Book review: Abolish the Monarchy, by Graham Smith

Over the Easter holidays I had a stump to dig out in the garden. It was going to be a long job, so I decided to choose an audiobook to accompany the task. Something I wouldn’t normally get round to reading. And since I was going to spend all day hacking at something obsolete but hard to uproot, a book about abolishing the monarchy seemed ironically appropriate.

I can feel some readers bristling already, so let me summarise my views of the monarchy so you know where I’m coming from. My interest in the royal family has generally been exactly zero. Neither support nor oppose, can’t bring myself to care either way. The idea of rulers chosen by birth is to my mind very obviously archaic, but if the royals make people proud then I wouldn’t want to take that away from them.

That view persisted for the first decade living in the UK. But then every now and again there’s a headline that reveals something darker beneath the surface. Tax evasion, the exemptions from laws that the rest of us obey, the persistence of old colonial mindsets. It was the coronation that pushed me over the line. The complete invisibility of republicanism in the media was troubling, and then the policing of the coronation was downright sinister. The establishment rallied to silence opposition, confirming beyond doubt that the royals are far from a benign irrelevance.

For Graham Smith, head of the campaign group Republic, people like me are exactly the problem and his book takes us to task. We’re complacent and uninformed. He insists that there aren’t really any robust arguments in favour of royalty, and he addresses all the common ones. Are they good for tourism? There’s no evidence to suggest they are. Neither is there any evidence that the royals bring in investment or trade. Are they hard-working models of public duty? Not remotely when you look at how many working days they do in a year. Do the long reigns of monarchs bring stability? Even if it does, that’s an argument made because the Queen lived a long time. It’s not relevant if a reign lasts a shorter time, and the long reign of somebody more controversial would be the opposite. Even arguments based on heritage and tradition are shaky – most royal traditions are more modern than people realise.

There are however lots of reasons to oppose the monarchy. For republicans, the most important is that the monarchy is wrong in principle. We’re all born equal, all subject to the rule of law, and should all be able to vote for a head of state or even run for it ourselves.

The monarchy is also disfunctional, which leaves Britain in political limbo in a crisis. Our famously unwritten constitution doesn’t work, handing far too much power to the government. This was proved comprehensively by Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament in order to push through his Brexit project. The queen had to give her assent and did so, even though it was later judged to be illegal. We learned that the “sovereign” has no right to say no to a prime minister, even if what they demand is against the law. There is therefore no check on the prime minister’s power, nothing to stop them abusing it. A written constitution and an effective head of state would fix that.

The monarchy is also highly secretive and borderline corrupt, claiming a variety of legal statuses for its operations in order to avoid paying tax. Individual royals have been implicated in a number of questionable dealings, and these are not investigated properly because embarassment to the royal family is a cardinal political sin.

Besides, the rules might apply anyway. In the world of the monarchy, rules are for the little people. The royals can demand exemption from any law they choose, and a study two years ago found that Queen Elizabeth claimed immunity from 160 different laws. That includes racial discrimination laws brought in during the 1970s. As a general (and racist) rule, the palace didn’t hire people of colour. When it was made illegal to discriminate, they got themselves an exemption. Whether or not they use it, to this day the royals are the only employers in the country who are allowed to deny someone a job on the basis of their skin colour.

The royals are also exempt from Scottish climate change laws. Crimes against nature and wildlife don’t apply on royal estates, and the police aren’t allowed to investigate anyway. You can’t ask about it either, because the royals are exempt from freedom of information laws. And data protection laws, and planning laws, etc. The immunity itself is troubling, but why would you ever ask for such a thing? In Britain we supposedly value equality and the rule of law – but not for royalty. Smith is entirely right that this stinks.

Smith is also aware that it’s an uphill battle convincing anyone of this, and that a big part of it is the failure to imagine life without the royals. One thing I found helpful here is what he calls the ‘abolition test’ – will things that we like survive the end of the monarchy? Usually they do. The palaces and the history and the pageantry are all possible without the royals. The tourists won’t stop coming. The guys in the red coats and furry hats will still stand outside Buckingham Palace if we want them to.

More importantly, the royals don’t have a monopoly on history. Abolishing them would also be historic. And as Smith is at pains to point out in the later stages of the book, it would a positive step forward. Despite the name of the book, the real win is not abolishing the monarchy, but purposefully choosing a real parliamentary democracy. Writing a proper constitution. Reforming the House of Lords. Selecting a head of state that represents the best of us*.

Smith thinks this will take time, but is pretty much inevitable in the long run. When polled, it turns out that most people don’t care about the royal family and its big events, but they assume everyone else cares about it because media coverage is so absolutely pro-monarchy.

That’s why books like this one are so important. We haven’t this debate in the UK. Many people have wanted to hold back on it out of respect for the queen. But we ought to have it now.

• Abolish the Monarchy is available from Earthbound Books
• *PS – Don’t think of America when imagining a British president. Under our parliamentary democratic model they would look more like the presidents of Ireland or Iceland – but hey, the detail of that is just the kind of thing we could decide together when we write the constitution.