Hollywood stars have not had a century, (and more) to cloak their celebrity in middle-class morality and an ethos of public service. Their attempts to be socially responsible with their endless charity galas and their fund-raising and stumping for Washington politicians are notoriously unstable and ill-fated. All too often the glitz and the glamour swamps any seriousness of purpose. All too often there is a coke deal or a hooker in the background.
By Hollywood standards, then, the Royal scandals were small potatoes. It was hard to see what all the fuss was about. And for my own part, I was indifferent to the Royals. I was used to regarding them as a side show: at best a part of the "heritage industry" and at worst an expensive and anachronistic irritant. I wasn't interested in reading about The Misadventures Of Charles And Di, Fergie The Flirt Of The Fourth Form or the sad fate of The Little Princes In Their Ivory Tower (it's curious how irresistibly the Royal scandals fall into the format of the old "school stories" and serials in the British boys' and girls' weeklies of the 1920s and 1930s). Only gradually did it occur to me that something important was going on, that the future of the Monarchy itself had become, suddenly and unexpectedly, an issue in Britain. Then I began to wonder, what was at stake here? What was the substance of this Monarchy? What was its purpose and its role? What would be gained or lost by its disappearance?
In his new book, The End Of The House Of Windsor, republican Professor Stephen Haseler dubs it the "royal-state", consisting of the Crown, the premiership, the Lords, the Commons, the senior civil service and the established Church. You might choose to add or subtract an institution here or there, but the thrust of Professor Haseler's analysis is clear. There is an unhealthy, disastrous, undemocratic concentration of power in Britain. There is an equally unhealthy, disastrous and undemocratic link between power, wealth and heredity along with it. And the Crown is the key to it all.
What makes the point hard to grasp is that Royal power now functions in exactly the opposite way from the way it once did. When the Monarch really ruled, power emanated downwards. In technical, constitutional terms, this is still the case. We have Her Majesty's government, Her Majesty's courts, Her Majesty's head on money and stamps and all the rest of it. Royalists love this technical fiction. They are able to point to it and say, "look, there's no real power there. You are mistaking the shadow of power for its substance, then boxing with it." In a reversal of the fairy' tale about the little boy and the Emperor with no clothes, they use the Crown's ostensible powerlessness as a reason to retain it.
Real power no longer emanates downwards from the Crown. Real power rises upwards, resting on the Crown as a foundation. The Monarchy is now the backbone or bedrock of a nexus of power, wealth and birth. It's as if Britain's world hasn't changed but the position of the Crown within it has turned upside down or imploded. In a positive sense, it's true that the existence of the Crown counts for little these days. Its vital significance is negative. Its importance lies precisely in the possibility - the threat of its abolition. "Remove the Crown," wrote Engels, "the 'subjective apex' and the whole artificial structure comes tumbling down." Class crumbles; power fragments or divides; Her Majesty's subjects turn into British citizens; and all the King's horses and all the King's men can't put Humpty Dumpty back together again, if only because there are no more King's horses and no more King's men.
Debates about the Monarchy rarely reach a conclusion. They turn around phrases like "the focus of our national identity" or "the importance of symbolic structures". It takes a real effort of will to realise these are not sober, neutral, abstract ideas. On the contrary, they are all terms invented by royal propagandists of the past. The result is like fighting a battle in a thick fog. But there is nothing mysterious about the position of the Crown or about the fog, composed of equal parts of custom, tradition, deference and ideology that surrounds and protects it. Everything is deliberate. Everything is deliberately designed to obscure the issue.
In the past couple of years, royalists have argued:
Contradictory arguments, shamelessly advanced and fuelled by emotion, are always a sign that something else is going on is being denied. When the arguments are in the political arena, what is being denied is always power. Besides being contradictory, the arguments are defensive. Modern Monarchy is an entirely defensive institution. As an idea, Monarchy's time came and went so long ago, there is no positive substance left in it. Once they lost their divine right to rule, kings and queens became animated waxworks, regal ghosts. Nobody has to argue for their abolition: the case is self-evident. All the onus rests with their defenders.
