A child was born earlier this week, to two very proud and, I assume, very tired parents. The circumstances of this birth mean that this child (without a name as I write) will grow up with almost unavoidable media attention, total security, and, crucially, his future job already set out for him. He will, all circumstances permitting, rule over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (not to mention the remnants of the empire). From the images on the BBC, you would think that entire nation is joyful, frolicking in the streets to welcome their future king. However, there exists a band of professional party poopers, known as republicans, who feel rather differently about the whole thing.
However, exactly what we republicans think about the royal birth has been much misrepresented. There are two main misconceptions (excuse the pun) about republican attitudes to the royal child. The first is that we all hate him. Not so, I’m afraid. I no more hate the kid than I hate any other. Frankly, it is not through any fault of his that he was born into an institution with which I find fault, therefore, I don’t have any personal problems with the Prince.
The other misconception, perhaps spurred on by the Guardian, with their option to censor their website to remove all royal content, is that republicans think too much fuss is being made out of this issue. This is nonsense. If anything, republicans feel as if too little fuss has been made. However, we feel as if the attention has been directed towards the wrong thing. Rather than obsessing over the very personal details of the birth in a worryingly voyeuristic manner, we ought to be reflecting on the very public and far-reaching implications of the peculiarity of this particular birth. Republicans do not demand that we treat this child like any other, we demand that the difference between this child and any other is taken and examined seriously.
This difference could not be any greater. This child, unlike the vast majority born to British parents, will come to rule Britain. However, this is no just deserts. It is only by the virtue of his parentage that the royal child will come to take this position. This is a serious constitutional point that should not and, indeed, cannot be ignored. Those who tell republicans, in varying levels of civility, to shut up and grin along, are merely ignoring the opportunity for a great and important national soul searching. Instead, they treat the birth of the royal child as a solely personal affair, whilst revelling in it in a very public manner. The public treatment of the entire occasion has been more reminiscent of celebrity, rather than political culture.
In fact it is precisely this dichotomy between the celebrity and the political which divides the public attitude towards the modern royalty. The royal family are treated much like many other celebrities, with constant media attention, prying photographers and a public desperate for any insight into their lives, no matter how invasive. We treat them first and foremost as people for whom the majority of the nation has great affection and great interest. However, this means that, whenever there is any (legitimate) political criticism of the royal family, the response is often to either attack the critic on an ad hominem basis (in response to a perceived personal attack on that beloved family) or to deny that there is any political content to the royal family – to deny that their position is up for discussion.
However, when it suits the royalist public, the royal family are anything but apolitical. They are the symbol of Britishness, of what it means to be a part of our society and a grand tradition that ought to be protected. If something is allowed to stand as shorthand for a nation, or to define a society, that is very definitely political. We need to be sure that every aspect of that institution is a desirable and appropriate representation of everything for which we want our nation to stand. That requires political argument, and thus requires royalists to engage with the republican case, rather than accusing them of ruining everyone else’s fun.
Perhaps the most obvious symbolic element of the royalty is the fact that we have a sole ruler. We are not citizens of a society which has any control over its head of state. In fact we are not citizens in any proper sense at all. We are subjects, subjects to the wishes of our monarch. Anyone with a shred of liberalism in their soul will surely be unable to stomach this constitutional stratification of society into those with inherent power and those without, far less those with any sense of the importance of the ideal of equality.
Furthermore, this sole ruler is not selected according to any process considering merit or worth, only heredity. This is not a process that can be conceived of as just under any definition. We do not accept this principle in any of our private institutions, nor even in our oldest and most public institutions (it has been a long time since anyone has looked favourably on hereditary peers), so it is a mystery why we should choose to accept it here and only here, much less let it represent our country. If we are serious about becoming a country where hard work is rewarded, rather than parentage, as many of us seem to think is only fair, then we should start by questioning whether we can legitimately have a head of state who is selected by the single least meritocratic process possible, and whether that is the face we want to present to the world.
Finally, and perhaps of little interest to most, there is the fact that our monarch is also the head of the established religion of our country. Or rather one of our countries – it is an absurdity that Scotland, Ireland and Wales are ruled over by the leader of the Church of England, and even more absurd that we continue to preach secular democracy in Northern Africa and the Middle East (particularly to Iran) when our country is run by the head of a religious institution who pray during communion that they should “may faithfully serve, honour and humbly obey her”. This is not to criticise the Church of England or its beliefs, incidentally, it is to criticise the connection between the head of state and the head of a particular church and the hypocrisy we commit when we exhort others to shun religious political leaders.
