https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/08/31/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-two-the-queens-gambit/
Hard times call for strong leadership. In the wake of the protests and riots which swept Britain last month, we witnessed two very different attempts at this. Most obviously, we witnessed the incoming prime minister telling bereaved communities that the murder of their children did not matter and that stamping down on “far right” disorder was his only concern. Certainly, the mass arrests and midnight court sittings sent a shock wave across Britain – including among those who might be tempted to share images and footage of the rioting on social media (there is no First Amendment in the UK).

The trouble is that in doing this, the UK government effectively proved the accusation of two-tier justice which it stood accused of. Ever since the Cameron government made savage austerity cuts in the aftermath of the 2008 crash, and especially following two years of lockdowns, the justice system has become a “precarious balance of incompetence,” where non-violent crimes go unpunished, where cases take years to come to court, and where prisons are too full to accept new inmates unless other inmates – including violent criminals – are released early. In effect, Starmer showed us what could be achieved if only the resources were made available, but without the follow-through to properly resource the system beyond the events of last month.

The rioting itself owed more to it being one of the first hot days of an otherwise dismal summer. And with Autumn just a couple of weeks away, we are unlikely to see a repeat. But as I explained in the first part of this essay, while the violence may dissipate, the underlying causes of discontent can only grow. For this reason, the short, sharp, shock approach taken by the Starmer government is likely to backfire. The main reason for this is that having taken off the velvet glove to reveal the iron fist, Starmer will not be able to put the glove back on. So that a further wave of public protest in 2025 will have to be met with an equally tough – if not tougher – response to avoid losing control of the situation. Worse than this though, those ex-industrial, rundown seaside and small-town communities who have been told that their needs and wishes don’t matter – including the reasonable wish that their children don’t get stabbed to death at a dance class – are now lost to the political system entirely… and certainly won’t be re-electing Labour MPs.

There was an alternative approach available to Starmer. Indeed, it was an approach taken by Tony Blair two decades ago. And, likely to Starmer’s embarrassment, it was an approach taken by the current head of an institution that operates on a far longer timescale. Not necessarily that King Charles III is any brighter than Starmer, but because the King represents the latest in a family line which goes all the way back to William the Conqueror (a man whose grip on power over the indigenous Anglo-Saxons was so tight it makes dictators like Stalin and Hitler look like rank amateurs – much of Britain’s land, for example, is still owned by the families of the nobles who arrived in England alongside the Conqueror, including the vast lands owned by the Royal Family themselves).

The unwritten rule of Britain’s constitutional monarchy is that the monarch cannot be directly involved in politics. And so, it would have been unwise for the King to visit Southport while the rioting and ensuing special courts were ongoing. But as soon as the media coverage had wound down, the King made a point of doing what Starmer should have done on day-one – visiting the parents and families of the girls who were stabbed to death, and more broadly reassuring the wider community that the royals – even if not the wider establishment – had not turned their backs on them. That is, to draw a line between the legitimate concerns of the community and the violent acts of a few – probably lager-fuelled – individuals.

The British monarchy has form in doing this, Queen Elizabeth II, for example, having embarrassed then prime minister Theresa May by making a long visit to the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. And this is far from accidental. In fact, it is part of a strategy to ensure the long-term survival of the monarchy drawn up by the current King’s great grandmother prior to the First World War.

By the 1910s, the role of the monarchy had been unclear. Victoria’s decades of seclusion following her husband’s death in 1861, had left the affairs of state in the hands of the governing politicians and officials so that, by the time Edward VII began his brief reign, the power dynamic between the two had reversed, with the King largely doing the government’s bidding… most notably in securing Britain’s geopolitical U-turn away from its traditional German allies into a de facto alliance with its thousand-year French enemy.

Edward VII’s successor, George V, was not expected to become king and was not groomed as such – only becoming heir to the throne following the early death of his elder brother, Albert Duke of Clarence and Avondale in 1892. And rather like his ill-fated lookalike cousin Tsar Nicholas II, relied on a stronger (German) consort to manage the role of the monarchy in an empire whose economic complexity was driving it in the direction of greater democracy and, as it turned out, toward the industrialised First World War.

To this day, historians are divided about whether a handful of governing officials and politicians conspired to create – or at least take advantage of – a war with Germany, or whether they simply blundered into it. Either way, the monarchy was even more peripheral to the largely side-lined emperors of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia… all three of which (along with the Ottoman sultan) had gone by 1918 – the first (Karl, successor to Franz Joseph) simply watched his empire disintegrate beneath him, the second exiled to Holland, the third murdered in a cellar in Siberia.

It is doubtful – though far from impossible – that the British monarchy would have suffered a similar fate. Certainly, by 1917 Britain was in serious financial difficulty, having sold the wealth of centuries of empire to the Wall Street bankers to fund not only its own war effort, but also that of its French and Russian allies. Meanwhile, the French army was refusing to fight the offensive battles ordered by the generals even as the Russian army had mutinied and overthrown the Tsarist regime – allowing the Germans to transfer armies to the western front. Prior to the entry of the USA (mostly to protect those Wall Street loans) it was far from clear that Britain had a route to victory.

