18.09.1997
Pre-republican epoch
Dave Craig of the Revolutionary Democratic Group (faction of the SWP) considers what we can learn from the crisis of the social monarchy
Eager to share in the profits arising from Diana Spencer’s death, the royal mail has rushed to prepare some designs for a new set of commemorative stamps. It was reported in the Sun (September 15) that these had been banned by the queen. Post office officials were somewhat upset about this, and told the paper in diplomatic language: “It seems royal protocol judged the idea unacceptable.”
In a new spirit of glasnost sweeping the royal establishment, the Palace issued a statement denying this. The idea had merely been put on hold, until they could tell which way the wind was blowing. Officials say that the queen is furious about such negative reports. She is determined to fight back against her enemies, who are spreading lies about divisions within the royal family and with the Spencers. The House of Windsor can no more survive glasnost than Mikhail Gorbachev did. After all they still have not told us where Camilla has disappeared to.
What should be clear is that the events surrounding Diana Spencer’s death are of real political significance, especially because of the involvement of millions of people. It would be silly to dismiss this as no more than an outburst of mass hysteria. Neither should our judgment be clouded by our contempt for the national outpouring of hypocrisy and bullshit that inevitably accompanies such events. It was a mass political demonstration by people with very mixed motives. By and large, it was people with illusions in the monarchy, but who wanted some sort of change. Everybody has something to learn from this, whether monarchist or republican.
The speech by Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, in Westminister Abbey in many ways caught the popular mood. Will Hutton compared it to Geoffrey Howe’s attack on Thatcher. Whilst it was the poll tax and class struggle that sank her, open condemnation by her main ally was a fatal blow from which she never recovered. Matthew Engel, writing in The Guardian (September 8), comments that on
“probably the most public occasion the world has ever known - Earl Spencer used it to come as near as anyone has done within Britain since 1745 to raising the rebel standard against the monarchy. His address was not a eulogy, but a battle cry.”
Certainly it was a most political speech at a most political event. He spoke of his sister’s “innermost feelings of suffering”. She had remained intact “despite the most bizarre life imaginable after her childhood”. She was “someone with a natural nobility ... who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic”. These words were a direct attack on the Windsors and their vindictiveness.
He accused them of not being fit to bring up the young princes. Diana “would want us today to pledge ourselves to protecting her beloved boys, William and Harry”. He added: “I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the loving and imaginative way you were steering those two exceptional young men.”
Perhaps his most pointed attack was his most oblique. He said of Diana: “I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down. It is baffling.” Was this naivety or diplomacy? Obviously the Windsors were the only ones who felt threatened by Ms Spencer. They were the only ones with a motive “to bring her down”. This was precisely what the royal bureaucracy, inside the Palace, was employed to do, using their extensive network of contacts and spies.
Charles Spencer provided his own explanation, saying that “genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum”. We are left to ponder on the real meaning of those words. It suits some to tell us this means the press. But the alternative explanation is that he is referring to the Windsors. At the “opposite end of the moral spectrum” they were threatened by Diana’s “genuine goodness”.
The masses assembled in Hyde Park and outside the Abbey broke into spontaneous and genuine applause. The applause entered and spread through the Abbey. Not everybody applauded. Princes William and Harry clapped. Prince Charles tapped his thigh and then stopped. The queen, prince Philip and the queen mother did not move. They sat there, stony faced, throughout the speech.
What was opening out before our eyes was a bitter row within the aristocracy. When two rich and powerful families fall out so publicly, it is no minor tiff, as royalists claim. The Windsors and the Spencer-Churchills represent two traditions within the British aristocracy. The German Windsors go back to the Hanoverian monarchy of the 18th century. The origins of the Spencer-Churchills’ wealth are 15th century sheep and wool.
Ben Pimlott (The Observer September 7) implies a political and not just a personal dimension. He makes a comparison between the queen mother’s family - the Bowes Lyons - and Diana Spencer, both of whom married into the Windsors. The queen mother’s family were Tories, and, as such, deeply respectful of royalty. The Spencer-Churchills “as Whigs, were traditionally contemptuous of convention and the monarchy”. Either way there can be little doubt that the Windsors will want their revenge. The royal press is already digging up the dirt on Charles Spencer.
Perhaps a more significant division was within the House of Windsor itself. Charles Windsor wants to be king now. He certainly does not want to wait another 20 years until the queen dies. Fighting for your royal right to be king is a political struggle like any other. Unless the queen is persuaded or forced to retire, Charlie might never make it to the job, for which his whole life has been dedicated. Already sections of the media and the establishment, and perhaps even his own parents, intend to dump him for Willie, who is now the Windsor’s untarnished new hope.
At first these events seemed a fatal blow to Charlie’s ambition. He was trapped in his castle with the rest of the reactionary Firm. But every threat is also an opportunity. He saw the chance to distance himself from his main rival, his own mother, and make his pitch. Within 48 hours of the funeral, Channel Four News was given an ‘inside story’.
“Sources close to the Palace” let it be known that some serious infighting had been taking place. The queen initially demanded that Diana’s body should not be placed in any royal palace. The queen wanted a private funeral. There was no mention of Diana at the church service in Crathie Kirk, because the queen had ordered that Diana’s name should never be mentioned in front of her. When the flag on Buckingham Palace was not flown at half mast, the message was clear. She was not one of them.
Apparently Charlie was not entirely happy with the royal ‘party line’. According to Channel Four and The Guardian (September 9) a furious row took place between Charles Windsor and the queen’s private secretary at which Charles told him to “impale himself on his flag staff”. Furthermore it was revealed that Charlie had sought and gained the support of Blair in this battle.
