A royal anniversary deserving of celebration: the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649. “A subject and a sovereign are clean different things,” declared the deposed tyrant from the scaffold with characteristic monarchic arrogance – moments before his head and body became two separate things
If the essence of the state, as of religion, is mankind’s fear of itself, this fear reaches its highest pitch in constitutional, and particularly in the English, monarchy. The experience of three millennia has not made men wiser but on the contrary more confused and more prejudiced, it has made them mad…
Friedrich Engels, 1844
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot
Consider two of the unfolding episodes in the Britain of June 2012. On the one hand we have the obscene expense and fawning media attention – take an especially obeisant bow of shame, British Broadcasting Corporation – lavished on “celebrating” the survival of the cadaverous institution of royalty. On the other we have the proposed closing of the Bennett Centre in Stoke-on-Trent, a vital institution for the continued running of which no money can be found, and whose imminent demise provokes scant media coverage outside that contained in the local evening newspaper, The Sentinel.
The monarchy, in so far as it has a purpose apart from inculcating the deference necessary to prolong its own lucrative rule, props up the elective dictatorship of the semi-feudal British state and its rigid, snobbery-ridden class division. As the Crown-in-Parliament, it “legitimates” the Westminster pantomime that so grievously misrepresents the bulk of parliamentary constituents, receiving in return “humble” addresses and slavish oaths of loyalty for its services. It stands in the way of a written constitution that would give inalienable rights to dignified citizens, as opposed to privileges granted to prostrate subjects through the noblesse oblige of those above (privileges which, as the post-9/11 era has highlighted, can just as readily be taken away). It administers a corrupt and risibly archaic honours system. It whips up nationalist delirium, as the mass waving of Union Jacks during the Diamond Jubilee will make lamentably plain. It fosters religious credulity and superstition, and encourages an idolatrous and infantilizing worship of itself which is repugnant in a supposedly secular and enlightened age. Let us not descend into the tawdry mercantile realms of squabbling over whether the royal family brings in hordes of awestruck tourists to swell the depleted coffers of the Treasury, drums up overseas business for UK corporations, or other such trivia. We may even spare the Windsors a detailed examination of their personal political beliefs, which span a cramped range from the predictably reactionary to the frankly racist and fascistic. Ultimately, as Saint-Just argued long ago in his indictment of Louis XVI, the very existence of a monarchy constitutes a crime, quite regardless of whatever actions it undertakes: “No one can reign innocently.”
The Bennett Centre, by contrast, does its commendable best to shelter and support those diagnosed with mental illness – most of whom, not coincidentally, are drawn from the lower rungs of the ossified class structure presided over by their royal masters. Everyone in the Pathways group is agreed on its outstanding merit, for those who are moderately unwell, as a halfway house between the Harplands psychiatric hospital (which is oriented toward patients who are acutely ill) and being left largely to one’s own devices in the community (or, as a current weasel-worded circumlocution has it, “person-centred care”). Its atmosphere is notably calmer and more relaxed than that of the Harplands. As our group’s Phil Leese said of his experience of being treated at the Centre, in an interview with Sentinel journalist Dave Blackhurst published in April of this year: “The staff have been brilliant and it is these services which have stopped many people having to be admitted to Harplands.” Service users are mounting a vigorous campaign to defeat the squalid financial logic that dictates it must close, and a consultation on the Centre’s future is scheduled for 14 June, which one hopes will turn out to be more than a token gesture. Unfortunately, they are fighting an uphill battle against politicians to whom they, and their concerns, are well nigh invisible.
The British royal family, it scarcely requires saying, need have no fears that budgetary restraints will rein in their opulent lifestyles, let alone pose an existential threat to the integrity of their psychological and physical health. On the tricentary of the “modernized” monarchy introduced by the misnamed Glorious Revolution, Charter 88 founder Anthony Barnett protested that 300 years of their flagrant indulgence was enough. A rather generous judgement, some might suggest, given that three centuries of so-called constitutional monarchy – not to speak of the additional ones of absolutist royalty that went before – was already far too much. Another quarter of a century on, the monarchy, alas, still has not quit the stage to take up its deserved place in the trashcan of history. It continues to play out its theatre of the absurd, piling up abundant evidence of its greed, its venality and its philistinism. William Morris castigated the Victorian monarchy as an embodiment of “the densest form of stupidity,” and in assessing its contemporary successor there are no grounds for revising his verdict. To cite only one example of the affliction, the Prince of Wales, in blatant violation of his non-political remit, has sought to intervene in the NHS to promote the cause of “alternative” medicine. He has had some success, owing to the craven failure of regulatory body the MHRA to stand up to the lobbying of the princely purveyor of quackery. For those with mental illnesses, as for other patients, the effects on their well being will vary from zero (at best) to potentially catastrophic, while desperately needed funding will be siphoned off from scientifically credible treatments. Nor is this an eccentricity peculiar to the man who terrorizes modernist architects, converses with trees, and longs to be reincarnated as a tampon, as many of the Windsors have been gullible devotees of homeopathy since the 1920s.
