Opposite-sex couples may already contract civil partnerships, so what is David Lammy going on about? Is this an attempt to solve the problem of provision for Sarah Ferguson?
Bit pity the poor old Blairites, and it is not often that you will read that here. Back in the day, they were the most ferocious republicans that I had ever heard before or since, and I was at only one degree's remove from the Corbyn Leadership several times over. Yet as Wes Streeting has hinted, monarchism is now the "centrist" position against the two sides of Kemi Badenoch's predicted civil war.
Civil wars do split families, but a civil war between the supporters of the Green Party and their grandparents in or around Reform UK and the avowedly Cromwellian Restore Britain? Alas, the Boomers' bemedalled fathers would not be around to laugh at it. But it would be the most popular comedy ever shown on Palestinian television.
This would make unmarried cohabitation so unattractive, Lammy may be trying to stamp it out as a moral mission.
ReplyDeleteWell, he did used to be on the Archbishops' Council of the Church of England. But that he is as bright as you suggest, I very much doubt.
Delete"Or since", what even including the "Charles is a Muslim" lot?
ReplyDeleteI have not yet met any of those.
DeleteOn 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. But 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 signed off on decriminalised abortion up to birth, and he would have signed off on assisted suicide and on gender self-identification, as he may yet. They have of course had assisted suicide in Canada for years.
If those monarchs 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?
DeleteDuring 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.
And 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.