In those conditions, Queen Mary’s decision to have the royal family’s German name – Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – changed to Windsor (which she later insisted would also be handed down the matrilineal line) to distance the monarchy from its German relatives, was eminently sensible. The more difficult decision came later in the year when some among the British elite sought to offer refuge to the deposed Russian Tsar and his family. And again, it is a measure of the steely determination of Queen Mary to put the long-term survival of the monarchy ahead of short-term sentimental ties, that she refused.

Britain didn’t entirely escape the revolutionary fervour which swept Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. British army units in France waiting to be demobilised mutinied (we know this because, while the government classified all references to the mutiny itself, they failed to classify the official report of General Byng’s meeting with the mutineers) and in a minor uprising in early-1919, armed soldiers marched up the Mall toward Buckingham Palace (although it is doubtful that this was much more than a demonstration against the slow pace of demobilisation). More broadly, industrial action by organised labour across Britain’s key infrastructure threatened to cripple an already weak post-war economy. Lloyd-George at one stage warning the union leaders that if they proceeded with a general strike, the government would fall and the country might slip toward communism (probably an empty threat, but evidence of real discontent among the war-weary masses).

Having survived the twin threats of military defeat and revolutionary overthrow, the question for the monarchy was what its role was to be in the post-war world. Already in 1918, the franchise had been extended to give the vote to propertied women over thirty. Herein was a perverse role for a hereditary – and extremely wealthy – monarchy. Because, in practice and despite historians’ tendency to focus on women’s suffrage, the mass of ordinary working people in post-war Britain still had no vote. To secure its future, the monarchy would at least appear to represent the views and needs of the disenfranchised masses to the government of the day. Essential to building this position was the extension of the practice of visiting working class people at times of strife which Queen Mary had engaged in from the moment her husband became King… the advent of newsreel providing an opportunity to promote this practice to the masses more broadly.

In 1928, the vote was given to all men and women over twenty-one irrespective of property. Nevertheless, the monarchy continued to portray itself as champion of ordinary people. And the practice outlived its originator. During the Great Depression, Queen Mary’s son, Edward VIII, insisted on visiting the struggling mining communities of south Wales to see for himself (and to be seen to be caring about) the deprivation inflicted upon the now unemployed masses. For the same reason, his brother (and his far steelier wife) insisted on staying in London during the 1940-41 blitz and made regular visits to bombed-out working class suburbs.

Queen Elizabeth’s visit to the survivors of Grenfell, and King Charles’s recent (and highly publicised) visit to the bereaved families of Southport, then, are part of a long survival strategy for the British monarchy. And while Charles himself may soon exit the stage due to his cancer, the institution of monarchy is far better placed to survive the coming unravelling than the organs of government more broadly… monarchy having already proved to be a competent means of operating a much slimmed-down state.

You might object – and we can’t rule out – that this is merely the regime playing good-cop/bad-cop, with King Charles appearing to play a conciliatory role even as Starmer and his officials use the mythical “far right” as an excuse to introduce even more authoritarian laws and even more censorship of social media. But that is to miss the point – that of the two approaches, it is the monarchy which is playing the long game while the Starmer clampdown may well prove to have a very short shelf-life.

Certainly, the government’s post-election honeymoon has come to an abrupt halt. To some extent, this reflects the general discontent with a political system which allowed Labour to win 60% of the seats with just 30% of the votes – 2024 was the first modern election where the number not voting was higher than the number voting for the government. In such circumstances, a wise government would tread lightly to ensure it doesn’t lose what little support it still has. But Starmer did the exact opposite… And the results are clear to see. While government approval (28%) and disapproval (32%) were roughly the same immediately after the election, in the wake of Starmer’s approach to the unrest, approval has fallen to 23% while disapproval has spiked to 51%. Starmer himself is in an even worse position, with just 22% approval and 60% disapproval.

The contrast with the monarchy is stark. Two years into his reign, 63% have a positive opinion of King Charles, compared to 29% who have a negative opinion. And the statistics for the heir to the throne are even more favourable, with 75% having a positive opinion and just 16% having a negative opinion of Prince William. Only the dodgy royals – Harry and Megan, and Andrew – have approval ratings as low as those of politicians. Insofar as government is nominally subject to the Crown and at a time where much of Britain is in decline, it is a tribute to the long-term approach taken by the monarchy that they appear to have escaped blame for the plight of a growing proportion of Britons.

Since the material plight of the mass of the UK population is going to worsen, we might place a bet on which leader – King Charles (due to cancer) or Starmer (due to incompetence and unpopularity) will be the first to go. Having alienated the “red wall” – which, like an abused spouse, gave Labour one last chance in July – Starmer will likely be replaced before the next election once the inevitable by-elections turn against Labour in the same way as they turned against the Tories after Partygate – that is, once sitting MPs realise they are going to be out of a job unless their party’s fortunes are reversed (although it is hard to find a competent alternative to Starmer in a largely braindead government – then again, that didn’t stop the Tories going for Dagenham Liz and vacuous Sunak when their popularity plummeted).

Monarchy, on the other hand, has persisted through so many forms of government, that it is the one institution which may yet survive the unravelling that will inevitably follow the UK’s fast-declining surplus energy. As even the lower ranks of the professional-managerial class discover that things we took for granted just a decade ago are no longer working, government must unravel too. But a slimmed-down – and less accountable – state under the rule of a more engaged monarchy seems the most likely form of governance for a far less complex and material economy.

I will address the unravelling of government in the third part of this essay.