Katie Hopkins is hell-bent upon becoming the go-to bitch for television producers in need of a cheap villain to fill sofa space, capitalising on her notorious appearance on ITV’s ‘This Morning’.  From the beginning of our interview, she makes it clear she is here to “say what you can’t say anymore”. She is a pawn in the tiresome narrative of breakfast chat shows, perpetuating a meaningless cycle of scandal, outcry and comment. 

She accuses me of being “the sort of person who believes in climate change”, in a provocative non-sequitur with no relevance our conversation. On one level, she is evidently attempting to keep the camera focused on her by inspiring fresh outrage. 

For example, I believe that parents almost always seek the best possible life for their children. Hopkins does not. “I don’t believe every mother wants what’s best for their baby,” she says. “[Single teenage mothers] want what’s best for themselves. And what’s best for them is doing very little to support their children.” She goes on to tell me in absolute seriousness how “young mums… take KFC home, stick it in the blender and feed it to their babies.”  This is precisely the sort of pantomime nonsense which makes Hopkins so easy to revile. 

In doing so, though, lefties like myself run the risk of engaging in dangerous and hypocritical snobbery of our own. The vitriol Hopkins peddles on daytime TV is being drip-fed into the nation daily, and must be taken seriously, representative as it is of a far wider culture of disdain. In these days of debt, unemployment and uncertainty, it is easy to see the appeal of Hopkins’ economic and educational ideology that “you have to let people fail”. 

She spells out her views in simple terms: “I think that hierarchy is a great way of sorting life and I think that shortcuts are a great way of making hierarchy work and I think that the class system is the best system that perfectly matches this hierarchy.” In other words, your position in the “hierarchy” of society is decided by a series of value judgements based on arbitrary “shortcuts” such as class, race, gender, appearance and even name. 

“[For everyone] to be educated the same? to have the same chance?” To Hopkins, these are empty aspirations — there is not enough money in the economy for everyone to be financially secure and well-educated, and so some must fail that others may succeed. She sees the class system as “much more effective than any social policy” in determining who is able to access higher education — who will succeed, and who will fail. Private schools are an “efficient way of processing highly intelligent individuals… into elite institutions”, because the children who deserve to succeed are naturally to be found amongst the upper classes. 

In contrast, there is no room in the state educational system for struggling children whose parents cannot spare the time to help with homework or the money for private tuition. “If the parents aren’t going to take responsibility”, Hopkins expects primary-age pupils to fend for themselves.  “At a certain age, around 8 years old, you can recognise either you are going to do something about that or you’re not.” 

Rich children “are funnelled into private schools” which “turn them into fantastically inquisitive minds”. Children of equal academic potential, who come from homes where there is less money and less time to spare, are mere intellectual collateral. “It’s harsh,” says Hopkins, “but life is harsh.”

We also discuss other “shortcuts”, such as the use of racial profiling by the police. To Hopkins, it is simple. “The ratio of black people that are found to have committed crime is greater. And so we are therefore making those shortcuts… now clearly I’m not suggesting racism is a great idea. I’m merely saying there are shortcuts that exist.” It should be noted that racial profiling makes no difference whatsoever to crime figures, according to the Equality and Human Rights Commission. (She is careful to tell me that “nobody can use race any more” when making value judgements between people. I will let those two words, “any more”, speak for themselves.) 

Hopkins is as scornful of the campaign for women’s rights as she is of the right of black people to a fair criminal process. “Do I believe there’s a lot of inequality around? No, I don’t.” To her, feminism is a matter of “special treatment” and mere semantics, and she talks dismissively of all-male golf clubs and all-female literary prizes when the topic is broached.  In fact, she tells me, “the equality brigade has managed to get themselves far more than equal”. Moments later, Hopkins freely admits that she would always “pick the man” when choosing between otherwise equal candidates for a job, as she “knows the cost of maternity leave”. 

Hopkins does not “believe in the world of –isms”. This is despite statistical evidence that working-class women continue to learn far less than their male counterparts, as this study by the Institute for Public Policy Research shows. All this proves is that “there are idle people in this world, and there are grafters.” 

“Money is very easy to come by if you do nothing”, she tells me. “Until we cap benefits at £20,000 a year, we will never find the workforce we are looking for.” Two and a half million people in the UK are currently unemployed- but Katie Hopkins has the solution. “You have to create your own job. Ask twenty people if you can take their bins out for them. Ask thirty people if you can mow their lawn. Just knock on a door.” It is simple — an entire generation can drag itself out of unemployment by doing each other’s chores.

According to Hopkins, single mothers only “want to find an easy way of getting their kid through life”. She seeks to absolve us of our corporate responsibility to help those at the bottom of the economic ladder, by perpetuating the toxic delusion that life on benefits is anything other than an endless struggle. “I don’t think a lot of mothers want what’s best for their baby. I think a lot of mothers what is best for them, and what is best for them is doing frankly very little to support their children.”

If she were an Oxford admissions tutor, Hopkins assures me she wouldn’t “want a Tyrone in her tutor group” when she could have a “Cecil”. That is to say, she would favour an upper-class applicant over a working-class student. “It’s a case of being true to what you’ve learnt… not many Tyrones I’ve had the misfortune to meet have been terribly nice.” Hopkins wants everyone to know their place. The working class should not aspire to a university education, for that is the preserve of the rich elite. She tells me that people “look up to Oxford because it is the hierarchy.” 

