Source: The Guardian

There are other much more powerful obstacles to social advance in Britain than the monarchy, but it remains a festering reactionary drag.

“Monarchy is only the string that ties the robber’s bundle”, wrote Percy Bysche Shelley, the favourite poet of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. This article was written by Seumas Milne in 2013. He is now the Labour Party’s Executive Director of Strategy and Communications.

The last few days have been par for the course. As in the case of every other royal event, the birth of a son to the heir but one to the throne has been reported in tones that wouldn’t be out of place in a one party state. Newsreaders adopt regulation rictus grins. The BBC’s flagship Today programme held a debate to mark the event between two royalists who fell over each other to laud the “stability”, continuity” and “mystery” of the House of Windsor. The press is full of talk of “fairytales” and a “joyful nation”.

But ignoring it leaves a festering anti-democratic dynasticism at the heart of our political system. As things now stand, Britain (along with 15 other former island colonies and white settler states) has now chosen its next three heads of state – or rather, they have been selected by accident of aristocratic birth. The descendants of warlords, robber barons, invaders and German princelings – so long as they aren’t Catholics – have automatic pride of place at the pinnacle of Britain’s constitution.

Far from uniting the country, the monarchy’s role is seen as illegitimate and offensive by millions of its citizens, and entrenches hereditary privilege at the heart of public life. While British governments preach democracy around the world, they preside over an undemocratic system at home with an unelected head of state and an appointed second chamber at the core of it.

Meanwhile celebrity culture and a relentless public relations machine have given a new lease of life to a dysfunctional family institution, as the X Factor meets the pre-modern. But instead of rising above class as a symbol of the nation, as its champions protest, the monarchy embodies social inequality at birth and fosters a phonily apolitical conservatism.

If the royal family were simply the decorative constitutional adornment its supporters claim, punctuating the lives of grateful subjects with pageantry and street parties, its deferential culture and invented traditions might be less corrosive. But contrary to what is routinely insisted, the monarchy retains significant unaccountable powers and influence. In extreme circumstances, they could still be decisive.

Several key crown prerogative powers, exercised by ministers without reference to parliament on behalf of the monarchy, have now been put on a statutory footing. But the monarch retains the right to appoint the prime minister and dissolve parliament. By convention, these powers are only exercised on the advice of government or party leaders. But it’s not impossible to imagine, as constitutional experts concede, such conventions being overridden in a social and political crisis – for instance where parties were fracturing and alternative parliamentary majorities could be formed.

The British establishment are past masters at such constitutional sleights of hand – and the judges, police and armed forces pledge allegiance to the Crown, not parliament. The left-leaning Australian Labor leader Gough Whitlam was infamously sacked by the Queen’s representative, the governor-general, in 1975. Less dramatically the Queen in effect chose Harold Macmillan as prime minister over Rab Butler in the late 1950s – and then Alec Douglas-Home over Butler in 1963.

More significant in current circumstances is the monarchy’s continual covert influence on government, from the Queen’s weekly audiences with the prime minister and Prince Charles’s avowed “meddling” to lesser known arm’s-length interventions.

This month the high court rejected an attempt by the Guardian to force the publication of Charles’s “particularly frank” letters to ministers which they feared would “forfeit his position of political neutrality”. The evidence from the controversy around London’s Chelsea barracks site development to the tax treatment of the Crown and Duchy of Lancaster estates suggests such interventions are often effective.

A striking feature of global politics in recent decades has been the resurgence of the hereditary principle across political systems: from the father and son Bush presidencies in the US and the string of family successions in south Asian parliamentary democracies to the Kim dynasty in North Korea, along with multiple other autocracies.

Some of that is driven by the kind of factors that produced hereditary systems in the first place, such as pressure to reduce conflict over political successions. But it’s also a reflection of the decline of ideological and class politics.

Part of Britain’s dynastic problem is that the English overthrew their monarchy in the 1640s, before the social foundations were in place for a viable republic – and the later constitutional settlement took the sting out of the issue.

But it didn’t solve it, and the legacy is today’s half-baked democracy. You’d never know it from the way the monarchy is treated in British public life, but polling in recent years shows between 20% and 40% think the country would be better off without it, and most still believe it won’t last. That proportion is likely to rise when hapless Charles replaces the present Queen.

There are of course other much more powerful obstacles to social advance in Britain than the monarchy, but it remains a reactionary and anti-democratic drag. Republics have usually emerged from wars or revolutions. But there’s no need for tumbrils, just elections.

It’s not a very radical demand, but an elected head of state is a necessary step to democratise Britain and weaken the grip of deferential conservatism and anti-politics. People could vote for Prince William or Kate Middleton if they wanted and the royals could carry on holding garden parties and travelling around in crowns and gold coaches. The essential change is to end the constitutional role of an unelected dynasty. It might even be the saving of this week’s royal baby.

Prince Charles lubricates the wheels of the British war machine and bestows his royal sanction on aggression.

