The extent to which Britain is in deep crisis can be seen that even such a liberal and bland publication as The New Statesman is calling, not just for Prince Andrew to be isolated, but for the monarchy to be disbanded [Abolish the monarchy – New Statesman].
In his scathing feature article, Will Lloyd, the magazine’s Deputy Editor, writes:
“William should stop the rot and acknowledge the truth when his father dies. The mystique is gone. Charles III should be the last King of England. He is the last Windsor who really believes in any of the hocus-pocus of his house. William doubts that God exists. How can he go through with a coronation in Westminster Abbey without acknowledging that God has put him there, on the throne?”
“Abolition would be contested and vicious. Or, the monarchy could end very beautifully. There are inalterable facts in our lives and the lives of nations. As Charles’s favourite poet wrote centuries ago: “All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity…” The old statesman’s body in a casket on the Royal Train. Crowds would gather along the route as they did for Elizabeth, to watch its journey as dusk falls, to hear its pistons hiss through the meadows, the Crown and the King being carried sadly back to the old chapel in Windsor, home again to the green heart of England, the royal throne of kings royal no more. A final human sacrifice. There would be no more kings. But there would be no more princes either.”
The article is interesting because it is so rare that any mainstream publication airs this view, but also that it is so passive. We should wait until William decrees that the monarchy is over, rather than demand it.
Here, Ed Balls looks on incredulously as Will Lloyd makes his case before making a spirited defence of the monarchy. Interesting that Lloyd suggests that Andrew should be “packed out to a shed in the Outer Hebrides”. Why is Scotland always seen as the repository for unwanted goods and people?
What’s missing from this analysis is a sense of a people’s movement, a Republican cause to rally around. Lloyd writes:
“Nobody with any sense of reality in June 2000 believed that Andrew was anything like the man presented. They thought he was cavalier in his personal relations, profligate in his financial dealings, immensely entitled, stupid and cruel. Such truths were not meant for the pages of Tatler, however. This is how false consciousness works. Faced with the reality of monarchy, people simply do what they always do: they become blind.”
“The truth is that an estimated £13m of public money helped to fund the decades-long Caligulan lifestyle of a prince who cavorted with, among others, a convicted paedophile, a Libyan arms smuggler and a Kazakh oil baron. This truth was obscured, denied or ignored – that is, until Andrew’s world began to collapse in 2011.”
This is the truth: the Windsors are so embedded into British everyday life, to remove them is literally unthinkable. The coterie of royal correspondents, the endless merchandising, the sycophantic press and broadcast media that surrounds them, has spouted out such propaganda that people have been convinced that they are irreplaceable even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are corrupt, useless and dysfunctional.
Ed Balls supine response to Lloyd is instructive. As Tom Nairn once wrote: “Genuine socialists have always detested the Windsor monarchs. They appear to confront a nation sucked into helpless crown-worship, without a single ounce of decent republicanism in its make-up. While they dream of communism, the country has not advanced out of this old feudal rhapsody. The ‘serious’ bourgeois Sunday papers lead their bloodshot cousins into new levels of hysteria. Given the opportunity Labour councillors slobber over the Regal fingers and the Dynastic feet. Huge crowds and street fêtes in Jubilee year testified to the continuing popularity of monarchy.”
The latest news, that Andrew is to be stripped of his titles and flung out of the Royal Lodge [Andrew stripped of prince title and set to move out of Royal Lodge] smacks of more desperate measures by the Royal Family trying desperately to circle the wagons and distance themselves from their errant son.
Here’s a thing: let’s put some shoulders to the wheel and help the (slightly half-hearted) dissenting voices here. Absolutely front and centre of the case for Scottish independence should be a Scottish Republic. No ifs, no buts. Not My King.
