Monarchy and Liberty Part 2 - The Case for Inheritance

So why is Monarchy a good thing? And why isn’t it necessarily smart and freedom-loving to be a fashionable republican?

Even to discuss this involves heresy. That heresy is this: To a) doubt that we have ‘democracy’ in this country or anywhere else and b) to doubt whether ‘democracy’ , if we do or did have it, is or would be an entirely good thing.

 

Democracy, or government by universal suffrage, is a very new thing. As I have mentioned here before, neither the Cromwellians who made the English Revolution, nor the Founding Fathers of the USA, who made the American one, were keen on universal suffrage democracy. They didn’t establish it, and they mistrusted it. Cromwell even mistrusted parliaments  as such, and ended up as a military dictator.

 

Since these are the principal practical founders of the republican idea in the Anglosphere in which we live, I think we have to pay attention to what they did in practice. Continental Republicans, who largely came to power through mob slaughter or total national defeat in war (and who murdered each other) , have little to say to us, in my view .

 

Before the French Jacobins usurped the idea of freedom, most Continental radicals in the 18th century admired Britain for its liberty, and for what they regarded as its near-republican form of government, namely a limited monarchy forced to rely for its income and its ultimate authority on a bicameral Parliament, one half hereditary and the other half chosen by a small elite.  They also noted the extensive freedom of speech and the press (though not as extensive as they would later become in the late 18th and early 19th centuries), the subjection of executive power to law through independent courts,  and the de facto separation of powers which stood in the way of autocracy. They also admired the freedom from arbitrary arrest and the safeguard against tyranny which is jury trial.

 

If they were paying attention, they understood that the 1689 Bill of Rights and the Act of Succession placed the ultimate power of king-making in the hands of Parliament.  Thus, the Monarch succeeded through heredity, but if he or she misbehaved, inheritance could be overridden by Parliament, as it had been in 1688 and would be again when Edward VIII came along. Even so, the hereditary principle had to be observed in the choice of a successor. Parliament couldn’t pick just anyone.

 

The US Constitution, as we have discussed elsewhere, (http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/06/what-is-so-good-about-democracy-whats-wrong-with-libertarianism-and-who-has-the-right-to-review-what.html )

tried quite hard to mimic much of this. That is why it is now so very old-fashioned, with a monarchical President far more powerful than the head of state of any other free country with the possible exception of France (and that only since De Gaulle) and a hugely powerful judiciary.

 

There is no American equivalent of the office of Prime Minister, and there cannot be (whereas French premiers are often quite powerful).  And for the first several decades of its existence, the USA did not have universal suffrage. In many parts of the USA only 70% of adult males were qualified to vote, in the first half of the 19th century. (A reader has rightly pointed out that it was even more undemocratic, thanks to the exclusion from the ballot of the large slave population and of most of their emacipated descendants) The US Senate was originally not a directly elected body, because many of the founders admired the House of Lords and wished to emulate it, and sought to defend the Senate against the  ‘fury of democracy’. This era only ended a century ago with the passage of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, opposed by several good, liberty-loving men.

 

They could see that the unhampered will of the majority could be tyrannical. Indeed, it is democracy that is responsible for the troubling ‘Homeland Security’ legislation which has so badly curtailed American freedom. Just as democracy , the channelled and professionally inflamed will of the people used by demagogues to gain their ends, which is responsible for our own equivalent assaults on liberty. Who, in a modern democracy, dares stand up for jury trial, the right to silence, Habeas Corpus, the protection against double jeopardy and arbitrary arrest. Get into trouble in this country now and find out how little the presumption of innocence actually means, as you are swabbed for DNA and fingerprinted on arrest rather than after conviction, and in many cases face the choice between accepting fixed penalties or risking  bankruptcy by challenging the charge in the courts. These changes have been brought to you by democracy.

 

And it must always be remembered that the National Socialist tyranny came to power by democratic vote, sustained itself through plebiscites whose results may not have been particularly badly rigged (especially in the Saarland) and was governed entirely according to the Weimar Constitution (once vaunted as the freest in the world) until capitulation in 1945.

 

‘Republic’ is not in any way a synonym for freedom. All it means is an absence of monarchy. Thus, East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), Despotic China, the USSR, Apartheid South Africa and present-day North Korea are or were all republics. This does not mean that republic are automatically despotisms – just that they are not automatically paradises of liberty.

 

By contrast, the former British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which never had much in the way of democracy, was,  on its handover to the Chinese,  one of the freest and most lawful entities on Earth.

 

And of the seven longest-lasting continuously law-governed free nations on earth (Our own country, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States) most are constitutional monarchies on the British pattern.

 

Again, it would be wise to be careful about drawing too much meaning from this. But it would also be a mistake to dismiss it as unimportant. 

 

What’s so good about monarchy?

The first good thing is that it provides a barrier to majoritarian rule, or elective dictatorship. It denies politicians the grandeur of the headship of state.

 

This can be very important indeed. During the second Iraq war, it was much harder for loyal Americans to criticise their President, who was also head of state and commander in chief than it was for British people and media to criticise the Prime Minister, who as a mere head of government and party leader, was legitimately open to mockery, derision and harsh denunciation, without any suggestion of disloyalty. Something similar could be said of Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan’s opposition to Anthony Eden’s Suez adventure, opposition which did much to rescue our national reputation at that awful moment.  The USA has no real Leader of the Opposition at such moments.

