22.09.2022

On to the red republic

The funeral of Elizabeth Windsor released a torrent of treacle. Paul Demarty welcomes the growing republicanism of young people, but, it is clear, we still have a mountain to climb

In 1919, disaster struck Boston, Massachusetts. At a distillery, a large storage container, filled with not less than 12,000 tonnes of molasses, failed catastrophically. There ensued a great flood, in which waves of thick sugar syrup gushed through the streets at up to 35mph, reaching 25 feet high. Twenty-one were killed, and 185 injured in this bizarre industrial accident.

The death toll of the British ‘treacle flood’ of 2022 remains, so far as we know, at one, although perhaps some ‘excess deaths’ among republicans might one day be reported - of cardiac arrest, or burst cerebral aneurysms, or old-fashioned public ritual suicide. And it is not so much a flash flood - its vast, terrible volume rolls over us at a stately tempo. The first week’s mourning gave way to the live updates on ‘the queue’ - to the funeral itself on September 19 - watched by an estimated 28 million on TV - to the current dangerous scenario, where tabloid editors desperately squeeze the last few drops out before facing the unconscionable reality (if publishing some copy about anything else at all).

Still, it has been a difficult time all round for those of republican sympathies. So much could be predicted, of course; but the steady ratchet of royal pageantry in the 25 years since Elizabeth Windsor’s annus horribilis has done wonders. It has long seemed that we have never been more than a couple of years from another wedding, or a big, round-number birthday, or a jubilee. In over a decade now of consecutive Tory rule, at a time of sharpening public rancour, dependency on glorious public displays has tended to increase. The more meagre the bread, the more extravagant are the circuses required to keep the peace.

To talk in this way, cynically and wholly in terms of the instrumental force of the week’s proceedings, is not to imply that the outpouring of public emotion is not genuine. There is no level of coercion short of ‘trail of tears’-style death march scenarios that will make someone queue for 12 hours, shuffling glacially from Southwark Park to Westminster. Two hundred and fifty thousand are supposed to have done so, roughly speaking, and we may conclude that there are at least that many vigorous royalists in this country.

Beyond the hardcore royalists, there is certainly a large population of people with a rather passive monarchist outlook. The monarchy is one of those unchanging features of life in Britain, like tepid summer rain. Indeed, what with Elizabeth’s longevity, it has been unusually immutable over the last several decades, which have seen drastic changes at almost all other levels of society. It is small wonder that pangs of regret and grief are felt within this otherwise ‘unconscious’ group of royalists. The spectacle of royal continuity is, from this point of view, intensely reassuring.

The first reaction in my job’s chat app when the news of the death was shared was: “What a shock!” On the face of it, this is bizarre, given the queen’s age. But then I would be shocked if I learned, right now, that my similarly-tenured grandfather had died - he has been alive for so long and it is not like him to be dead! In other words, we are dealing with a genuine parasocial bond with real emotional content.

Certainly it ought to put paid to the rather sad bit of republican wishful thinking we have heard many times over the years - that Charles is such an oddity that the monarchy could not possibly survive with him at the helm. But so far the whole thing has come off without a hitch. The new king has looked appropriately regal and dignified in his grief. Most of the rather feeble opprobrium directed at Elizabeth’s children has been soaked up by Andrew - potentially legally exposed as he still is in the US in relation to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking activities (he settled a civil case with Virginia Giuffre back in February, but prosecutors may yet build criminal charges). Although much of the endless busywork - getting his face on the money and the stamps, updating the royal crests everywhere, getting drunk football crowds used to singing ‘God save the king’ - remains, the transition has been mostly seamless. Why wouldn’t it be? The one thing these people do is ceremony. It is the monarchy that makes a cold fish like Elizabeth or a ranting, reactionary bore like Charles into that most mysterious of things: a natural-born ruler.

The popularity of this fond hope is primarily a reflection of the weakness of republicanism in this country in recent history. The present situation is not utterly awful - opinion polls typically find 20%-25% in favour of abolishing the monarchy - a minority, of course, but one large enough to build on in principle (encouragingly, a “greater number” of 18-24 voters are republican, 41%, compared with monarchist, 31%¹). Yet we observe the same kind of division as within the monarchists: there are ‘true believers’, for whom the monarchy is a serious obstacle to progress, and relatively passive republicans, for whom it is an expensive and embarrassing archaism that ought to be got rid of sooner or later, but essentially unimportant. The true believers, we expect, are a much smaller minority than their hardcore-royalist counterparts.

Loyalism

Why? That in the end is the contingent outcome of our history. While the 19th century saw great moments like Chartism, the republic never enjoyed the sort of totemic importance it gained in European social democracy (so far, at least, as the various political regimes permitted open republican agitation). Lib-Lab-ism and ‘pure’ trade unionism blunted the high-political attack of the working class, and bourgeois republicanism was severely weakened. So it continued in the 20th century. Though formal commitments to abolition of the monarchy were common enough within the left and workers’ movement, they were largely platonic in a period when Labour was desperate to form his/her majesty’s government, and the far left largely succumbed to spontaneism and did not really wish to pick a fight, if there was no immediate prospect of mass radicalisation as a result.

