Domine Dirige Nos

Some attention to Mark Seddon's Left Futures post, although I am sure that he is mistaken about where the Smithfield meat market is. The main story, although Seddon would doubtless admit that it was nothing remotely new, is that both King George VI and the Queen Mother were honorary members of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the latter having accepting that honour from her friend great friend, Ron Todd, with specific reference to her late husband’s great admiration for Ernest Bevin.

But then, Attlee had appointed Mountbatten (admittedly, no friend of the Queen Mother’s) as Viceroy of India, and Mountbatten had been Wilson’s first choice for the new position of Secretary of State for Defence, which he had felt obliged to decline only because of his closeness to the Royal Family, no small part of the reason why he had been asked in the first place. The Silver Jubilee was held under the Callaghan Government. The Queen had famously good relations with Wilson and Callaghan, in stark contrast to her famously bad relations with Thatcher, who called her “the sort of position who votes for the SDP” and who sought to usurp her position in public life. Callaghan threatened to resign as Labour Leader rather than contest a General Election on Tony Benn’s policy of abolishing the House of Lords as that House was constituted in 1980.

Peter Shore denounced the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and supported Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State. Labour MPs opposed Thatcher’s cutting of Canada’s last tie to the Parliament of the United Kingdom, so opposing for the sake of the Aboriginal peoples and of the French-Canadians specifically as Her Majesty’s subjects. The Gibraltar Socialist Labour Party was founded out of the T&G explicitly in order to secure for the British workers of Gibraltar the same pay and conditions enjoyed by other British workers. Wilson deployed armed force in order to protect the right of the people of Anguilla to be British. Callaghan successfully prevented an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands. Bernie Grant vociferously supported the monarchy because of its role in the Commonwealth, probably also the view of Diane Abbott.

Such was the movement of the trade unionists and activists who peremptorily dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist. A 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 the social democratic goods within the parliamentary process in all its ceremony.

And such is the only movement, deeply rooted in municipal and parliamentary pageantry and charity, that could retain the pageantry and charity of the Lord Mayor, the Livery Companies, and so forth, while removing from the heart of our capital what amounts to a tax haven and, as the case to which Seddon refers illustrates, a state within the State, the last great Medieval republican oligarchy in Europe, right where the United Kingdom ought to be. No wonder that the republican oligarchs of New Labour, although theirs was a most limited concept of the res publica, were so keen on the City just as it is.

There will now be no such movement this side of electoral reform. Bring it on.