I actually passed as this exhibit was being erected, and had a hearty chuckle. Then I thought no more about it until I saw the nation.cymru article in which Ceredigion Council condemns it as “distasteful” and proudly announces that it’s been removed “from council land”. Which is to say, our land.
So, no matter how bleedingly obvious the harmless double entendre of “seventy years on the throne” is, you are not allowed to publicly show the toilet-related joke. It is just too closely related to the – unarguable – fact that Elizabeth Windsor is human in all the same ways as the rest of us.
As a confirmed republican, I like this.
I’d guess that some of those entering the scarecrow competition were actually lukewarm royalists with a crude sense of humour: and that the revelation that they are not allowed to express it has brought them into the republican camp. Feel free to argue the case, but the sane ones amongst you will concede that a mild and ambiguous visible public opinion has, in this small instance, been pushed toward an angry, tactically aware, and therefore potentially effective republican opinion. Those who were outraged by the “distasteful” scarecrows, on the other hand, have not changed their opinion at all.
The net effect of the episode, therefore, has been to create some more effective republican opinion. But not in a way you’d pick up in the statistical analysis of visible public opinion.
You won’t see this, of course, in an opinion poll.
Let’s look at why this matters.