Press Review The monarchy
London bridge is falling (sujet X/ENS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v61JI6h423E&app=de
sktop
Monarchy (Constitution Society London)
Why It Matters
The Queen is sometimes thought of as merely a figurehead, but she retains personal powers
which are controversial. As head of state, the Queen represents the nation as a whole and a
wide range of public servants pledge allegiance to the Queen, instead of to a politically
oriented Government.
The fact that Britain is a Constitutional Monarchy rather than a Republic sets us apart from most
other developed democracies and has a significant influence on the way we think about
national identity, our history and our heritage.
The Monarch – sometimes called the Sovereign – is the United Kingdom’s non-executive head
of state.
Should the monarchy be abolished?
Arguments in favour of abolition of the monarchy:
• The Monarchy is anachronistic and not in keeping with a modern society – the concept
of monarchy is inherently class-ridden, encapsulating the now unacceptable idea that
some persons are of a higher social rank than others by right of their birth.
• The hereditary principle is abhorrent
• The Monarchy is a waste of money
• The privileges accorded to the Royal Family are incompatible with a modern
democratic society
Arguments in favour of keeping the monarchy:
• The Monarch is able to be a non-political head of state
• The Monarchy is cost-effective since any alternative would be just as expensive, if not
more expensive
• The longevity and collective memory of the Monarchy is invaluable in terms of
international relations and relations between Parliament and the people at large
• The Monarch is not just head of state in the UK but is also head of the Commonwealth
• The powers of the monarch are more symbolic than real. Those public servants who
swear allegiance to the monarch are in effect swearing allegiance to the state, i.e. the
community of the people of the UK.
Citizens have to owe allegiance to someone or something – either to a constitutional abstract
(as in Germany), or to a symbol (as in the United States) or to a legal person. So it would seem
to follow that in the United Kingdom we can either have a written constitution, or a monarch
or some other sort of a-political head of state. When the Australian people were offered a
referendum on their head of state in 1999, they preferred to keep the Queen in place rather
than creating a new role of President.
Should the roles of certain members of the royal family be reduced?
Even some of those who agree in principle with the constitutional monarchy believe that the
roles played in public life by members of the extended royal family should be curtailed. HM the
Queen and HRH Prince Philip perform numerous public engagements and arguably play an
important role in our relations with foreign nations and other heads of state, many of whom
hold the estate of the monarchy in high esteem.
However, the involvement of other members of the royal family in public engagements is not
always welcomed by the general public. Some regard the extended royal family as a spoilt
elite, taking advantage of the taxpayer. It is not clear to what extent those feelings are based
on an assumption that the public purse is maintaining the entire extended family. The Statute
of Westminster 1931 requires the consent of all members of the Commonwealth to any change
in the laws relating to succession to the throne, since change to the British head of state
necessarily affects them as well.
Is the Monarchy accountable to the public for the public funds it receives?
The Queen publishes annually an account of how the money which comprises the Civil List has
been spent. The Civil List is the amount of money provided by Parliament to meet the official
expenses of The Queen’s Household, so that The Queen can carry out her role as Head of State
and Head of the Commonwealth.
The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh are the only members of the Royal Family to receive a
direct annual parliamentary allowance. The Queen makes allowances out of the Civil List for
certain members of the extended royal family in recompense for public engagements which
they attend. So although technically only the Queen and Prince Phillip are in receipt of public
funds, in fact other members of the royal family can be seen to benefit from this money, which
some people regard as less than satisfactory in terms of value for the taxpayer.
Head of State expenditure is the official expenditure relating to The Queen’s duties as Head of
State and Head of the Commonwealth.
Head of State expenditure has reduced significantly over the past decade, from £87.3 million
in 1991-92 (expressed in current pounds) to £38.2 million in 2009-10. In the year 2009-10 The
Queen cost the taxpayer just 62 pence per person. Since 1993 the Queen has paid income
tax and capital gains tax on her income and gains in the same way as every other citizen.
Head of State expenditure is met from public funds in exchange for the surrender by The
Queen of the revenue from the Crown Estate. In the financial year to 31 March 2010 the
revenue surplus from the Crown Estate paid to the Treasury amounted to £210.7 million.
