Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

Angus MacNeil, the SNP MP for the Western Isles, maintains that the Royal Yacht should never have been scrapped. He is of course quite right to bemoan that action of the last Conservative Government, to which John Redwood raised no objection at the time, but which was vigorously opposed by Peter Shore.

The anti-monarchist catcalling over the Queen's Hebridean holiday is being led by the Taxpayers' Alliance, as it calls itself. Well, of course. 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; Diane Abbott is quite probably of the same view.

No wonder that the National Party abolished the monarchy 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. No wonder that the BNP wants to abolish the monarchy here. And no wonder that Margaret Thatcher launched a sustained assault on the monarchy, since she scorned the Commonwealth, social cohesion, historical continuity and public Christianity, and called the Queen "the sort of person who votes for the SDP", arrogating to herself the properly monarchical and royal role on the national and international stages. The newspaper that was most vociferous in her support was also most vicious in subverting the position of the Royal Family.