11.09.1997

New Labour, New Britain, New Monarchy: New Enemy

The death of Diana Windsor gives Blair a unique chance to slot the monarchy into his plan to remake the United Kingdom constitution and Britishness

Combined, the huge turnout for Diana Windsor’s funeral and her brother’s momentous speech from the filigreed pulpit of Westminster Abbey mark a watershed for official Britain. We have in all likelihood witnessed the beginning of the end of the old monarchy.

If the ‘firm’, the top royals - the Windsors Elizabeth, Philip, Charles, etc, had had their way the burial of the troublesome princess would have been a low-key and very private affair. Media and public would have been banished. Hence no sea of flowers, no live broadcast, no humiliation.

The wooden conventions of royalty, the Gothic pomp, the haughty certainties of inherited wealth and privilege would have remained intact and inviolate. The royal standard would throughout have remained flying high over Buckingham Palace. The queen would have kept her ice-cold silence and not have had to break with invented tradition and bow her arrogant head as the body of her estranged former daughter-in-law passed the specially assembled royal group. Charles Spencer would certainly have been denied the opportunity to place himself at the centre of events and deliver his damning oration before an estimated 31.5 million British and a two billion worldwide TV audience.

Alive, princess Diana was an acute embarrassment for the Windsors. However, in death she has become a potent cause, a totem, a weapon in the hands of forces - not least Tony Blair - who want an end to the old, unpopular, monarchy and the birth of a new, popular, monarchy.

Many journalists have presented the Diana funeral as an epic struggle between the houses of Spencer and Windsor, between archaic English aristocracy and parvenu German royals. From Matthew Engel in The Guardian to Peter Hitchens in The Express,the event is retold as a modern version of Shakespeare’s Montagues and Capulets or the Wars of the Roses. Here we see superficial knowledge united with profound philistinism.

In terms of content her funeral should be characterised not as the clash of one dysfunctional upper class family against another. To the extent that is true it is secondary and surely internally conflictive. The Spencer brother wants to put the boot in. But what of the sisters? Anyway as a family it is altogether different from the Stewarts. The Spencers are aggrieved courtiers, not an alternative monarchy.

Objectively September 6 was a massive manifestation of popular politics. Poignant, often sentimental, unorganised, it was nevertheless the ‘little people’ of Britain - a million and a half gathered in central London, hundreds of thousands all the way up the M1 and right to very gates of the leafy Althorp estate - who were the prime makers of the day.

It was their spontaneous outpouring of grief, their culture, their morals, their sense of an injustice done which made and changed the agenda and gave Charles Spencer the means and the courage whereby he could challenge the Windsors. After he had finished speaking the tradition-shattering applause swept into the Abbey from the outside like a huge wave. Showing the impossibility of their position, none of the ‘firm’ joined in; though a squirming Charles Windsor reportedly “tapped” his thigh a couple of times. The ‘little people’ did not merely constitute a Greek chorus commenting on events. The ‘little people’ were not a passive, but an elemental force.

Politics from above, let alone blood line, cannot explain the Diana phenomenon. The woman was not a divorced, semi-detached royal acting out some primitive ancestral tragedy. In terms of time and space she was very much of late 20th century Britain. Marriage to Charles Windsor did not only mean coming into the royal family. Watched by millions on TV, hyped in the glossy and tabloid press, sold through the souvenir and tourist industry, she was not only iconised, but commodified. However, separation and then divorce did not see her market price fade - like a Sarah Ferguson or a Mark Philips. Despite mental anguish and being stripped of the HRH title her star shone brighter.

Diana Windsor successfully fought back against the disapproval, marginalisation and antagonism cynically orchestrated by the ‘firm’ - or, as she called them, the ‘enemy’. This she did brilliantly by selling herself. Her popularity ratings had to and did constantly remain far above any of the official royals. On the one hand this was achieved by parading before the unseeing eye as the photogenic member of the international jet set, leader of fashion and friend of the famously famous. On the other hand she cleverly cultivated a reputation as the princess of hearts - the charity-monger, the champion of the dispossessed, the hugger of Aids sufferers and small children.

Via the mediation of the market countless ‘little people’ imagined part of their lives refracted through her and sincerely thought that in her there dwelt a kindred spirit. Diana Windsor thereby both mirrored and helped create the dominant values of our time. The ‘little people’ gave her adulation. They also gave her power. In return the ‘little people’ got vicarious glamour and a grain of hope.

There was a cost. Those who live by the media are also doomed to be plagued by the media. Here we find the source of the ‘love-hate’ relationship with the tabloid press and the paparazzi. Diana Windsor gorged on publicity, but in terms of her complex personality had to believe she hated publicity. Now in death she is a transfixed, frozen image, a sort of cross between Eva Peron and Marilyn Monroe. If the government’s strategists succeed, Diana Windsor will become the martyred patron saint of a New Britain - with, of course, Tony Blair as her earthly prophet.

Some comrades in the workers’ movement dismiss the whole Diana phenomenon. What goes on above matters not! It is capitalism that we should concentrate on - leave the constitution to the bourgeoisie! What is the death of one aristocrat? The population must be mad! Thousands die of industrial illness or accident every year, they shout. Others, in equally puerile fashion, want to celebrate the demise of a parasite. Such politics have nothing to do with Marxism and scientific communism.