Whilst the Queen has considerable personal wealth, the royal palaces are not part of her
private property, but instead are held by her on behalf of the nation. Whilst many of the facilities
within the palaces are used for events such as state banquets and the entertainment (at the
request of the Government) of dignitaries, the royal family may nevertheless be considered to
have exclusive use of the private facilities within the palaces. For this reason controversy can
accompany funding from the public purse for the upkeep of the palaces.
If Britain was to remove the Monarchy, what would replace it?
If Britain were not a constituitonal Monarchy, it would be a republic. A republic is a country in
which all the key public offices—and in particular, the head of state—are elected by the
people. The principle difficulty which appeared to confront the republicans in the Australian
campaign for a republic was who would make a suitable candidate to take over the role of
head of state from the Queen. A unique blend of diplomatic skills, political knowledge and
impartiality are required. A president would require at least the same level of staff and support
as the Monarch requires in the performance of her state duties. The question would also arise
as to whether abolition of the monarchy would also lead to the abolition of state pomp (such
as the Trooping of the Colour) which is part of Britain’s national tradition.
Should the royal prerogative and the conventions surrounding the Monarchy be codified?
All of the prerogative powers noted above, both ‘general’ and those personal to the Monarch,
remain part of the royal prerogative. As noted, many are now by convention exercised by
‘responsible ministers’—that is, our elected representatives. But almost none of these powers
are regulated by law: they are not defined, confined or constrained by statute; and the courts
have been very unwilling to examine the exercise of these powers. Some scholars argue these
rules ought to be ‘codified’—written down – to prevent misunderstandings. Against this, others
argue that writing these rules down may prohibit natural evolution of the rules.
The death of Elizabeth II marks the end of an era The Economist
Sept 8th 2022
It deprives Britain of a thread that wove the nation together, and linked it to its past
The queen is dead. The second Elizabethan era is over. Its passing will be marked with
superlatives. Elizabeth II was Britain’s oldest and longest-reigning monarch. She featured on
more currencies than any other living figure; hers was perhaps the most reproduced image in
history. Most Britons say that they approved of their superlative monarch. They are less likely to
be able to say why.
Elizabeth II was the first monarch of the modern media era. Her coronation in 1953 was the first
to be televised; in 1976 she became Britain’s first monarch to send an email. Her subjects knew
more about her than about any previous monarch. They knew that before her coronation she
had worn her crown at breakfast, to accustom herself to its weight. They knew the sight of her
ankles in tan tights and the buckled brogues beneath (pre-worn, they also knew, by a courtier
for comfort). They watched her crowned in her finery and knew that, beforehand, she had to
strip to her shift to be anointed with holy oil.
The relationship between commoner and queen has always been one of great distance and
odd intimacies. You bow before your monarch, and yet you hold their head in your hand, and
use it to pay for potatoes. Elizabeth II brought a new kind of intimacy. The Victorians believed
that to survive, the monarchy must keep its distance: “We must not let in daylight upon magic.”
During her reign, not only daylight but flashlights were let in. It did not always go well. In 1997,
when Diana—pursued by paparazzi—died in a Paris tunnel, Elizabeth was in turn pursued by a
media who scented less blood than bloodlessness.
Time and again Elizabeth was stripped to her shift by the media—and for a while neither crown
nor subjects coped. Royal and remote, with her headscarves and clipped vowels, she seemed
like a woman out of time. Each person is an anachronism in their own era, and monarchs more
than most. Elizabeth’s uncle, the abdicating Edward VIII, wrote that he was “a Prince trained
in the manners and maxims of the nineteenth century for a life that had all but disappeared
by the end of his youth”. The young Elizabeth went for lessons in a school built in the medieval
era (Eton), using a book written in the Victorian one (Bagehot’s “English Constitution”), and was
instructed by a tutor so used to teaching male students that he addressed the young princess
as “gentlemen”. He also kept a pet raven on a perch.