There’s no difference between being an arms dealer
And being a wanted war criminal.
Although you don’t have to get your hands bloody
The results are equally terrible.

But arms dealing will suit anyone used to gracious living
In one dinosaur nest after another –
Such as Balmoral, or Clarence House, or Highgrove,
Thanks to a billionaire mother.

Such a dealer can travel at taxpayers’ expense
And can trade on a moth-eaten charisma
While he’s luxuriously feted by insecure tyrants
Before he sells them toys for their militia.

He boasts that he’s “boosting British trade”
As he attends an arms fair in Dubai,
Giving his blessing to sniper rifles, gun silencers
And grenades, designed to blow you sky high.

“We’re really rather good at making
“Certain kinds of weapons.” Charles has said.
“If the UK doesn’t sell them someone else will.”
As if that might bring comfort to the dead.

After a four-day visit to Saudi Arabia, Charles Windsor
Secures an arms deal for British Aerospace.
It’s worth $8 billion for 70 Typhoon fighter aircraft.
Charles then leaves with a smirk on his face.

But his warplanes will be used in Bahrain and the Yemen
To strafe and to suppress secessionists.
Their bodies will be left to rot in desert sand
Thanks to the royal environmentalist.

He celebrates the sale by joining a sword dance in Riyadh
Which his PA describes as “a cultural nicety”,
But Saudi swords aren’t used for combat in the region,
They’re used for executions of astounding brutality.

The prince poses for photographs waving a Saudi sword
Which is drawn just as it’d be for a beheading
And, pandering to his hosts, he reminds King Abdullah
How he once gave him such a sword for his wedding.

When it was rumoured BA share prices looked likely to fall
This tweedy Salome brought the Saudis to heel:
The ‘apolitical’ Prince flew to the Gulf with sexy pictures of weapons
And urged the Saudis to finalize an overdue deal.

“One may smile and smile and be a villain,” says Hamlet
And Prince Charles’ dithering and asinine grin
Belie the nature of the Commander-in-Chief of Bloody Sunday’s Paras
Who killed Derry Civil Rights marchers… thirteen.

Angst-ridden, with pretensions to the moral high ground,
Charles is a businessman with a heart of granite
For whom being unelected heir-apparent opens handy doors
For this badger-culling and fox-hunting bandit –

A landlord who benefits from inhuman rack-rents
Prompting tenant farmers to commit suicide,
Prince Charles is rich and avaricious on principle
But he’s no need to make money from homicide.

Sealed off by coteries of craven courtiers and lick-spittles,
He flies into rages when contradicted;
He’s petulant whenever tenants are slow with their rent
And only too happy to see them evicted.

His Duchy estates are worth 400 million.
He has an income of 40 million a year.
As the beneficiary of common lands’ enclosure
Democracy has to fill him with fear.

“I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment,”
“I felt proud of that”
Charles once told a conference at St James’s Palace –
Hard to think of such a creature as head of state.

He’s a man who’s evidently inclined to feel at home
In Saudi Arabia, ruled by 20,000 princes,
Where women can’t drive and can’t have the vote
And where severing heads are legal sentences.

How can he justify arming such a reactionary state?
Yet he bends over backwards to do so –
Respecting the taboo against all mention of human rights
Saudi oil’s ubiquity prevents him from saying, ‘Boo!’

In his awarding medals to troops involved in illegal wars
And in his pestering PM’s for money for weapons,
He lubricates the wheels of the British war machine
And bestows his royal sanction on aggression.

As a reward for their arms-dealing antics
Charles and Andrew, his sordid brother,
Are awarded ludicrous, Ruritanian honours
By their indulgent, billionaire mother.

They’re Royal Knights Companions of the Thistle, or Garter –
The Duke of York and the Duke of Rothesay –
They’re Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order
And Vice Admirals in their mother’s Navy.

In sanctimonious moments the poor little rich boy
Speaks of his “brothers and sisters in Christ”
Yet Charles sidesteps the New Testament’s peace-loving message
Lest there be arms-dealing profits to be missed.

The global arms industry is worth
Over a trillion dollars a year.
Charles happily becomes its obliging minion,
Peddling its deadly tools of hatred and fear.

Thanks to the Crown Proceedings Act
The Royal Household is immune from arrest:
Unfair privileges are built into the system
With the sub-text ‘blue blood is best’.

But if Monarchy insists that heredity is paramount,
That nations are best ruled by special gene pools,
What’s one to make of Charles resembling his distant cousin:
George Bush, the sociopath; the warmongering fool?

Prince Charles may believe in homeopathic farming
And in planting crops in time with the moon,
But unscientific sentimentalism green-washes
A land-hungry sadist in a royal cocoon.

It’s a short step from his regarding some animals,
Such as badgers and foxes, as vermin
To his regarding other humans as inferior, and the subjects
Of a pantomime killer dressed in ermine.

Source: Sputnik International

There’s a growing public anger over a political and media establishment whose detachment from the lived experience of millions is near complete.