Communism is not the politics of envy, but human liberation. That is why we argue against those who foolishly think the height of working class politics are the terms and conditions whereby wage slaves are forced to sell their labour power. We also argue against those damaged individuals who are motivated by revenge. Our politics are universal. We concern ourselves with every class, every stratum, every issue, every violation of democracy, every wrong perpetrated - no matter how small or to whom. This stems not from woolly liberalism, but a recognition of the necessity of the workers as a class being raised to the position of hegemon of society.

Where Diana Windsor provided solace and mere gestures, the working class - organised as a future ruling class - alone provides real solutions. That is why communists insist that there must be a working class-making response to the Diana Windsor phenomenon. It is after all beyond doubt a major social and cultural event and is already being deployed by the government as part of its evolving programme to remake Britain and what is seen as Britishness.

Evidently Blair is not working towards some preconceived blueprint of changing the way we are ruled. He is a typical pragmatist. Yet all the signs and indications point to a coherent and far-reaching programme. Blair is not tinkering with the constitution. He wants to radically transform the political foundations and thus the political architecture of the UK state.

Obviously at the top of his agenda is the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly. The referendums on September 11 and 17 will pave the way for Westminster legislation and, Blair hopes, the re-integration of the alienated Scots and Welsh into the fold of a New Britain.

As we have pointed out before, his reform in Scotland and Wales goes hand in hand with moves towards some generalised system of PR and thus a transformation of the entire party structure.

Not only will the Scottish parliament and the Welsh assembly use a form of PR, but so will the next Euro elections. Moreover Blair pledges not to campaign against PR for Westminster elections and Robin Cook has proclaimed himself a convert. This, the presence of Ashdown and other Liberal Democrats - enthusiasts for PR par excellence - in cabinet committees, the imminent overhaul of the House of Lords, the idea of elected mayors for big cities, Sinn Fein’s acceptance into the peace process in Northern Ireland - all show we are entering a period of political transformation. Now with the death of Diana and her massive funeral Blair has publicly demanded a New Monarchy for his New Britain.

What does all this mean? Well, we are not seeing the completion of Britain’s bourgeois revolution - à la Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson. Economically Britain was the first and is socially the most developed capitalist nation. Blair’s remaking of the UK constitution is in fact both the continuation, the complement and the completion of the Thatcherite counter-reformation. Blair has no intention whatsoever of resurrecting or re-creating the 1945-1979 social democratic settlement. His address to the TUC on September 9 makes that perfectly clear. His commitment to ‘modernisation’ and maintaining a ‘flexible’ workforce are code words for anti-trade union laws and ensuring that dead labour, capital, can continue to exploit and accumulate at the expense of living labour. Blair will do nothing to jeopardise Thatcher’s success in overseeing the turnabout of Britain’s economic prospects.

Wealth has been redistributed from the poor to the rich (inequality is now the widest, the most extreme for 100 years). But industry is undoubtedly much more productive. Profit rates have been hiked up. Inward investment has increased markedly. Because of Thatcher’s defeat of the organised working class - crucially the miners in 1984-5 - Britain is again a country fit for capital. Even with the strong pound Britain can now compete with, and perhaps for the moment out-compete, its main rivals.

What is particularly striking about Blair’s programme of constitutional reform is the absence of any working class input or alternative. Indeed it is the atomisation, the (temporary) disappearance of the working class from the political stage that creates the conditions whereby Blair can propose and carry through his programme. There is neither pressure nor threat from the working class.

Thatcher broke the post-World War II social democratic consensus - which necessitated emasculating trade union power. That carried a huge price tag. Not only has oil money been pumped into sustaining mass unemployment, but there has been enormous social dislocation. Millions are alienated from the state. In the absence of socialism, everything from petty nationalism to the cult of Diana fills the vacuum. Blair wants to cement a new consensus around the state. That is what his constitutional programme is designed to achieve.

The consequences will be of historic importance. We have suggested before that what we are about see is something on a par with the rise of Labourism and the death of the great Liberal Party. The Labour-Tory two-party system that emerged from the collapse of the Liberal-Tory two-party system is about to end. The working class that found an expression in Labourism at present exists sociologically, as wage slaves and voting fodder. But in no sense as a subject - ie, maker - of history. The political alliances and the institutional expression of class antagonisms and compromises that have characterised British politics since the rise of the Labour Party and the eclipse of the Liberals - ie, roughly in between the years 1906 and 1924 - will therefore undergo a far-reaching change.

Blair has already ideologically thrown the Labour Party back to its liberal origins. His social-ism is capitalism. Now later this month he will use ‘Partnership in power’ to qualitatively change the internal power relationships. Conference will become a Tory-type rally. The union link and block vote, if it survives for any time, is to become an empty shell of its former self. State funding of parties is only part of it. Downgrading the NEC, robbing the unions of initiative, concentration of everything into the hands of the parliamentary leadership will in all probability mark the final de-Labourisation of Labour.

Yet though Liberal Britain is being put together again by Blair it must be emphasised that such far-reaching change is enormously risky. Global capitalism faces not a boom, but general crisis. Moreover from the Tory lords to fox hunters, from Ulster Unionists to royal reactionaries, there are all manner of sectional interests, invented traditions and overblown vanities that will be fiercely defended. That is why in the temporary absence of any sort of working class politics differences and contradictions above assume enormous importance. Splits within the establishment can allow mass discontent to find expression. The Diana Windsor funeral showed just that.

Jack Conrad