Small wonder then that Elizabeth’s values—of stoicism and duty, of keeping calm and carrying
on, and above all of shutting up—were those of another era. Under the dazzle of the modern
media gaze such old-fashioned values looked dun-coloured. While her children, grandchildren
and in-laws emoted in interviews and misbehaved, she buttoned her lip and stepped on planes
and trains and boats. She criss-crossed the country and the Commonwealth, listening, waving,
weaving her lands together and asking: “Have you come far?” Few had come further than
she. When, at the cop26 summit last year, she tutted at those who “talk, but don’t do” it
seemed a heartfelt comment from a woman who, for a lifetime, had done but not talked.
As the media age became the social-media age, empathy mellowed harsh judgment. The
mood towards her shifted. Her silence, which had seemed an unfashionable anachronism,
started to seem prescient, even refreshing. As the currency that bore her profile declined, and
as Britain became diminished, her stock stayed high. Donald Trump longed for a state visit;
Michelle Obama put her arm around her.
And now she has gone. It is hard to imagine life without her because almost everyone alive
today has experienced only life with her. Walter Bagehot—that Victorian whose book Elizabeth
studied—once wrote that monarchy “acts as a disguise” allowing a nation “to change without
heedless people knowing it”. By living so long, Elizabeth offered the illusion of stability to a
nation that was in truth changing markedly. Her predecessor-but-one, Edward VIII, who was
born in an era of square-rigged sailing ships and died in the era of nuclear warheads, wrote
that so much had changed so fast he felt “as if I have been travelling through history in a time
machine”.
The time-machine continued hurtling. Elizabeth II leaves a country, and Commonwealth, very
different from those she inherited. When she acceded to the throne the vestiges of imperial
power lingered; the afterglow of victory in the second world war was still warm. Now Britain is
no more than a regional power in the North Atlantic; secession is threatened on all sides; the
Commonwealth, unravelling already, looks likely to unravel still further without her. With her
death a final thread that tethered Britain to an era of greatness has been cut.
Few feel confident that the monarchy will thrive without her. Many fear Charles will not be up
to the job. He has said too much, too much of it self-pitying: the Prince of Wails. But in recent
years he too has mellowed. Some of the topics on which he has thumped the tub longest,
notably the environment, now seem less like the obsessions of a crank. And the Windsors have
always had an instinct for survival: it is in their very name. They used to be called the House of
Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. But in June 1917, “Gotha” bombers launched a raid on London and 18
children in a primary school were killed. That month the royal family changed its name to
Windsor.
The old order changeth
King Charles’s role is not an easy one. Waiting in the wings is tough, and the corollary of the
world’s longest-reigning monarch is the world’s longest heir-apparent. Hers was a hard act to
follow and people wonder whether he can. In truth, there is no reason why he should. She
moulded the monarchy to her character, and longevity made idiosyncrasy seem like
orthodoxy.
Change is possible. Indeed, the coinage of the realm virtually demands it. Ever since the
Restoration in the 17th century, it has been customary for each British monarch to face the
opposite way to the predecessor, perhaps to symbolise that each will do it their way. George
VI faced to the left; Elizabeth II, to the right; and now Charles to the left again. Change, and
continuity, continuity and change, minted into metal. ■
Mourn the Queen, Not Her Empire The New York Times Sept. 8, 2022 By Maya
Jasanoff, professor of history at Harvard, author of three books about the British Empire and its
subjects.
“The end of an era” will become a refrain as commentators assess the record-setting reign of
Queen Elizabeth II. Like all monarchs, she was both an individual and an institution. She had a
different birthday for each role — the actual anniversary of her birth in April plus an official one
in June — and, though she retained her personal name as monarch, held different titles
depending on where in her domains she stood. She was as devoid of opinions and emotions in
public as her ubiquitous handbags were said to be of everyday items like a wallet, keys and
phone. Of her inner life we learned little beyond her love of horses and dogs — which gave
Helen Mirren, Olivia Colman and Claire Foy rapt audiences for the insights they enacted.
The queen embodied a profound, sincere commitment to her duties — her final public act was
to appoint her 15th prime minister — and for her unflagging performance of them, she will be
rightly mourned. She has been a fixture of stability, and her death in already turbulent times will
send ripples of sadness around the world. But we should not romanticize her era. For the queen
was also an image: the face of a nation that, during the course of her reign, witnessed the
dissolution of nearly the entire British Empire into some 50 independent states and significantly
reduced global influence. By design as much as by the accident of her long life, her presence
as head of state and head of the Commonwealth, an association of Britain and its former
colonies, put a stolid traditionalist front over decades of violent upheaval. As such, the queen
helped obscure a bloody history of decolonization whose proportions and legacies have yet
to be adequately acknowledged.
