The recent Royal furore has proved one thing for certain: we really need to address our problems. Our obsession with the Windsors is damaging in itself, but it is also symptomatic of a much deeper malaise in our national life. The way in which we see ourselves; what we are prepared to accept from our politics, our constitution, and thus for ourselves; what we are prepared to allow our political leaders to do to us, and how we deal with, react to and conduct ourselves over issues of national importance is affected in a fundamental way by the manner in which we organise our political structures. I have absolutely no interest in the details of who said what about whom over the Harry and Meghan story. In fact, I have absolutely no interest in Harry, Meghan, or any of the rest of the Windsor family as individuals. I find the whole debacle to be too tedious to follow the tittles of one side or the tattles of the other. My view is that the entire family exist only as a sort of immersive virtual reality video game. None of it is real – in any evidential sense of the word. It is all a fabrication, a construct, a falsehood, an illusion played out in our headsets. It looks and sounds as if it has a firm relationship to life as we live it and, even though we know that it is an empty sham, we are so transfixed by the appearance of reality that we play the game as if our lives depended upon its outcomes.
Thus, the events that we are witness to, the whodunnits and the whosaidits and ooh aren’t they marvellous and the oh isn’t it magical and the they’re above all that you see, pure class! illusion which plays out on the screens of our virtual reality headsets seems to transfix the national consciousness.
So that, while the moves of the game are actually completely irrelevant and separate to the lives that we lead, the power and significance with which we endow the game means that it does, actually, become a form of reality for us. Because we pick up the headset, put it on and press PLAY on the controller it becomes a real and significant part of the lives that we lead – the life of the nation. It is both reality and illusion at one and the same time.
Rather like going to the theatre is both reality and illusion.
We know that the action is prepared, we know that the actors are playing roles, we know that the situation is a constructed illusion for our consumption. But we also know that we will follow the twists and turns of the events that are presented to us; we will be moved by the action and take the experience away with us after it is done. We employ a suspension of disbelief and allow ourselves, for the duration, to be carried along with the action. We don’t leap onto the stage when Macbeth slopes off to kill Duncan, desperately phoning 999 in order to try to prevent the planned murder. We know it’s false – we may have seen the action play out before us a number of times before but still we watch. We don’t walk out (not if it’s a half-decent production, anyway) because we know that Macbeth is going to get away with it for a while and his wife is going to go mad – again!
The action is a falsehood, an illusion, but the experience is a real one.
So it is with our Royal Family.
And our perpetual suspension of disbelief is critically damaging to our collective, national mental health.
“…a people mentally poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy necessary for the attainment of social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings – capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks.”
James Connolly has encapsulated in this quotation precisely the trouble we in Great Britain are having with ourselves. The struggle we are having to find our new identity after the birth pangs of Brexit.
As we scream and wave our podgy little limbs about in desperation; as we take our first gulps of Brexit air after the trauma of being crushed and then expelled from the warm security of our EU womb; down through the slime, blood and stench of the ERG’s very own birth canal; and out through the vagina that is the Tory Party, we blink in the strange and unaccustomed light. Who are we, we think to ourselves, as Midwife Farage, Sister Cummings and student nurse Grimes wipe the gore from our gummy eyes and undertake a suspiciously longer-than-necessary final assessment of the organ from which we have just exited? Is this manifestation really us, we gasp as Doctor Johnson smacks us joyfully across the buttocks with a classical allusion to putti (or it may be cherub) just before presenting his bill for an immediate downpayment on his fee, with further monthly instalments to be entered into for the next 30 years? Are these outcomes the ones we envisioned when we mused, completely unaware, in the womb, still attached to our nourishing umbilical cord? Is this really the direction in which we want to be heading, we ask ourselves as Gove, the porter, wheels us recklessly down the corridor to the unheated ward and places us in what he has said is the specialist cot with thermal blankets but, it turns out, is only an old apple crate padded with unwashed underwear from the clothes bank?
Who on earth are we?
What is to become of us?
Make no mistake – the last five years have been a national trauma.
