From Polly Toynbee tonight:
The cost of the monarchy, though a hundred times the price of the modestly likeable Irish presidency, is counted not in palaces and royal trains, but in the fantasy of imperial power the crown bestows on British politics. Punching above our weight, we have just ordered a new Trident to cling to an undeserved UN security council seat from which to hector the world about a democratic idea so weakly applied at home.
Meanwhile, defrauding ourselves and the world's treasuries, the sun never sets on the Queen's dominion over more tax havens than any other country, an archipelago of shame from the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, Gibraltar, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands — and the City itself. Beneath the splendour, the squalor.
Quite so. And spot on.
But for the sake of full disclosure I guess I should say we did discuss it, yesterday.
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Yes, the hereditary principle is hard to defend, and if one was building a new state, you wouldn’t start by putting a monarch on a throne.
But let’s also be realistic: articles like these aren’t going to dispel the notion that republicans are a miserable, whining bunch.
The fact is support for a republic hasn’t budged at all for the last however many decades and the monarchy enjoys far higher support than a PM or political party could ever dream of.
So long as people want us to remain a constitutional monarchy, that is what we will remain.
Wait until we change monarch
I did meet Polly once, when in the SDP ( I confess) and I have respect for her but I would take issue with her ‘undeserved place’ on the Security Council. We are there partly due to history. We went to war for a principle in 1939 (unlike the USA or USSR in 1941) but we are still in the top ten world economies.There are not that many countries which have have a record of continuous democracy going back 100 years. Iceland, Switzerland, France and the USA are republics. Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia and Canada are kingdoms. I may have left someone out. But one can see the UK has influenced that system of government-for all its faults. The world’s largest democracy, India, uses English in their Parliament.
We also played a useful part in the Cold War. Despite Iraq (and some people in Iraq still think liberation from Saddam was worthwhile) and the Suez debacle, we left our colonies in a fairly orderly way (no Indo China or Algerian style exit) and wars in Korea and the Malayan Emergency-a 12 year slog- saved those countries from the ‘benefits’ of the type of communism found in North Korea, Cambodia and Tibet.
I could mention the Commonwealth. We could have played a more constructive role in Europe and had we done so would have been another point in favour. However, having given a “Cavalier” style opinion to balance the “Roundhead” view, which was always popular in East Anglia, I feel I have said enough this week and have issued a ‘self denying ordinance’
in the manner of the Long Parliament and shall retreat to the country for a few days.
On the last: so might I
Troubkle is, even when I retreat I seem to take a keyboard
This article really is just Toynbee’s (flimsy) angle on the Queen/Monarchy/Royal family bashing that the Guardian is indulging in of late.
I don’t know why they bother, to be honest. For the most part they’re preaching to the converted, barring a few, but they aren’t going to change the minds of the public at large. Firstly, because hardly anyone reads The Guardian, and secondly because the republicans haven’t sorted out very good arguments yet.
Whether they like it or not, the vast majority of the population are going to have a good weekend. There’ll be street parties, picnics, tea parties and BBQs and even if the weather is a bit ropey, people will enjoy themselves. They’ll cheer and wave their little flags in London and the republican demo will get laughed at (or maybe pushed in the river) for being bloody misery-guts who won’t be happy until this country is as grey, drab, mediocre and soulless as possible. Elsewhere in the country people will be grinning and cheering at the telly.
But what the republican cause and teh Guardian will really hate is that the country will be almost completely united, and what’s more – happy. It’s the latter that seems to cause the most annoyance to the self-appointed metropolitan lefty-elites.
This is a happy country is it?
2.7 million unemployed?
1 in 4 young people out of work?
It has to be said your line of reasoning does not include reason
My head agrees… Meanwhile my heart is truly excited at going to watch the river pageant on Sunday and singing as part of a local community choir at the south London beacon lighting on Monday (from one of those Guardian reading London lefties)