For the sake of the royals, abolish the monarchy

For a revolutionary socialist to admit to a degree of sympathy for the Royal Family is a bit like a cat declaring himself haunted by images of suffering mice, a sign of irredeemable softness. Yet I do pity the Windsor family. Any relationship of dominating inequality damages those at the top end as well as those at the bottom, albeit in different ways. Marx wrote of the bourgeoise being alienated under capitalism. The financier in front of a laptop screen showing market values is at the mercy of forces he doesn't control, even if the impact of those forces on his life is more cushioned than it is on the rough sleeper outside the cafe where he is sipping coffee. In fact, that the financier lacks a meaningful, equal, human relationship with the rough sleeper is one way is which he is alienated.

Similarly the Royal Family, by virtue of the very social set-up that gives them wealth and opportunity galore, can scarcely function like normal human beings. Their every doing happens under the lens of the paparazzi. Their most intimate moments, weddings, funerals, and so on, are public property. It is, admittedly, not the most tear-jerking tale of woe; many residents of Grenfell Tower, an easy walk from Prince Harry's family home, found themselves the objects of press attention without the compensation of a black tie evening function. Still, it would be better for the Windsors were they not on a pedestal (and not just because if somebody is on a pedestal, somebody else inevitably occupies a more lowly position).

Happily, we don't need to wait for anything as drastic as socialist revolution to relieve the Windsors of their burden. It is perfectly possible to abolish the monarchy, and this should happen. And it is perfectly possible for Labour members to mobilise around a policy of holding a referendum on the monarchy issue. The leadership, lifelong republicans the lot of them, maintain an embarrassed silence on the questions. One of the tensions of labourism is that it commits itself to bring about change through constitutional mechanisms. Attacks on that constitution itself are therefore shot through with a certain dissonance. The radical Labour politician who wants there to be no monarch still has to deal with that monarch on a regular basis, and acquiesce to any number of rites and procedures which speak of royalty's place at the heart of the British order. It takes peculiar circumstances and particular clear-sightedness for the effect to be anything other than quietism on the Crown: Tony Benn's experience of being in government is one example.

I sense scepticism at this point among some of my readers. Surely, they are thinking, the reason Labour isn't calling for the monarchy to be abolished (and won't do) is that there are far more important things on which to focus. We need to save the NHS, repeal anti-union laws, nationalise the railways. Abolishing the monarchy is a distraction. In any case, the monarchy  is popular, and committing itself to even a referendum would cost Labour at the polls and prevent it from doing these things.

The assumption here is that the monarchy is not that important, and isn't tied up with the other things wrong with British society. This is just wrong. Millions of people organised their way around watching two people they don't know get married. Many waved union jacks and threw street parties. As they did so they reproduced the deference that poisons British society. If you think that somebody deserves our attention simply because of the family they are born into, you are more likely to be the kind of version who is happy to vote for a bunch of Etonian Tories because 'well, they know what they are doing'. This is class politics from above. Its product is a mass of people who know their place. The point of socialist politics, on the other hand, is to change our places.

All of this is quite apart from the role of the Crown in the British constitution. Perogative powers allow Prime Ministers to do many things without even reference to parliament, as the victims of many RAF bombing missions over the decades know to their cost.

But what would we replace the monarchy with? The assumption in the background of this question is inevitably that, whilst having an unelected aristocrat as head of state may not be perfect, it is better than the likely alternatives: how would we feel about President Blair? Well, we could at least unelect him, which is not the case with queens. But it's not clear at all that Britain needs a head of state. It probably needs somebody to meet visiting heads of state and open the odd shopping mall. Fine, let the Speaker of the House of Commons do it. Or some more local dignitary. Or somebody chosen at random. The range of possibilities is much wider than debates usually allow.

So please let's allow the Windsors to be ordinary people. I don't want to be having to avoid anniversary celebrations in 25 years' time.

Dare to be a Daniel : a note on Benn and religion

A striking aspect of Tony Benn that has escaped much attention (outside the religious press at least) in the past 24 hours is his debt to religious, specifically Christian, ideas and images. This is entirely unsurprising in the present climate, where admission of an interest in, let enough attachment to, religion is, in many left-wing circles, the social equivalent of coming out as the unique possessor of a paraphilia involving Jeremy Clarkson and yoghurt.

It is worth pausing to think about Benn's roots in Christianity. His own attachment to the creed was ambiguous, the son of a congregationalist minister and himself a confirmed Anglican, he described himself as a 'student of the teaching of Jesus'. Again and again throughout his speeches and writings, the incompatibility of this or that social injustice with (Benn's interpretation of) that teaching is asserted. Much more often, biblical images are deployed: a recurrent idea for Benn is that the Old Testament presents us with an opposition between 'the kings', who want order and hierarchy, and 'the prophets', who demand justice. We, says Tony, should be on the side of the prophets. Elsewhere, he describes the name of the right-wing Tory pressure group No Turning Back as "the motto of the Gerasene swine". Famously, he takes as a motto, and names a memoir after a Sunday school chorus:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone!
Dare to have a purpose firm!
Dare to make it known.