The Leave campaigners really didn’t expect to win and were demonstrably unprepared for their victory. They have wrestled with the paradoxes of their win ever since – refusing to see what is coming our way as a result of our decisions – not alert to any danger as they place the telescope to their blind eye as a means to avoid seeing the existential threats that are coming at them shouting, screaming and waving their banners.
It’s all under control, they tell us while it is manifestly obvious that there isn’t even the merest semblance of control. Nelson-like they continue to place the telescope to the blind eye and declare confidently that there are definitely no ships at all. ‘Ships’ are what experts might call them whereas what are actually on the horizon are opportunities – with sails, and flags, and cannon – heading straight for us.
Now, I don’t mean to dwell on the mendacity of the government in bringing us through Brexit. Of more interest to this blog is the manner in which we, as a nation, have responded – and what has made it possible for us to vote for our own impoverishment.
If you’ve read my blog The English National Mythology you’ll know that my assessment of the English national character is not all that complimentary. I do not mean that every Englishman/woman inevitably carries all the traits I identified but they are there and, from the comments I have received I have enough corroboration to know that what I observe of the English national character has more than a ring of truth about it.
Like it or not we are all products of our cultures and the English culture is a peculiar one. We have swept so much under the carpet that we dare not lift it. The lumps that trip us up every time we walk across it are not to be mentioned. We turn our blind eye – Nelson’s eye – to it and pretend to ourselves that the carpet is beautifully smooth and flat. We know that the carpet was woven with care and exceptional expertise, with artistic flair, by machinery that once was the marvel of the world. We know that it cost us dear to have it made but we won’t discuss the price for it is vulgar to do so. To the English the carpet is still a magic one – because once it was – but now it’s not. To say so is to undermine the entire enterprise of English carpet-making. But to maintain the pretence is both the national obsession and the nation’s delusion.
The ‘home nations’ of Great Britain were forced partners in the great enterprise of English Empire-building. From its beginnings with Edward 1, hammer of the Scots, subduer of Wales – those two nations were bludgeoned into submission. Wales by brutal military conquest; Scotland, which resisted militarily for centuries but eventually was gathered into the warm embrace of cousin England by unification of the Crown under James I/VI and finally succumbed to the necessities of economic conquest. Ireland similarly fought against successive English attempts to subjugate it and, when that didn’t work – not without trying pretty hard and pretty persistently – we just colonised the northern bit with Scots and cut it off from the remainder. The English tend to think of the UK, Britain, Great Britain as all much of a muchness – we’re all the same really. This springs from its arrogant assumption that, since you’ve been knocked out, had your hands tied behind your back and your old socks stuffed into your mouth (which is a lot better than the things that the English habitually stuffed into the mouths of defeated rebels once they’d nearly finished with them) the fact that you’re not making much of a protest actually signals deep satisfaction at your position, even gratitude for the peace that has come over you. The only really enthusiastic British, English aside, are those Protestant Ulstermen/women who see themselves as more British than anyone else.
I think the home nations stuck together over the years because they saw that there was a benefit in unity. Unity was strength. Peace – of a substantial sort – was achieved after the centuries of antagonism and conflict.
And then, of course, there was Empire. The spoils may not have been distributed evenly – but they were so vast that even uneven distribution immeasurably enriched those hitherto forced partners and gave them a sense that it was all worthwhile after all.
So what held it together? Apart from the plunder and the trade and the overseas territories and the power and the influence – in other words, the self-interest? What was overlaying it all?
Why, the Monarchy. That’s what.
When kings were kings because they were bloodier, more brutal, more powerful than their peers; when patronage could buy off the challengers: someone else’s land given to you to reward you for your support or bribe you into submission, that was pretty much it. A mouthfull of your own genitals generally had the desired effect if you got ideas above your station.
