50 Years Ago: Rubbish about royalty (2025)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The name which has become well known for attacking royalty is the Labour MP William Hamilton. That is a piece of good luck for the journalists and commentators. Hamilton is an earnest nonentity; so the press can have the luxury of criticizing the extravagance and forelock-touching and the secrecy over the Queen’s wealth, and at the same time disparaging Hamilton. He is reported in various papers as saying he does not want actually to abolish royalty.

“The object of my book is not to destroy the Monarchy” (News of the World).

“Sack the lot except the Queen, her husband and Charles. Pay them properly taxed salaries and take over the two Duchies” (Guardian).

Does it matter? Hardly at all. Hamilton gave his case away in a TV interview on 31st January. Explaining the origin of his hostility to royalty, he recalled his father’s wage as a miner between the wars — £2 a week — and went on: “And it is still the same today, there are the rich and the poor.” Yes, it is. One has to ask if he seriously thinks, then, that putting down the royals would alter it? And, if this is still the position after the voluminous Labour reforms for which he has worked, why has he not thought of working for Socialism instead?

But there is an opposite fallacy which should be mentioned too. It is the idea that a surge of resentment of the sheer plutocracy the Queen represents is an indication that the working class are up in arms against the system. Unfortunately, no. The fact is that royalty’s popularity has always had ups and downs. (…)

… [T]he alternative to monarchy could be a dictator, or a Nixon. Looked at from another point of view, this brings us to the truth. Are things any different for the working class in the countries where they have no monarchy? Manifestly they are not. The class division of which royalty is a tiny, if spectacularly absurd, part exists just the same. The great majority spend their lives struggling to make wage-labour’s ends meet, and other people with other titles lap up the fat of the land.

[From the article, Rubbish about Royalty by Robert Barltrop, Socialist Standard, March 1975]

So They Say: Ungrateful Lot (1976)

The So They Say Column from the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ungrateful Lot

Much play has been made recently by both Labour and Conservative! groups on their various schemes to allow Council tenants to purchase the properties they occupy. The Southwark Community Development Project and the Joint Docklands Action Group of Newington decided to conduct a survey to discover the appeal of such schemes to those concerned, and came up with the conclusion that “few are interested in buying a typical council flat.” The report in The Times of 29th June seemed to have regarded the findings as something of a foregone conclusion. It argued:

While new houses with gardens on suburban estates or in new towns, for example, would attract ready buyers flats in inner city tower blocks would have little or no appeal.

While surveys like this never cease to amaze us, it shows just, how unreasonable workers can be. Who else but the members of the working class would express disapproval at the prospect of spending their lives, and paying for the privilege at that, packed together well above ground level in noisy and uncomfortable cells of concrete (often, as in the case of Ronan Point, with no visible means of support, or lifts—even if installed), albeit with magnificent views over the previously erected low-rise slums? Come to that, who else but the workers would be offered such a glorious opportunity to join "the property owning democracy”?

O Brother!

"We should not destroy or split or seek to destroy in any way the Labour Government” said Mr. Benn on the 4th July, and no doubt the Labour government gave three cheers for Benn and said "Amen”. He was speaking at the Institute for Workers’ Control in Keele University, in his capacity as Labour’s Energy Secretary, when he also revealed to his audience the information that capitalism was in "irreversible decline.” We do not know if he was standing on his head at the time.

Now we who advocate the abolition of the capitalist system were naturally agog with excitement at a “leak” of this magnitude. Was there to be a surprise announcement from the government? We scanned the newspapers. Yes, there was an announcement from Healey. No, it was not a surprise—except perhaps for his fellow minister Benn.

Britain would be one of the few countries which could look forward to a rapid recovery over the next 18

months . . .

The Times, 7th July 1976

Followed presumably by three more cheers and back-slapping. Considering that both these men are “united” in a political party which expresses the view that a system of exploitation is the only one to which workers are entitled, and capable apparently of both declining and recovering at the same time, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that were they to pool their respective talents and issue a joint statement, it would prove twice as ignorant as either of their individual efforts.

Sir Willie?

The fanaticism with which William Hamilton attacks the Royal Family appeared to have abated somewhat when he voiced “concern” over a motion from other Labour MPs—themselves expressing “surprise” over the Queen’s purchase of Gatcombe Park for her well- breeched offspring Princess Anne. The price was reported in the Daily Telegraph of 12th June as £500,000. No, No, said the microscopically-minded Hamilton, the Monarch should spend her money as she saw fit. What was wrong was that “the Royal wealth which makes such expenditure possible has been due to the failure of successive governments to tax that wealth in the same way as that of all other citizens.”

Can it be that he is angling for something? Considering his immense publicity services to the Crown, he must surely be deserving of some appropriate medal or title. This would be no more than he deserves. We note incidentally that in the Register of MPs’ Interests, he gives one source of income under the appropriate heading of “royalties”—a reference to the money from his literary masterpiece on the Royal Family. While he, and others, spend so much of their time and effort in expressing a petty outrage at the size of the molehills, they have missed the mountains—capitalism rumbles on. But then Labour MPs could hardly be expected to think about anything as fundamental as that.

