By John Pickard
The predominant feature of the official period of mourning, leading up to and including the state funeral for Queen Elizabeth on Monday, was the overwhelming, unprecedented and carefully choreographed campaign of the national media in support of the monarchy. There has not been a tsunami of press coverage like it any time in the post war period, or perhaps ever.
Day after day, newspaper headlines, with virtually identical wording, followed a scheme clearly laid out in advance, as if coordinated by the press office at Buckingham Palace. The newspaper front pages all led with the same phrases and photographs of the coffin cortege arriving at Edinburgh; then the speech of Charles to the nation; then the arrival in London; then the vigil of the Queen’s children; then her grandchildren, and so on day by day. Finally, there were the orchestrated headlines about the lying in state, the length of the queue as people waited to see a coffin for twenty seconds and finally, the funeral itself. It was complete wall-to-wall coverage in every newspaper, as well as on TV, particularly the sickeningly sycophantic BBC, of a sort no-one in this country has ever experienced before.
The press and TV coverage was so oppressive that only five days in, most people were already sick of it.”When it comes to media coverage of the death of the Queen,” a YouGov poll asked, “do you think it has been too much, too little, or about right?” Of those asked, 49% said it had been “too much“, with only 41% saying it was “about right“.
The press coverage was a powerful political message
This poll was published on September 15, so it must have been taken in the days prior. Another five or six days later would probably have made the 49% a lot more. Although there were many people – including working class people – who watched the funeral, for millions more, their TV effectively disappeared from their lives for a week and a half.
The ten-day press barrage was not put into effect for tourists and it was not just a quirky and quaint adherence to ‘tradition’, something the British are supposedly good at. It was a lot more than that. The mass media was the vanguard of a powerful and calculated political message to the mass of the population.
The message was that “we” – the Establishment, the ruling class, the rich and super-rich, large landowners and capitalists – are very much in charge and we expect conformity and obedience to “our” rule. It was an extravagant and forceful vindication of their assumed place at the top of society, with the additional pressure for the masses to conform.
Although many ordinary workers may have felt some lingering affection for an ageing monarch well into her nineties – but not, to use a common phrase, for all the “hangers-on” – the participation of ordinary workers, such as it was, arose from a vague desire to lift themselves out of the humdrum and difficulty everyday life, and be a part of ‘history’. The pomp and ceremony succeeded in one aim, in so far as it provided for many a short-lived distraction from the problems of everyday life, of low pay, ongoing austerity and cuts in living standards.
Now that the state funeral is over, the big majority of working people will get back to their normal lives, fighting to make ends meet, struggling for decent wages, housing, education and health services – all the basic necessities of life that are denied or have been eroded dramatically in recent years.
Keir Starmer’s fawning eulogy of the Queen
The press coverage on Queen Elizabeth’s life was a massive and overwhelming pressure to conform to the myths of the monarchy and unfortunately, it met little resistance from most of the leaders of the Labour and trade union movement. The TUC dutifully postponed their annual congress, with scarcely a murmur and that loyal knight, Sir Keir Starmer, circulated Labour members with a slavering eulogy to the Queen.
Starmer’s missive echoed the media perfectly. Fawning and sentimental, it referred to the Queen’s relationship with “us all” as one “based on service and devotion to her country”. It has been rumoured that the same eulogy will be used to open Labour conference – five days after the official period of mourning ended – and that it will include a minute’s silence, none of which will not go down well among delegates gathered for a conference.
There was no mention in Starmer’s letter to members about the fact that Elizabeth was one of the richest people in the world, with vast landed estates, a fine art collection, jewels and a property portfolio worth billions. She had wealth beyond the imagination of most of her increasingly impoverished ‘subjects’ and, moreover, as far as possible the extent of the wealth was deliberately kept secret.
Sir Keir’s circular did not mention that the Queen’s representatives had a right (as did Prince Charles) to inspect every Act of Parliament to see if it affected her personal financial arrangements. According to research by The Guardian (February 8, 2021), “More than 1,000 laws have been vetted by the Queen or Prince Charles through a secretive procedure before they were approved by the UK’s elected members of parliament...”
Changes in the laws that have been put through parliament were invariably designed to protect royal estates and property from regulation, taxation and above all, from public scrutiny. The Queen’s “service” to her subjects did not extend to letting us know how wealthy she was.
Royal interference with Acts of Parliament is kept secret
“The investigation” the Guardian went on, “uncovered evidence suggesting that she used the procedure to persuade government ministers to change a 1970s transparency law in order to conceal her private wealth from the public”.
The Queen and Charles sought and obtained amendments – as secret clauses – to scores of Acts of Parliament, purely to protect royal wealth and privilege. It is as a result of amendments to law that the Queen was not obliged to pay income tax and her son, King Charles, paid no inheritance tax on his mother’s vast fortune.