Hopkins’ argument is that “it is not the responsibility of the state [and] it is not the responsibility of the taxpayer” to help children who do not get the academic help they need from their parents. However, failure to invest in state schools will leave thousands of potential high-achievers without the training they need to support Britain’s gradual financial recovery, rather than achieving Hopkins’ stated aim of “getting this economy streamlined” by saving money in the short-term.

This is not a matter of what Hopkins terms “vengeful social mobility”. It is simply a matter of ensuring that the best possible people get the best possible training to give British businesses the best possible future employees. She is “sickened… by social mobility clauses” which make allowances for the different levels of education and support university applicants have received. But higher education exists to provide the economy with the scientists and businessmen and innovators it needs, irrespective of their social background. Oxford should embody not hierarchy but opportunity. 

Katie Hopkins believes that the poor are poor because they are lazy, and that the rich are rich because they are talented and hard-working. This is a lie. Although she contends that “we all buy into this shortcut system” where we can be judged on our social standing, class has nothing to do with the degree you can study or the career you can follow.  

It would be useless to tell Hopkins the truth — that snobbery is as groundless as racism, and that the word “chav” is as dehumanising as the word “nigger”. The value of human life evidently means nothing to her. However, you do not need a sense of social responsibility to see how these generalisations are hurting our economy.

All of Katie Hopkins’ “shortcuts” (and this is a word she repeats more than any other) seem to make life much easier. They distract us from the true causes of our poverty, debt and despair by making monsters of the innocent. They absolve us of our duty of care toward the vulnerable. But they also prevent whole generations from realising their academic and economical potential. They must be resisted. We cannot afford to do otherwise.

Marc Pacitti has just written a very thought provoking piece on this website, giving a republican perspective on the birth of the royal baby. In the first instance there are some things that he writes about which are I think certainly of merit.

He is for instance right to identify the friction between royalty and celebrity and the problems that this has caused – the 1990s being its best example. Royalty’s identification as celebrity produces problems in its ability to perform its constitutional role; but the media hopefully is learning lessons from the horrors of its behaviour in recent years.  

He is also right to identify the complexities associated with the Head of State sharing responsibilities as Head of the Church of England in our twenty first century secular society. We cannot expect an eighty six year old Queen – who is in all regards – a devout Christian to change this function radically anytime soon, but Prince Charles’s plans to be Defender of Faith as well as Defender of the Faith should certainly go some way to healing these issues.

But Marc’s piece does not, in all its significant length, identify what is arguably the basis for Monarchy’s survival – that it has to evolve, change and modernize. In order to survive the Monarchy has to move with the times – it is not a museum piece; it has to reflect the society at which it is at the head. As far back as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert the Monarchy has done this, through to George V’s use of radio and creation of the Windsor brand to Prince Philip’s 1960s modernizing programme and most recently the bringing forward of the new generation.

Marc quotes Christopher Hitchens in his piece, fortunately not associating himself with the belated writer’s aggressiveness and obsession to be right and throw compassion and pragmatism out of the window in the process. I have no intention of writing here to Hitchens’s (or Pacitti’s, for that matter!) depths but let me just put forward a few of the reasons, which I seem to share with a great number of people, for why what this royal baby represents works and is so special.

First, the monarchy is relevant – it performs that vital task of bringing our contemporary life together with our historical past. Monarchy provides a symbol of national unity around which we can all, regardless of our background gather. You only had to stand on The Mall on the evening of the Diamond Jubilee concert to experience that awesome sensation in practice.

Second, of course Marc is right to recognize the drawbacks of heredity – there are many. It is certainly the case that heredity cannot guarantee us that Prince George will, all going well, turn out to be a suitable King. In an age when we (quite rightly) care a lot less about royal etiquette and educate sovereigns much better, these risks are eliminated a lot less though. Heredity has less drawbacks than other methods of producing a Head of State. An elective monarchy for example would produce a scramble for social distinction and simply enlarge our awful culture of party politics. Who would want David Cameron or Tony Blair as a monarch? Who would show them the same kinds of affection we show the monarchy as it is? An elective monarchy would lose the monarchy’s central benefit – its reconciling character.

Of course, the greatest charge that many produce against the monarchy is its cost. But this can in practice come to no fruition. Even if one disregards the hugely significant levels of money the monarchy brings to this country’s economy through tourism, the Monarchy still runs at a significant profit. No longer do minor members of the royal family receive money from the state and nor, in a way, does the Queen because of the method of surrendering the Crown Estates’ profits to the treasury. If you were to put a number on it, which is difficult to do, then it would probably cost around 52p per head, which is far less than Heads of State in other countries. There is certainly a case for a republic and there is a case for a proper monarchy, but nobody wants a mean monarchy – where would the fun be in that?

In a final recall to Marc I have to tell him that I am not alone in my thoughts here – the numbers show that most of us support, and feel great affection for the monarchy. Probably, on principle, many objections can be leveled against it. Many of them are certainly fair – though I hope I have been able to respond to a few of them here, albeit briefly.

Put that aside, there are times when things work and are special for reasons which we cannot explain. The monarchy is an example of that and we would be very stupid indeed to let something as unique as it go. The birth of Prince George only reinforces the importance of the monarchy as an institution. We only have to look at what happened last time we got rid of a King to convince ourselves of the merits of having one. Why look in the crystal ball when you can read the book?

Marc describes the monarchy towards the end of his piece as “an interesting and decaying relic on the international stage”. Perhaps that is true, but there’s one thing that is for sure, there are certainly worse things to be called. Maybe we should take it as a compliment? 

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.