We do not know who leaked this story, but we know whose political interests it served. Charlie appeared, if not exactly smelling of roses, as a more humane Blairite moderniser. The logic of these revelations was that if we really wanted a modern monarchy now, perhaps the queen should retire and then Charlie could take her place.
If this conclusion is premature, we can see how the battle lines are developing. Confirmation was provided in The Guardian (September 15) when “elements within Labour” informed the press of “Prince Charles’s reported desire to abolish the civil list, the state funding of the royal family”. No doubt Liz and Phil think such a plan is further proof that their son is not fit for the job.
The Windsors are the Most Political Family in Britain. They are billionaires with special power and influence within the state. They are supreme politicians. The death of Diana is first and foremost a political question, concerning their own power and influence. Herein lies a contradiction. The Most Political Family has to be officially “above politics”. Their political moves must be shrouded in mystery and secrecy. Their political decisions are covered up behind tradition and protocol.
The myth of a non-political monarchy is increasingly difficult to maintain in such times of crisis. Royal apologists, of the Norman St John Stevas variety, have tried in vain to reinforce this non-political image. We are told it was unfair for the masses to criticise their political decisions, because they are just a grieving family, who need to be left alone in quiet contemplation.
Yet behind the closed doors of Balmoral Castle, the Royal High Command was in permanent session, working overtime on how to handle the crisis. Before the car crash, their battle plan had been to destroy Diana’s credibility, rebuild Charlie’s image and slowly bring Camilla Parker Bowles into public acceptance. Continuing the battle for their own self-preservation, against their enemy, the Dangerous Diana, governed their initial response. If the funeral could be a minor non-event, so much the better.
Divisions within the aristocracy and within the royal family, combined with pressure from the masses on the streets, exposed much more about the inner politics of royalty. The sudden and unexpected turn of events and the involvement of millions shone a spotlight of them. It was not a pretty sight. Like a mass revolution, where the old ruling class is divided and cannot keep up with events, so the Windsors appeared before us, too little too late, in trying to placate public opinion.
Lo and behold, certain ‘traditions’ melted away quicker than snow in a desert. The flag was lowered and the queen appeared on TV to tell the nation that its Most Political Family was after all united with the people.Yet no sooner had the gap been closed than Charles Spencer’s speech opened it up again. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is very difficult to put it back.
The crisis facing the British monarchy is a fundamental one, not something that can be overcome by smarter public relations. The root of the current situation is the destruction of the old order, the British social monarchy. The monarchy has survived by re-inventing itself. Between 1940 and 1950, it was rebuilt as the social monarchy, the Elizabethan welfare state.
From the mid-1970s the end of the long capitalist boom put this social contract under pressure. Following the defeat of the miners in 1984-85, Thatcher and the Tories began to dismantle it. Bereft of its economic and social props, the constitution was now revealed to be seriously in need of modernisation and repair. At the pinnacle of this whole facade was the monarchy itself, now overwhelmed by a tide of ‘modernisation’, ‘privatisation’ and ‘marketisation’.
The Tories led the country, by accident rather than design, into a new pre-republican era. This epoch is characterised by a disjuncture between the monarchy, the constitution and the people. What to do with the monarchy is part of an unresolved crisis at the heart of the British state. Without a political solution, this crisis will continue and inevitably grow deeper. Already it has begun to ascend to a higher level.
The royal divorces were the first signs of trouble. In pre-republican Britain, problems within the royal family began the process of re-educating the public in royal reality. They were not the cause of the new epoch: rather one of its symptoms.
Then came the fire that burnt down Windsor Castle. It had a certain symbolic significance. The Tory government rushed forward with the offer of unlimited state finance. Suddenly it became clear that public opinion was hostile to such ‘charity’. This annus horribilis showed for the first time a serious rift between the expectations of the Windsors and public opinion. Soon after the queen had to start paying taxes. As the last nationalised industry, subsidised by the state, it was even suggested that the monarchy too should be privatised.
In the preliminary stage of the new epoch, the question of the monarchy was confined to articles in newspapers (including the Weekly Worker) and discussions amongst the political and chattering classes. The Windsors set up their own working party on the future of the monarchy. John Redwood came forward with a plan for a new royal yacht. Labour wanted to build smaller palaces. And socialists debated whether to continue ignoring republicanism and wait for the socialist revolution.
The death of Diana marks a new stage in the pre-republican epoch. It brought the masses into play. It drew the whole country to consider the issues. It called attention to what had already been developing within the womb of our society. It brings into clearer focus the pre-existing crisis of the monarchy. It gives change a kick up the arse. It shifted the debate between the traditional monarchists (Tories, etc) and those who want a reformed constitutional monarchy. Tony Blair emerged triumphant from these events. The Labour government’s plans for constitutional reform were in tune with the mass mood.
A pre-republican epoch will not automatically lead to a republic. Without republican parties and the support of definite classes, the social order could remain stuck in this epoch for a long period. What has been missing from this whole situation is an organised republican force that can put an alternative case before the people. This has exposed the massive failure of the British left to become the ‘party’ of militant republicanism.
Scottish Militant Labour and the Socialist Workers Party should be singled out as classic examples of this failure. During the devolution referenda, they did not raise any militant republican slogans. They did not campaign for the Scottish and Welsh people to fight for a republic now. They lined up behind Blair’s programme of the reformed monarchy. Don’t be surprised if you see on the front page of Scottish Socialist Voice: ‘SML says ‘yes, yes’ to Princess Di’.
If this seems absurd, it is only the logical extension of the politics of the reformed monarchy. Perhaps our English rose will yet light a candle in the mind of Tommy Sheridan.
If it does not, we will need more than a minute’s silence for SML.