Though Cowards Flinch

I’ve always enjoyed the bon-mots of Winston Churchill. The announcement in the press during the week that we may be introducing oaths of loyalty to the monarchy for school leavers reminded me of one.

“The monarchy is so extraordinarily useful. When Britain wins a battle she shouts, “God save the Queen”; when she loses, she votes down the Prime Minister.”

Whilst overtly very witty, I suppose Churchill makes a rather astute point; the monarchy at one point took the credit for everything that went well, and deferred the blame for things that went wrong to the government of the day.

Politics is different today of course. I can’t help but think that Winston might have enjoyed Brecht’s bitter point about the Stalinist government being dissatisfied with the people, dissolving them and electing another.

He may perhaps, in this age of Royals parading drunk in Nazi uniforms, divorce, affairs, adultery, have wished to dissolve the royal family and choose a more appropriate moral model for the nation.

Against this background it is, of all things, a Labour government and a former Labour attorney general who has advised that school leavers be asked to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen. The reason? To solidify what British citizenship means.

More and more it is becoming apparent that we have utterly lost our way as a Party. We may as well have returned to the days of Ramsay MacDonald and his ministers parading in robes to the palace to meet the King, stumbling over their own nervousness.

Next we’ll be re-introducing the mandatory tugging of forelocks.

Not to put an unnecessarily teleological strain on our history, but the evolution of democracy through the centuries – from Oliver Cromwell to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – has been to develop the individuals interpretation of what it is to be a citizen.

The abolition of feudal dues, the devaluation of positions passed down by birth and so on have all been a reaction against the inbred sots who seemed to so consistently wind up at the top of the pile, ringed by their sycophantic minions.

With all that in mind, what the hell is our government doing with the authoritarian imposition of this arbitrarily defined concept of citizenship. It has entered the curriculum; immigrants have to take an oath already; now we’re expanding it to school children.

I have a new idea; so long as we have a monarchy, they have to swear an oath of allegiance to the British people. If they fail in their supposed moral duty, their punishment will be to be marooned on the same island on which they film “I’m a Celebrity, Get me out of here” and visited only to deliver food.

To these intellectually stunted advocates of an anachronistic Royalism I have to ask: what has the Royal Family done to earn your respect? Mrs Windsor would be more worthy of respect had she worked for thirty five years as a teacher to collect a lousy pension. It’s time to pull the silver spoon out of the ass of the Royal Family.