Crown Dependency?

Assisted suicide in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and possibly very soon in Scotland, Jersey and the Isle of Man. In all six states of Australia, in fact, so it has received Royal Assent there six times. Jersey and the Isle of Man are specifically Crown Dependencies. What is the monarchy for? That whole Coronation malarkey, what did it mean?

I have no idea where those classless and incorrupt republics are supposed to be, so the case for change has not been made. The arguments for a republic are rubbish in their own terms. But in their own terms, so are the arguments for the monarchy. Britain may yet have a fourth Prime Minister in this Parliament, and it has had three General Elections in the last nine years, so the world does not exactly look at us and see stability.

And symbolic value, you say? Symbolising what values? Assisted suicide in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and possibly very soon in Scotland, Jersey and the Isle of Man. You cannot symbolise nothing, and there is no value in trying to do so. Quite the reverse, in fact. Monarchists may console themselves only that the republicans' arguments are no better, thereby upholding the status quo by default.

The legalisation of assisted suicide would give to a High Court judge in the Family Division such power over life and death as no judge in this country had enjoyed since the abolition of capital punishment. My paternal grandfather was born before such working-class men could vote in parliamentary elections, and my maternal ancestors included African slaves, Indian indentured labourers, and Chinese coolies. We who come off the lower orders and the lesser breeds, and perhaps especially those of us who are disabled, know perfectly well who would be euthanised, and how, and why.

Even if we had made it past the industrial scale abortion that disproportionately targeted us, then we would face euthanasia as yet another lethal weapon in the deadly armoury of our mortal enemies, alongside their wars, alongside their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, alongside Police brutality and other street violence, alongside the numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, and alongside the restoration of the death penalty, which is more likely than it has been in two generations, and which would not be repealed if the Prime Minister were a former Director of Public Prosecutions who was now a war criminal.

All this, and the needle, too? This is class and race war, and we must fight to the death. That death must not be ours, but the death of the global capitalist system. Having subjected itself to that system to a unique extent, Britain is uniquely placed to overthrow it, and to replace it with an order founded on the absolute sanctity of each individual human life from the point of fertilisation to the point of natural death. That foundation would and could be secured only by absolute fidelity to the only global institution that was irrevocably committed to that principle, including the full range of its economic, social, cultural and political implications. For all its Commonwealth role, that institution is not the British monarchy.