The response of the royal family to mental illness in their own ranks sheds an illuminating light on precisely how “nice” its members are. Inbreeding has led to a high incidence of hereditary mental debility in the family. Five of the present queen’s cousins on her mother’s side, Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, Katherine Bowes-Lyon, Rosemary Fane, Idonea Fane and Ethelreda Fane, were confined to a psychiatric hospital and completely shunned thereafter by their royal relatives. Not a single one of them saw fit to attend Nerissa’s funeral in 1986, when she was buried without fanfare in a pauper’s grave in a council cemetery; only a plastic tag marked the spot. The Queen’s favourite corgis, meanwhile, were interred with solemn ceremony, their headstones bearing sentimental inscriptions, on her Sandringham estate. Monarchic compassion went so far as denying that the embarrassing cousins were still alive, with Nerissa and Katherine listed as deceased – those responsible for the deception did not balk at inventing precise dates for the fictitious deaths – from the 1963 edition of Burke’s Peerage onwards. Shameful neglect was compounded by revolting hypocrisy, since the Queen Mother was a patron of mental health charity Mencap. (One might recall that David Cameron is the fifth cousin, twice removed of Elizabeth II, which conceivably helps explain his noted propensity for “volatile” behaviour. It is a relationship which is also instructive about the tight-knit exclusivity of Britain’s ruling class.)
At the Pathways group’s meeting on 22 May, Dave Sweetsur informed us that polls indicate a large proportion (some 80%) of the population to be pro-monarchist. It would seem that the psychosis of public grovelling at the feet of what the late Christopher Hitchens decried as “Britain’s favourite fetish” has not run its course yet; and this in the land of Thomas Paine, where in 1649 revolutionary upheaval deprived a king of his head. Although degrees of approval will differ, from the grudgingly acquiescent to the irredeemably servile, its obstinate presence is dispiriting news for republicans, not least because acceptance of monarchy’s elevated status implies being resigned to one’s own correspondingly low station. Happily, royalist fervour was hard to detect in our group – proof, if it were needed, that experiencing mental illness doesn’t mean you take leave of all your senses. Dave Sweetsur reckoned the Windsors to be only slightly less odious than bankers, while Dave Williams seemed not averse to seeing Jacobin-style tumbrils set rolling in the direction of Buckingham Palace. Dominic Orosun has had the singular misfortune of visiting that monstrosity – an uglier “carbuncle” than anything ABK Architects could dream up – but was dismayed to find himself being asked to hand over the preposterous sum of £14 for a slice of cake. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha gateau, perhaps? I will allow readers to supply their own Marie Antoinette-themed jokes.
No doubt there are conservatives who would disagree with us by prattling on about the inestimable benefit of traditions passed down from time immemorial, lauding the role played by a venerable institution in bolstering political stability (political sclerosis would be a more truthful description), and reciting all the other wearying exculpations of the monarchic status quo we hear recycled ad nauseam. In doing so, they would betray their ignorance of the fact that the “traditions” of which they speak are often of recent vintage. The coronation oath, for instance, has been adjusted to suit the temper of the times, being made less offensively anti-Catholic for the 1911 investiture of George V – which is not to say that the oath sworn by Elizabeth II, like everything else to do with monarchy, did not remain a ludicrous anachronism. (We do not know what innovations, if any, attended that part of the 1953 coronation involving the Queen’s annointing by the Archbishop of Canterbury, because this particular charade was held to be too “sacred” for mere mortals to observe and was hidden from view beneath a canopy. One must conclude that our head of state, not content with lording it over the terrestrial social hierarchy, is deranged enough to believe herself only a notch down from God in the cosmic pecking order.) Extravagantly orchestrated Jubilee festivities, it may surprise some to learn, were devised in the later Victorian period as propaganda vehicles to boost the prestige of a reclusive sovereign: the pageantry that enraptures misty-eyed nostalgists is not a relic of an antiquated past, but a calculated product of industrial modernity. Those who are dazzled by “tradition” overlook, or wilfully ignore, a nobler and more authentic tradition of anti-monarchic struggle (the Peasants’ Revolt, the Levellers, Chartism), and make the unwarranted assumption that what is traditional must be automatically worthy of preservation. Slavery has its traditions too, and monarchy is one of them. We in the Pathways group are painfully aware of the customary discrimination and stigmatization directed at the mentally ill, but we have no desire to see those traditional evils perpetuated.
At the time of the 1977 Silver Jubilee, the Sex Pistols lambasted a UK hypnotized by false consciousness, in thrall to a stupefying ideology of the purported greatness and organic unity of the kingdom (England being the principal victim of the malady – for obvious historical reasons, royalist dementia is less pervasive in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). John Lydon’s declaration that Elizabeth II “ain’t no human being” is, of course, correct. Only an inhuman creature could parade herself as performing dutiful service to her country – and it really is, in a legal sense, hers – by inheriting a position which makes her rich and privileged beyond the dreams of avarice (her art collection alone has an estimated value of £10 billion). This, however, is only half the equation. The other half is that we are all denied the chance to become properly developed human beings – in Karl Marx’s terminology, to attain our full “species being” – while we are the supine “subjects” of a monarch who stands at the apex of a class society which frustrates that goal. I wrote in a previous article that it is not unreasonable to assume that an unfettered flourishing of human potential, of the kind Marxist thinkers foresee occurring in a post-capitalist world, would put paid to a good many psychological ailments. In addition to its numerous other sins, therefore, we may plausibly lay some of the blame for the persistence of mental illness at the door of British monarchy. On the occasion of the Diamond Jubilee, the present writer (Mark Conlon) accordingly finds it impossible to wish “Her Majesty” – or the rest of her loathsome clan – anything but the very worst.
pathwaygroupstoke 