The Other View

Issue No.1 Summer 2000

Reigning on Us - The Other View Of The Monarchy

By Tommy Gorman

In his article about The Monarchy, Billy Mitchell makes a reasoned argument for the existence of a phenomenon that is, for republicans and socialists, anachronistic. For this reason alone I welcome Billy's contribution as part of a wider discussion.

Nevertheless, in this part of the world anti-royalists have never been afforded any coherent justification for why they should be pleased or proud to live as subjects of a British monarch. Instead 'God save the Queen/King' has been a comma or full stop used most often in pre-election and anti-republican tirades by those Unionist politicians with little else to offer the electorate.

Significantly, it was this catch phrase, in tandem with 'No Surrender' that was used by reactionary mobs as they broke up trade-union gatherings or meetings of workers on those rare occasions when there was the potential for working class unity. Of course there were rednecks on the Nationalist side as well. The attack by such miscreants on the Protestant workers attending the Wolfe Tone Commemoration at Bodenstown in the 1930's was evidence of this.

Post-colonial Britain has become a melting pot for the multitudes from the former colonies and elsewhere who have decided to make it their home. As it stands constitutionally and legally the British monarch is 'Defender of the Faith'. Not all faiths but the Established Faith of England. Under the Act of Settlement, a catholic cannot 'rise' to the Throne. Neither can the reigning monarch marry a Catholic.

This may have had some tactical relevance in those centuries when England was involved in constant conflict with the colonial states in Europe over the carve up of the American, African and Asian Continents, but as we move into the twenty-first century this situation cannot be allowed to persist.

I am however, less concerned with the religious aspect of the situation than I am with the socio-political economic conditions that the Monarchy spawns and confirms. The English monarch is at the pinnacle of a pyramid of hereditary (usually male) 'noble people'. Like Queen Elizabeth herself, these people have been born into a privilege and dominance. The fact that somewhere in their antecedents is a blood line to a monarch or someone that chose the right side in a supremacy, has determined that such people can still live in great wealth and decadence.

It is an indicator of the abject failure of the Irish revolution that many of the descendants of robber barons still live on their vast estates and attend the British House of Lords. Some overdue changes are occurring within this institution. There is the promise that most of the hereditary Lords will be sacked. To my mind this is a futile exercise as it will do nothing to address the underlying division and privilege that the British class system represents and which has it's head, the monarchy, in the person of Queen Elizabeth II.

If the British people choose to retain this system of privilege - that is their democratic right, but it is not something that I could support.

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