Then, if you were King, it didn’t really harm your cause to claim Divine Right. If you were King and God was on your side, you’d think you’d pretty much got it all sewn up, I would imagine. God’s anointed. A very special kind of human being – different from all the rest. Just simply superior because of birth and nothing else. Of course that brought with it a certain sense of hubris which, sooner or later, was going to be someone’s undoing. In our case it was Charles I. Charles really was a dickhead in so many ways but primarily because he refused to see what was coming. He had Nelson’s blind eye before Nelson was ever born. If we’d taken full advantage of the Regicide of 1649 we surely wouldn’t be in the mess in which we now find ourselves. But we didn’t. Rather like Brexit today those who found themselves rid of the monarchy really had little idea of what to replace it with. It had never been tried before and some of the suggested alternatives seemed just too much even for puritanical regicides with a direct line to God. Eventually they just resorted to what they knew and offered Cromwell a crown – which, to his credit, he refused. But his death and the unsuitability of his son brought about a Restoration and that’s what we’re stuck with. A Monarch whose wings have been severely clipped but the propaganda that goes with the title has continued unabated
So where did the wealth and power of the monarchy come from? We still talk of ‘their’ money as if they had earned it like an ordinary mortal would. Sold their labour for an honest wage; their intellectual property to the highest bidder. What we conveniently forget – what we are not really told about except for in tales of way back in yester-year – is how it all came about. The Norman Conquest, from whence our Windsors claim inheritance, stole the whole lot by force of arms. Parcelled up all the land and threw the Saxon/Celtic owners off, turning native owners into subjects – and appropriated it all for themselves, introducing repressive laws of property by which the original owners had no hope of redress. Having pulled off that feat of brazen theft, both legal and physical, the French-speaking English monarchy ruled bloodily and brutally through 350 years of conquest, sequestration, theft and protection racket until the first English-speaking usurper grabbed the throne in the shape of Henry IV (Part 1). 350 more years of increasing wealth and power brought a bit of a problem when the line died out and they had to turn to a minor German Prince to fill the gap. Thenceforth we have been ruled by Hanoverians, Sax-Coburg Gothas and Wettins until the German connection became a little embarrassing and bad PR in 1917, when we were bleeding ourselves white in the 1st World War with Germany (itself ruled by Victoria’s grandchild Kaiser Willhelm II) and they thought it might look better to change their name to Windsor. And so here we are. A thousand years of theft, plunder, racketeering, murder, bribery, conquest, sequestration, subjugation and they seem to have done pretty well out of it. 26 royal properties including palaces, castles, grand houses, ‘cottages’ and Lodges; a land portfolio in the UK worth around £13bn; The Duchy of Lancaster’s (18.5 thousand hectares) income goes directly to the monarch with 12 nautical miles of seabed around the British Isles thrown in; while the heir has to make do with all the income from the Duchy of Cornwall (only 53,000 hectares). Around 30% of the land in UK is owned by the Monarch and the Aristocracy. The Queen herself is estimated to be worth around £350m, what with some jewellery, a couple of paintings, a statue and some horses. And some vehicles. And some furniture.
Now, I don’t mean to pretend that the Queen and the extended family keep it all to themselves, nor that some of it (lots of it) wasn’t legally purchased rather than stolen or confiscated, but you get the vague picture – and I’ll come to why it’s so vague in a minute. But, if I robbed the corner shop and ran off to buy some lager from Asda I’d still be liable for the robbery and the lager would have been purchased with the proceeds of a crime – no matter that I bought it with cash in an apparently legal transaction. You see how it works?
The proceeds of a crime are the proceeds of a crime, whoever commits it – unless, of course, you’re the Monarch – in which case you can get away with it. (I won’t go into the legal indemnities benefitting the Crown.)
What I will do is just mention something called Queen’s Consent (quite different from Royal Assent), a convention which gives Her Maj privileged access to all draft legislation. Her lawyers have the right to scrutinise proposed laws and, if they see something they don’t particularly like, they can ‘request’ that the draft is changed. This is not just a convention, not simply a courtesy, it is a mechanism that is used repeatedly by our ‘powerless figurehead’ to change laws that may affect her, her family and their wealth and possessions. The Guardian recently ran a story about a case in which Brenda’s lawyers objected to a law proposed by the Scottish government allowing them to purchase parcels of private land in order to lay pipelines for communal heating projects. Would you believe that Elizabeth Windsor is the largest landowner in Scotland? She secured exemption without, as usual, her lobbying being revealed. It would be interesting to know what would happen if a UK legislature refused her lobbying, for Queen’s Consent is allowed so as to enable the ‘smooth passage’ of Bills after her amendments have been complied with. It seems she threatens to disrupt the due processes of the democratically elected legislatures of the UK in order that her private interests are protected.
