Why was Prince Philip allowed to keep saying offensive things?

[SewANeedlePullingThread]

There are so many examples of Philip saying offensive things such as:

"If you stay here much longer you'll all be slitty-eyed." This was said to a group of students during a royal visit to China.

"If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?" This was said in response to calls to ban guns after the Dunblane incident.

"It looks as if it was put in by an Indian." This was Philip talking about a fuse box in a factory.

There are so many more examples. Why was he allowed to act this way whilst representing the Royal Family? I like a laugh, I can take a joke, but he was so often just really offensive.

While the press reported the racism, they ignored the child abuse. His and his best friend's/father figure, child abuse, Mountbatten. It wasn't by accident that within two years of Andrew meeting Epstein, Fergie couldn't move for a photographer (so every indiscretion could be captured). Very dangerous men like to play bumbling fools in public.

I didn't think that was in question TBH. Clearly he was.

But the quetion posed was- Why was Prince Philip allowed to keep saying offensive things?

And as Minjou says it's partly as fewer people in the population were so ofended - some were and newpapers did push back but a larger percentage still thought his comments fine. That change with time - but he's now dead.

Plus offence at the time was different - we didn't have same media cycle or social media to carry on outrage in public setting - it would hit headlines people would conden and mutter in everyday life and life would move on and then he'd do something else and it would start again.

Life very different now - but he's dead been dead a few years now - he's clearly not changing now is he.

There's a video of him on YouTube getting impatient waiting to have a group photo taken and he said something on the lines of "just take the effing photograph" and didn't give two shits. 😂😂😂

Life very different now - but he's dead been dead a few years now - he's clearly not changing now is he.

That depends on what you believe, I guess! 😁

fewer
🙂

You have just perfectly proved my point. You are both excusing him on the basis of his age (my dad was a simular age and without the benefit of aids and advisers, a costly education and the privilege of exposure to other cultures, somehow managed to not be racist) and minimising by asking 'who could possibly care'? As though it was nothing.
This is exactly what was done at the time. "Ooh isn't he awful!" (Titter, snigger). "But he's old, bless him" (fawn).

Another excellent post.
The knowledge of History is partly dire because for the last 25 years or so kids are only 'taught' certain parts of 'history' and plenty of that has been rewritten to suit the left wing rhetoric which has been followed through to the universities.
They're completely one dimensional.
Edit This was meant for @Diamond7272

I knew some people of his era, who are gone now, who would make similar jokes, but who would help absolutely anyone, including people of colour, and who selflessly volunteered to fight in WW2 as soon as they could, lying about their age to join up, etc. I saw one of the worst Philip-type joke offenders do as much as he could to help an Indian lady one day. I really think that this is simply a type of humour from the past, and I don't think that people from that era who used it are necessarily awful people.

I don't know about Prince Philip or what kind of person he really was, but he was referencing the Chinese saying that youngsters who stay too long in the West may go ‘round-eyed’, and it did not cause an uproar in China like it did in the UK. This is per the South China Morning Post when I just googled the incident. OP, your friend may feel better if she knew that.

He died 4 years ago. You'll be really shocked when you find out people still talk about Royals who died hundreds of years ago.

If making unpleasant racist remarks and humiliating ordinary people with no chance to answer back is your idea of hilarious then I dread to think how you conduct yourself. He didn't have any "balls". Having the balls to say something does not apply when you have massive privilege and protection from every quarter. Having the balls means sticking your neck out knowing full well that someone could verbally retaliate or even punch you. Nobody was ever going to to that to him, or get within an inch of their lives trying, and he knew it.

Why are people defending him?

‘Because he was down to earth, said it like it was, said what everyone else was thinking, was a breath of fresh air, was hilarious, was a character, - have I missed anything?’
Yeah. He was a total wanker too.
Got away with it due to Palace PR machine which spun him as the aforesaid down to earth character etc etc.
And the media obediently parrotted it.
—Bit of a boozer too, as the on-dit goes—

Well I'm 'offended' indeedly deeply traumatised and hideously offended about how stupid some of these posts are.

He made mistakes. Tick.
He did a lot of good. Tick.

He sounds like all of us.

He was the Queens husband. He had no power. He couldn't influence government or policy, indeed most of the time he had to keep quiet (which must have frustrated him a lot). Prince William today cannot side with/criticise any political party, no matter how crackers and abhorrent some of them may be.

Phillip made racist comments. A few yes. As a percentage of his life or words, maybe 0.0000000001%

And didn't the press just jump on it. To make the press money through selling papers.

