An Unpopular Case for Monarchy.
This is not an argument for the ornamental value of an institution now reduced to mere symbol; and which is not a symbol for much more than its former powers. It is an argument for the restoration of those powers. The essential question is whether we ought to be run by the head of a family, appointed to the duty of governing us by birth; or by fellow-citizens who appoint themselves to that duty at whatever costs it takes to win our votes. And I argue here that the first option is by far the better.
The chief advantage that monarchs have is that they are born to rule, and do not therefore seek their position; they can have no ambitions short of the grave beyond fulfilling the duties of it. They do not perform the duties of their office for the sake of obtaining a higher one. Nor does their position permit them to entertain the conceit that they are ‘self-made’; the throne obviously does not belong to a monarch because their own merits deserve it. They can, in short, make an accurate estimate of their own abilities; appoint ministers who can best advise them where they are wanting; and listen humbly to their advice. But a monarch is also likely to have an advantage over politicians in expertise; for they have their whole life, before their accession to the throne, to prepare for it; a kind of preparation impossible to equal, in duration or quality, among the general populace.
The elected politicians who approach us with their manifestos at elections officially remain ‘ministers of the crown’; and yet purport to be our servants. Their services would be far better used by the crown than by us. A monarch can consult each of their ministers privately and at their own pleasure; they need not listen to the performative rivalry with which our politicians serenade us. Moreover, only a single person is capable of making consistent decisions from rational deliberation; any parliament will decide now for one party, and then for another, leaving no consistent policy possible to maintain. In order to make its policies consistent, the executive may modify its proposals to appease factions among its supporters, or impose sanctions upon those who reject it. But in every good democracy, the party of government changes; and successive governments undo each other’s work. The less time each government has, the fewer its achievements can be, and the narrower its expertise; which only increases our desire to replace them.
Elected politicians need to distinguish themselves from their opponents in order to gain any prominence, and outdo the promises of their opponent in order to defeat them; regardless of whether what they have promised the electorate is good for it, or even whether they will have the time to carry it out. When their promises cease to be credible, politicians take instead to abusing their opponents; which either divides the public into political factions, or unites them in disdain for all politicians.
These considerations, taken together, demonstrate quite how unfit we are in our state of knowledge to choose any of our leaders and hold them to account; and the mischiefs that are introduced by giving us the right to do so. An elected head of state would only add to the many problems there already are in it. It is impossible for a head of state to command the loyalty of the whole country if much of the country believe the slanders their opponents made against them at the previous election. It is impossible for any president to fulfil their promises if the legislature is dominated by their opponents; it will either allow no decisions to be made, or will make decisions that leave neither party free from the taint of unpopular compromise. Every new democratic institution deepens the distrust of politicians endemic to all democracies, since it multiplies political rivalries and provides greater resources to contest existing rivalries.
And should any tenderness remain in you for the principle that we should choose those who govern us, merely consider what sort of choice it is. In the fairer democracies, the cost of a deposit and of a political campaign is paid by a political party; which binds the sponsored candidate to its manifesto. However, parties only choose candidates who support their policies; and we are compelled to choose between mediocrities chosen by their parties not to lead us but to follow their own leaders through the lobbies. A proportional electoral system would only worsen this problem, by multiplying parties; and producing politicians who have no convictions to lose to the rainbow coalitions they plan to join.
Some of our greatest intellects have sat in the House of Commons; none do today. Consider how our democracy has treated them: Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill lost their seats after one term, and the former resorted to a rotten borough. Enoch Powell was rejected by his party; and Michael Foot led his party to one of its worst defeats ever. And the House of Commons is no longer the place to look for great intellects, powerful rhetoric or original thoughts; the cameras have chased out all traces of life. In their place the mechanisms of full-suffrage democracy have resorted to safety, conformity, mediocrity; in short, electability.
The kind of republic that most British republicans want to establish is democratic; though that is certainly not the only kind. The main other kind is a republic established to serve an ideology; which democracy makes far easier to establish. The democratic instinct is safe to indulge when religion and culture are weak. They are very weak now: Cromwell probably now seems about as English as Khomeini, and the convictions that animated the English Civil War virtually incomprehensible in England or Britain today. But we cannot be sure that they will remain so. And democracy usually does not last long, nor does it make us safe, if much of the country are moved by a deep ideology for which they are prepared to kill or die.
Movements such as Dominionism or Hindutva make fairly easy use of democratic institutions to attempt to establish their ascendancy; and in states in which they succeed, democracy may yield to the dictatorship of an idea, and those who hold it. Monarchy cannot extinguish this tendency, but it can contain it: it is as different from ideological dictatorship as Cromwell was from Charles I, or Khomeini from Mohammed Reza Shah. We would rather not live in a dog-eat-dog world; but when we do, the jaws of the top dog are less to be feared than the bloodthirst of the whole pack. And such dictatorships are dangerous because they put the concept of popular accountability to the service of an ideology; they keep the pack growling in reserve for the blood of a traitor or the scent of a turncoat. There is no limit to the violence to which officials can then be incited to retain the favour of their masters; no limit to the recklessness with which they can apply his tenets at the intimation of reward or preferment.
I do not know whether I really accept the conclusion of these arguments. I have made it because the arguments about constitutional monarchy are too easy to make. Rail with eloquence against inherited privilege and wasteful expenditure, and it will make you a political theorist for the day; plead that its ancient prestige limits the ambition of politicians and provides the treasury with revenue, and you will find yourself with an incontrovertible opinion. But I hate such easy wins. Matters of importance are matters of difficulty; and whether we have a purely ceremonial monarchy is neither. If you can prove any of it wrong, and I hope you can, I would be happy at least to have done justice to the wrong opinion. And in this hope, itself vain and complacent, I rest my Unpopular Case.