A powerless figurehead she – and the Monarchy – most certainly are not. I urge you to read The Guardian‘s archive on this matter – click on the “series of reports” link in their article for much, much more.
My point is that the Royal Family enjoy immense wealth, legal and social privilege, power and influence simply by right of birth. You could count the monarchs on the fingers of one hand who have made any kind of personal, practical contribution to benefit their subjects or mankind in general: Charles II perhaps with the Royal Society and the encouragement of science, George III (Farmer George)?
The edifice of the UK Monarchy – that which we like to think really doesn’t have any power any more – they’re just figure-heads, really – does far more by playing its virtual reality games in our national life than we generally give it credit for. For it is this illusion that is so insidious in our society. The Royal Family, notwithstanding their wealth acquisition, represent an old, anti-democratic way of doing things. The inherited privilege principle which they embody and perpetuate is deeply damaging to our national psyche and the structures of power in this country. The delusion that we live with that the Windsors are anything other than human beings like us, pulling the wool over our eyes every time they appear in public, speak or don’t speak on an issue, act or refrain from acting – maintaining the illusion that they are in place to look after the best interests of the nation when it is abundantly clear that, if they were any other family on the planet, we would look at them askance and dismiss their self-interest and double-dealing as nothing more or less than self-preservation and self-perpetuation. The illusion is that they are a bit like us, when it suits – but they really are separate and special and different from the ordinary. Not exactly Divine Right, just the next step down. We refuse to see it. We are Nelson with a VR headset.
We have absolutely no idea what these people are actually like, what they actually think, what they actually do away from the very carefully arranged public appearances – behind the mask. Absolutely none. It is extremely difficult to find out what they actually own and where it’s all invested. We have no idea at all what the family get up to politically, diplomatically or financially because that’s private, apparently. So we just shrug our shoulders as a nation and say that’s fair enough. They’re private citizens as well so they should have the same privacy that we have. Really? The hereditary Crown, an entire extended family that has been plundering and stealing for centuries should just be left alone to count their own private property. This obsequious, fawning, forelock-tugging attitude just has to stop. The property that accrues to a Head of State as the Head of State belongs to the State not the the holder of the office. (I am aware of the distinction made between the Crown and the person but that really doesn’t cover it, I’m afraid.) Yet we discuss and takes sides and give various members of the family a good score or a bad one depending on how each one is presented to us at any one time. The mask is so carefully constructed and so faithfully preserved for our adoration that we are almost never allowed to see the face behind it. The media play the Windsor’s game as long as the Windsors play the media’s game. It is a symbiotic relationship played out for our consumption and we may not participate – only consume.
Thus, we play the virtual reality game with one good eye, with Harry and Meghan who carefully construct an image to play out for the media to relay to us. We watch (or not) and take in every detail – we follow the action of the play even though some of us remain detached enough to know these are roles being played for us. For others -those of us who will camp out for nights in advance for just a chance of catching a glimpse of one or other of them – the characters are as real as in a thriller, a whodunnit where we are consumed by the illusion and the clues are to be gleaned if we pay close enough attention. The brothers, the spouses, the parents and the grandparents – Princes and Princesses and Queens and Dukes; a scheming, dysfunctional family with a paedophilic Uncle here and an “If it moves fuck it, and if you can’t fuck it, shoot it.” old patriarch there.
We obsess about them – our news bulletins are grotesquely imbalanced with the trivia of their moves, royal correspondents abound and the minutiae of their choreography is analysed and scrutinised and adjudged.
