Analyse af 'A Royal Salute to the Commonwealth'

The article ”A Royal Salute to the Commonwealth” by Peter Oborne leads to an interesting question: is the Commonwealth good for Britain? There are shared opinions on that, however Peter Oborne has a really strong and solid opinion. The article is rather provoking and almost forces the reader to pick a decision, it’s obvious that the writer knows what he’s talking about, but can he force the readers what side to be on? He introduces his article with a salute to British monarchy. He pays attention to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s trip to Canada. He points out a Canadian spectator who had waited five hours to see the Royal couple walk by. He uses that to show the importance of monarchy. It is a big moment for some people to see the “history” walk by, as in a royal couple and people will actually wait several hours to experience such moments. It seems as though the writer praises the royal family, in the first bits of the article. Therefore, it is easy to define his opinion on the royal and the Commonwealth. The writer only mentions the royal and the Commonwealth with positive words tied to them, making them look utterly positive. “While the Commonwealth is more relevant than ever” (P 2 L 30). The writer focuses on describing the royal and the Commonwealth as positive, strong and more like a healthy organization that has been evolved and turned into a more powerful organization after the 2. World War. However, Peter later on points out how the opinions and support on the Commonwealth slightly changes, he strikes quickly before looking into facts and attacks the New Labour with Tony Blair as their leader without any hesitation. When Peter positively describes the Commonwealth, he uses statistics and then goes straight onto pursuing the reader into supporting the Commonwealth, by attempting to drag his readers on his side with the statistics as his “evidence”. He doesn’t bother to think about what the Commonwealth is doing wrong whatsoever, which makes Peter rather arrogant with these cold comments and opinions. When he talks about the relevance of the Commonwealth, he uses ethos to persuade the reader into believing the same as he does. How he does this is really simple, he uses a statistic as an argument and throws it at the readers. Peter also continues demoting the New Labour, by talking them down with a respectful tone. At one point Oborne shows another side of himself, he promotes himself over his own opinion by looking at the problem from another perspective. The problem is pretty much the Queen, he claims that when she dies it will be a big crisis for the Commonwealth and that it will “Swiftly collapse”. The Queen knows most of the Commonwealth leaders and many of them are old friends now, it is a really negative feature to make assumptions like that and say that the community will collapse when she dies. Even though she is described as a very important person in the Commonwealth. Oborne describes the Western connections as negative for the Britain, saying that “Washington and Brussels, two connections that have served us so badly over the past two decades.”