Tuesday 11 August 2009

Out of Many, One People

I laughed and laughed as I watched Kwame Kwei-Armah last night. He had gone onto a Jamaican radio talk show in the clear expectation that the callers would be queuing up to demand that Jamaica abolish the monarchy. But instead, they called repeatedly for independence to be revoked and Britain begged to take them back. The cry of a poor country’s poorer people in the present global climate, of course. But even so.

At an elite black-tie function that evening, the great and the good also expressed themselves firmly in favour of the monarchy as something with which everyone in a divided society could identify, and as a link to the other countries, including the United Kingdom, that retain it. Quite so.

And quite so that, as a very middle-class presenter on the radio programme put it, if Jamaica had remained British, then her social welfare provisions would be greatly superior to their present condition. Monarchy embodies sheer good fortune (or Divine Providence, as some of us prefer to call it), with its conferral of responsibilities upon the more fortunate towards the less fortunate.

Britain until Thatcher (who had extremely strained relations with the Royal Family, and the logic of whose ideology was and is anti-monarchist) was a shining example of this. Canada still is, more or less. Likewise, New Zealand, Scandinavia and the Benelux countries. Australia became viciously neoliberal economically (and viciously neoconservative geopolitically) during the same, now mercifully concluded, period that anti-monarchist sentiment rose to its peak. The SNP purports to be social democratic and monarchist, but in reality it is neither. Like New Labour, in the starkest possible contrast to Old Labour.

The countries still sharing the monarchy are those which have chosen to do so through the period of decolonisation and now very well beyond it. It is who and what they are. Kwei-Armah, with his affected African name (he was born Ian Roberts, and his parents were from Grenada), seems unable to grasp this in his own West Indian case: that Afro-Caribbeans have no reason to feel any particular affinity with the people who sold them, that they have closer blood ties to these Isles than to Africa, and that the culture that plantation society gave them (the monarchy, the English language, Christianity, the names of their Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ancestors, the lot) is the only culture that they can possibly know as their own. The assumption seems to be that history went straight from slavery to independence. It did not.

A glorious project for the present age would be for all the countries sharing the monarchy to guarantee to each other the Welfare State (locally adapted, but to non-negotiable minimum standards), workers’ rights, consumer and community protection, conservation, progressive taxation, full employment, a strong Parliament, strong local government in countries large enough to need or sustain it, and every household’s base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. Far from anywhere casting off the Crown, countries might very well seek to put it back on.

7 comments:

  1. But what has unelected power got to do with people's welfare?

    Why would the richest family in the country have common cause with the rest of us? They stand to lose financially from the kind of changes we want to see implemented.

    It's nonsense to say that the decolonization process is completed. What now exists is neo-colonialism in which the big banks and transnational corporations call the shots.

    You cannot have democracy - popular sovereignty - if power ultimately resides in one unaccountable individual. The powers of the Crown allow the kind of electoral dictatorship that we have in this country.

    It will be in the struggle for a democratic constitution that the rights you outlined will be won. Just consider the ongoing processes of constitutional reform in the Americas - Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, etc.

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  2. Can't wait to see the documentary. I understand next week's documentary will deal with Australian and New zealand.
    Please keep us down under informed what Kwame Kwei-Armah has to say.

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  3. "But what has unelected power got to do with people's welfare?"

    Power?

    "Why would the richest family in the country have common cause with the rest of us?"

    They are not the richest family in the country. And they seem to make more than a decent fist of it. One Nation Tories? Whig grandees? I suppose so. But there are a whole lot worse. In the Political Class.

    "It's nonsense to say that the decolonization process is completed. What now exists is neo-colonialism in which the big banks and transnational corporations call the shots."

    That's RE-colonisation. No wonder people are nostalgic for the old kind.

    "You cannot have democracy - popular sovereignty - if power ultimately resides in one unaccountable individual."

    The succession to the Throne is determined by Parliament, within which supremacy has passed to the House of Commons, which has come to be elected by universal suffrage.

    "The powers of the Crown allow the kind of electoral dictatorship that we have in this country."

    That's a very moot point, and one answerable by means of reforms already implemented in several Commonwealth Realms.

    "It will be in the struggle for a democratic constitution that the rights you outlined will be won."

    I don't like writing these things into constititions. It hands over control of them to judges, and it binds future Parliaments. Imagine if Attlee had faced a written Constitution, even one written by the Liberals in the early twentienth century, or the electricity-nationalising Tories between the Wars. He would have been very severely constrained.

    "Please keep us down under informed what Kwame Kwei-Armah has to say."

    If he's a British anti-monarchist (I don't know), then he's in very limited company among black Britons, African and West Indian alike. Even the late and extremely left-wing Labour MP Bernie Grant, born in Guyana, was a fervent monarchist because of the monarchy's role in the Commonwealth.

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  4. Why couldn't a constitution guarantee public utilities and services?

    This has been inserted into many democratic constitutions.

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  5. Once that is in the Constitution, then anything further isn't, and can be struck down in the courts as going beyond the Government's or Parliament's constitutionally defined powers.

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  6. What do you mean "anything further"?

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  7. It would depend what the Constitution said. Anything beyond that would be struck down in the courts as exceeding the powers defined in the Constitution.

    These are matters to be decided politically, not judicially.

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