The Real Defender of Liberty and Equality

To a warm reception on the website of the much-maligned Australian Broadcasting Corporation, which is also celebrating prominently the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, Phillip Blond writes:

One of the more interesting aspects of Queen Elizabeth's jubilee celebration was how muted republican protests were, and yet how the monarchist majority seemed unable to articulate or provide an explanation of why they support the institution of monarchy - at least, beyond some vague but deeply felt emotion.

This lack of philosophical explanation extends beyond Britain's shores, where many are puzzled over why a seemingly anachronistic institution sustains such popular support both in the UK and abroad. After all, the Queen remains sovereign over fifteen other democratic nations - including Canada and Australia - and many in former colonies, like Jamaica, hanker for a return of British rule, while others like Bermuda vote for it.

So, monarchy must have a deep rationale - but what might it be?

In part, the longevity of constitutional monarchy can be explained by the limits and deficits of a purely democratic polity. A republic is rightly the site of political contestation, but when all common codes are eroded and no general good can be articulated, the notion of what is in the interests of all is lost and only a partisan interest remains.

This is not just a reference to America's current political impasse; part of the reason that Europe in the last century fell into the dark ages is that virtually every continental state was fatally divided between right and left, and all lacked the means to craft and embody a vision of the national good beyond ideology and the absolutist claims of class or race.

Constitutional monarchy provides exactly this salve. As the embodiment and personification of a national good, the Queen - and not parliament - is the fundamental site of loyalty, and so the national debate extends beyond competing creeds to resolution in a popular organic consensus. Hence monarchy represents a limit on the absolutist claims of democracy, just as democracy qualifies kingship.

Moreover, there are advantages to being a subject of the crown rather than a citizen of a republic. Traditionally English monarchs conferred the status of subject on all in their realms, thus making all equal. This effectively subverted the rule of feudal lords by making the King responsible for the peasants who worked the land. Conversely, citizenship in republics was often only conferred on a privileged group and could be denied of whole classes of people, such as slaves or women.

When monarchy and republics collide, it quickly becomes clear which is the more just. For example, in 1772, when Lord Mansfield freed an American slave named Somersett who had landed in Britain, he declared slavery an odious institution and argued that it had no place in British common law. Fear that this would extend to the American colonies helped provoke the war of independence, resulting in a republic that maintained slavery. As the former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass noted on leaving America in 1845 for Britain, he would be sailing from "American republican slavery, to monarchical liberty."

And English colonial history is replete with examples when the monarch tried to restrain colonists from pillage and murder precisely because the natives where also subjects of the Crown. So progressive is constitutional monarchy that, had the American Revolution been avoided, I suspect slavery in the United States would have abolished decades earlier, the civil war would not have occurred and the Native American population would not have been slaughtered.

Nor are the virtues of monarchies confined to the distant past. Constitutional monarchies comprise some of the world's most developed, wealthy, democratically accountable and progressive states. According to the UN, seven of the top ten countries in the world in terms of quality of life are constitutional monarchies. Monarchies really do help guarantee liberty and prosperity.

High Tories used to argue that because the monarch stood alone, he or she could not be bought off by vested interests or the corruptions of representative politics. Indeed, English monarchs have regularly allied with the people against vested interests - so, when landowners were evicting peasants in the sixteenth century, the king campaigned against enclosure and the landed interest.

Similarly, today Prince Charles sponsors through his foundations and charities political and educational work that is often more radical and transformative than anything state or private endeavour has yet achieved. A populist monarchism also brought Spain out from fascism and monarchy remains central to many European states, precisely because people trust the institution more than they do politics and politicians.

In an era when representative government is so despised and democratic accountability has resulted in the creation of undemocratic and unaccountable elites who are nothing less than a modern oligarchy, do not be surprised that monarchy becomes ever more popular. It is, after all, the real defender of liberty and equality.