The scale of this wealth was outlined in the Financial Times last week. “The £15.6bn property portfolio includes large chunks of central London, such as Regent Street and St James’s, as well as retail parks and countryside outside the capital. It also owns the seabed up to 12 miles out from the coast, the value of which has surged since 2021, thanks to the lucrative lease of seabed rights to develop offshore wind projects”. (Financial Times, September 9). So every time an off shore wind farm produces electricity, King Charles will get a cut of the income because he “owns” the sea bed around our shores.
“A more direct source of independent income” the Financial Times explained, in relation to the Queen, “came from the Duchy of Lancaster, a private estate that has belonged to the reigning monarch since 1399. Its holdings cover 18,248 hectares and the Duchy’s net asset value is £653mn”. This enormous body of wealth, in other words, goes back to the favour and patronage of a medieval king.
The Duchy of Cornwall, formerly ‘belonging’ to Prince Charles and now, on his accession, going to the new Prince of Wales, William, goes back even further, to 1337. Besides the former Queen and the new King, there are scores of other royals, all sitting on land and property that has not been earned but inherited because the right person happened to win the right battle, six hundred years ago.
Not a penny of this vast fortune is earned
The Royals, “serve” the nation by living parasitically on its land, its wealth and its accumulated riches and not a penny of this vast fortune is earned. Those who argue in favour of retaining the monarchy suggest that it is ‘above’ politics and acts as a ‘unifying’ force in society and, besides, it is good for tourism.
But the political ‘neutrality’ of the royals is a myth. The royal family plays a political role, particularly in times of social and political crisis. When large sections of the population are being pauperised by government policy, it is always the refrain of reactionary politicians that ‘we are all in this together’. The monarchy is the living embodiment of that false argument.
Although the monarch pretends to represent a ‘unifying’ force and to stand ‘above’ politics, in fact, it is an important reserve political weapon, one that would be deployed against any radical government that attempted to interfere with the wealth, privileges, power and influence of the ruling class. It is no accident that the entire apparatus of the state: judges, civil servants, police and armed forces swear their allegiance to the Crown and not to parliament.
As Prince Charles, the new King was always portrayed by the media as a harmless and eccentric old buffer, perhaps a little too fond of trees. But in fact he is a greedy and grasping landowner, with an utterly reactionary outlook towards the ‘peasants’ over whom he lorded it . Like his mother, he used his inherited wealth and feudal rights to enrich himself, whatever the cost to his tenants.
Charles had no sooner been invested as King and moved into Buckingham Palace before his staff at Clarence House, his former home, were given their redundancy notices. The TUC may have agreed to suspend ‘normal’ activities during the mourning period, but that didn’t stop employees of royalty being unceremoniously given their marching orders.
Behind the mask is a vicious, ruthless and reactionary face
Like his mother, the new King might wear a mask of ‘national unity’ and ‘neutrality’, an image that is carefully nurtured by the press and the media. But behind it there is a vicious, ruthless and reactionary monarch, who cares as much about the welfare of his ‘subjects’ as an elephant would care about the ants on which it might tread.
The death of Queen Elizabeth undoubtedly marks the end of an era. During her seventy year reign, Britain has gone through a long and inglorious decline. It is now a second-rate economic and military power, in danger of slipping into the third tier. This is despite the fact that sections of the political right and some newspaper editors wave the Union Jack for all they’re worth, as if Britain still had a mighty navy and an Empire.
It is as a result of the huge relative decline of British capitalism that its economic prospects are today worse than for any other of the main capitalist countries, the G7. It is for the same reason that workers in Britain will face a harsher attack on their living standards than in any other Western European country.
A kind of collective Stockholm Syndrom
In the long run, it is always the economic imperative that determines the direction of politics. The lingering affection that may have been felt for the Queen is a kind of collective Stockholm Syndrome, whereby oppressed people develop an unlikely regard for their oppressor. But such respect as there was for the old monarch will not be passed to her son.
Before the death of the Queen and the subsequent press barrage, attitudes were already changing. A YouGov poll in May 2021 found that among 18-24 year-olds, 41% favoured an elected head of state, while only 31% supported a monarchy. Increasing austerity will shift the balance even more against the pomp and privilege of the royals. Some royals, like Prince Andrew are already overwhelmingly disliked.
Charles will not be able to prevent an inevitable slide of British society towards social and political upheaval because capitalism is dictating that the mass of the population be impoverished in the interests of rent, interest and profit. In the next few years the largely manufactured outpouring of emotion of the last two weeks will be forgotten. Even the planned coronation of Charles next year – once again with a mountain of fanfare – will fail to register on the same scale.
On the contrary, millions will come to question the role, the wealth and the position of the monarchy. There is no place for such a medieval and reactionary institution in a modern, democratic society, just as there is no place for the privilege, power and position of the capitalist class itself.
