Why Anti-Monarchists Are So Angry

They know that they have lost for at least a hundred years. The monarchy was unpopular for much of the Victorian period, but at the Diamond Jubilee there was an outpouring of popular adulation such as had never been seen before. Nor will it be seen again until the next Diamond Jubilee, in 2012. As in so many other ways, those who were once flattered, and who flattered themselves, as radicals now stand exposed as growing ever more bitter with age.

How very long ago it all seems now. All that “Cherie is the First Lady” business. Her refusal to curtsy, and her blanking of members of the Royal Family. The references to Tony Blair as “the Head of State”. His reference to “my” Armed Forces. The fact that, at one time, the Downing Street website even said that the Queen had weekly audiences with him, rather than the other way around. The dropping of the Royal Coat of Arms from the Treasury’s logo, and of “HM” from its official title. The Blairs’ hijacking of the 1997 State Opening of Parliament, of the death and funeral of Princess Diana, and attemptedly also of the funeral of the Queen Mother.

The proposal for a new national day as if none already existed, at least potentially. The endless definitions of Britishness in terms of abstract values not remotely peculiar to this or any other country. The 2007 Ministerial pamphlet that cited the likes of Sure Start as important symbols of Britishness but did not mention the monarchy. That year’s Prime Ministerial announcement to Parliament of the contents of the forthcoming Queen’s Speech. The fact that the 1997 Labour Manifesto felt any need to include the assurance that “we have no plans to replace the monarchy”, something that would have gone entirely without saying on any previous occasion.

And so much else besides.

Truly, there is nothing more frightfully New Labour than hostility towards the monarchy, as much as anything else this country’s tangible link to the West Indies, and to the Canada, Australia and New Zealand to which our white working class has so many close ties. Half of children with an Afro-Caribbean parent now have a white parent, usually a white working-class parent who may well have family connections to Canada, New Zealand or, especially, Australia. New Labour’s characteristic anti-monarchism is New Labour’s characteristic racism and New Labour’s characteristic snobbery.

Harold Wilson, so hated by the Sixties Swingers who did not realise how lucky they were to have only him to hate, and Jim Callaghan had famously good relations with the Palace and the Queen. Whereas Margaret Thatcher, the Mother of New Labour and the heroine of the 68ers as they applied their unchanged social views to economics, had famously bad relations with the Palace and the Queen, calling Her Majesty “the sort of person who votes for the SDP”.

For anti-monarchism in Old Labour was, and is, a fringe oddity. It is held either on the semi-detached Hard Left or, in the case of Roy Hattersley, by those simply eccentric on this one issue. All the way back in 1923, trade unionists and Labour activists took all of half an hour to dismiss an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist. The matter has never again been brought before a Labour Party Conference, although I do remember a rejection of the proposal by the Lib Dems some time in the early Nineties, despite the best efforts of one Liz Truss. Whatever happened to her?

The Welfare State, workers’ rights, progressive taxation and full employment were delivered by a political movement replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services; a movement which proudly provided a high proportion of Peers of the Realm, Knights of the Garter, members of the Order of Merit, and Companions of Honour, who had rejoiced in their middle periods to be Lords Privy Seal, or Comptrollers of Her Majesty’s Household, or so many other such things, in order to deliver those goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony. They also kept us out of the Vietnam War.

The greatest Labour Prime Minister ended up all four of an earl, a Knight of the Garter, a member of the Order of Merit, and a Companion of Honour. Peter Shore denounced of the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and he supported Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State. The Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party was founded out of the T&G, now Unite, specifically in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers.

And so on, and on, and on.

Monarchy embodies the principle of sheer good fortune, of Divine Providence conferring responsibilities upon the more fortunate towards the less fortunate. It therefore provides an excellent basis for social democracy, as has proved the case in the United Kingdom, in the Old Commonwealth, in Scandinavia and in the Benelux countries. Allegiance to a monarchy is allegiance to an institution embodied by a person, rather than to an ethnicity or an ideology as the basis of the State. As Bernie Grant understood, allegiance to this particular monarchy, with its role in the Commonwealth, is a particular inoculation against racialism.

No wonder that the National Party abolished it in South Africa. No wonder that the Rhodesian regime followed suit, and removed the Union Flag from that of Rhodesia, something that not even the Boers’ revenge republic ever did. And no wonder that the BNP wants to abolish the monarchy here. They are not the only ones. But the others have essentially the same motivation.