Bring the powerful to heel, don’t glorify monarchs and privilege
by Philip Hall
The idea that Charles III is divinely appointed to rule over us is ridiculous! Yet, ultimately, it is the metaphysical idea of the divine right of kings that gives King Charles III his legitimacy as the head of state. Ordinary British people are not citizens, but the subjects of a king whose soul was chosen by God to rule over them.
Pull the other one! The only sacred task that Charles has in front of him is to phase out the British system of monarchy; to dissolve the monarchy and return all crown properties and privileges to our democratically accountable state – to the people.
Charles III is not King Arthur; he is not a sacred king. He is not divinely appointed. He is not a unifier. Royalism is a smokescreen for the neo-Thatcherites, and the warring corporations. It is a kind of opiate, an important distraction that we don’t need at a crucial time when the cost-of-living crisis is upon us – while US capitalism wars with Russian capitalism, fighting over lebensraum in Ukraine at the cost of half a million dead, and at the risk of setting off a world destroying conflagration.
What would really unite us now is not a jug-eared new king, but a fairer society. What would give satisfaction is to see our elected government call to hell the wealthy and the corporations that puppeteer our corrupt political system in Great Britain.
Royalism is a smokescreen for the neo-Thatcherites, and for the warring corporations.
. . .
Kings and Queens brought people together into greater communities using brute power and oppression. Monarchical systems concentrated the wealth produced by the labour of ordinary people. Instead of sharing wealth with the people, the aristocrats generated luxury for themselves and wasted people’s work and the resources of the land on vanity projects.
From the beginning, monarchies had great pointless monuments like the Pyramids built. They enslaved millions and made civilisation more uncivilised, preferring to have huge luxurious tombs and religious buildings built instead of, for example, preventing the deaths of children from starvation and avoidable disease. The aristocrats had, and have, all the morality of lizard-eating snakes.
The ancient institution of monarchy is not as old or respectable as our dream of a happy communalism. When we were more monocultural society, monarchism grounded our beings in the land across a narrow racial and cultural spectrum. But let’s get our bearings, for God’s sake, we no longer live in a mono-racial, monoculture, we live in the multicultural Great Britain of 2023.
The Monty Python team put the question well: is a mystical connection to God and the land the basis for a good modern system of government? A king is not subject to the will of the people. The monarch embodies a divine appointment to rule and the right of the Monarch contradicts, by definition, the rights of the subjects of that monarch.
The monarch heads an aristocracy. The monarchical system contradicts, in principle, the ideas of liberté, égalité, fraternité. It is an insult to the ideals of social and economic justice. For modern humans living in democracies, the values of liberty, equality, fraternity and social and economic justice supersede any mystical connection one person might or might not have to the land. Respect for basic human dignity precludes us from agreeing to subject ourselves to another human. As Mark Twain said in private notes:
The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.
Tony Benn, who was himself from an aristocratic family, while he was respectful towards the Queen, was correct in his assessment of the foundations of a monarchical system.
I don’t think people realise how the establishment became established. It simply stole the land and property off the poor, surrounded themselves with weak-minded sycophants for protection, gave themselves titles and it has been wielding power ever since.
Tony Benn, in conversation
Of course, the monarchy in the UK is not absolute as it is in places like Saudi Arabia. In Britain, the power of the monarch was circumscribed long ago by the Magna Carta (1215) and we eventually ended up with a constitutional monarchy, by way of the abortive English Revolution.
In the United Kingdom, the monarch’s power is limited by a constitution. The new King Charles III is relegated to the role of being a symbol of state continuity and the union. But the British monarchy underwrites the unfairness of our British class system. It is no coincidence that the link between the monarchy and the military is very strong and always has been. It is not just that the British people have acquiesced to becoming subjects of the monarchy, force of arms maintains the monarch in power.
