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| Left should learn that workers love the monarch, The Australian, 8 June 2012 |
| By Dennis Glover, Per Capita Research Fellow | |
Here's a fact everyone in the Labor Party knows but probably doesn't want to explore too deeply in this the week of the Queen's diamond jubilee: Labor's base loves the royal family.
My mother, who spent all her working life on the factory floor as a paid-up member of some of the most radical unions in the nation, is possibly the Queen's greatest admirer, with the exception, that is, of my sisters. And the long-term bad news for Labor's republicans is that they seem to like Prince William even more.
Why is this? No doubt it has a lot to do with the cult of celebrity and the fact the English royals have a AAA-list social rating; but to write-off this attachment to the Windsors as a form of false-consciousness peddled by the reactionary owners of glossy magazines is dangerously anti-democratic. Let me offer a different explanation.
Popular attachment to the royal family has a lot to do with appreciation of their service to society, a value the Left can endorse. Yes, the Windsors are wealthy, but compared with the Wall Street bankers whose reckless greed has plunged the world into recession they are positively middle class and magnificently public spirited - everything the mining tycoons at war with Wayne Swan are not.
And this points us at one of the most important contemporary justifications we have of monarchy: the idea of the crown as the fall-back guarantor of the welfare of its subjects against a political class that's got just a little too cosy with the economic elite.
Today, in an era of democratic citizenship, the sorts of protections a monarch can offer are mostly symbolic; even so, their moral example has never been more needed than now.
At first glance, this idea of monarchy working for the Left seems absurd. After all, the hereditary principle is offensive to the very idea of democracy. But history suggests this is not necessarily so. Those who think that monarchy is a potential bayonet in the back of a radical Labor government should consider the history of the most reforming left-wing administration the English-speaking world has seen: that of Clement Attlee.
Between 1945 and 1951, Attlee's government nationalised the commanding heights of the British economy, built the modern welfare state, and redistributed wealth as never before or since - all without the Queen's father, King George VI, lifting so much as a finger to stop them. In 1940, George Orwell wrote that if as a result of World War II Britain became a socialist country it would be one in which the rights of the individual, the rule of law, the sovereignty of the parliament and the popularity of the royal family would remain intact. Orwell was proven correct.
Here, it seems to me, is the ultimate left-wing defence of our Constitution. By knocking our head of state out of the political contest, it becomes potentially much easier for a sovereign parliament with a left-wing majority to implement a radical social and economic program free from the threat of a conservative constitutional veto. If you think left-wing reform of this type is a spent force, have a look at the state of the world economy, think about what's happening elsewhere, and tell me if you're still so confident.
Now ask yourself: could you trust a president appointed on the recommendation of someone like Tony Abbott standing by, as the Queen's father did, and doing nothing in Australia's current tight economic and political situation, in which a Keynesian-minded Labor government with a slim majority is bravely taking on the big end of town? More to the point, could you trust an elected president who hailed from today's aggressive ideological Right to remain neutral in the same way? Tradition here is the Left's friend.
And here's another consideration: who would likely replace the Windsors as our head of state should we become a republic? I think we know: appointed or elected, it would be someone wealthy and well-connected, perhaps even some mouthy mining magnate, bored with litigation and looking for a new hobby, like politics, for instance.
One thing is clear; whoever our first president is, he or she is less likely to stay out of politics and set a better example of selfless duty to the entire community than the current incumbent.
This argument of mine will no doubt be dismissed as another example of "conservative socialism" imported from Britain, and in some ways it is; but it's conservative only in the strictest constitutional sense. You might notice that the most vociferous republicans on the Labor side tend to be from the party's Right.
There's a lot of chippy Sydney history involved, obviously, but I believe this republican posing actually works to blunt the radicalism of Labor's social and economic credentials. After all, even the strongest believer in the philosophies of Friedrich Hayek can impress a Labor national conference by standing up occasionally and calling for a new republican referendum before the decade is out.
In an age of rising inequalities of wealth and power, driven by the rise of an aggressive neo-conservative ideology and the triumph of a new global plutocracy, the Left would be crazy to hand over the ultimate fall-back power in the state potentially to one of its sworn enemies. A monarch who would be unlikely to ever stand in the way of a future left-wing Labor government is far preferable to a president who almost certainly would.
In some ways it pains me to say it, but if Labor's base is telling it that it loves the royal family perhaps the party should listen.
You don't have to be an arch monarchist - I am not - to see that in the current climate the best, most democratic and ultimately most radical reformist course for Labor to take could very well be to leave the party's dreams of an Australian head of state to more propitious times.
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