The underlying issue is constitutional loyalism. Republicanism is, to say the least, overwhelmingly dominant in France, since three of the last four constitutions (the exception being that of the Vichy regime) were avowedly in the tradition of 1789. French loyalism is loyalism to liberté, égalité, fraternité - however laughable an impression of those virtues is actually mustered by the politicians of the mainstream parties. Republicanism is the ideology of things going on more or less as they are - allowing, of course, for the notoriously fungible character of French constitutions. In Britain, we make more of a big deal about things staying the same, as is demonstrated in a very obvious way by the present ‘transitional’ period.

What both ideologies - monarchism and constitutional republicanism - in fact serve is, of course, the class rule of the bourgeoisie, which imposes equal and opposite forms of corruption (the domination of inherited wealth is flatly incompatible with authentic republican self-governance).

Thus France has wended its way to an intensely monarchical-presidentialist form of a ‘republic’. On the other hand, specifically capitalist class rule cannot be purely a matter of inherited rights and obligations, but must be tied to merit somehow - there must be, somehow, the shadow of the idea of social mobility, if no more than that. Thus the serene continuity of monarchy is itself a sham, even if we forget the tumult of the 17th century - we confidently expect that the new king’s eccentric eco-feudalist utopia will not be realised.

His role in things is a little different: it is, after all, the crown to whom the armed forces of this country are ultimately answerable, as well as the secret services and the vast civil bureaucracy. The crown is the formal principle of the unity of the British state. Insofar as this is so, even the ‘radical’ opponents to the capitalist status quo - such as, in recent history, Jeremy Corbyn, whose Labour leadership offered essentially no serious constitutional proposals - can always be seen off, if the necessity arises. Walter Bagehot famously wrote of the “dignified part” of the British constitution - and its having such a “dignified part” renders it permanently a force against popular self-government.

The conservative writer, Peter Hitchens, recently lamented the death of the queen, predicting that the dissolution of the British union and a republic might not be far off. We do not propose to go into that here, but note rather a minor point of his: “I can’t count the number of people who have told me they ‘voted for Thatcher’ in 1979 or ‘voted for Blair’ in 1997, when they couldn’t possibly have done so because they didn’t live in their constituencies.”² He thinks that means a presidential system cannot be far off; but in fact, it betokens the reality that we already have a ‘presidential’ system, because Thatcher and Blair had the use of the ceremonial powers of the monarchy, which served as a sort of video-game power-up for their official roles. The ignorance of Hitchens’ interlocutors is in fact wise in its own way: they know, instinctively, that that is how things really work.

One more effort

For this reason, ‘official’ liberal republicanism - of the sort put about by the pressure group, Republic, which wants “to see the monarchy abolished and the Queen [sic] replaced with an elected, democratic head of state”³ - will never really cut the mustard. I remember, 10 years ago, an abortive attempt by CPGB comrades to join a protest at the jubilee celebrations. We were hemmed into a fenced-off area on the South Bank reserved for ourselves and a couple of dozen miserable Republic types (though at least we were not carted off by police on ludicrous pretexts like the few brave souls to object to the present situation). Some had dressed their kids up in T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘When I grow up, I want to be president’.

Is that what we want - in place of a monarchical figurehead, Liz Truss as a Donald Trump, with the nuclear codes and the arbitrary power to put anyone in the world on a kill list? In essence, that is what we have now, except that it is the prime minister who gets to act with similar levels of impunity, by dressing herself in the garb of the royal prerogative. (The intellectual pecking order between Trump, Joe Biden and Liz Truss we leave to readers to decide.)

Towards the end of the Marquis de Sade’s novel Philosophy in the boudoir, the narrative breaks off from relentless pornography and disquisitions on libertinage to reproduce a long, fictional pamphlet, supposedly written by some radical of the national assembly, entitled: ‘Frenchmen! One more effort if you wish to be republicans’. It argues that dispensing with the monarchy and clerical power will not do the trick: there remains the small task of overthrowing all norms of morality.

Communists do not have quite the same prescription for the additional duties involved. But we share the notorious author’s understanding that a republic is no more the absence of a king than peace is the absence of war. So long as the state itself remains a tyrannous counterweight to popular self-government, substantive republicanism is impossible; and so long as economic life is itself a tyranny, so shall the state follow suit. Only the socialist left can possibly make good on the best promises of 1789, or even 1776; it is a pity we are doing such a terrible job of it.

Until that changes, we can do no more than avoid drowning in treacle.

pauldemarty@weeklyworker.co.uk