I had an argument with a friend which marked the end of our friendship. He was a member of the SAS and, while he studied Arabic and French, he moonlighted as a bodyguard for Prince Charles and Diana on different occasions, when Diana was still alive. I asked him this:
I accept the monarchy and the current political state of Britain under Margaret Thatcher because that is the expression of the will of the people in a democracy. But what if a socialist republican government were to be elected into power? Would you swear loyalty to it?
He said: ‘No!’ That was when we parted company.
In fact, according to past revelations, one of the main alleged organisers of a possible coup against the Labour government of Harold Wilson in 1968 was Lord Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle. The Queen’s uncle, King Edward VIII, was a notorious Nazi sympathizer before he was forced to resign. The sexual behaviour of Edward VII was a hundred times more scandalous than that of Prince Andrew. Remember that the democratically elected Gough Whitlam, Prime Minister of Australia, was removed from office by the governor of Australia, the Queen’s representative.
Underlyingly, the ideals and principles of a monarchical system and the very real material foundations of that system are antithetical to socialism and equality. Though we should remember that four of the most progressive northern democracies in Europe apart from the UK, have constitutional monarchs: Holland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The British monarch has no legitimacy in India, Africa, Asia or the Americas
Fifteen Commonwealth realms are now supposed to have King Charles III as their monarch. In the past, under the system of the British monarchy, Queen Victoria had the chutzpah to call herself The Empress of India (at Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s suggestion). Victoria presided over the British Empire. Britain colonised a quarter of the world and governed almost a quarter of its people not by divine right, but by conquest. Then Great Britain robbed the colonies blind in order to extract wealth and advantage. To maintain British imperial power, the British state over the whole period of empire, killed thousands in the colonies and oppressed millions on every continent. Australia, Canada and New Zealand were settled by colonialists transplanted from the mother country and dedicated to the extermination of the indigenous peoples of those lands.
Look at it coldly! How can there possibly be a mystical connection of fealty between the monarch of the United Kingdom and the native populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, who Britain oppressed?
Though, perhaps those same indigenous peoples do have a deep, almost mystical feeling of hatred towards the British monarchy for the British theft of farmland and mineral resources and the British violation of sovereignty and the many acts of oppression by the British. The British Monarchy, for example, can certainly sling its hook when it comes to claiming any divine right to rule over Ireland.
The United Kingdom is the place where the scattering began, as Merle Collins explained in a poem, and the UK is where the people of the former empire now gather, attracted by the wealth which that empire extracted from their different countries. When you look around you in the UK, you see that a large proportion of the people who form part of our multicultural society are here because ‘we were over there‘.
What would really unite us all now would be a fairer society
What unites us in a post-enlightenment, technologically unified, globalised society is not a monarchy. What unites us, to the extent that it still exists, is being British citizens of a functioning representative democracy. What unites us is a system of social protection and welfare. What unites us in 2022 is free education and free health care. It is also negative liberty that unites us; the right to be free from persecution and prejudice
What would really unite us all now would be a fairer society; the bringing to heel of the wealthy corporations that currently puppeteer and corrupt our British government. What would really unite us would be the control, taxation and regulation by the government of powerful people and corporations who, without that control, have a tendency to behave like the ruthless commercial barons of the early part of the industrial revolution.
Social justice will bring social solidarity, not the anachronistic, counterfactual mysticism of an incredibly expensive celebrity cult.
The unification of Europe, and togetherness and kindness further afield, global unity and the elimination of conflict, is something the more enlightened spirits among us long for. All of us who believe in reciprocity and historical justice and the equality and rights of all human beings want unity, not splintering and division. But that unity should come about as the result of a proper democracy, not something as silly and irrelevant as a monarch.
We need a different system of government in the UK. We need an elected upper house and an elected head of state.
The real sacred task of King Charles III is to ‘love’ his people enough in order to have the democratically elected state abolish all aristocratic titles and inheritances and return all that property and wealth acquired through the system of monarchy back to the British people; from the property of the Duke of Westminster downwards.
You must be logged in to post a comment.