Thought, Art and Science

There are those who are complaining that we now know that our next three Heads of State, probably stretching into the next century, will all be white males. Well, they would all have been white males, anyway.

The present one is not male. But any elected Head of this State always would be. And white. And quite or very posh. So why bother changing the present arrangements?

No one with anything like the Royal Family’s foreign background would ever stand a hope of becoming the President of Britain. Nor would anyone aged 26, as the present Queen was when she came to the Throne. Nor would anyone aged 87, as she is now.

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 racism.

No wonder that the National Party abolished it 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.

It was Margaret Thatcher who mounted an assault on the monarchy, since she scorned the Commonwealth, social cohesion, historical continuity and public Christianity.

She called the Queen “the sort of person who votes for the SDP”, and she arrogated to herself the properly monarchical and royal role on the national and international stages. She used her most popular supporting newspaper to vilify the Royal Family.

The Queen broke with protocol, as she almost never does, in order to attend the funeral of the only Prime Minister of her own sex, who had been born within six months of her. Old ladies never miss the mourning rituals of their archrivals.

Several questions arose out of that funeral. Where, when, how, why, and by whom was it decided that neoliberal capitalism and its neoconservative foreign policy were now the official ideology of this State, and beyond question even on the floor of the House of Commons, the business of which has been suspended in order to glorify that ideology?

Extremely prominent seats were allocated to Dick Cheney and Binyamin Netanyahu. They were closer to the bier than the Queen was, or even than Thatcher’s own children were. Departing mourners were air-kissed at the back of the Cathedral by Tony and Cherie Blair.

Obeisance was made not only by Parliament, but also by the monarchy, by the churches, by the print and broadcast media, by the Corporation of the City of London, and most especially by the Police and by the Armed Forces.

Furthermore, where, when, how, why, and by whom was it decided that political office and military rank were now interchangeable, even identical? No other reasonable inference could be drawn from the burial with full military honours of a politician who had never served in any of the Armed Forces.

For there is something in Roy Hattersley’s criticism that the monarchy only celebrates the philistine worst of this country, and especially the military rather than the literary, or the more broadly artistic, or the directly scientific.

Anyone looking at a Royal event, including the Royal prostration to the corpse of Thatcher, would assume Britain to be a far more militarised society and culture than is in fact the case.

That was fine, or at any rate tolerable, when our Armed Forces were for the purpose of defending our territory, citizens and interests.

But they now exist in order to spread by force of arms some American high school definition of “freedom and democracy”. Yet there are now hardly any of them, and there will be even fewer once the Coalition has had its way.

There is no point in looking to the electoral process to deliver us anyone more cerebral. We are talking about the electorate that gave three General Election victories to each of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, but not even one to Gordon Brown.

Those who claim that David Cameron is a learned or a deep-thinking man need to be challenged to produce even the tiniest scrap of evidence to that effect.

The United Kingdom descended into anti-intellectual self-parody, perhaps in 1994, when the gutter press successfully ordered the Labour Party to choose the unlettered and uncouth Blair over Brown, or perhaps even as long ago as 1983, when the gutter press gave the unlettered and uncouth Thatcher a storming victory over Michael Foot, Denis Healey, the SDP very much as a whole (both for good and for ill), and everyone in her own party who had ever read a book. In any event, we are now living in the country that Thatcher and Blair created.

There is a certain type of emerging right-wing anti-monarchism, which imagines the Queen to have breached the Coronation Oath by granting Royal Assent to the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act, when in fact that Oath binds her, if in elaborate terms, to do literally nothing more than sign whatever legislation Parliament has approved while preserving the property rights of the Church of England and of its clergy, rights which are themselves defined by Parliament. Read the Oath dispassionately, and you will see that that is the reality.

The members of that school, much in evidence on the Internet, also see the Queen as having somehow betrayed her true role by never having resisted the erosion of the United Kingdom’s sovereignty by the European Union, in a vain attempt to make themselves feel better, probably for having failed to vote No in 1975, and certainly for having failed to vote Labour in 1983.

Yet the very last thing that the present Royal House has ever had any claim to be has been any kind of bulwark against political interference from the Continent in general and from the Teutonic milieu in particular.

A plain and simple Dutch invasion installed a plain and simple Dutchman as King in 1688, and his first Hanoverian successor never spoke English to his dying day.

From 1714 until as recently as 1936, no monarch had a British spouse, and almost all had German ones. The Queen is old enough to remember elderly relatives who, although born and raised here, spoke English with heavy German accents, having been brought up at the German-speaking court of Queen Victoria.

Why, even little Prince George has been given a Battenberg middle name. As the legitimate son of a legitimate son of a legitimate son of Prince Philip, his real surname is Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.

The root of his late paternal grandmother’s troubles with the Royal Family was the firm view of the old aristocracy, more or less openly expressed by her family to this day, that she had married down into those parvenus, arrivistes, and nouveau riche immigrants, an unfortunate political necessity from the eighteenth century. “The People’s Princess” was the opposite of the truth.

Auberon Waugh was, to date, the last great paleoconservative mocker of the Royal Family in those terms, representing in humorous form an entirely serious tradition which has never been reconciled fully to 1688, or fully if at all to 1534, or perhaps even, at some level, to 1485. Those abiding disaffections are the ultimate sources of many, many things. Including Toryism.

But 1688 was hardly the first time that any of the Three Kingdoms had looked to the Continent to provide an occupant for the Throne, on the strict condition, not in fact apparent in the Revolution of that year, that our own laws and customs must then take their course once such a figure had been found. We may and must do so again.

There are at present 12 Europarties, transnational federations that, while no one would have founded them if the EU had not existed, and while they receive funding from it (as does UKIP, which is rather more dependent on such funding than any of them is), are not confined to it, having affiliated parties from well beyond the EU’s member-states.

As, for good or ill, an alliance of Whigs and dissident Tories invited over William of Orange, and an alliance of Lancastrians and dissident Yorkists invited back Henry Tudor, so we should invite each of the Europarties to name a British citizen, resident in the United Kingdom for tax purposes, as a Lord Protector, a title first used in England in 1422, with something very similar first used in Scotland around 1481.

A Lord Protector, or Lady Protectress, would be charged to embody the ontological, the epistemological, the ethical and the aesthetic; to celebrate the fine arts, the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences; to define the parameters wherein we may enjoy an economy and a society, a culture and a polity; in the spirit of the tradition that was given a political voice and vehicle by the organisation that had nominated him or her.

Each of those traditions does very much have a British expression, although our electoral system and other features tend to obscure that reality.

But crucially, a Lord Protector, or Lady Protectress, would also be required to name an heir, at least 20 years younger, but necessarily or even ordinarily a blood relative. Rather, an intellectual soul mate, who would succeed in due course and fulfil other functions in the meantime.

The Europarties, since they were there, would set everything off in the first instance. But they would have absolutely no role ever thereafter.

The naming of such an heir, also a British citizen resident in the United Kingdom for tax purposes, would be a condition of exercising the functions of a Lord Protector.

Those might in each case include naming up to 12, 24, 36, 48 and 60 members in the five respective classes of an Order of Chivalry for thought, art and science.

They would certainly include participating in the provision that anything requiring Royal Assent receive the prior assent of not fewer than nine of the 12 Protectors.

Being a question of the procedures of the Privy Council, it would seem to be possible to enact this by Order in Council, something that itself could not be altered or repealed without Royal Assent, and therefore without prior assent.

Thus would thought, art and science be placed at the heart of our legislative life, with all that would follow from that.