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From Socialist Worker, No. 128, 26 June 1969, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
WITH THE INVESTITURE of the Prince of Wales on Tuesday we reach the climax of a veritable orgy of royalty. In recent months, press, radio and television have waxed lyrical, if not hysterical, in an effort to convince us that we are a lucky nation indeed to have such a charming, witty and ordinary family looking after our interests in that small semi at the end of the Mall.
Last Saturday some 27 million watched a near two- hour BBC documentary on a year in the life of the Windsors, a sort of everyday story of aristocratic folk. (The amazingly high viewing figure was helped by ITV’s alternative choice of an old film starring Anna Neagle, who is really Queen Victoria.)
Reactions varied to the royal epic. Mr Peregrine Worsthorne, High Priest of the Far Right, thought that to show Them eating, talking and laughing detracted from the essential mysticism of royalty. The London correspondent of Izvestia felt that Britain might break new ground by having the first socialist monarchy, while my old mum gave the whole thing the switch at the point where the Queen produced a piece of jewellery from a copious casket and asked, ‘Have I worn this before?’
The film was at pains to tell us just how modern the royal family is. Certainly where money is concerned this is true. The Queen has cast oft all those old feudal inhibitions about businessmen and has a cast-iron contract to gross 50 per cent of the takings from the longest commercial yet seen on British television. Her rake-off should amount to £200,000, a nice round figure, the same as the annual allowance for ordinary, likeable, so-witty Prince Charles.
Are you baffled by the sudden frenzy over this pampered, trivial and boring clique? The reason for it all is quite simple: things aren’t going too well for the small class who run and control Britain. The workers aren’t happy as they are forced and cajoled into bearing the brunt of the problems facing British capitalism.
While the government and TUC go about the essential business of castrating the union rank and file and the gnomes demand an even more stringent freeze and squeeze, our attention has to be diverted. And so the Royal Family are taken down from the shelf, a few of the more pathetic loonies hidden away, and presented once again as the epitome of a happy, united nation.
The whole pathetic exercise would be laughable were it not for the astronomical cost. The values of capitalist society are seen sharply in the high jinks at Caernavon next week. The latest estimate for the investiture is £½m, but this does not include the cost of police, soldiers, civil servants and flunkies, it is thought that the final total for one day’s royal fun and games will be close on £1 million. That sort of money could be put to better use in Wales, with 40,000 unemployed, 20,000 of them in the areas of the coalfields, and 31 per cent of the houses more than 80 years old.
The organisers of the investiture learnt with alarm that no facilities existed for attending royalty to empty their bladders while watching the ceremony. What might be called the problem of the royal wee was simply solved: an extra £30,000 was allocated for temporary toilets. In Wales, 37,000 houses have no water closets, 184,000 have no bathrooms ...
And yet we should be grateful for all this appalling waste. While the Queen remains, no dictator can grab the reins of power, so the great epic informed us last Saturday. Hardly convincing. The Italian and Greek royal families, for example, worked happily with fascist regimes, although the latest Greek incumbent has had a temporary disagreement over the sharing of the spoils.
And our own Duke of Windsor was hastily bundled off the throne, under the pretext of an unfortunate marriage, when he showed too much sympathy for Herr Hitler and was described by Sir Oswald Mosley (who should know) as the ‘perfect fascist monarch’.
The royal family is not a bulwark against dictatorship. It is part of the sometimes subtle, sometimes brutal dictatorship of capital. Of course, as a correspondent to the Morning Star complained recently, we mustn’t be unfair to them – after all, they didn’t ask to rule over us. We intend to put them out of their misery ...
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Last updated: 16 January 2020