What could be fairer ?

It is usually the practice, after being led up the garden path by one man, to find at the end of it another who then exhibits a bag from which he releases a cat. Although capable of fulfilling both rôles, Eric Varley, Secretary of State for Industry, has been releasing the cat.

The dictionary definition of a scientist is given as: “A person learned in one or more of the natural sciences” and science as: “Systematic and formulated knowledge.” Now Mr. Varley has not so much altered the definition, but put it into perspective! within the context of capitalism—where, like all other members of the working class, scientists must live by selling their mental and physical energy to the ruling class. He was bemoaning the fact that “to be a technologist or a manager in industry is considered to be a pretty lousy job” and from this erudite premise, drew the conclusion that potential but reluctant scientists just did not know what they were missing:

Qualified scientists and engineers, although numerically a small category, have a particularly significant role. They have the innovative capacity to generate and translate the technology into competitive and saleable products and the responsibility for managing the production processes.

Daily Telegraph, 7th July 76

A significant role therefore, not in an abstract sense of the pursuit of Knowledge, but in the real economic field where the owning class is in pursuit of something else, the accumulation of capital.

Class Distinction

“More than 1000 London dockers, who are being paid £57 a week for doing nothing, at a cost to the Port of London of between £6 million and £7 million a year, are ‘moonlighting’ to double their earnings”, reported the Daily Telegraph of 30th June. “A scandal” is their description. They do however concede that the men, on average 1,250, do no work for the reason that there is often no work for them to do. The men are protected, however, under the National Dock Labour Scheme from sacking on this ground alone, and even the inducement of a £5,250 “golden handshake” to accept redundancy has failed to shift them. Considering the apparently universal exhortations from the press for workers to pull out their respective fingers and earn themselves a living, we would have thought that the taking of a second job would have merited praise. Apparently not, so “a scandal” it remains.

Surprising then to note that the moral indignation of the Telegraph respectfully faded to nothing when it reported on the twelve, no doubt “just”, women whom Paul Getty “richly remembered in his Will” (10th June 76). Among others they noted that Lady Ursula D’abo, sister of the Duke of Rutland, was to receive 1000 of his shares, worth £93,361, and how she was duly “surprised by the gift. The shares will remain in Getty Oil until I die, as he would have wished.”

All highly commendable; no mention here of a “scandal.” No mention, incidentally, of what happen to the share dividends either—we refer to the large cheque which drops through the letter box from time to time. Work for a living? My dear, who do you think opens the envelope!

Idle-ized

Who was Eric Singer? If you never heard of him— Snap! But on 30th June The Times published an obituary of him. What were his achievements? Take note.

According to the article, he was “an early, though later disenchanted” member of the German Communist Party. In Britain he became “a planning consultant”. To illuminate that, he was able to do his day’s work “before most people had roused themselves from their beds”, which clearly means it was a very small day’s work. What did he do after the rest got up? “He left behind an uncompleted book on inflation and an unpublished work on architecture.” He spent the war “at the roulette tables in Lisbon”, and became “a purveyor of gallantries to ladies, snuff and gossip to men”. “He greeted each day with his freshly-plucked button-hole, his stick and his joie de vivre”.

This reminds us strongly of Fred Bloggs. In his teens Fred joined the Balls Pond Road Libertarian Society, resigning when he discovered he had mistaken its name for “Libertine”. He was widely known in all four corners of the betting shop, while his élan and the je ne sais quoi with which he rolled a Nosegay cigarette made him a favourite of barmaids everywhere. He always alluded to his lifelong redundancy with the characteristic epigram: “Never done a stroke and don’t intend to, mate.”

What a curious world where a man is praised for having had political delusions and spending his life as a fashionable idler.

Alan D'Arcy

Rubbish about Royalty (1975)

From the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the more risible sights of capitalism is when its politicians and journalists think they must appear to be down on unfair stakes. The crisis does it, of course. Here is the Man in the Street, and they have nothing to offer him but unemployment, cuts, shortages and rising prices; and there are the Very Rich, rolling in luxury as ever. In ordinary times the vulgar opulence is the fun of the fair and Our National Heritage, but in times like these it is an inconvenience. So out come the false noses and falsetto imitations, and across the stage they go.

On this occasion it centres on royalty. The Queen has a private income which is secret but estimated (The Guardian London Letter, 28th January) to be £300,000 a year. From the Government she gets £980,000 a year, and on 12th February the Prime Minister almost brought apoplexy on some Labour MPs by announcing that she wanted another £270,000 and proposing to give it to her. A tribe of her relatives and hangers-on exist on the Civil List of government allowances. Prince Charles has £105,000 a year, Princess Anne £35,000, and the young princes Andrew and Edward £20,000 each. The Sunday Mirror on 26th January told us about the Queen’s Hereditary Champion, the Master of the Horse, the Keeper of the Swans and:

Enough Brigadiers, Admirals and Air Marshals, equerries to mount a blitzkreig; a smothering of Mistresses of the Robes, Ladies of the Bedchamber — ho! ho! — Ushers with, and without, Sword, Sergeants at Arms, Constables, clergy with powers of bell, book and candle — apothecaries with vials of goodness knows what!

