The Legacy State?

“We have to build a New State and shut down the Legacy State, with digital ID making people’s experience of that New State fundamentally much better.” While I revile both the horseshoe theory and most comparisons with the Great Dictators, on this occasion Darren Jones has managed to sound like both Benito Mussolini and Mao Zedong.

But with Asda, NatWest, Heathrow, Xbox and Minecraft all down today, as Amazon Web Services was last week, the case against digital ID is making itself. And Jones will miss “the Legacy State” when he loses Bristol North West to the Green Party. Not so Will Lloyd. He is attracting a lot of attention, but it is George Eaton’s New Statesman article that is more notable, following on from Andrew Marr’s last week, and standing alongside Polly Toynbee’s in The Guardian. The line is that Wes Streeting is moving left in order to take on Reform UK. No evidence for that is presented, since none exists. Do they want Streeting to replace Keir Starmer? Do they think that he will, meaning that they need to keep in with him? Both. Of course.

Lloyd’s piece will change no one’s mind. The threat to the monarchy was always going to come from the Right, although I had always assumed that that would be because it was blindingly incompatible with Thatcherite meritocracy. As it is, though, note what those Raising the Colours, no beneficiaries of Thatcherism unless one reasonably counted lifelong and intergenerational benefit dependency, were saying online about the King, and note what they were not saying, for God to save him or for him to live long, either there or on the streets. Of course Queen Elizabeth II was a Remainer, just as of course the King is a Green at least in a nonpartisan sense; he and his asylum-seeking father practically invented it. Like Green Parties from the Bundestag to the House of Commons, the King is a supporter of the war in Ukraine.

The political neutrality of the monarchy is like the impartiality of the BBC. When, exactly, has there ever been any such thing? The monarchy keeps sweet a lot of people who need to be kept sweet. But I am entirely at a loss as to why it has that effect on them. Either Elizabeth II or her equally revered father signed off on every nationalisation, every aspect of the Welfare State, every retreat from Empire, every loosening of Commonwealth ties, every social liberalisation, every constitutional change, and every European Union treaty. Charles III will sign off on assisted suicide and on decriminalised abortion up to birth, and would have signed off on gender self-identification, as he may yet.

If they could not have done otherwise, then why bother having a monarchy? What is it for? I support public ownership and the Welfare State in principle, even if the practice has often fallen short. The same may be said of decolonisation, as a matter of historical interest. I find some social liberalisations and some constitutional changes a cause for joy, and others a cause for horror. I abhor the EU, and the weakening of the Commonwealth. But this is not about me.

Is it the job of a monarch, if not to acquire territory and subjects, then at least to hold them? If so, then George VI was by far the worst ever British monarch, and quite possibly the worst monarch that the world has ever seen, with his daughter in second place. And is it the job of a British monarch to maintain a Protestant society and culture in the United Kingdom? If so, then no predecessor ever began to approach the abject failure of Elizabeth II, a failure so complete that no successor will ever be able to equal it. And for all her undoubted personal piety, I am utterly baffled by the cult of that Queen among Evangelical Protestants and among those who cleaved to a more-or-less 1950s vision of Anglicanism, Presbyterianism or Methodism. What did she ever do for them? What has the monarchy ever done for them?

During the last reign, Britain became history’s most secular country, and the White British became history’s most secular ethnic group, a trend that has been even more marked among those with Protestant backgrounds than it has been among us Catholics. The next monarch is not a regular churchgoer, meaning that the one after that is not being brought up as one. “We have no King but King Jesus,” proclaimed the Covenanters of 1638, and another King Charles’s prayer with the Pope has at least implicitly caused the Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster to hoist again the Blue Banner, “For Christ’s Crown and Covenant”, from Kyle Paisley’s ministerial charge in old Puritan East Anglia.

This has implications for the Windrush debate, and with eight Commonwealth Realms in or on the Caribbean, a fat lot of good being the Queen’s loyal subject did anyone there; Barbados, proportionately the most Anglican country in the world, became a republic in 2021. It also has implications for aspects of the debate around Brexit. If you wanted to preserve and restore a Christian culture in this country, then you would welcome mass immigration from the Caribbean, from Africa, from Latin America, and from Eastern Europe.

Speaking of immigration, the Royal Family would agree with NHS England that cousin marriage, not least where one party was an immigrant, had “benefits” that included “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages”. Queen Victoria and the immigrant Prince Albert were first cousins. By descent from that marriage, the King’s parents were third cousins, while they were also second cousins once removed through a different line, and Prince Philip was not only an immigrant, but an asylum-seeker who took refuge in Britain because he had relatives here, one of whom he married. Britain intervened militarily in his native land to restore his family to the Throne. Talk about bringing their troubles to our door.

On balance, I would not abolish the monarchy. The arguments for the monarchy are rubbish in their own terms, but so are the arguments for a republic, meaning that the case for change has not been made. Which republic is classless, and free of corruption? France? Germany? Italy? India? Ireland? The United States? Where? A Presidential Election would be a choice between the next Bullingdon Club member in line and someone who had casually given a trifling £50,000 to the most recently successful candidate for the Leadership of the Labour Party. No one else would even make it onto the ballot paper, and I would not want either of those as my Head of State. There would have to be a nomination process. Candidates would certainly require nomination by one tenth of the House of Commons, 65 MPs, and very probably by one fifth of that House, 130 MPs. Even in the first instance, in the wildly unlikely event of more than two candidates, then the House would whittle them down to the two who would then be presented to the electorate. Almost certainly, only two parties are ever going to have 65 MPs. Certainly, only two are ever going to have 130. In practice, they would probably arrange to alternate the Presidency between them.

Nor would I abolish the Royal Prerogative. Rather, I want it to be exercised by a Prime Minister who aspired to strengthen families and communities through economic equality and international peace. But the monarchy, and with it the exercise of the Royal Prerogative by persons who most certainly did not share those aspirations, does not depend on the support of people like me. It depends on the support of people who, as long as the monarchy were simply there, have been prepared to overlook the fact that hardly anything that they really wanted ever happened, while all sorts of things that they did not want did happen, no matter who was in government.

The Order of the Garter is entirely in the gift of the monarch, so the then Queen alone chose to confer it on Tony Blair. Prince Andrew chose to move in the circles of Jeffrey Epstein, of Robert Maxwell’s daughter, of Peter Mandelson, and of the Clintons. It is the Anglo-American liberal elite, the right wings of the Labour and Democratic Parties, that are the Royal Family’s sort of people, even if they would never stoop to voting for those parties. Culturally, no one is more Tory than a liberal Tory; politically, no one is more liberal. The people on whose support the monarchy depended have chosen to ignore the fact that that was what their heroes must have been, and openly were. But we may be living through the end of all of that.