BOOKBUSTER ESSAY
On the Queen and Monarchy
Essay by Tim Barton
Milan Kundera said that ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.
Writing this month, Robin Artisson said that ‘from 1688 till now, the social and political influence of the monarchy was waning, until they became what they are now: almost pure figureheads’ then gave a brief precis of the world-spanning global power of the English ‘East India Company’ (‘the first truly massively powerful international corporation’) and of the rise of Capital. He clearly positions the contemporary monarchy well outside of this colonialist horror show. Of the late lamented Queen, he says, ‘I’m sure she wasn’t some portrait of “progressivism” as it is known today, but it is beyond any charitable or reasonable appraisal to imagine she was the genocide-loving reptile that half my feed seems to think she was’.
This perspective has been, in one form or another, very visible in social media responses to her death. Few, even anti-monarchists, have not acknowledged the steadfast and dignified way in which she filled her role. Obviously, the picture is simplistic, as is the wave of hatred from a few quarters: yet, both have a kernel of truth to them. One of the richest families in Europe, or even the world, the royals are decidedly not ‘outside the system’, or beyond criticism. The huge revenues from offshore wind farms are a quarter of the Crown Estates, for example.
Kundera’s quote is pertinent in so far as the wave of public feeling over the Queen’s death is, yes, blind to certain realities; but so, clearly, is the more extreme negative narrative coming from other quarters, especially on social media. Another aspect of Kundera’s point may be John Philpot Curran’s statement, ‘The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt’. And it is here that one must question, not Queen Elizabeth, but the institution she headed, whether ‘disempowered’ or not.
SO MUCH FOR THE ‘ROYAL PREROGATIVE’
The truth is, of course, that the ‘rubber-stamping’ of Acts of Parliament is, whilst famously what her political role was reduced to, not quite accurate. Not merely through the influence accruing to over-weening wealth, but of course also through the overly-respectful attitude in which monarchy is held by this country’s establishment, and its disempowered and some-times feckless general population. What a monarch might express privately, in or out of Privy Council, is undoubtedly important to our political classes.
The Constitution Unit says that ‘as the ultimate guardian of the constitution, the Queen has power to dismiss a Prime Minister who refuses to resign after losing the confidence of the House of Commons; and in future the Queen may be expected to refuse an untimely request for prorogation, lest it be declared unlawful’. This unlawfulness comes from William of Orange’s Bill of Rights. Not only is it clear that Johnson was acting illegally in constitutional terms by proroguing Parliament, it was also within the monarch’s power to curb such excesses no matter now little power she may have constitutionally exercised elsewhere.
I think it was a mistake to force the courts to make that judgement and be pilloried for it, though no doubt her advisors would have seen her doing it as possibly harmful to the monarchy as an institution. She must have known it was unlawful. Johnson has since passed Acts that include new guidance on prorogation and other mechanisms to dissolve Parliament, guidance which has yet to be tested in constitutional law. A new Bill of Rights could simply override the one written after the Glorious Revolution, but until that is so his new Acts remain constitutionally dubious. A very good overview of these Acts appears in Ferdinand Mount’s essay ‘Shades of Peterloo’, in the July 7th London Review of Books. Johnson has gone a long way toward making Parliamentary sovereignty a nonsense, extending the already over-weening and dubious power of the Executive yet further, something that, too, should have been within the monarch’s power to curb. So much for the ‘royal prerogative’.
Still, most observers will agree that as head of state and commonwealth she did a respectable and consistent job.
NOT ALL MONARCHS ARE AS POPULAR AS ELIZABETH WAS
But what of the role of our monarchy going forward? What message does Charles touring Britain with Truss in tow send? What, really, should we make of the ‘black spider memos’? Will Charles more actively pursue his life-long obsession with population control? Will the public reject future royals, due to the clearly feckless personalities of those lined up for succession behind Charles? Given the tabloid sensibilities of much of the public, a few ‘Jeremy Kyle Show’ antics may simply endear them even more.
Ultimately, I am a ‘republican’. It is all too clear that a functioning and empowered monarchy is a dangerous way to confer power generation to generation. Not all monarchs, by any means, are as popular as Elizabeth was. That her powers were strictly limited is a boon to democrats. What role, really, even this attenuated ‘monarchy’ has going forward I do not know. Alternatives are often proffered on a Platonic model, one where a president, or ‘philosopher-king’ as he had it, has supreme power over the public he or she may claim to ‘represent’; one where poets and artists are seen as fostering dissent and so are oppressed; one where, if elected, Britain’s feckless public would fill the post with the most outspoken narcissist in town.
An ‘American’ model is little better, though more concerned with the trappings of democracy. Here, we do not use our schooling system to create citizens, so merely have the ‘form’ of a democracy, but not enough functioning citizens to really be one (and then, there’s the archaic misery of ‘first past the post’); there, the post-war economic hegemony of Capital, combined with an extremist interpretation of ‘freedom’, dooms the American Republic to ultimate failure. Too few of us think of another ‘republic’, one based on biomes, anti-hierarchy, and bottom-up. On which note, in a future review I will look at John P Clark’s The Impossible Community, which addresses the later republican model.
• Robert Hardman’s biography ‘Our Queen’ is available at Bookbuster, as are Plato’s ‘Republic’, and John P Clark’s
‘The Impossible Community’.
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