Time to abolish the Queen of the Kleptocracy

The Paradise Papers showed that the Duchy of Lancaster, which manages investments for the Queen’s £520m private estate, invested around £10m in the Cayman Islands and Bermuda-based funds. It also showed that the Queen holds investments in businesses including BrightHouse, which has been accused of exploiting people with mental health problems and learning disabilities in order to sell its products.

Where was the outrage? Jeremy Corbyn made some noise then quickly ‘rowed back’ under whispering orders that “that’s not the done thing”. The BBC rolled out their most obsequious Royal Correspondent who explained that the whole thing had been “an embarrassment” and the entire media circled the wagons and stuck to the script.

The attempt to separate the Queen from “her advisors” can’t be allowed to stand. The Duchy of Lancaster is a private estate managed specifically to generate a return for the reigning monarch. That is its sole purpose.

It was set up in 1399 and manages investments held in trust for the Queen. The most recent filings show it had assets worth £519m as of March 2017.

Only astonishing levels of fealty and patriotic self-delusion allow this to be maintained.

Remember when Diana died and the country went into meltdown because of the way the Queen responded (or something). Blair talked of the “People’s Princess” and Elton John sang a Candle in the Wind and everyone cried for weeks? Imagine if people actually responded now with just a fraction of the same emotional intensity to these revelations?

As James Connolly once famously noted: "A people mentally poisoned by adulation of royalty can never attain to that spirit of self-reliant democracy."

But as Brexit initiates further economic breakdown and the political class falter under the strain of their own bewildering self-induced shambles, the role of a unifying “non-political” figure like the Queen will become more, not less important. And if it turns out that she is as corrupt as the rest of them, this is a problem. The poison will need to be administered in heavier doses.

As the Scottish academic Tom Nairn has written: “Each new lapse or misfortune is accompanied by exaggerated flag-waving and over-rehearsed adulation.”

In times of stress and crisis, people cling to traditions and familiarity, hence the Keep Calm and Carry On meme, Moggmentum and the suggestion, apparently serious, that the government should commission a £100 million new royal yacht to replace Britannia. The original is of course currently being used to sell high-end chintz in Leith.

If part of the problem is a sort of clawing unquestioning deference, the other is the PR and image-making that surrounds the Queen herself.

She’s frequently portrayed as a kindly old woman who lives in a big house and likes gin and corgis. She’s famously hard-working and thrifty. People like her. People love her. She says virtually nothing, ever.

But this scandal won’t go away and is a reminder of Britain’s dark past. As the author and investigative journalist Kevin Cahill has pointed out, wealth is about land: “The world's primary feudal landowner is Queen Elizabeth II. She is Queen of 32 countries, head of a Commonwealth of 54 countries in which a quarter of the world's population lives, and legal owner of about 6.6 billion acres of land, one-sixth of the earth's land surface. Her position is a relic of the last and largest land empire in history, rumours of whose demise would appear to be somewhat premature based on her position and possessions. But her power is real, or at least legally real, and it derives from a tradition based on a specific and unbalanced relationship between rulers and the ruled.”

Of the world's 24 largest tax havens, the Queen is sovereign of no fewer than 13. She is the Queen of a Kleptocracy.

Despite all of the patter about thrift and the endless media puff-pieces, Harry pleading that he didn’t really want to be a Prince - the reality is that her income is rocketing.

Last year it was disclosed that Her Majesty received a record £19.2m from the Duchy of Lancaster in 2016-17, up 7.9% on last year’s profits. Revenue from the Duchy (that has for the last eight centuries has provided a private income to the monarch) has trebled since the millennium. It begs the question if the Queen could get by on £5.8m in 2000, why does she need almost £20m today?

In the face of ongoing crisis and the potential collapse of elite rule, this sort of lifestyle may not be tenable. I don’t think voluntary litter collection campaigns like ‘Clean for the Queen’ are going to work when food prices are through the roof and poverty is endemic in post-Brexit Britain.

‘The Austerity Generation: the impact of a decade of cuts on family incomes and child poverty’ – a new report by the Child Poverty Action Group published this week tells us that the cuts to Universal Credit will put 1,000,000 children in poverty and 900,000 in severe poverty by the end of the decade. An Oxford University report into food bank users found people were experiencing multiple forms of destitution - 50% had gone without heating for more than four days in the past 12 months, 50% couldn’t afford toiletries, and 1 in 5 had slept rough in the last 12 months. Over 78% of households were severely, and often chronically, food insecure.