Setting aside the justification that is offered on the basis of tradition (which, although beloved of conservatives, would justify many atrocities, such as female circumcision, institutionalised anti-Semitism and hanging, and so cannot be admitted as a guiding principle), the only real justification of the continued existence of this institution is that it preserves stability and national cohesion in the face of the populism and capriciousness of unfettered democracy. Whilst America may face dramatic swings between Democratic and Republican (no relation) presidents, we have a reigning monarch who provides a degree of continuity to our nation’s face to the world. This relies on the fact that the royal family is apolitical in effect, if not in symbolism. Their continued inaction and impartiality, and, consequently, removal from the policy-making process, is essential to maintaining the justification for their existence.
This is, however, a much overstated case. Firstly, as the late Christopher Hitchens correctly observed, the same people who claim that the monarchy is a force for something also have to claim that they have no power to force anything at all. This is not an easy circle to square and requires a great deal of credulity rather than reason. Secondly, the monarchy does in fact possess a great deal of power, and political power at that. They can, by exercise of the Royal Prerogative, make orders in council, declare war, make peace, recognise foreign governments, sign and ratify treaties, grant pardons, grant charters, confer honours, confer patronage and establish commissions. These are hardly the powers of an impotent head of state. Royalists will counter that, although the royal family are entitled by law to do all of the above, they rarely do. This too is a poor replacement for an argument. We should be concerned about what our constitution allows, rather than exactly how it is currently used, in case any future monarch, including perhaps the Prince Cambridge, should prove to be more of an activist than our current Queen.
Additionally, there is the question of whether our current royal family is actually as apolitical as it claims to be. Recently, the Guardian newspaper tried to access notes, known as the “black spider memos”, written from the Prince of Wales to government ministers in order to influence policy. This attempt has been unsuccessful, as the attorney general vetoed the release of the memos, and three high court judges ruled that the memos were not in the public interest. Apparently, the release of the letters would lead to the public no longer perceiving Prince Charles as neutral. The attorney general said that “any such perception would be seriously damaging to his role as future monarch because if he forfeits his position of political neutrality as heir to the throne he cannot easily recover it when he is king.” If that doesn’t sound like the royal family influencing policy, I don’t know what does. If that is the case, then the monarchy is just as political as republicans have feared it could be, and does not fulfil the criteria drawn up by its own supporters.
But let us set aside the points of constitutional principle. Let us set aside the power of an unelected head of state over their subjects and all that that entails. Instead, let us turn to money. The royal family provide incredibly poor value for money, require millions in upkeep from the taxpayer at the best of times. Whenever there is some kind of party to be had, whether for an anniversary or a wedding, the taxpayer foots the bill for an opulent ceremony. In an age of austerity, when the general public are facing increased pressure to pay down debts, unable to secure credit for themselves and are having benefits and other government spending cut, it seems ridiculous to ask them to pay what is essentially a transfer payment from the taxpayer to the biggest landowners in the world (they can’t exactly be hard up). The scale and direction of this transfer is simply one of the greatest self-inflicted injustices being done to the British people.
Self-inflicted, unfortunately, because the majority of people in this country will disagree with most of what I have written above. The vast majority of us are royalists, content to have the Windsor family as our rulers and our superiors. International opinion, however, is something quite different. Whilst the majority of Britons may think that a monarchy is the best form of rule, the fact that only 45 countries in the world have a monarch as head of state (among them Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Monaco and the Vatican City – salubrious company) speaks volumes. To the rest of them, the British monarchy is not a grand old tradition, but just another obnoxious eccentricity. If we cannot recognise the way the tide has turned since the days of feudalism, if we can’t embrace a vision of society as a group of equal citizens, if we can’t throw the last vestiges of our imperial past into the dustbin of history, then we cannot be anything more than an interesting and decaying relic on the international stage.
In short, the birth of the boy who will one day become king should not prompt unbounded joy in us, but instead should start a serious and far-reaching examination of what it means to be a monarchy in the modern age and whether our current constitutional position is tenable. It is my contention that it is not and never can be.