Elizabeth became queen of a postwar Britain where sugar was still rationed and rubble from
bomb damage still being cleared away. Journalists and commentators promptly cast the 25-
year-old as a phoenix rising into a new Elizabethan age. An inevitable analogy, perhaps, and
a pointed one. The first Elizabethan Age, in the second half of the 16th century, marked
England’s emergence from a second-tier European state to an ambitious overseas power.
Elizabeth I expanded the navy, encouraged privateering and granted charters to trading
companies that laid the foundations for a transcontinental empire.
Elizabeth II grew up in a royal family whose significance in the British Empire had swollen even
as its political authority shrank at home. The monarchy ruled an ever-lengthening list of Crown
colonies, including Hong Kong (1842), India (1858) and Jamaica (1866). Queen Victoria,
proclaimed empress of India in 1876, presided over flamboyant celebrations of imperial
patriotism; her birthday was enshrined from 1902 as Empire Day. Members of the royal family
made lavish ceremonial tours of the colonies, bestowing upon Indigenous Asian and African
rulers an alphabet soup of orders and decorations. In 1947, then-Princess Elizabeth celebrated
her 21st birthday on a royal tour in South Africa, delivering a much-quoted speech in which she
promised that “my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and
the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” She was on another royal tour,
in Kenya, when she learned of her father’s death.
On Coronation Day in 1953, The Times of London proudly broke the news of the first successful
summiting of Mount Everest by the Sherpa Tenzing Norgay and the New Zealander Edmund
Hillary, calling it a “happy and vigorous augury for another Elizabethan era.” The imperialistic
tenor of the news notwithstanding, Queen Elizabeth II would never be an empress in name —
the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 stripped away that title — but she inherited
and sustained an imperial monarchy by assuming the title of head of the Commonwealth. “The
Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past,” she insisted in her Christmas
Day message of 1953. Its history suggested otherwise. Initially imagined as a consortium of the
“white” settler colonies (championed by the South African premier Jan Smuts), the
Commonwealth had its origins in a racist and paternalistic conception of British rule as a form
of tutelage, educating colonies into the mature responsibilities of self-government.
Reconfigured in 1949 to accommodate newly independent Asian republics, the
Commonwealth was the empire’s sequel and a vehicle for preserving Britain’s international
influence.
In photographs from Commonwealth leaders’ conferences, the white queen sits front and
center among dozens of mostly nonwhite premiers, like a matriarch flanked by her offspring.
She took her role very seriously, sometimes even clashing with her ministers to support
Commonwealth interests over narrower political imperatives, like when
she advocated multifaith Commonwealth Day services in the 1960s and encouraged a
tougher line on apartheid South Africa.
What you would never know from the pictures — which is partly their point — is the violence
that lies behind them. In 1948 the colonial governor of Malaya declared a state of emergency
to fight communist guerrillas, and British troops used counterinsurgency tactics the Americans
would emulate in Vietnam. In 1952 the governor of Kenya imposed a state of emergency to
suppress an anticolonial movement known as Mau Mau, under which the British rounded up
tens of thousands of Kenyans into detention camps and subjected them to brutal, systematized
torture. In Cyprus in 1955 and Aden, Yemen, in 1963, British governors again declared states of
emergency to contend with anticolonial attacks; again they tortured civilians. Meanwhile, in
Ireland, the Troubles brought the dynamics of emergency to the United Kingdom. In a karmic
turn, the Irish Republican Army assassinated the queen’s relative Lord Louis Mountbatten, the
last viceroy of India (and the architect of Elizabeth’s marriage to his nephew, Prince Philip), in
1979.
We may never learn what the queen did or didn’t know about the crimes committed in her
name. (What transpires in the sovereign’s weekly meetings with the prime minister remains a
black box at the center of the British state.) Her subjects haven’t necessarily gotten the full story,
either. Colonial officials destroyed many records that, according to a dispatch from the
secretary of state for the colonies, “might embarrass Her Majesty’s government” and
deliberately concealed others in a secret archive whose existence was revealed only in 2011.