He once delivered the Tawney lecture to (what was in happier days known as) the Christian Socialist Movement on Christianity and socialism, but Benn was no systematic theologian or original Christian socialist thinker. In fact, he often seemed not to get theological or ecclesial distinctions. He would describe devout Anglo-Catholic Eric Heffer as standing in "the tradition of nonconformist dissent". And whilst his parliamentary and other interventions on the ordination of women in the CofE are powerful testaments to a commitment to equality, he doesn't really ever give the impression of understanding what was at issue.

But none of this really matters. What is interesting about Benn is his acknowledgement of, and use of, a religious tradition. Drawing in an eclectic fashion on Christian tropes, and displaying an openness to working with religious groups and individuals, Benn's approach to religion is different from those common on the Left. Many, in recent years, have displayed an enthusiasm for the dimwitted philistinism of the new atheists. Others, including the ancestor of the present blog, have attempted more systematic engagements with religion. In contrast to both, Benn's approach echoes that advocated by Marxist biblical critic Roland Boer. In his Rescuing the Bible, Boer champions a `worldly left', comprised of secular and religious leftists alike, that recognises the importance of the biblical text and promotes emancipatory interpretations. It seems to me that this worldly left has just lost its most significant proponent.

Tony Benn - Mourn and Organise

That the author of this blog is cut up at the departure from this life of a notorious tea drinker is a measure of what we have lost.

I still have in my possession a letter from Tony Benn written to me when I was seventeen years old. I had written him a rather pompous missive about, amongst other things, nuclear weapons, the European Union, and the monarchy. He replied by hand assuring me that he agreed with me "100%" (this was underlined) about nuclear weapons, and enclosing the text of one of his speeches on Europe. A few years later, we were organising a campaign at my university to prevent Margaret Thatcher being awarded an honorary doctorate. I wrote scores of formulaic letters to prominent figures asking them to put their name to our cause. Not only was Benn one of the few to reply, he telephoned me personally to assure us of his support. There was a humanity about the man, not just in the kind of genuine, personal, attention to individuals of which I had experience and of which numerous stories are being told today (see, for example, redcathy here), but also in the warmth with which he writes about friends and families in his diaries and above all in his deeply moving love for his wife Caroline. Tony Benn came to believe that politics was a matter of struggle, of taking sides and fighting, but unlike so many he did not allow this to dent his humanity. He was not the kind of left-wing leader to whom Gramsci's self-critical words from the Prison Notebooks could be applied,

How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one's own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn't this had some effect on my life as a militant--has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?

Benn's starting point was that people mattered and this was lived out with a consistency not evident in today's political class.

His commitment to a politics of struggle, and to socialism (in the proper sense of that word), arose out of his experience of government in the Wilson and Callaghan years. The insights from this period caused him to give serious critical attention to the manner in which institutions - both  State and internal to the Labour Party - hinder the implementation of socialist policies. Benn is not always given sufficient credit as a political thinker but this analysis led to the development of a distinctive emphasis on democracy as integral to socialist advance; the Bennite Left focused on the democratisation of the Labour Party (the electoral college was a fruit of this, recently consigned to history by Benn's one-time intern Ed Miliband), whilst Benn himself argued for radical constitutional reform. The young, left-wing, Peter Hain correctly claimed the Bennite movement for 'libertarian socialism'.

Benn's mature politics echoed one of the best lines of Billy Bragg's dubious reworking of the Internationale 'change does not come from above'. His vision was one of a labour movement working in combination with grassroots movements of all kinds, developing alternatives to capitalism-as-usual and demanding of parliamentarians that they act in support of this vision, this demand being backed up by the teeth of democratic institutions. At its height this politics gave rise to a unique moment in Labour Party history. The Bash-Fisher book puts it like this,

The Bennite left... embraced and responded to newly emerging forces - a radicalised left in local government around the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Lambeth and other London boroughs; a feminist women's movement that left a lasting impact on most sections of the socialist movement; and the movement for Black and Asian representation in the Labour Party and beyond.

Now, there are problems with the 'don't mourn, organise' line. It lacks humanity, fails to acknowledge loss. A socialist who tells you not to stand by the grave and weep because the struggle continues is no better than a religious fundamentalist who tells you not to cry because the departed has passed on to better things. But we should at least mourn and organise. And those of us who remain in the Labour Party could do a lot worse than attempt to breathe back some of the life of the heady early 1980s to our local parties. What were once places of intense political debate, connected to local campaigns in communities far broader than the place of meeting, have become in many places little more than convenient holding pens for electoral volunteers. Debate is as absent as the democracy that depends on it, meanwhile the political enthusiasm of a generation is being poured out in numerous autonomous campaigns - around education, housing, LBGTQ liberation, the environment, and anti-imperialism - which seem a million miles away from a Labour Party dressed up in business suits and mouthing empty promises to a sky-blue backdrop.

Tony Benn, by his own admission, made mistakes. He had the humility to learn from many of them. His greatest error was undoubtedly insufficient opposition to the Eastern Bloc regimes. More recently he unfortunately lent his support to Julian Assange. But, when all is said and done, the spirit of Tony Benn is something of which the Labour Party, and the wider world, stands in desperate need.

Friday Video Corner

R.I.P. Tony Benn 1925-2014

"The key to any progress is to ask the question why? All the time. Why is that child poor? Why was there a war? Why was he killed? Why is he in power? And of course questions can get you into a lot of trouble, because society is trained by those who run it, to accept what goes on. Without questions we won't make any progress at all."