A dead cat

Today is the Queen's (official) birthday. Colours are being trooped. Prince Philip has polished and pinned on the various medals he has won on various gruelling campaigns of handshaking and banquetting.

The Queen's birthday message has made a touching allusion to the prevailing sombre and turbulent mood in the country. The malignant indifference of the government and the wealthy elite they represent towards the dead and dispossessed of Grenfell is ironically thrown into stark relief by the monarch's attention and acknowledgement.

It was not always thus. Up until the late 18th century there were large public gatherings to celebrate the monarch's birthday. As society was transformed by industrialisation, however, and class antagonisms became more pronounced, these gatherings were marked by increasing tension, and resentment towards authority exercised on behalf of an exploiting capitalist class expropriating the products of labour simmered and boiled over into riots more often than not. The pastoral idyll of earlier occasions had been transformed into confrontation by the Corn Laws and the urbanisation and segregation of society by nascent industrial capitalism. This was most acute in Scotland, which at this time was the most rapidly and thoroughly industrialising society in the world.

And so the unregulated and spontaneous celebration of the monarch's birthday ceased and strictly controlled ceremony took over, to remove the flashpoint the occasion had become. But one thing endures in our political discourse from this time.

Illustrations and woodcuts from the period showing the riots often show an odd custom that is rather poorly documented. The pictures often include an odd detail: a dead cat, hurtling in mid flight through the air over the mob, having been cast aloft by one of the rioters. We are familiar today with the phrase "throwing a dead cat on the table" meaning introducing a political distraction. Once upon a time it wasn't a distraction. It was integral to the proceedings we were to be distracted from.

As the full horror and malignancy of the consquences of official indifference unfold, there are no more distractions. Keep your cat indoors for a while.