Hence the need for the fog, to baffle and distract. Republicans, say the royalists, are just bores. There they go again, conjuring up that old spectre, the British establishment. Inorder to slay it one more time, when we all know the Establishment suffered a death by a thousand cutbacks in the Sixties. Yet anyone who looks at Britain honestly 30 years on, cannot avoid certain facts. Three million unemployed. Three million children living in poverty. A tenth of the population living on less than œ100 a week. The gap between rich and poor greater than at any time since the last century. Continuing, grinding, demoralising economic decline relative to the rest of the leading industrial world. A culture still immersed in nostalgia and the worship of the past. A culture of government that believes it right to lie deliberately to its people. Ostensibly the 14 years of Thatcherism and John Major's "classless society" were a long, determined attack on this Establishment an attack which, since it was led by members and beneficiaries of the existing power structure, was inevitably self4imiting, crippled and abortive.
Nothing happens to nations by accident. The British are not uniquely unfortunate, unlucky, the victims of historical trends and the loss of Empire. Nor are we uniquely plucky, stoic, brave at making the best of difficult circumstances. Nations progress or decline for reasons, and history is ruthless. It is one or the other. There is no standing still. Britain's economic and social problems are the expressions of an underlying political distortion, a malformation of power which, left untreated, cripples the patient so that at first he cannot run, then he cannot walk, and in the end he can hardly crawl between his bed and his wheelchair. And the Monarchy is the crooked spine, the backbone, around which the body of the nation twists and bends itself out of shape.
At the height of the Royal Family's troubles, the Financial Times described the Monarchy in slightly different terms as "putting the lid on a glass jar inside which sit all the suffocating elements of a Britain that should be long past: an overly powerful executive... a tradition of secrecy in the name of the Crown; a tendency for Ministers to make arbitrary decisions; an obsession with maintaining the unitary structure of the United Kingdom." They were too solicitous of their readers' sensibilities to add, as they might have done: an aristocracy that owns almost all the land; a concentration of wealth in the hands of people who consider themselves not just rich but the rightful rulers and sole representatives of the nation; a political class still only partially democratised and dependent on a governing and administrative elite; a plethora of boards, tribunals, institutions, quangos which are unelected, undemocratic and unrepresentative; a bloated and corrupt Honours system that rewards sycophants and toadies.
Partial as it is, the Financial Times list puts some flesh on the bones of Professor Haseler's "royal-state". But the picture is still a little bloodless. Where is the blood? And is it blue blood or a blacker bile? There is a peculiar strand of hatred in British life. It is different in kind from the rebelliousness and disaffection you find in every country. In the 1960s, for example, Europe was full of Americans who claimed to hate America, but their feelings mainly followed their politics rather than, as is often the case in Britain, the other way around. When the Vietnam War ended, most went home, reconciled. Some of the then-rebels are now rulers in Washington, still an unthinkable transformation in this country. The hatred you find in Britain is more visceral, more implacable, more unthinking. It is not a class hatred as such, though it may be strongest among the working class. It is not an ethnic hatred, although some of the fiercest haters come, as you might expect, from the Celtic fringe. Insofar as I can characterise it at all, it is the hatred felt by the dispossessed.
Speaking in a debate about the House of Lords, Lloyd George asked, "what made 10,000 owners of the soil and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth?" Lloyd-George spoke of 10,000. George Orwell wrote about "half a million in their country houses". The numbers don't matter. They know who they are. We know who they are. As a result, over the centuries, whenever the people have burst on to the stage of English history, they have done so more often as a mob than a chorus. Peasants' revolts, apprentices' uprising, bitter strikes like the miners' strike of the 1980s, urban riots, football hooliganism. Violence in Britain generally has a flavour of rebellion, of anarchy. Today, the hatred in question is more like an underground river, surfacing in the odd council estate or homeless encampment, festering in mental wards, enclosed in hostels and borstals and erupting in an arson attack on an Asian family - a river of which class and race hatreds are only the tributaries.
