"The House of Mountbatten Now Reigns"

A Very Happy Birthday to the Duke of Edinburgh, exactly 60 years older than my sister. At least two of his children apparently signed their marriage registers as Mountbatten-Windsor, and even if Prince William did not, then two of his Christian names are Philip and Louis. Canadians may have a small gripe against that Louis, and Punjabis undoubtedly have a large one. But even so.

One of the many reasons why Peter Wright should have taken up writing fiction much earlier than he did, since he had such an obvious gift for it, was his astonishingly popular suggestion that there had been a plot to make Lord Mountbatten Prime Minister in a military coup that would have ousted Harold Wilson, whom Wright claimed was a Soviet agent. The politest way to answer that would be to point out that if the Soviet Union was paying Wilson, then it ought to have demanded, in no uncertain terms, its money back.

In reality, Mountbatten, like many upper-class people whose formative experiences had been the First World War and its aftermath, was, if not exactly a Labour supporter (although some of them were that, and more than that), then certainly a sympathiser. Attlee therefore appointed Mountbatten as Viceroy of India, and he was Wilson’s first choice for the new position of Secretary of State for Defence, which he felt obliged to decline only because of his closeness to the Royal Family, no small part of why he had been asked in the first place.

It was Thatcher who mounted an assault on the monarchy, since she scorned the Commonwealth, social cohesion, historical continuity and public Christianity, and who 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, using her most popular supporting newspaper to vilify the Royal Family, and legislating to pre-empt the courts on both sides of the Atlantic by renouncing the British Parliament’s role in the amendment of the Canadian Constitution, to abolish the power of the Parliament of the United Kingdom to legislate for individual Australian states, to end the British Government’s consultative role in Australian state-level affairs, and to deprive the Queen’s Australian subjects of their right of appeal to Her Majesty in Council.

Whereas trade unionists and activists peremptorily dismissed an attempt to make the nascent Labour Party anti-monarchist. The movement that delivered social democracy was replete with MBEs, OBEs, CBEs, mayoral chains, aldermen’s gowns, and civic services; that movement 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.

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. Callaghan once 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; abolition of that House is now the policy of the Coalition, although it is being resisted vigorously by Labour in both Houses.

Peter Shore denounced the Major Government’s decision to scrap the Royal Yacht, and unlike John Redwood he did it at the time. Shore also supported Canadian against Spanish fishermen not least because Canada and the United Kingdom shared a Head of State. Labour MPs who 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. Both King George VI and the Queen Mother were honorary members of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, which the latter accepted from her great friend, Ron Todd, with specific reference to her late husband’s great admiration for Ernest Bevin. Bernie Grant vociferously supported the monarchy because of its role in the Commonwealth, probably also the view of Diane Abbott.

Efforts to cut constitutional ties to Britain have been a white supremacist, and an anti-Catholic, cause ever since Thomas Jefferson. Which is to say, ever since Dr Johnson asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” That wretched tradition has continued down through the foundation of Irish Republicanism by those who regarded their own Protestant and “Saxon” nation as the only true nation on the Irish island, through anti-monarchist attitudes to Australian Aborigines from the Victorian Period to the present day, through Hendrik Verwoerd and Ian Smith, through attempts to abrogate the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand, and through the patriation of the Canadian Constitution against the wishes, both of the Aboriginal peoples to whom the Crown had numerous treaty obligations, and of the government of Quebec.

The fact is that only a movement steeped in royal, parliamentary and municipal pageantry and charity, could preserve and celebrate the pageantry and charity of the City of London while ending its status as a tax haven and as a state within the State, Europe’s last great Medieval republican oligarchy, right where the United Kingdom ought to be. The liberties of the City were granted to a city properly so called, with a full social range of inhabitants and workers. The Crown should explicitly guarantee the hereditary economic and cultural rights of, for example, the Billingsgate fish porters in the same way as it guaranteed or guarantees those of Aboriginal peoples elsewhere in the Empire and the Commonwealth.

Liberty is the freedom to be virtuous, and to do anything not specifically proscribed. Equality is the means to liberty, and is never to be confused with mechanical uniformity; it includes the Welfare State, workers’ rights, consumer protection, local government, a strong Parliament, public ownership, and many other things. And fraternity is the means to equality, for example, in the form of trade unions, co-operatives, credit unions, mutual guarantee societies and mutual building societies, among numerous that could be cited.

Liberty, equality and fraternity are therefore inseparable from nationhood, a space in which to be unselfish. Thus from family, the nation in miniature, where unselfishness is first learned. And thus from property, each family’s safeguard both against over-mighty commercial interests and against an over-mighty State, therefore requiring to be as widely diffused as possible, and thus the guarantor of liberty as here defined. The family, private property and the State must be protected and promoted on the basis of their common origin and their interdependence, such that the diminution or withering away of any one or two of them can only be the diminution and withering away of all three of them. All three are embodied by monarchy.

Monarchy also 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 and as one rather expects that Diane Abbott understands, 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, again 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. No wonder that the BNP wants to abolish the monarchy here. After all, the Queen is descended, via the “Negroid” Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, from the part-black Royal House of Portugal, and, via Elizabeth of York and her Moorish ancestors, from Muhammad. So is her husband.