Isla Campbell works through the constitutional case, the economic case, the cultural case, and the ‘but what would we do instead’ case, and ends up where most honest people end up on this question
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
I have been trying, in the spirit of genuine intellectual engagement rather than the spirit of reaching a conclusion that confirms what I already think, to work out whether Britain actually needs a monarchy. I have been doing this for three weeks and I want to report that the process has been interesting, occasionally illuminating, and ultimately has brought me to the exact same position of constitutional uncertainty from which I started, which I present not as a failure of analysis but as an honest account of what careful thinking about this question produces if you are determined not to simply land where your priors point.
The Constitutional Case
Britain’s constitutional arrangements are unusual in ways that matter for the monarchy question. The UK lacks a codified constitution, which means that the monarchy is not defined by a document whose clauses specify its powers and their limits. What the monarch can and cannot do is a mixture of statute, convention, and precedent that has accumulated over centuries and is genuinely complex enough that constitutional lawyers disagree about it in specific cases. The King’s reserve powers — the ability to refuse royal assent to legislation, to dismiss a Prime Minister, to dissolve Parliament in extremis — have not been exercised in modern times but exist in theory, and their existence complicates the argument that the monarchy is purely ceremonial.
The republican argument is that these reserve powers, however rarely exercised, represent an undemocratic check on parliamentary sovereignty that should not exist in a modern democracy. The monarchist counter-argument is that the powers’ non-exercise demonstrates that the institution has successfully evolved to a position of genuine political neutrality, and that the powers exist as a theoretical safeguard against constitutional breakdown that elected heads of state, whose political allegiances are inherently partisan, could not exercise with equivalent impartiality. Both arguments are coherent. The evidence for either depends on a counterfactual — what would have happened if there had been no monarchy in specific historical moments of constitutional stress — that cannot be tested.
The Economic Case
The Crown Estate generates approximately £440 million annually for the Treasury, of which a fixed percentage is returned to the monarch as the Sovereign Grant. The total cost of the monarchy — the Grant plus security, maintenance of occupied palaces, and the cost of royal travel on official business — is estimated at between £87 million and £345 million annually depending on what you include in the calculation and who is doing the calculating, both of which vary significantly between republican and royalist advocates. The tourist revenue argument — that the monarchy generates billions in tourism that an elected head of state could not replicate — is more contested: research on the counterfactual is difficult, and the monarchy’s contribution to UK tourism relative to the tourism that would exist without it is genuinely hard to isolate.
What the economic case for the monarchy amounts to, if you are being honest about the numbers, is: unclear. The Crown Estate surplus is real. The tourist premium is real but uncertain in magnitude. The cost is real but disputed in quantum. The honest economic position is that the monarchy is roughly cost-neutral to mildly positive on the available evidence, which is neither a compelling case for it nor against it.
The Cultural Case
The cultural case is where I find myself most uncertain and most honest about my uncertainty. The monarchy provides a focal point for national identity that is separate from the partisan political identity that an elected head of state would inevitably carry. The Queen’s death in 2022 demonstrated the institution’s capacity to produce a genuine national moment of collective feeling that crossed political, generational, and cultural lines in ways that are rare in contemporary Britain. State occasions — the Coronation, royal weddings and funerals, the Trooping the Colour — provide ceremonial content that the country’s shared culture draws on in ways that are not easily manufactured.
The republican response is that these cultural functions could be performed by elected or appointed alternative institutions, and that relying on inherited monarchy for national culture is a choice whose costs — the class signal that hereditary privilege sends, the values it embeds in national identity — are not offset by the cultural goods it provides. I find this argument reasonable and I also genuinely do not know whether an elected President of the United Kingdom would produce the same collective national feeling that the monarchy produces, because I cannot observe the counterfactual. I suspect not, but suspicion is not evidence. Where I end up after three weeks of thinking about this is: uncertain, probably more sympathetic to the institution than my starting position would have predicted, and clear that the question deserves better public debate than it usually receives. Which is, again, exactly nowhere. But it is an honest nowhere.
The position I arrive at, after all of this, is something like reformed agnosticism: I do not think the monarchy should be abolished in the near term, because the disruption to constitutional arrangements whose fragility is underappreciated would be significant and the benefits of an elected presidency are uncertain. I do think the monarchy needs to change in ways it is already slowly changing: more transparency about funding, a smaller working royal family whose costs are more easily justified, continued evolution of the constitutional conventions around royal reserve powers in ways that make their scope clearer and their exercise more accountable. And I think the debate about whether Britain needs a monarchy is worth having properly, in a citizens’ assembly or similar deliberative process, rather than being periodically revived in newspaper opinion columns whenever a royal controversy makes it topical and then allowed to subside without conclusion. The question is too important for that treatment. It is also, when you look at it carefully, more genuinely uncertain than its confident advocates on either side typically acknowledge. Three weeks of thinking has made me more certain of my uncertainty, which is progress of a kind, even if it is not the kind that resolves anything.
Isla Campbell writes from Central London for The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Her homepage is at prat.uk/author/isla-campbell.
Also undecided at Private Eye | NewsThump | The Daily Mash
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/does-britain-need-monarchy-three-weeks-thinking-arrived-nowhere/