As below, so above. The hatred of the dispossessed is matched by the fear felt by the rulers. The twin, authentic trumpet notes of British politics are an overweening, outdated triumphalism and plain fear. We are constantly told that Britain is the most mature, the most experienced democracy in the world, the envy of everyone, devoted to the rule of law, whose stability is guaranteed by none other than the Monarch herself. Yet the same speaker, sometimes in the very same speech, will turn apocalyptic at the slightest disturbance, the slightest tremor in the body politic. Seen from outside, it is an extraordinary reflex. It gives a fevered, overheated atmosphere to the routine conduct of public life. Some leaked civil service documents, the memoirs of a clapped-out spy, the activities of a few teenage delinquents and at once we are supposed to be on the verge of blood-soaked anarchy. Uneasy lie the heads that depend upon the Crown.
At least, they do so these days. For most of the last century, the Crown performed a skilful double-act. On the one hand, its existence as an institution underpinned Engels's "artificial structure", and was therefore the Unmoved Mover or First Cause of the fear and hatred I've described. In this sense, the Monarchy was, and remains, a destabilising rather than a stabilising factor in British life. On the other hand, individual Royals tried, and often succeeded, in presenting themselves as the nation's benevolent parents, who understood and sympathised with -if regrettably they were powerless to change - the suffering of their people. A famous example came when George VI and the now-Queen Mother chose to stay in Buckingham Palace during the Blitz, then toured the East End to comfort its victims. In this second sense, then, the Monarchy played an important part in maintaining the only real security a nation can have: its social cohesion, what Orwell called Britain's "emotional unity", while he marvelled at its continuance in the face of manifest injustices.
A cynic might have said you cannot go on forever repairing with one hand the damage you do with the other. At any rate, it is one of history's nicer ironies that Mrs Thatcher, royalist and monarchist par excellence, was the person who destroyed the double-act when she warned off the Royals from criticising the social effects of her government's policies. There was the real turning point. Stripped of the chance to appear benevolent and egalitarian, it was inevitable the other face of Monarchy would emerge and be criticised as the acme of privilege.
Because something is inevitable doesn't determine how and when it will come to pass. There is some truth in the argument that the Royal Family brought their current problems on themselves. Even now, royal apologists try to claim otherwise. The behaviour of individual royals, they say, has nothing to do with Monarchy as such. They are being disingenuous. As they well know, the whole trouble with Monarchy, the reason it was tossed on the historical scrap heap as a serious form of government, is exactly that. Monarchy is the Monarch, good or bad, and most often he or she is unspeakable. Anyone who wants to see a full-blown Monarchy in action has only to look at the current state of Saudi Arabia. In Britain, though, our trimmed and defoliated "constitutional monarchy" has two essential functions. One is as the foundation of the country's power structure. The other, less important but more visible, is to provide a sort of archetypal family, to be the symbolic guardians of our traditions, including traditional morality.
So far, much of the criticism the Royal Family has attracted has been to do with their performance of this second function. This is treacherous ground for royalists and anti-royalist alike. Royalists have been tying themselves in knots trying to avoid criticising individual royals. The Royal Family's mistake, we hear, was to become too populist, to let in the TV cameras, to shed the "mystery" Walter Bagehot believed was vital to Monarchy. Once they let the public see them as human beings, sooner or later they would be 'found out" (as if it would have been better for the Royals to behave badly and not be found out).
In the end, royalists have been driven to suggest ludicrous expedients like skipping over Prince Charles and giving the succession to his son. They are expedients which would destroy the Monarchy in order to save it. Monarchy doesn't just rest on strict succession: it is strict succession, or nothing. Rearranging the succession, shuffling the Royal pack to produce a better King or a non-Queen is like cheating in a game whose rules are the only point the game has.
Republicans, too, need to be careful about attacking the Royals as individuals. The Royal Family may have become an unedifying soap opera but soap operas are very popular You can see it happening in the way the debate over the Monarchy has slid into arguments about how much Charles was at fault in his marriage and whether or not Diana is a good mother. "Hollywood style" royalty may survive. Besides, we would do better, we would be less hypocritical, if we sympathised with individuals forced to lead hopelessly distorted lives in order to prop up our collective national fantasy.
