If the monarch's the face and embodiment of the country, then what does the monarch embody?
She never complained about a Bloody Sunday in Ireland, about the rule of terror in British Africa, the displacement of the Chagossians to make way for the US military, the wholesale destruction of the British economy by Thatcherism that resulted in the country becoming one huge money-laundering scheme. She respectfully held her peace during the Windrush scandal. She sheltered her pædophile son, except for a few honours removed. She never complained when the police criminally mishandled a football match to the point that 96 people were trampled to death in a stadium.
She did, however, ‘uncharacteristically’ object to a Scottish independence referendum. But right away the following year, she didn't object to a demented Brexit project that was specifically predicated on two things: one was racism, intimately linked the glorification of an imperialist scheme that saw the UK become a criminal enterprise dedicated to piracy and forcing foreign countries to buy drugs at gunpoint; the other was a bunch-of-hogwash statistics that predicted that the UK would do better economically out of it (spoiler alert:
it didn't).
I sometimes like to say that a country's football scheme echoes their sociopolitical structure. In England the clubs are money-laundering schemes for foreign autocrats who want to sportswash their image and the Premier League and FA cheerfully help them. The same as with the country's sold-up economy, opened up for pillage. The other leagues are clearly inferior in quality, it saddens me to say.
And all the above is just in the Home Nations™ and formal empire. What she's presided over in other realms includes abuses against indigenous populations in Canada and Australia, ongoing at the moment of writing.
And there was that thing about toppling an elected Australian government.
By the way, what's this about a constitutional monarchy? That's where you get in e.g. Spain, where, for all its faults, at least the monarchy is explicit as a matter of statutory law. In the UK there is no constitution and the presumption is that the monarch's power is absolute unless explicitly denied, and even then there is a royal prerogative which the executive can use as an excuse to bypass parliamentary debate and oversight.
Now you have to think how she got there.
I live in a country wracked by eighty years of corporatism explicitly modelled upon the then-contemporary Mussolini's Great Italian model: reduce the actual elected representatives of the people to a mere rubber-stamp for what corporatised interests decide in an instance of capitalism corrupted to the utmost degree of regulatory capture at all levels.
What's the ultimate corporation if not a monarch who says ‘it's my right because I'm me, everything happens if I allow it’? Because the monarch does object whenever the personal income or other convenience of the crowned head is affected, which anyone who's read Rousseau will tell you clearly separates the population into people who make rules and other people who have to follow them?
The new King
has spent decades corresponding with politicians and telling them what he thought ought to be done, neutrality be damned. He did spend his time visiting foreign autocrats who wanted to purchase arms with which to strengthen their grip on their victim populations and did get personal donations to his charities which help whitewash his public image. Want to help the people? Don't donate, just undo the regressive taxation scheme that transfers wealth from poor to rich.
Monarchs are the ultimate political fixers and operators. Their fee is the prestige and not having to pay the political costs of (most) failings. As well as having a few hundred million quid in assets personally, and a lot of exemptions from laws not limited to taxes.
As I already said, the royal prerogative has been used to legislate without parliamentary oversight.
And what's the sociological value of having a structure that tells you that some people have a right to rule that derives from a deity that large numbers of people don't believe in or believe in but don't believe gives that rule? That's an outright autocracy if I ever saw one.
Which is, of course, realised in a twisted electoral system that sees a minority of the vote get a parliamentary majority and thus results in the disastrous condition of the country.
Symbolically Queen Elizabeth has been a TIto: everybody who can has been leaving the Commonwealth even within her lifetime and only the personal prestige of the late queen kept the monarchy as a façade for a disintegrating empire that has been impoverishing and alienating a population. From the raj to food banks.
The personal affection which a lot of people felt for her papered over the cracks, but the country's been experiencing centrifugal tendencies that nobody's dared speak about… for now.
I don't see it likely that things will devolve into armed confrontation as in Yugoslavia. But you
can have a social collapse and disintegration. Probably not a Venezuela, because people with money didn't and still don't give a crap about Venezuela, but things can still happen. But it can be tough. Brexiteer England is already going the way that many nationalist dictators have gone, from irreverent to irrelevant, from outrageous to just outdated.
Of course, you can have utterly corrupt systems without formal monarchies (there's so many variations to point out, but I want to go play civ); that's just proof that ending monarchy is necessary but not sufficient.
As Kenan Malik says,
we can respect popular affection for the queen and still question the idea of royalty.
