Pale By Comparison

A very elderly person would seem quite ideal to promote understanding of noncommunicable diseases. But as a comment on an earlier post put it, "They are very lucky to have Mugabe as the other side, otherwise nobody would feel any sympathy for them apart from the Thomas Mairs of the world." That comment was not quite about noncommunicable diseases in the ordinary sense of the term. Yet the point almost works either way.

Robert Mugabe, who is there at all because Margaret Thatcher absolutely insisted on him, can make almost anyone else look good by comparison. Or, at any rate, that is the view of him from the old colonial powers of Europe, and from the United States. Clearly, he does not necessarily have that effect on Africans. To many of them, even his faults pale, so to speak, next to those of his enemies.

The ongoing sympathy for the Rhodesian cause in certain circles needs to be set in the context of the fact that Ian Smith and his supporters not only committed treason against the Queen, but then purported to depose her, going so far as to remove the Union Flag from their own, something that even the Boers' revenge republic to the south never did.

I have wondered for some time why the monarchy kept sweet the people who needed to be kept sweet, since it had at least signed off on every aspect of the Welfare State, on every nationalisation, on every retreat from Empire, on every social liberalisation, on every EU Treaty, and on every one of Tony Blair's constitutional and ceremonial changes.

But perhaps those people do not really care for the monarchy at all, or even for the Queen herself? They certainly cared rather more, in practical terms, for its visceral enemies and hers in South Africa and Rhodesia. That was not in the distant past. In the South African case, where we are talking about people who annually laid wreaths in memory of the other side in a twentieth century war against Britain, it was all the way up to 1991. (I do not blame the Afrikaners on that point, by the way. I have stood in the Boer cemetery in St Helena and read the headstones of those boys of 14 and 15, carved in the language of their captors. Of course their nephews hated Britain.)

Ultraconservative opinion might do better if, alongside the continuation of an essentially decorative monarchy, the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, or at least of the parts of it that made any political difference and thus including Royal Assent, were to be made subject to the approval of seven out of nine Co-Presidents, elected every eight years and required to name seconds in case they died or resigned.

Each of us would vote for one candidate, and the top nine would be elected. These would be non-party figures, although of course the German and Irish experiences indicate that winning an election entails having an electoral machine such as ordinarily only a political party possesses, and the party card can just be dropped as part of that process. But even so.

People who think that the monarchy acts as some kind of bulwark against whatever it is that they might happen to dislike are akin to people who think that the EU was some kind of bulwark against Thatcherism, or that it is some kind of force for peace. Which privatisation did the EU prevent? Which dock, factory, steelworks, shipyard or mine did the EU save? How did workers' rights in the Britain of 1972 compare to those in the Britain of 2017? Did the EU prevent the war in Northern Ireland? Or in Yugoslavia? Or in Ukraine?

Likewise, which aspect of the Welfare State did the monarchy moderate, as those people would see it, in any way whatever? Which nationalisation? Which retreat from Empire? Which social liberalisation? Which EU Treaty? Which of Tony Blair's constitutional and ceremonial changes? Still, it keeps them sweet. And they need to be kept sweet. But for how much longer will it do so?