The exception to this rule is Fergie. Never forget Fergie. No one could have predicted what would happen to Charles and Diana. But Fergie was the Royal Family's conscious mistake She was the connection the Royals never wanted, the one that reveals the secret indivisibility of royalty, aristocracy, privilege, wealth, arrogance and indifference She stands for the raffish segment of the aristocracy other aristocrats despise. These are the families where the parents commit multiple adulteries while their offspring racket around fashionable restaurants, jet off to Nepal for a quick spiritual experience and get their names in the newspaper They are the ones with little sense of public duty, no intelligence, no heart, no taste, no limits. In other words, item by item, they expose the pretensions of their peers and their leaders, the Royals, to the supposed aristocratic virtues, as in a dark mirror. You cannot have the one without the other. To paraphrase Susan Sontag, they think they are so civilised. They are despicable. Damn them all.
To all intents and purposes the English Monarchy, like the English nation itself, began with the Tudors. The Tudors did four things at once: they united the country after the civil Wars of the Roses; they established a modern-type administration with a central bureaucracy; they broke with the Pope and turned England Protestant and they presided over the first English voyages of discovery.
The English Reformation was a terrifying achievement for its perpetrators: terrifying practically because it united the Catholic powers of Europe against them; terrifying psychologically, as a sort of spiritual lese majest‚. The medieval unity of Europe, of one Christian world with one faith, of the Pope and the Emperor, may have been more honoured in the breach than the observance, but it was still honoured. To be the first to shatter it was an awesome responsibility, even more so for the recently established king of a provincial island. There were Reformations all over Europe. But the distinctive form of English heresy was the replacement of Pope by King. To sustain it, both the Crown and its subjects needed all the help they could get. Hence the remarkable cult that grew up around Elizabeth I, in which flattery quite literally became an art. Elizabeth was Astraea, Justice, the divine goddess or principle returned to earth. One world with one faith had failed under the Popes because the Popes were corrupt. Now it was the turn of the secular monarch.
In Elizabeth's England, poets were idealists and idealists were imperialists. A set of familiar themes begins to cluster around the Crown. Purity. Virginity. Justice. The restoration of a golden age (a theme repeated at the accession of Elizabeth II) which, if it is to be golden. must also be universal. Hence empire, ruled over by a Monarch who unites temporal and spiritual power ó an empire whose feelers were going out in the form of the voyages of discovery. Royal Britain is inseparable from empire. It began with dreams of empire, reached its apogee with the reality of empire and should have perished when the empire perished. Instead, the current Queen's personal project, the one political role she is known to insist on, is as head of the Commonwealth, that imperial hangover. Dean Acheson made a famous comment about Britain losing an empire and not finding a role It wasn't just about foreign policy. By clinging to nostalgia for empire embodied in the Crown, Britons, and the English in particular may have muddled and confused their identitv.
There is supposed to be a mystery about English identity. Certainly there comes a point in the lives of educated Englishmen and women outside the elite when they must confront an old quirk, a blind spot in their psychology, implanted in childhood. William Pfaff,, the distinguished American political commentator, calls it "the Arcadian illusion". Really, it is pure chocolate-box: an image of England as a land of rolling downs, country lanes, hunting fields, villages nestling in the shadow of the manor house, cricket on the village green. It's a rural, aristocratic image. For most people, it has nothing to do with their own experiences. When Professor Haseler talks of "the breathtaking magnitude of the appropriation by the monarchy of the symbols of nationhood and authority," its cultural aspect is their appropriation of the images and values of English life. But what value does that leave for anybody else? In what possible ways do our lives count?
