Anyway, the pageant failed to melt my crusty republican heart where argument had failed before. It's not that it's a big issue for me - after all, in a lot of ways, the Royals are just puppets. If a genie came along and allowed me to wish for three things that would change the world for the better, abolishing our constitutional monarchy wouldn't be anything like important enough to consider. In fact, it wouldn't make my top 50 issues and it's quite possible that I could get to 100 and still find more important things to worry about. It's just that nobody has ever come up with a more compelling case for our monarchy than inertia - it's what we've got and there are plenty of other issues more pressing than coming up with an alternative.
Still, I resent being a subject, rather than a citizen, the pomp and circumstance leaves me cold, (or, at best, tepid), I'm tired of hearing Prince Charles' nonsensical opinions being given the oxygen of publicity, just because of who his parents are, and it's hard to square any notion of either meritocracy or some degree of fairness and equality with the bizarre fact that his mum is the legal owner of about 6,600 million acres of land, (one sixth of the planet’s land surface).
A lot of the arguments in favour of the monarchy are pretty feeble. 'The country needs a symbolic figurehead who's above politics' insist monarchists. I'm not convinced that we need national symbols half as much as some people believe. If this country is a good place to live, the feeling of belonging and the symbols will take care of themselves; if it's not, the important thing is to tackle the causes of misery, rather than fretting about flag-waving distractions.
The other favourite one is 'if you abolished the monarchy you'd be left with President [insert name of unpopular ex -prime minister].' If you really wanted to have a figurehead president, (preferably elected for a fixed term) there are any number of constitutional ways you could separate the presidential career path from the prime ministerial one - if we had an elected upper chamber, for example, presidents might be elected from there, rather than from the Commons, with former PMs and party leaders barred from standing for President for, say, ten years.
The Presidential powers could be so limited that they'd have no attraction for ambitious politicians. Or, if you wanted to exclude party politicians altogether and there was still a national honours system, maybe the pool of potential presidents would be people who'd been awarded non-political OBEs, CBEs or equivalents for services to something worthwhile.
I did come across a more convincing argument for a constitutional monarchy recently. It didn't convince me completely, but it's a lot more appealing than the usual ones. It goes like this:
Look at the top ten countries in the UN’s Human Development Index (which takes into account life expectancy, education levels and standards of living). Seven out of the ten are monarchies.
The OECD has a Subjective Well Being index (an attempt to measure life satisfaction the presence of positive experiences and feelings). Eight of the top ten countires on this index are monarchies.
According to Euromoney, out of the top ten safest countries in terms of financial risk, seven are monarchies.
Given that monarchy and equality would seem to go together like steak and kidney pudding and custard, it's surprising to see that half of the top ten most equal societies according the OECD's Gini Coeffieicents are monarchies.
These are some of the the reasons why Rick at Flip Chart Fairy Tales isn't a Republican and he's got more figures on global competitiveness, labour productivity and social mobility to back up his position.
I'm not wholly convinced; the UK's monarchy doesn't put it in the top ten on any of the lists and, although he tackles the 'correlation isn't the same as causation' objection, I don't think that the good showing by countries that happen to be constitutional monarchies is much more than a historical accident. After all, rule by monarchs has been the norm for most societies for most of history. The fact that many of the world's best places to live retain remnants of this history is interesting, but no more significant than the fact that I've still got an appendix that's a vestige of the organ my remote evolutionary ancestors used to digest cellulose.
Still, it's better than most pro-monarchy arguments and chimes with my instinct that monarchy, although in principle indefensible, doesn't need urgent abolition. I'd like to see the back of the Windsors, but I'd settle for a slimmed-down bicycling monarchy on Scandinavian or Dutch lines. After all, despite the decline of the British manufacturing industry, this country still boasts a major cycle manufacturer (even if they've outsourced their manufacturing). I'd be a bit more enthusiastic about a less extravagant, non-land-hogging, quirky, human-scale monarchy, with the monarch and consort pedalling about on Sir Walter, the Raleigh State Tandem.
Image courtesy of Gerard Stolk's and williamcromar's Flikr streams
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