The Red Queen, The Black Queen

The confirmation that Ed Miliband will attend the Royal Wedding in a morning suit, such as trade union leaders used to wear to Royal Ascot in the days when they were always justly and often technically known as barons, confirms that he is True Labour rather than New Labour, as surely as David Cameron's vacillation on the subject confirmed his desire to be the Heir to Blair. Stuart Reid's always excellent Catholic Herald column this week points out that anti-monarchism was a Thatcherite cause back in the day, spearheaded by the Murdoch papers, and posits that as the explanation for middle-class mean spirits towards the Royal Wedding. He is, of course, quite right.

Thatcher scorned the Commonwealth, social cohesion, historical continuity and public Christianity. She called the Queen "the sort of person who votes for the SDP". She arrogated 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. She legislated 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. And she legislated 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.

That last points to the fact that 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 one 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 BNP wants to abolish the monarchy, the Queen being 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. She has little of the "English blood" favoured by the likes of the EDL, and her children have almost none. If born of his marriage to Mr and Mrs Middleton's daughter, the successor of Lady Diana Spencer's son will be the first ethnically English monarch for almost, if almost, exactly one thousand years, since 1066. And even he will have plenty of other things in him, as all ethnically English people have had ever since that year, if not even earlier.

Only a movement of morning-suited Labourites, 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 the economic and cultural rights of Aboriginal peoples elsewhere in the Empire and the Commonwealth.