Seen from outside the country, the accepted images of England are incredibly narrow. Oxbridge, Eton, Henley, Royal Ascot, the Trooping of the Colour: these are still the things that matter. Seen from the inside, we carry around a rural. aristocratic idea of the "real" England, of which those occasions are just the public face. For the past 14 years, radical conservatives have attempted to offer a new image, a new value for ourselves ó as consumers. But consumption is not so much a value as the shadow of value, value as commodity. Americans can cast themselves as consumers with enthusiasm because they have prior identity as democrats and republicans. They own their own country and express their ownership in a simple pride in "being an American" (which the English typically never understand but view as boasting or "bad taste").
Faced with the mystery of English identity, even so acute and hard-edged a social critic as George Orwell turned to mush. "It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes," he wrote. And he summed it up in his famous description of England as "a family . . . a family with the wrong members in control, that is perhaps as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase."
Pure mush. There is no mystery. There is no family. Orwell was fighting a battle in the fog. His guff about green fields, families and red pillar boxes is an echo of old royalist propaganda. To be specific, it's an echo of Edmund Burke, and Burke's defence of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the installation of William III. The deal between Parliament and the Dutch William was the key moment in the development of "constitutional monarchy". Burke turned the deal into a constitutional theory, then made the theory sound like an eternal verity. Here is English society as organic, familial, harmonious yet evolving, the expression of a particularly English genius for evolution over revolution, compromise over conflict. And while we have stared dazzled at our own genius ever since, far too little, the Monarchy least of all, has changed.
It almost changed. The Crown almost toppled in the 1870s, once again due to the misbehaviour of a Royal (contrary to the royalists, there have been crises due to the character of individual sovereigns throughout modern British history). This time it was Victoria. grieving for her dead Albert and refusing her public duties. A new generation of royal propagandists stepped forward to rehabilitate her. They were conjurors really, not a patch on Burke, second-rate verbal magicians. But among them were two men each of whom had one good idea.
Walter Bagehot's idea was to take the cardinal weakness of Monarchy, its elevation of an individual into a government and make it a virtue. According to Bagehot, the people cannot understand constitutions, republics and "impersonal laws". But they can understand a personal sovereign. Bagehot laid the groundwork for shrewd politicians like Disraeli to refurbish Victoria, now no longer just a queen but an empress, the monarch's monarch, matriarch of the crowned heads of Europe, the sun which never set on the British Empire and the bountiful Great White Mother of its numerous peoples.
AV Dicey's idea was almost the opposite of Bagehot's: for him "parliamentary sovereignty" was the key to Britain's unwritten constitution. It remains the favourite motto of British politicians. Elected members of parliament are the guardians of our liberties. Authority may come from the Crown in the last resort, but power rests with the people in parliament. Whatever substance it once had, "the sovereignty of parliament" is now a fiction, an alibi for the growth in executive power. On a bad day, British democracy looks like a vehicle for the continuation of absolute monarchy by other means.
British politicians who start out as populists and reformers find themselves irresistibly attracted to eliminating opposition, concentrating power still further, imposing their reforms from the top in a way that defeats their original purpose. Power per se may corrupt, but the British power structure, dependent on the Crown and dominated by the executive, is a standing temptation to abuse, to make itself narrower, more concentrated, more dictatorial. Look at what happened to Thatcher. She started out aiming to free people from the tyranny of vested interests and ended up demolishing independent power-centres throughout the country, as well as within her own Cabinet, gathering power into a single pair of hands. But were they her hands or HM the Queen's hands? Thatcher fell only when she showed signs of no longer being able to tell the difference.
Bagehot and Dicey used to be held up as major figures in front of English schoolboys and girls (the same boys and girls who learned English history as a list of names and dates of Kings and Queens). Constitutional theory is supposed to be arcane, intricate, the province of learned experts. In fact, as the great English radical Tom Paine saw, there are only two constitutional theories that count. Either men need authority, mystery, tradition and repression to gaze in awe at the Crown and to tremble in fear before the executioner. Or they are capable of governing themselves in a democratic republic.
For a scant few centuries, say between the mid-l7th century and the early 20th century, it was just possible to argue there was a compromise between the two; and Britain had found it. False, but just possible. This was Burke's cautious conservatism, his emphasis on the impalpable organic connections that make up society. Unfortunately, our century, which is supposed not to have been kind to revolutionaries and utopians, has been even harsher on the organicists and constitutional mystery-mongers. Fascism tore the Burkean mask of tradition and consent off conservatism to reveal the realities of power, authority and the religion of state.
