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.