Re: [A-List] Popularity of UK Royals falls

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 30/12/02 21:32 -0800, you wrote:
> King Farooq of Egypt once said, only five kings will ultimately remain, four
> of the cards and the British sovereign. I feel he was slighly wrong.
>
> Soon the time when people would wonder at the folly of people of these times
> to have allowed humans of their like to reign over them.
>
> Tariq

Yes in some ways it is very strange. It is partly that since the "Glorious
Revolution" of 1688, the bourgeoisie in alliance with the landed
aristocracy have almost always had the upper hand in shaping the monarchy
for their own class purposes.

It is also that England has been blessed with being of a size and and in a
geographical and geological setting favourable to the early formation of a
bourgeois nation state, with neigbours in the "British" Isles who could be
dominated, and at times could be crushed with appalling brutality. The
relatively early formation of a nation state went hand in hand with the
development of precapitalist economic formations, and allowed a pragmatic
and flexible civil society to emerge at times when other states faced more
violent choices.

Blair's pragmatic handling of the British royal family follows on this
tradition. So it is impossible to predict whether it will disappear or not.
However the nature of the debate seems to have shifted to one in which they
are judged somehow strangely by evidence of whether they have produced some
sort of social use value from their labour power. This might ultimately be
more damaging to their real power and influence than a violent republican
revolution. The actual constitutional questions are more whether the prime
minister can exercise arbitrary decisions in the name of the monarch,
without being duly accountable under the constitution. Some gradual
constitutional reform on this front is possible, but will not be encouraged
by Tony Blair.

Chris Burford

London