It’s important to have that context while discussing the effects of tax evasion. It’s difficult to underestimate the scale of the crisis we are in and are entering.

Crisis after crisis and scandal pile on daily until it is just a blur. Writing in the New York Times, Steven Erlanger suggests that “No-one knows what Britain is Anymore”.

He writes “Britain is undergoing a full-blown identity crisis". It is a “hollowed-out country”, “ill at ease with itself”, “deeply provincial” - engaged in a “controlled suicide.”

He continues: “But Britain is now but a modest-size ship on the global ocean. Having voted to leave the European Union, it is unmoored, heading to nowhere, while on deck, fire has broken out and the captain — poor Theresa May — is lashed to the mast, without the authority to decide whether to turn to port or to starboard.”

Another newspaper columnist Suzanne Moore is no less brutal: “Trust in our institutions is collapsing before our eyes. The Paradise Papers reveal the monarchy to be tax-avoiding hypocrites. Really? Who knew? At a certain level of wealth, many simply opt out of the social contract – for that is how taxation functions – and operate according to a model that says there is no such thing as society. Huge corporations do it. Sitcom stars do it. The idea that this government can regulate this seems far away, because it is in such disrepair itself. The promise is that a Labour government can. Certainly it is becoming hard to imagine anything more shambolic and, indeed, venal than the current shower. Yet it seems deeper than this. As a nation, we have become essentially ungovernable, in ways that no one wants to admit.”

She concludes: “London remains free-floating, its own country with its own financial institutions. Scotland is remain, England is leave. Things are breaking up.”

I think Moore is quite wrong to say we have become ungovernable, that remains an aspiration. And the problem is not that “no-one knows what Britain is anymore”. The problem is that people know exactly what Britain is, and have done for some time.

During the Scottish referendum it was a striking recurring phenomenon that pro-Union voices really struggled to articulate a future-focused vision of Britain. Almost all of the appeals to unity and common interest were from history.

In times of crisis in the past, the Royal family have been used as a totemic unifying force. Whether it be war propaganda to keep up morale or a sop in the 1980s to distract from poverty and mass unemployment, their function was clear.

What the Panama Papers reveal is that they are part of the crisis not a friendly distraction from it. The Diana Cult is still going strong but the continuity of the monarchy may shudder and falter under the stress of post-Brexit economic chaos.

Writing online at Bella Caledonia, Ruth Patrick, author of ‘For whose benefit? The everyday realities of welfare reform’, reports on the flimsy assumptions, that form benefit sanctions. She writes: “These include the idea that people on benefits need the threat of sanctions to ‘incentivise’ transitions into work (when in fact claimants most often want to engage in paid employment, where it is a realistic option) and the assumption that the ‘problem’ of unemployment lies at the individual rather than the structural level.”

In a haunting section she writes: “For the participants in my study, sanctions often meant that individuals were busy looking for food rather than work, or ended up so hungry and physically emaciated that they were quickly discounted as unemployable by prospective employers. Further, the negative impact sanctions – and their threat – had on individuals’ mental health and self-confidence also affected participants’ ‘work readiness’.”

In the context of such degrading activity it is difficult to see how the tax-dodging super-rich can survive the backlash. There must be a psychological limit to the docile quietism that allows this. It is not that there will be an uprising - but if a state fails to protect its people from economic predation and governs through a sort of Kafkaesque system of bureaucratic punishment, resentment cannot be suppressed through Royalism. The entire system, from the unelected Lords, to the Commons, creaking and groaning under the weight of sexual harassment scandals, authority is haemorrhaging credibility.

Republicanism may yet re-appear on a wave of economic failure and ostentatiously stupid political manoeuvrings. We will have to just suffer the side-splitting irony if this comes about as a result of an explosion of Anglo-British nationalism.

There are three elements that have held the monarchy in place: an implacable personality, serene and silent; a Union at ease with itself and unifying around symbols and bling; and a deep sense of deference. When the Queen dies each of these elements will have slipped away.

Facing the very real fear of self-induced economic carnage Anglo-Britain is now in convulsions over its identity and daily spouting huge hilarious whopping lies in a desperate effort to justify and re-invent itself. It’s Panic History, but it’s very difficult indeed to retrofit the past to the grand vision of Paul Nuttal and Dr Liam Fox.

We live in the remnants of a feudal state. The challenge more than ever is to move from being passive British subjects to becoming active Scottish citizens. You can’t do that under a monarchy. We need a republic now.

Mike Small is the editor of the website Bella Caledonia