Queen Elizabeth II may have been styled the “people’s monarch”, but for much of her reign, and especially its last 40 years, the amassing of vast wealth was simply de rigueur for the UK’s financial and landed elites.
As the Guardian investigation into the cost of the royal family reveals, the late queen was at the forefront of her class’s pursuit of wealth extraction. Using royal privilege, the crown secretively exempted itself from public scrutiny and taxation. Royal fortunes soared. And this was the rule, not the exception.
The consequent optics for the incoming head of state are poor. His family’s vast accumulation of wealth is all the more glaring when juxtaposed with soaring levels of poverty and hardship among his subjects, including as many as 3 million children. But the one is part of the cause of the other. While the king may not have uttered “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, the parallel with the “great princess” who apparently did is not fanciful. Monarchy helps make vast disparities of wealth seem normal and natural, an enchanting part of our jolly heritage to be questioned only by mean-spirited and unpatriotic scoundrels.
The queen really was a symbol of British nationalism, and part of the glue that held the United Kingdom together. Her wartime experience provided a bridge between Britain’s prewar, class-stratified, imperial past and its new postcolonial, postwar, modern welfare state.
But the values of social solidarity and equality – forged in the hardship of the second world war and given extended life in the postwar consensus – were swept aside by the Thatcherite revolution. In its place came the belief that one should be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes”, as New Labour’s Peter Mandelson made clear. It seems, however, that only half that memo got to the royal family.
The question now is what kind of king will Charles III be? What will he seek to symbolise in his reign, and what part will he play in a Britain of many nationalisms – Scottish, Welsh, English and none – finally facing the truth about its imperial history and disunited along so many faultlines? We have been given an encouraging glimpse when it comes to his family’s enrichment from the transatlantic slave trade. But it’s not enough. The Guardian revelations show the monarchy will not reform itself. It is too firmly entrenched in old notions of class, deference, wealth and international aristocracy.
This is where an incoming Labour government might make a stand. It could embrace rather than resist the change symbolised by the crowning of a new king. And it could do so in ways that in turn symbolise a new conception of public life: built on transparency, not the hiding of wealth in tax havens; on integrity, instead of the easy acceptance of gifts and payoffs; and on economic justice, rather than the hoarding of wealth by a few.
The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has made clear he will uphold the institution of monarchy, rejecting calls from those who would go much further than mere reform (myself among them). And Labour would do well to take this opportunity to define the kind of reforming government it would be. After all, a constant of Starmer’s leadership has been the absence of a strong idea of what he and the party he leads stands for, what they call in the US “the vision thing”. With a general election looming, time is running out. What better way to define himself than to propose reform of this archaic institution?
Refusal even to countenance reform of the monarchy is an admission that the party lacks a vision for the country’s future and wants to stay in the past; that Labour has little to say about Britain’s post-Brexit role in the world and our post-imperial reality. The illusion that, unchained from the EU, Britain would reassert itself in on the world stage, that empire 2.0 was there for the taking, with the royal family once again its ambassadors, has been dispelled. Instead, we have found a world that has moved on. Nobody wanted their imperial overlords back. Instead, our royals have been handed a bill in some Commonwealth countries for centuries of imperial plunder.
The country needs a vision of what 21st-century Britain will look and feel like under a Starmer-led Labour government. One based on an honest understanding of our past, dealing with historical traumas that have been suppressed for too long. One that articulates new institutions for new challenges – ranging from the climate crisis and food security to AI. A vision for current institutions such as the police, the BBC and the NHS – all in desperate need of renewal and repurposing.
Symbols matter to people and politics. A reformed monarchy, scaled down in size and cost, less opaque, more open and fit for purpose, once again a symbol of service not servitude, could symbolise the renewed Britain the party needs to create. Labour succeeds when it articulates a vision for the future the public can believe in and buy into. One that captures the essence of the moment and confronts the challenges the country faces. The Tories are, by their nature, always trapped in the past. By redefining the monarchy, Labour can change the future.
Clive Lewis is the Labour MP for Norwich South
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