The man is dead. He can't reply to this dumbness, which isn't fair, indeed the postings on here are bullying, ignorant and the dumbest of dumb.

As others have pointed out, plenty of people and media did criticise his racism. It was not wholly accepted as a social 'norm' (even when it was dismissed as 'gaffes').

I'm aware of the atrocities committed during WWII. A suggestion that this is in any way a disclaimer leaves me speechless.

Racism didn't 'naturally' die out - it didn't die out at all. It's since taken on a more covert, micro-aggressive and less direct shape. Although to look at any thread on this subject on Mumsnet, the denials that racism exists in any way in 2020s UK - 'not a racist country' is a phrase that crops up a lot - tells a lot about attitudes in general.

I'm also failing to see where you make the leap that this in any way denigrates the work done to fight racism, or that this is a denial that this work was ever needed. If anything, it's needed more now that it ever was. It hasn't gone away. It's merely being expressed in less overt terms. The boiling down of racists into 'nice' people and non-racists as 'nasty' ones is also crudely oversimplistic and a straw man. Everyone knows that human beings are more complex than this. And yes, in the past there were plenty of people who did know better than to indulge in racist behaviour.

It's not a generational thing and some generations don't behave better than others. To suggest the reverse is true is extremely naive.

I'm going to stake a hefty bet that this is sarcasm.

The trouble is you can never quite tell with Mumsnet these days.

I suppose it's why even nowadays people like Bernard Manning jokes, Jim Davidson (awful awful man) and Roy Chubby Brown.
They weren't pushing the boundaries, they were racist and homophobic shits and I'm old and could recognise that back in their heyday

Didn't he famously say in 1988 "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to do something about overpopulation"?

Now, if he had died a year earlier, that would have been spooky.

Royals and types like Stanley Johnson occasionally hint "we should do something about overpopulation" when they think nobody is listening.

Is it sarcasm ?

Ultimately for all the distractions and whatabouttery and brown nosing of the royal arslikhan of MN my point is correct. The monarch is a position which no one in the UK can aspire to unless they are the first born child of the reigning monarch. So by definition they are not "just like us". Nor is their family.

I guess it all depends on how ambitious you are for your children. But it's never sat well with me to have to say to a child "stop ever imagining you can be king or queen no matter how well you do or work.". That offends me so much more than any silly bantz Prince Philip may have engaged in.

😂👏

presume OP thinks RF can be abolished for this crime?

Mmm. My elderly dad left school very early to join the family farm and can often say things or use expressions that wouldn't be used today. He is nearly 90 now and in poor health and I don't feel it's a good use of my time or fair to him to constantly correct him on the correct terms for things. He absolutely was a product of his time. In my opinion it's not fair to judge him by the standards of the today and I know him to be a good dad, friend ans neighbour even of he could be more political correct .

I think the pp who mentioned that one of the huge differences in why it feels like it was widely tolerated is that the media landscape was so different before the internet and social media platforms.

So the papers would report on it - you’d get call in radio shows doing the odd debate on it and people writing to the letters page of the newspapers but there was no mass way to express views to get a overview of just how tolerated or not it was.

People would discuss in their small groups and that was it.

I think we are in a weird place now with cancel culture being quite dangerous at times but it does help hold people more accountable - for example if Camilla said the sorts of things Phillip did the outrage would be felt by the mass response.

Ah, I see. Well, aside from the acceptance that these unremarkable people are in any way 'above' anyone, I agree completely with your other points.

Many of the people who are defending Prince Philip make me laugh. He probably wouldn't spit on most of them if they were on fire. Do you really think he gave a toss about what any of us think of him, or that he needs you to defend him? He probably looked down on the whole lot of us (and if he was the man you say he was he probably had more respect for people who would take him to task than all the brown nosers). Hahahaha!

My father would be 110 years old if alive today. He would never denegrate anyone because of their race or humiliate someone for laughs. He was from a working class background, but was a natural born gentleman. He loathed Prince Phillip and the concept of a Royal Family. My mother would be 106 if still alive and she held the same values. Not everyone was a "product of their time". Besides, your Dad's job wasn't meeting members of the general public as consort to the Head of State. He wasn't being funded by the tax payer to give awards to people who had worked tirelessly for charity or other remarkable achievements. If he had been, I doubt that he'd go out of his way to make them look stupid simply because he was superior in status to them.

It doesn't matter one jot what you accept. It's the way it is.

That's rather what grates for some people.