Though some activists such as the Labour M.P. Barbara Castle publicized and denounced
British atrocities, they failed to gain wide public traction.
And there were always more royal tours for the press to cover. Nearly every year until the 2000s,
the queen toured Commonwealth nations — a good bet for cheering crowds and flattering
footage, her miles clocked and countries visited totted upas if they’d been heroically attained
on foot rather than by royal yacht and Rolls-Royce: 44,000 miles and 13 territories to mark her
coronation; 56,000 miles and 14 countries for the Silver Jubilee in 1977; an additional 40,000
miles traversing Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand and Canada for the Gold. The British Empire
largely decolonized, but the monarchy did not.
During the last decades of her reign, the queen watched Britain — and the royal family —
struggle to come to terms with its postimperial position. Tony Blair championed multiculturalism
and brought devolution to Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but he also revived Victorian
imperial rhetoric in joining the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Social and regional
inequality widened, and London became a haven for superrich oligarchs. Though the queen’s
personal popularity rebounded from its low point after the death of Princess Diana, the royal
family split over Harry and Meghan’s accusations of racism. In 1997 the queen famously shed
a tear when the taxpayer-funded Royal Yacht Britannia was decommissioned, a few months
after escorting the last British governor from Hong Kong. Boris Johnson floated the idea
of building a new one.
In recent years, public pressure has been building on the British state and institutions to
acknowledge and make amends for the legacies of empire, slavery and colonial violence. In
2013, in response to a lawsuit brought by victims of torture in colonial Kenya, the British
government agreed to pay nearly 20 million pounds in damages to survivors; another
payout was made in 2019 to survivors in Cyprus. Efforts are underway to reform school
curriculums, to remove public monuments that glorify empire and to alter the presentation of
historic sites linked to imperialism.
Yet xenophobia and racism have been rising, fueled by the toxic politics of Brexit. Picking up
on a longstanding investment in the Commonwealth among Euroskeptics (both left and right)
as a British-led alternative to European integration, Mr. Johnson’s government (with the now-
Prime Minister Liz Truss as its foreign secretary) leaned into a vision of “Global Britain” steeped
in half-truths and imperial nostalgia.
The queen’s very longevity made it easier for outdated fantasies of a second Elizabethan age
to persist. She represented a living link to World War II and a patriotic myth that
Britain alone saved the world from fascism. She had a personal relationship with Winston
Churchill, the first of her 15 prime ministers, whom Mr. Johnson pugnaciously defended against
well-founded criticism of his retrograde imperialism. And she was, of course, a white face on all
the coins, notes and stamps circulated in a rapidly diversifying nation: From perhaps one person
of color in 200 Britons at her accession, the 2011 census counted one in seven.
Now that she is gone, the imperial monarchy must end too. It’s well past time, for instance, to
act on calls to rename the Order of the British Empire, a distinction that the queen has
bestowed on hundreds of Britons every year for community service and contributions to public
life. The queen served as head of state in more than a dozen Commonwealth realms, more of
which may now follow the example of Barbados, which decided “to fully leave our colonial
past behind” and become a republic in 2021. The queen’s death could also aid a fresh
campaign for Scottish independence, which she was understood to oppose. Though
Commonwealth leaders decided in 2018 to fulfill the queen’s “sincere wish” and recognize
Prince Charles as the next head of the Commonwealth, the organization emphasizes that the
role is not hereditary.
Those who heralded a second Elizabethan age hoped Elizabeth II would sustain British
greatness; instead, it was the era of the empire’s implosion. She will be remembered for her
tireless dedication to her job, whose future she attempted to secure by stripping the disgraced
Prince Andrew of his roles and resolving the question of Queen Camilla’s title. Yet it was a
position so closely linked to the British Empire that even as the world transformed around her,
myths of imperial benevolence persisted. The new king now has an opportunity to make a real
historical impact by scaling back royal pomp and updating Britain’s monarchy to be more like
those of Scandinavia. That would be an end to celebrate.
