by Joan Smith
I was more than a little surprised, in view of my republicanism, to receive a letter in 2003 offering me an MBE for ‘services to human rights’. I didn’t think about accepting it for a moment because the Order of the British Empire is so closely associated with the royal family; dished out by the Queen and Prince Charles at twice-yearly investitures, its motto is ‘For God and the Empire’. It is outrageous that a citizen of a 21st-century democracy can be honoured by the state only if he or she buys into this edifice of royal flummery. I’m not against the state recognising outstanding achievement, but it could just as easily be done through a secular and egalitarian Order of Britain. The reaction to my refusal was revealing in itself, showing how widely the snobbery of the honours system has taken hold in unexpected quarters, including journalism: one friend told me I’d done the right thing because he thought I deserved ‘more’ than an MBE; another wrote an angry newspaper column, implying that if I didn’t want it, he wouldn’t mind having it in my place. There is an option of accepting an honour without receiving it in person, but it’s clearly frowned upon; a well-known writer who turned down a trip to Buckingham Palace told me he was later left off the list when the country’s foremost novelists were invited to a reception by the Queen.
Along with the monarchy, it’s time for the whole rigmarole of royal dukes, hereditary peers, earls and knights to be consigned to history. (It actually made no sense to expel unelected hereditary peers from the House of Lords, where they were able to pass legislation, while retaining the far greater privileges of the unelected royal family.) That would allow the UK to become the egalitarian nation it already claims to be; for the growing numbers of people who are getting involved in Republic’s campaign for an elected head of state, the idea of the UK as a species of royal theme park is long past its sell-by date. Just about every recent political development is moving in the same direction, whether it is the demand for greater devolution in Scotland and England or legal powers for constituents to recall MPs. Indeed, it is ironic that most of the accusations hurled at MPs, reasonably or otherwise, since the expenses scandal of 2009 apply with even greater force to the royal family: distance from ordinary people, lack of accountability, absence of transparency, profligacy with public money. But while MPs who behave badly are subject to parliamentary scrutiny and can be ejected from office at the next election, nothing in our political system can protect us from the accession of a monarch who has already shown himself unfit to represent the country.
Anxiety about the heir apparent emerges in unexpected places, as this headline from the Daily Mail reveals: ‘Why Prince Charles is too dangerous to be king: in a landmark essay Max Hastings tells why this increasingly eccentric royal could imperil the monarchy’.87 Even without anything approaching a genuine debate, it is clear that a substantial number of people – around a quarter of the population – do not want Prince Charles to succeed his mother. According to a YouGov media briefing in the wake of the diamond jubilee, ‘Our polls are consistent in showing a significant minority of people who think Charles will not do well in the role of King.’88 Although Charles has since recovered some ground, a poll at this time showed that 44 per cent would prefer the throne to pass directly to William. Clearly, despite this country having been a monarchy for centuries, a significant number of people do not understand the principle of primogeniture; in a constitutional monarchy, it is of no consequence if the heir to the throne is a dud. Charles III, or whatever he decides to call himself when he ascends the throne, will be the next head of state whether we like it or not. Nor does he intend to change his ways: ‘friends’ of the Prince told The Guardian that he will go on making ‘heartfelt interventions’ on subjects he feels passionately about when he becomes King.89 It is a curious fact that people seem less concerned about this eventuality than they are about the bogeyman of ‘President Blair’, a prospect from which we are protected by the most significant feature of any democratic system. Anyone who wanted to become our elected President would have to win the popular vote, and it is hard to imagine a politician more widely disliked or distrusted than the former Prime Minister.
In the end, trust is at the heart of this matter. It is a paradox that we trust ourselves to elect MPs and hence the government of the day, made up of individuals with the power to make laws, set tax rates and even take us to war against other countries, yet we don’t trust ourselves to choose the person who carries out an equally important but ceremonial job, representing our values on the public stage and pulling us together at moments of crisis. No matter how much the country changes, we are always represented by the same mono-cultural individuals who look nothing like so many of us. Why should one section of the population – white, conservative, upper middle class, publicly heterosexual, Christian – have a monopoly on how the nation presents itself to the world? Why can’t I and people like me have an opportunity to vote for someone whose values are closer to ours? I can think of many individuals who would do the job with greater warmth and spontaneity than the Queen or Prince Charles – the author Philip Pullman, the human rights campaigner Pragna Patel or the artist Grayson Perry, for instance. In a world dominated by celebrity, it would be refreshing if less well-known people decided to stand, using social networking sites to launch their campaigns. I wouldn’t even mind if a member of the former royal family put him or herself forward as candidate, although I wouldn’t vote for them. No matter who was elected, we could choose someone else next time if they didn’t do a good job.
What I do mind is the fact that the same bland and unrepresentative woman has been head of state longer than I’ve been alive. I’m embarrassed when British politicians and athletes are expected to mumble ‘God Save the Queen’ at public events, demonstrating an affection some of them don’t actually feel, as well as the fact that very few of us know more than the first verse. I have no doubt that a country as diverse and culturally rich as ours, with such a huge range of talent in business, politics, medicine, law and the arts, can do better than this. If anything, the question of what we look like to the world has been made more urgent by the Scottish referendum; I don’t want to live in an increasingly disunited kingdom, torn apart by competing forms of nationalism. A republic of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is long overdue, and so is the opportunity to celebrate the values – equality, fairness and compassion – that bind us together. In the twenty-first century, we shouldn’t still be imploring an imaginary deity to save an inherited head of state. If we can only find the courage, we are perfectly capable of saving ourselves.
63 The Guardian, 6 August 2005.
64 The Guardian, 26 June 2014.
65 The Guardian, 4 March 2013.
66 The Guardian, 25 June 2014.
67 The Guardian, 8 June 2014.
68 Washington Post, 2 June 2014.
69 The Guardian, 26 April 2011.
70 US State Department, Lesotho Human Rights Report.
71 New Statesman, 17 March 2011.
72 The Week, 17 March 2011.
73 Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2012.
74 The Guardian, 19 February 2014.
75 Saudi Arabia: Scheduled beheading reflects authorities’ callous disregard to human rights, Amnesty International, 22 August 2014.
76 Migrant workers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia suffer extreme abuse and human rights violations, Children’s Human Rights Network, Amnesty International, 24 December 2013.
77 Daily Mail, 16 May 2010.
78 Building.co.uk., 25 June 2010.
79 Financial Times, 25 June 2010.
80 RIBA response to Chelsea Barracks judgment.
81 Evening Standard, 23 August 2013.
82 Daily Mail, 26 November 2011.
83 Daily Telegraph, 2 July 2012.
84 Situation in Libya: The Prosecutor v Said Al-Islam Gaddafi, Case No. ICC-01/11-01/11, International Criminal Court, warrant of arrest issued 27 June 2011.
85 The Guardian, 4 March 2011.
86 BBC News, 4 January 2015.
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87 Mail Online, 18 December 2010.
88 YouGov: Recent YouGov polling on the Monarchy and the Jubilee.
89 The Guardian, 20 November 2014.
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by
Biteback Publishing Ltd
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Copyright © Joan Smith 2015
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ISBN 978-1-84954-901-1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Set in Stempel Garamond
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