So the choice is clear. Either "the British need the smack of firm government". Or our leaders are but trusted servants; they do not govern.
British radicalism has fatally failed to address this issue. It was about to do so in the late 19th century. But, blunted by the renewed popularity of Queen Victoria, it turned aside and tried to address economic and social problems separate from constitutional reform. Much good was done. It has been a great tradition. But who can doubt that, at least since the war, it has been gradually running out of steam? We have had collectivism of the left followed by laissez-faire capitalism of the right. But the figures, the evidence of ongoing decline continue to mount up, and will do as long as British politics and society are organised, in William Pfaff's phrase, as a "meritocratic governing class assimilated to a hereditary aristocracy, and to the values of that aristocracy".
The presence of egalitarian figures like a Thatcher, a John Major or a John Smith makes no difference to this analysis. They are as much the prisoners of the system as its victors, doomed to go on juggling money supplies and industrial policies, centralising their power and trying to order modernity into existence. Even economists are now starting to admit economic policy has strict limits, that the key thing is the "real economy". The real economy is working people. Everything suggests that societies which are botched compromises with ancient regimes cannot survive and compete in the modern world. Only full-blown democracy with all its facts. its messiness its inherent indiscipline, can release the creative energies of its population. In essence what Elizabeth I did can now only be done by getting rid of Elizabeth II. For the Crown is the weak link in the structure of British power. Abolish the Monarchy and the House of Lords goes with it; the link between wealth, power and birth withers; the logic of a written constitution, A Bill of Rights and a separation of powers becomes irresistible; subjects turn into citizens.
In the meantime, coming back to this country is like stepping into a hall of mirrors. The issues that dominate the headlines feel as if they are linked behind the scenes, parts of a hidden, unitary agenda. The economy, crime, Northern Ireland and Europe, to name only a few, look like aspects of a central, underlying problem, distorting effects of an atrophied and backward looking royal-state.
Britain doesn't have an economic problem. It has a social and political problem, Unable to draw on the energies of the mass of its people, it can only devalue them, waste them. Even the so-called "enterprise culture" has turned out, in many cases, to be not about building things but about hustling, a version of the old working-class culture of survival, of cowboy builders, tinkers, market-stall traders and backstreet mechanics dressed up in a sharp suit. The typical British bourgeois remains cautious, timid, inept in business, happier as an ersatz professional man than as an entrepreneur.
Overall, the values of the elite, epitomised by the Royal Family, continue to percolate through British life causing the problems we are only too familiar with: the bias against trade and industry; the neglect of science; the preference for tradition and the past; the cult of the amateur; the pyramid structure of education; the penchant for treating workers as servants; the rentier mentality and the attractions of manipulating money rather than of production etc., etc. Nor can we omit the over-concentration of talent and resources in the media, in criticism and presentation rather than in making and doing.
As for crime, when laissez-faire conservatism destroyed the power of the unions, and of the miners in particular, it also destroyed the core of the culture which protected the working class from the worst effects of modernity; while leaving intact the culture that protects the upper class from the best effects. Some of the poor become ram-raiders. The upper class stay on their grouse moors. The causes of the rise in crime are complex, and by no means limited to Britain, but the forms that rise takes are distinctly British. There is an inchoate political edge to them, a flavour of rebellion and anarchy as opposed to, for example, the racial and ethnic flavour of similar crimes in the US.
In Northern Ireland, nobody can have anything but contempt for the IRA. But it's curious the extent to which the Ulster Protestants, a tiny minority of the UK population, disliked and distrusted by almost everyone on the mainland, have been allowed an absolute veto over any progress. The alliance between the royal-state and the Ulstermen seems to go beyond expediency, beyond the use of Ulster MPs in tricky parliamentary votes. It's as if the Ulster Protestants offered a glimpse into the past, at a working class which is still true blue, deferential, flag waving, loyal to the Queen. Regrettably, their ranks include bombers and murderers. Those are your last real royalists. Those are your laughing cavaliers.