There are three “official” royal residences besides Buckingham Palace: Windsor Castle, Balmoral and

Sandringham House. (The last, according to the London Evening News on 6th February, has 274 rooms.) In addition there are the racehorses and limousines and the Royal Yacht, which was attacked scathingly in The Sun on 27th January:

She sails endlessly round the world at a cost of £7,700 a week, stopping off occasionally to pick up this or that royal couple for a dream honeymoon . . . When her royal hull was noticed to be less than gleaming, 80 gallons of exclusive royal blue paint were flown from Portsmouth to New Zealand by commercial jet at a cost to the public of £2,180 . . . Her fuel bill, alone, makes nonsense of the oil crisis. While British motorists are confined to 50 mph to conserve the odd gallon. Britannia bums her way through a ton of oil every seven miles.

Veblen with his theory of “conspicuous wasteful consumption” as the apotheosis of class societies would have loved that. It sounds like the crazy pomp of a barbarian super-chieftain; and that is its genealogy.

However, the details are no more offensive than the criticisms of them now being made for public consumption. Royalty has to be surrounded by servility. In R.H.S. Crossman’s diaries published in the Sunday Times, the former Labour minister described the ritual of induction to the Privy Council:

. . . the “fantastic ritual” of rehearsals. He recalled that for over an hour “16 grown men” were taught to stand, kneel on a cushion, raise the right hand holding the Bible and advance three paces to kiss the Queen’s hand.
Of the Queen, Mr. Crossman wrote: “In our ten minutes she talked, as I am told she always does, about her corgies. Two fat corgies, roughly the same colour as the carpet, were lying at her feet. She remarked how often people fell over the dogs . . .

It may all be a printing error, of course. Perhaps it was some corgi dogs which were being trained to sit up and beg and lick their mistress’s hand, and a couple of putty-coloured Labour MPs that were lying on the carpet. But, assuming the scarcely-believable to be true, there is something Crossman’s diaries do not tell us. If it was so pathetically degrading, why was he in it?

There are also the comic sop-gestures which if they were imitated in everyday life would not deceive a child, but are intended to persuade the working class of something or other. The Evening News big headline on 6th February was: The Queen tightens her belt. What was the dour, austere step taken? A plan for improvements at Sandringham House, which was to have cost £250,000, has been postponed as “inappropriate when many face difficulties.” The Queen will keep the money in her pocket instead. Noblesse oblige.

The name which has become well known for attacking royalty is the Labour MP William Hamilton. That is a piece of good luck for the journalists and commentators. Hamilton is an earnestly nonentity; so the press can have the luxury of criticizing the extravagance and forelock-touching and the secrecy over the Queen’s wealth, and at the same time disparaging Hamilton. He is reported in various papers as saying he does not want actually to abolish royalty.

The object of my book is not to destroy the Monarchy.

(News of the World) 

Sack the lot except the Queen, her husband and Charles. Pay them properly taxed salaries and take over the two Duchies.

(Guardian)

Does it matter? Hardly at all. Hamilton gave his case away in a TV interview on 31st January. Explaining the origin of his hostility to royalty, he recalled his father’s wage as a miner between the wars — £2 a week — and went on: “And it is still the same today, there are the rich and the poor.” Yes, it is. One has to ask if he seriously thinks, then, that putting down the royals would alter it? And, if this is still the position after the voluminous Labour reforms for which he has worked, why has he not thought of working for Socialism instead?

But there is an opposite fallacy which should be mentioned too. It is the idea that a surge of resentment of the sheer plutocracy the Queen represents in an indication that the working class are up in arms against the system. Unfortunately, no. The fact is that royalty’s popularity has always had ups and downs. Indeed, it was never widely popular until the nineteen-thirties, when a number of factors turned feelings in its favour. In particular, the British monarch was practically the only European head of state whose speeches were not warlike harangues (the reason being that he had and has no powers in that direction).

The same sentiment probably remains today, despite the criticism: the alternative to monarchy could be a dictator, or a Nixon. Looked at from another point of view, this brings us to the truth. Are things any different for the working class in the countries where they have no monarchy? Manifestly they are not. The class division of which royalty is a tiny, if spectacularly absurd, part exists just the same. The great majority spend their lives struggling to make wage-labour’s ends meet, and other people with other titles lap up the fat of the land.

One other reason why many of the working class don’t mind royalty too much is that it gives them pageantry and a show. That should not be dismissed. We all need colour and variety in life: and the fact that large numbers of people get them from a royal wedding every few years and from distantly viewing other splendours is a testimony to the meanness of life under capitalism — another kind of poverty. Establishing Socialism does not mean simply getting rid of parasites; it is the opening of the doors to living.

Robert Barltrop