Wouldn’t it be helpful if we did the same with important things in our national life? Shouldn’t we give the same attention to matters of national significance? Shouldn’t we be concerned with the details of Brexit inasmuch as it will affect every single one of us in this country (or countries) for generations to come? Should we not give the same thought to government corruption on a scale that has not been seen since the 19th Century? Should we not pay the same attention to the slide into authoritarian rule by a government that exceeds levels of mendacity and curtailment of rights, rolling back the liberty of the citizen to levels we haven’t seen since well before universal suffrage? Should we not be outraged at the government’s mishandling of our version of the global pandemic that has brought us 130,000 deaths and a year of inept administration laced with corruption, cronyism and favouritism that Charles 1 himself would have winced at? Are we angered at the levels of poverty our country is experiencing? Are we aghast at the impending break-up of the nation that all of us have been born into and has been an historical certainty for generations?
We need a mature democratic meritocracy in our country where rationality is the norm not a tribal winner-takes-all system more reminiscent of the courtly intrigues of a medieval state. We need to divest ourselves of the very notion of inherited privilege that corrupts the entirety of our public life. Where else could you possibly contemplate a legislative second chamber populated by members for life without challenge: automatic inclusion for the old aristocracy, members of the Church of England, Judges and by political appointees through the corruption of patronage? What mature modern state should rely almost exclusively on privately educated individuals, most often from the very same families give or take a parvenu or two, who attend the same universities and take up the same positions in public life as the family have for generations? What mature modern democracy should allow vast landowning and wealth achieved through historical plunder, theft and sequestration concentrated into so few hands in perpetuity?
Should we not be active citizens, participating in and shaping our own democracy, demanding that our politicians respond to our needs and wants, our hopes and fears – rather than being dictated to and sold falsehoods, false narratives and false prospectuses?
We are a nation of cowed and subservient subjects, not citizens of a modern state. We do as we’re told and we don’t complain. We haven’t complained since the miners’ strike of 1984 and the Poll Tax riots of 1990. We haven’t put our politicians on notice that we just will not stand for their games any longer. That we are where the power must reside, not in the hands of a very few of the elite class who attend public school and Oxbridge and come from the same families and intermarry to ensure it stays in the family and are accustomed to rule because they always have.
At the top of this sit the Windsors – playing their games with us, maintaining their pretence, keeping the mask on. And we turn our blind eye. Other European countries have kept their royal families but they have been reduced to the level of citizens who walk among us as humans, who cycle through the streets. The mystique and the awe, the genuflection and the adoration has been rightly stripped away to reveal much more of the human being behind the title – but we maintain the Windsors.
We are not a mature democracy because of our monarchy. We do not engage in mature debate about issues of central importance in our political and social life because of the monarchy. We hearken after times gone by that never existed and can never come again. We are deluded and servile, envious and divisive. We polarise every issue because we are not used to debate and discussion in our national life because we do not participate: we watch others doing it for us – with only one eye.
Then, what does the Monarchy do for us when really needed? Does the Queen refuse to illegally prorogue Parliament? Does she grab Johnson by the bollocks and tell him to stop fucking lying or they’ll stay in her Royal hand and he’ll be leaving the palace without them? Maybe she did and Johnson called her bluff. We don’t know. Does the family muck in with the NHS staff on a covid ward? Does a Duke or Duchess help out at a food bank, or a soup kitchen for homeless ex-servicemen/women who have lost themselves in the service of Queen and country – I mean really help out, not a photo-op? What do they do at all except provide a spectacle at our expense and tell us, through their media outlets, how marvellous they are? We’ll address the accusations of racism in the family privately. No you fucking won’t – you’ll come clean, we’ll conduct a proper investigation, and we’ll find out which scumbag actually cares so much about the colour of a baby’s skin – or not. Because you serve us – not the other way around!
We put on our virtual reality headsets and look at our royal family with Nelson’s eye, who tell us that they have risen above it all; they tell us they will serenely and sagaciously steer us through the existential hazards of each stage of the game.
Stick with us for we have been with you since before anyone can remember. We are continuity. We have accrued wisdom that you cannot possess. We have your best interests at heart. Trust us. We will not let you down. We will show you the way. Though the world will change, the world will stay the same. It is time for you to sleep now. Do not take off your headset. Do not unplug your device. We are here. Sleep now. Sleep.
The Cynical Squid 