think it's an important lens through which we can use this current media ferrari to look at issues in addition to the ones that are already being focused on like the way that power operates how power functions and the inability of most people to have access to resources the apparent intransigence and immobility of wealth and power that a royal family has to stand for if they stand for anything you

Channel: Russell Brand

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Keywords: Russell Brand, Brand Russell, BrandThe, Russell Brand video, Russell Brand news, Russell Brand politics, News, Brand, politics, Russell, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, Meghan, Harry, Royal, royals, royal family, the queen, Queen, Prince Charles, prince william, kate, Oprah, clintons, clinton, thatcher, JKF, george bush, bush, buckingham palace, interview, reaction, reacts

Id: OyREzWcCPDo

Length: 9min 40sec (580 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021