by Daniel Jupp
I’m not one of those people who think the British Royal Family secretly control the world. They can’t even stop the media revealing their tampon fantasies. They can’t stop gold digging lunatics like Diana and Meghan doing enormous damage to their reputation.
They are so powerless that Prince Andrew becomes just about the only person to attend an Epstein party that everyone knows about.
I think they do, despite the stupidities of individual members, a great deal of good as an institution. They prevent an additional layer of politicians, and that alone is a national service of great value. Much of their activity is worthy in the way that mind numbingly tedious small acts of kindness are worthy.
I wouldn’t want to open a supermarket in Doncaster or host the Charity Raffle for the British Foundation for Skin Diseases. But they do. And it’s good that somebody does.
I’m a Royalist because I don’t think you can be a serious conservative without wanting to preserve the living embodiment of more than one and a half thousand years of British history.
The present Queen, for example, is directly descended from King Ine of Wessex. That’s a recorded lineage that literally goes back into near the misty origins of Englishness itself. Ine claimed descent from Anglo-Saxon gods. Other than the U.K. and Japan, how many nations have symbolic leaders who can claim a personal link to mythology? If you don’t think that’s cool, there’s something wrong with you.
That’s not to say I consider the present Queen’s reign a glorious one. It’s the opposite. It is 70 years of almost continual national decline, including the death of nearly every British value she herself possesses. Those 70 years have seen only two British Prime Ministers who were both loyal and good. Only two who were competent at anything other than corruption and self-enrichment. The rest were all fools, crooks, charlatans and mountebanks, if not active and determined traitors. And we are where we are because of that.
The present Queen chose to preserve the institution via neutrality. She would say or do nothing in contradiction of her ministers. The Royal power, already shrivelled to almost nothing, became a sword that never leaves the scabbard. Quietly, diligently, with great personal sacrifice and warmth, she did the little things, the charitable things, the things which nobody could question. But this in fact robbed the British people of their last line of defence. Every institution and every Parliament turned to crime, the crime of treason, while the Monarchy watched, and watched, and watched.
She might not have been able to change a thing. She might not have been able to preserve the old verities and values, or steer by prodding her governments towards something other than the charted route of constant decline. But the stasis of her reign meant that no attempt was ever made. She was perhaps a shrewd monarch, sensing the end would come if she ever did stir. But how we needed a more active champion, above the stinking garbage offered by our main political parties, in those seven decades. For seventy years she played the role of a prisoner in golden robes whilst her Kingdom was robbed blind.
PMs-do you mean Churchill and Thatcher? I wonder what difference it would have made if she had run the country.
Countries don’t need to be ‘run’ by anybody and in fact cannot be run from the top down. Any attempt to govern over and against the wishes of the individuals who make up ‘society’ is ultimately futile. This is fundamental to any understanding of libertarianism.
I think she has done a great job for the country and has saved us from having a series of political buffoons as head of state.
What in the name of liberty is this doing on a so-called Misesian publication, under the banner of ‘libertarianism’, for added insult? Pretty much every living European is a direct descendant of King Charlemagne… so what?
Rothbard – the original founder of the actual Mises Institute in Alabama and the entire modern libertarian movement – was clear that we libertarians are not conservatives, no matter how much or how little we agree on cultural and political matters.
Because this is a publication open to a diversity of viewpoints. It is even open to you.
I’m a direct descendent of King Charlemagne? Does this mean I can start calling myself Prince Thomas? Or King, perhaps?
King Thomas I has a certain force to it. I think on the first day of my reign, I will pardon all leading members of the English Nationalist-Libertarian Revolutionary Command Council, I will proclaim that the libertarian-reactionary-conservative dispensation has been inaugurated, and I will order the prosecution of the entire New Class. Naturally, Dr. Gabb will be appointed as Lord Protector of the Realm and put in charge of it all.
Elizabeth II was a terrible monarch who put her own comfort before the interests of native British people, who she was supposed to serve. Perhaps she thought that her non-interventionist approach was best for preserving the monarchy in the long run, but what is the use of that if – as very nearly occurred – Britain were to become a federal European state. She would be demoted to princeling of a statelet, rather like one of the hereditary rulers of the old German confederate states, and she would relegate her own people in their own native homeland.
I am glad she is dead. Only in a pretentious, fake, sentimental culture such as ours could she receive eulogies to her public memory, rather than the obloquy her neglectful reign deserves.
Let us consider briefly what she could have done differently. Everybody assumed she was powerless, but that was never true. To use a chessic analogy, the Monarch is a king piece: i.e. a placeholder who moves slowly and is vulnerable, but is able to act as a block of last resort. Her duty was to speak up, in private at first, then publicly. Doing so might not have affected things greatly in the short term, but would have been a source of encouragement and legitimation for those of dissenting opinion. She did not even try. She could have gone ‘nuclear’ and triggered a constitutional crisis by refusing assent to the European Communities Bills of 1972 and 1992. Who’s to say this would have brought her down? Certainly in 1972, there was serious opposition to Britain’s accession into the EEC.