The hidden wiring: how the Queen’s Speech shows just how immature our democracy is

The Paul Richards column

I have nothing personally against the individual members of the Royal Family. The Queen seems to do what is expected of her, and she was great in that film. What was it called? Ah yes, The Queen. I even have a sneaking regard for Prince Charles who has proved over many years that he does not fear the unpopularity caused by his eccentric and unfashionable views on architecture, alternative medicine, and tackling youth unemployment, many of which have turned out to be prescient and more enduring than the nonsense dreamt up by the political class. They live, as Earl Spencer put it at his sister’s funeral, ‘the most bizarre life imaginable’. I saw the Duke of Edinburgh in the back of a London taxi a couple of weeks ago. He owns his own cab, and uses it to get around town. The only other non-taxi driver I know of who owns his own taxi is Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes. It’s a small club.

No, it is not the individuals who cause me heartburn, but their place in our constitution. Yesterday I watched from the windows of the old Treasury building the royal carriages bearing the Queen, her flunkies, and her crown down Whitehall towards Parliament. The state opening of Parliament is not a quaint ceremonial. It is a slap in the face of anyone who thinks we live in a mature democracy, waking them up to the fact that the British constitution has the Monarchy, not the people, at its head. And just as the chamber of the House of Commons was built in the 1940s, so the state opening of Parliament is a pageant stretching all the way back to the mid-1950s. It is a tradition younger than Bruce Forsyth.

As the Queen processes at the head of the Blue Mantle Pursuivant, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant, Arundel Herald Extraordinary, Wales Herald Extraordinary, Norfolk Herald Extraordinary and Maltravers Herald Extraordinary (these are people, not real ales) we are reminded that the elected House of Commons comprises a mere third of the constitutional top table. That’s why Members of Parliament have to stand at the back as the Queen’s Speech is read out, like gatecrashers: to put them in their place.

If you ever go on the guided tour of the Houses of Parliament you are shown the royal throne, the robing room, the portraits of Queen Victoria, the Queen Mother, and other royals and the places where monarchs lay in state. If they can squeeze it in, they show you the green benches of the Commons, but do the tour guides point out that it was in this very room that the NHS was enacted, or the votes to establish the Open University, the national minimum wage, or the right to hold civil partnerships were won? No, of course not. A visitor is encouraged to see the Houses of Parliament as part of a heritage theme-park alongside Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square. On seeing his statue, an inquisitive child asking who Oliver Cromwell was would not get much of an answer from the tour guides.

Britain will not become a republic in our lifetimes. But that shouldn’t deter us from a grown-up debate about the role of the monarchy, and how to unearth what Peter Hennessey calls ‘the hidden wiring’. It should be a debate guided by democratic, decentralist impulses, not animus towards the royals themselves. It is an irony that the most radical reformers in the past 25 years have been members of the royal family, moving towards opening up royal palaces, publishing accounts, and paying income tax. If you’ve survived at the top of the tree for over a millennium, you develop an instinct for adaptation. Politicians have been too fawning to challenge any aspect of the monarchy, no matter how absurd.

Labour can only blame itself. Labour’s leaders and ministers have exercised the power of the royal prerogatives, accepted the membership of the privy council, gone to the garden party, bowed and scraped as directed by protocols which belong in the middle ages. When Keir Hardie was taken off the invitation list for the garden party, the response of Labour’s leaders was to lobby to have him put back on. You could say that Labour’s support for the monarchy is its oldest, and only consistently-held policy position. Conference debated it in the 1920s, and we haven’t done it since.

This failure to behave like democrats does far more damage than a few venal MPs and their mickey-taking expense claims. The failure of schools to teach young people about the vote and how it was won is why so few value the franchise. The Queen’s Speech reinforces the idea that elected politicians are a bolt-on extra, and so the democratic ideal is confounded far more effectively than by putting tanks on the streets.

At one end of Whitehall is the very spot where the King was beheaded in the English Revolution. At the other end, yesterday afternoon, his descendent reminded us who won in the end.

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1. The ICM poll shows we have to get moving – what better opportunity than the Queen’s Speech?
2. Goodbye social democracy. Hello economic democracy.
3. While our democracy burns, Cameron wants to fiddle
4. The Queen’s Speech is no saving grace – but it kicks off a winnable debate
5. The living wage campaign shows we can remake the moral economy – there has never been a more timely endeavour