7th June 2002

The Jubilee has, as must have been intended, immensely strengthened the existing order and made those at the top feel much more secure in the wealth and privileges which they enjoy and confident that no effective challenge can be mounted against them, at least for the moment.

In that sense the concerts at Buckingham Palace, the parade in the Royal coach to St. Paul's, the lunch with the Lord mayor and the fantastically colourful and multicultural parade in the Mall have been brilliantly devised and executed to consolidate the idea that the essence of everything British can be best expressed by our common allegiance to a Monarch who reigns over us.

In Royal Britain we are expected to confine our loyalty to someone at the top rather than express it in solidarity with our fellow men and women, and this is the basis of the feudal class system within which our duty is to those put above us, know our place and keep it out of respect for our betters.

The feudal class system is still a very powerful force in Britain but it has nothing whatever to do with the socialist definition of class which identifies very different economic interest between those who work to create the nation's wealth and the handful at the top who own that wealth.

The perpetual bowing and scraping we have seen over the Jubilee is a celebration of that old class system, whereas the socialist understanding of class was obliterated as symbolized by the absence from the parade of any of the great trade unions which organize the workers, and the only reference to the unions were a huge puppet depicting a despondent miner and a cardboard cut-out of Arthur Scargill on a float showing well known people who have lived while the Queen has been on the Throne.

This elimination from our political vocabulary of class, in its socialist sense, has been planned for a long time because when it became a political force with the emergence of the Labour and Socialist movement a hundred and more years ago it divided the nation into haves and have nots and that analysis looked as if it might destabilize the feudal system for the simple reason that with the arrival of the universal adult suffrage it was obvious that the have nots could - if organized - have outvoted the haves.

That is why the Thatcher government made it their business to destroy, so far as they could, all the structures of working class power, especially the trade unions, local authorities where Labour was strong and began the process of dismantling the welfare state and the public services by privatization, summing it all up by announcing as she did that 'There is no such thing as Society' and 'There is no alternative' to frighten off those who might challenge her.

Politically the immense legal powers in our monarchy do not lie with the Queen herself but with the prime minister of the day who personally exercises all these Crown Prerogatives and does so without the need to get the authority of the elected House of Commons who have no control whatever, and are not even allowed to vote before Britain goes to war, or agree to new laws imposed by the Council of Ministers in Brussels, and the power of patronage, including the grant of peerages and honours is personal to the prime minister too.

This is the gaping democratic hole lying at the very heart of our parliamentary system and explains why every prime minister, Labour and Tory, passionately supports the monarchy - which is necessary to retain those powers - and why the monarch depends on every prime minister to provide the political support which the monarchy needs to survive.

So important is the monarchy to the political establishment that they would be quite happy to ditch a King or Queen to save the institution as happened when Edward Vlll was forced to abdicate for fear that his marriage to an American divorcee might shake public confidence in the system, and they would do it again for the same reason if they thought it necessary.

It is in my opinion a great mistake for Republicans to criticize the Queen herself because it is the issue, and not the individual which should concern us, since the Queen did not pick the job, having been born of the right parents, in the right bed at the right time and having, for fifty years, done all that could have been required of her, which explains the genuine affection that many people feel for her as has become very clear especially during the last few months and days.

Personally I would have no objection whatever if she continued to call herself Queen and live at Buckingham Palace to attract tourists as a privatized and profitable business, so long as we could elect our own First Citizen and made him or her fully accountable to the parliament we choose on polling day.

But that is not what the people at the top want and for them the Jubilee has provided them with a marvelous opportunity to put the clock back more than a hundred years by providing bread and circuses for the peasants and allowing the powerful to celebrate their new found sense of security.

This is a system which has lasted for far too long, and it should act as a reminder to all democrats and socialists that the Labour Movement has got to start building itself up, all over again, if we really believe in self-government and intend to achieve it in Britain.

7/6/02