 

This non-political focus of loyalty is also important in the judiciary, the civil service, the police and the armed forces. Perhaps it is most important to the concept of a neutral civil service. When Richard Nixon was covering up Watergate, those who worked for him in the White House had nowhere to turn. To refuse what they feared was an unlawful order was also to defy to the embodiment of the nation, the head of state and Commander in Chief.

 

Some of you may remember the presidential way in which Mr Blair behaved in his early years in office, the grotesque fake demonstration of support , Stalinist in conception and execution, which was staged for him in Downing Street after his election victory, his reading of the lesson at Princess Diana’s funeral, the way he paraded himself in front of the crowds during the state Opening of Parliament (a day which belongs to the Queen) and the row over his attempt to muscle in on the Queen Mother’s funeral, not to mention his posing with soldiers as if they were ’his’ during the Kosovo intervention. Others may remember Margaret Thatcher’s’ unfortunate habit of turning up monarchically at the scenes of disasters. In both cases large parts of the population were repelled, and rightly. The existence of a monarch keeps this sort of thing out of the hands of politicians, and a good thing too.

 

Finally, a few words about the virtues of hereditary office. The usual wiseacre hurled Tony Benn’s old jibe at me, asking how I’d like to have a hereditary dentist.

 

To which I replied that I would like it no more than I would like to have an elected dentist.

 

We then got side-tracked into a  discussion of qualifications. But the point about political office is that it is not, unlike dentistry or even accountancy or law, a profession for which people have to be qualified.

 

But why is it so much better to be ‘elected’ than to be hereditary?

In one simple way almost all of us support the idea of inheritance, in hoping to leave what we have to our children, or to inherit from our parents. It is a perfectly good and benevolent thing, supporting continuity and peace. Aren't we pleased in some mysterious way to discover that a certain house has been in the same family for centuries? In any case, private property would be impossible without inheritance, which maintains the power and independence of family at the expense of the state, its great, bitter and jealous rival. And without private property there would be no freedom, for all would be the servants of the state.

 

What does election mean?

It means personal submission to central executive authority, the essential preliminary to the real selection process for MPs. This is not the actual parliamentary election, in which tribal voters willingly accede to the choice made for them by the machine of whatever party owns the safe seat in which most of us live.  This central control was always strong (the Tory high command tried hard to deselect Winston Churchill for opposing Neville Chamberlain in the late 1930s, and might well have succeeded if events had gone slightly differently). But in recent years , since the advent of Alastair Campbell on one side and of Michael Howard on the other, it has become even tougher.

 

The old-fashioned brutal chief whip has now been supplanted in both parties by a sort of monstering system which combines the traditional thuggish blackmail of the whips’ office with the enormous powers over the media, and so over MPs too,  of the Party’s ruthless and centralised spin operation.  

 

Those who defy the leadership can expect no mercy, in Parliament or out of it. Rare exceptions, such as Torbay’s Sarah Wollaston, selected by primary, have not prospered and will not prosper. They are too independent-minded to serve as foot soldiers in the ‘elected’ chamber Nor will the primary experiment be widely repeated.  

 

All those whose lives bring them into daily conflict know that MPs are employees of Downing Street or of the Opposition Leader’s office, and that the main influence over them is not the voters, but the leadership of their party. Favourites , tale-bearers, backstairs crawlers and toadies prosper. Free spirits suffer. The behaviour of whips and spin doctors, a mystery to the general public, is as savage as at any medieval court in the days of star chamber, except that punishment is through career damage and whispered denigration through leak and gossip, rather than by death or torture.  Why should anyone prefer the products of this system of propaganda, bullying and centralisation to the hereditary peerage? Why is the ‘elected’ (ie subservient) House of Parliament so widely assumed to be superior to the unelected and thus independent House? The only fault of the old House of Lords was that it did not rebel enough. What sort of person, knowing all this as professional politicians all do, would *want* to destroy the independent part of the constitution?

 

By contrast, in the old House of Lords, the whips were powerless head prefects, able to josh, cajole and provide free drinks, but quite unable to compel or bully.

 

I might add that a man who has from birth been brought up to the knowledge that he will one day sit in the Lords, whose father has encouraged him to watch debates from the steps of the throne, and who in the fullness of years comes to his inheritance, is probably far better qualified to make laws for the country than some oily Oxbridge careerist who sees politics as a route to fame and money. Very few normal people, let alone ordinary people, become MPs. Many of the old hereditary peers were by contrast both normal and ordinary, and in many cases had a great deal of knowledge of the world as it is. So did the life peers who sat alongside them, many of them grammar school boys and girls who had seen war, love and death face to face, and knew enough about the House of Commons not to be overawed by its pride.

 

A certain amount of democracy is a good thing, as a restraint on complacency and a way of ejecting governments when they have grown tired and barren. But any sensible country, especially one that values its liberty and its law, should make sure that democracy is restrained by tradition and heredity. Myself, I think there is a connection between the fact that we have a constitutional monarchy and the fact that we don’t have any torture chambers.