The New Right is in full cry against the Prince of Wales. Be he right or be he wrong on certain specific issues, their real target is the monarchy.
Their heroine waged a long war against that institution, 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, and using her most popular supporting newspaper to vilify the Royal Family.
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, lowering the voting age to that end. 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.
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I suspect you will find more republicans in the Labour Party than the Conservative Party.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post. For all the anti-monarchy rhetoric in the States, the republican (lower case l) system we have - becoming more and more divisive and ideology based - is a good example of what happens when there is no crowned sovereign (in addition to the examples you used).
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, there hasn't been a Labour Party Conference motion on the subject since sometime in the Twenties, when it was dismmised in 20 minutes.
ReplyDeleteBut there was one at a Lib Dem Conference in the Nineties. It was defeated. But one of the prime movers behind it was Liz Truss, now a Conservative MP.