Many republicans, including Stephen Haseler, put their faith in Europe. They believe that the royal-state cannot survive developing European union. Brussels, if you like, will make of Britain what we cannot make of it ourselves. In this sense, those conservatives of all parties who see Europe as a threat are right. Parliamentary sovereignty" will certainly be transformed, if not dismantled. Power will be divided to some extent. Where the anti-Europeans turn dissemblers is when they present the threat as a threat to nationhood rather than to their own power. Then they start appealing to a nationalism which is illegitimate. In his new book, The Political Psyche, Andrew Samuels calls it spiritual nationalism, "the creed of the Rulturnation, with the emphasis on kinship, blood, people (Volk), the earth, the whole mysterious, mystifying Romantic lexicon," which, in the wrong hands, can chime so well with a mystically empowered, hereditary monarchy.
There is a difference between what being English or British is like and what being British is. Royalists and reactionaries constantly blur the distinction. Europe or a domestic republic - poses no threat to what being British is like. That will continue perfectly well. Nationhood is infinitely mutable. As for conversations about what being British is, they belong with conversations about what being a Jew or a Black is, on the garbage dump of racism, fascism and all the other -isms.
A Republican movement will probably be led by idealists. Cynicism is the dirty little secret of the royalists. Royalists believe people are too undisciplined, too in need of mystery and authority to govern themselves. For them, "the people" will always be a mob. Republicans believe people are neither all bad nor all good but in any case have certain inalienable rights to be whatever they can. Republicanism is not an idealist programme and idealists will see it as a beginning for Britain, not an end.
Political idealism has had a bad press lately. It is reputed to be totalitarian at worst and impractical at best. Actually, it is the only true form of political realism since it grasps a reality so stark. the supposedly tough-minded and hard-headed conservatives and royalist cannot even comprehend it: there is no security until everyone is secure; there is no property until no one goes without; there is no happiness unless everyone is happy. In a sense, that reality is the obverse of Burke, restoring him as the revolutionary he almost was, and should have been.
The Royal Family was bound to run into trouble as the gap widened between its position and lifestyle and the lives of its subjects. Nor, having constituted themselves as the "Family Firm" could they fall back on the nit-picking of defenders like Enoch Powell who tried to claim that only the character of the actual sovereign counted. The whole point, the whole problem of the British Monarchy is its indivisibility, not just from an extended Royal Family. but from the aristocracy, the Church, the executive, Parliament, the unaccountable structure and secret operation of power in the country.
That is why the idea that Diana - currently the clear popular favourite could point the way to a more popular more modern. more modest monarchy is a fantasy. The Crown is as frozen in place as it is in time. Its immobility, its resistance to change is a clue to its function, propping up power. Which is why asking politicians to become republicans is asking them to adopt a self-denying ordinance. Not only self-interest but also a misplaced devotion to the public good suggest politicians should leave things alone, wait their turn in government, inherit power and use it. The main benefit of the last 50 years of decline will come if and when politicians realise they cannot accomplish their aims without changing the structure of power. The monarchy cannot change or it will go. It has to go in order for anything to change.
Royalism is not the only tradition in British life, nor will we be bereft without it. There is another tradition, forged less than a century after the first Elizabeth's death, when poets and idealists ceased to be royalists and imperialists and became democrats and republicans instead. This is the tradition of Milton, Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge and radicals like Winstanley, Paine, Wilkes, Cobbett and others. This is the English tradition worth remembering, the past worth honouring. It is summed up in Blake's poem that became the famous hymn: "I will not cease from Mental Fight/Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand/Till we have built Jerusalem/In England's green and pleasant land."
Who wants to live in a country where we are not building Jerusalem? Who wants to visit a country where they are not building Jerusalem? Truly, why else does anybody get out of bed in the morning? To wave at the Queen?
Mike Bygrave, Guardian Weekend, October 9, 1993
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