17.01.2002
Puff, piss and princes
Superficially, it is hard to take seriously the furore surrounding the revelations of prince Harry's under-age drinking and sessions with the evil weed. On one level, it is just another vacuously silly royal story. We are meant to be enthralled by the spectacle of this highly dysfunctional and individually uninteresting family of misfits doing rather ordinary things like getting divorced, shagging illicitly and now getting bladdered and chucking up. It's like the Royle family, only less happens. Similarly, the idea that the appropriate response to Harry's misdemeanours is to make him visit a drugs rehab clinic is very odd indeed. If every young male who had acted like a prat in his local after an evening on the puff and the piss were made to follow HRH's lead, there would be no room for the addicts. A dismissive response would spectacularly miss the point, however. The media-hysteria around prince Harry 'pot head' Windsor's "drug shame" tells us much about contemporary British social and political life, and the continued symbolic potency of the monarchy. First, there is the fact that this young's man's mundanely common problem - of learning to control his intake of widely used drugs - is treated as a metaphor for a society tottering dangerously on the precipice of mass addiction. Millions of young adults and others use, enjoy and suffer no serious ill effects from the consumption of a wide variety of legal and illicit drugs. Learning to gauge their likely effects on your behaviour is simply part of the process of growing up. We do not need the state - either in the tough form of the police or the 'fluffy' shape of the addiction/counselling industry interfering any further with our right to make informed decisions about our lives and the pleasures we pursue in our leisure time. Second, the continued - extremely arbitrary - designation of some drugs as illegal simply has the effect of ciminalising wide swathes of our society. Despite recent relaxations in the law around possession of cannabis, Britain's drug laws remain irrational by any standards. They do, however, justify massive police surveillance of, interference in and disruption to many people's lives. Third, it has been instructive how this story has been used to attempt to form a point of contact between the experiences of 'ordinary people' and the royals. Precisely because Harry's antics have been so typical, they have struck a resonance with millions, particularly the young. Ever since the death of Diana, efforts have been made to rehabilitate the house of Windsor, to recast them as less cold, out of touch and 'unfeeling'. The prince of Wales - regarded once as the two-timing villain - has drawn praise for being a 'responsible but caring dad', with the queen herself apparently looking favourably on his efforts. Royalty - at least in its modern incarnation - has always had this dual aspect. On the one hand, an otherworldly institution, with a divinely anointed right to rule. On the other, just another family with the same small cares and woes as you and I. Or, as a writer in the forerunner of the Weekly Worker once put it, "on the one hand, the icing on the great British cake; on the other, just ordinary plum duff" (The Leninist July 12 1986). In the jubilee year, the Socialist Alliance would do well to pay close attention to efforts to rebrand the British monarchy. It would be too easy simply to dismiss developments such as the fuss around young Harry's little faux pas as irrelevant to the class struggle, almost beneath comment. A profound mistake. We can be sure that our class enemies will be busy spinning even such an ostensibly negative story as this one to their advantage. Ian Mahoney
Worker