Deo Adjuvante Labor Proficit

David Blunkett is rightly berating his BNP opponent, the perfectly preposterous Marc Collet, and a BNP-supporting blog, for vicious attacks on the Queen. Read the comments on any broadly or narrowly Tory blog, however, and you will find the same. As a regular poster or would-be poster of comments here is hilariously incapable of understanding, Fascists hate monarchy, they always have done, and it is a hugely successful bulwark against them.

The Queen loathed Thatcherism, and its present-day nostalgists loathe her back. Monarchies are about social cohesion, ours is also about the Commonwealth (an object of very particular hatred by neoconservatives and racial purists alike), and the Royal Family is descended both from the part-black Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and, via Elizabeth of York, from Muhammad. No one seriously suggests that an elective arrangement could deliver a mixed-race Head of State, or an elderly one such as the Queen now is, or a young one such as she was when she acceded, or a woman. That is why both the Radical Right and the Far Right want such an arrangement.

But their way in is to ask "What has the Queen ever done about...?" The EU is a favourite here, and let's not talk about who was Prime Minister at the time of the Single European Act. So are the social changes of the Sixties and onwards, and let's not talk about who was Prime Minister when abortion up to birth was legalised. Similar points could be made, I suppose, about the 1980s assault on social democracy, or about the erosion of civil liberties, or about the loosening of the Union and the Commonwealth (although that has reached its limit and may well be going into reverse).

We have managed to convince ourselves that monarchs should be politically neutral. Heaven knows either how we have come to think that or why we do so, but here we are. So we need to require that nothing be submitted for Royal Assent unless and until approved by, say, three out of five figures, independent of party, elected by the nation as a whole for a fixed term of, say, five years, with each of us voting for one candidate and the five highest scorers being declared elected at the end. The act of Royal Assent would then bring together the broad traditions, rather than narrow party interests, thus represented: paleocon, neoliberal-neocon, Liberal, Socialist, and combining social democracy, moral and social conservatism, and British and Commonwealth patriotism.