The accidental anarchist and the British revolution

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "There are a whole heap of people out there who want to be rid of the monarchy, but it's not going to go away just by wishful thinking," said Steve Edwards, spokesman for the Movement Against the Monarchy (MA'M for short). So on Oct. 31, for the first time since the riots over the cost of Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1898, MA'M led 2,000 marchers through central London in a protest against the British monarchy.

They had a 20-foot-high (6-meter) guillotine at the head of the procession, and carried out a symbolic execution outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall, where the English beheaded King Charles I and inaugurated modern Europe's first short-lived republic 350 years ago. The aim was to "rattle the gates of Buckingham Palace," and the protesters will be back in mid- November to invite Prince Charles to 'test drive' the guillotine at his 50th birthday celebrations.

It's just street theater, of course, and by itself it would certainly not amount to proof that Britain is heading into a constitutional revolution. But there is a revolution underway, although it's not really about the royal family.

Prime Minister Tony Blair, the man who invented 'New Labor', is a self-described "passionate monarchist" and a dyed-in-the- wool conservative (small 'c') who has absolutely no desire to lead a revolution. But it is possible to be an accidental anarchist, and Blair is living proof: the processes he has set in motion are revolutionary in their implications, though it will be (in journalist Andrew Rawnsley's words) "a typically British revolution: belated, unbloody, haphazard, hesitant, untidy, but inexorable."

Blair's tactic of promoting separate parliaments for Scotland and Wales, intended to appease and domesticate the forces of Celtic nationalism, is having precisely the opposite effect. Next May's Scottish election, which will produce the first parliament in Edinburgh for close to three centuries, is also likely to produce a majority for the Scottish National Party, and to lead in fairly short order to an independent Scotland.

And if an independent Scotland, or even just one with a separate parliament, then why not the same for England? "On May 1 last year (the date of the Scottish referendum on a separate parliament), I ceased being a Briton and became an Englishwoman," proclaimed an outraged Tory party worker at the Conservative Party's annual conference in Bournemouth in October. For in the pseudo-federal Britain with separate parliaments for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland that will be a reality within the year, what institution will speak for the English interest?

Liam Fox, the Conservative party's constitutional affairs spokesman, warns that the ultimate goal of Tony Blair, "the most un-British of prime ministers", is to slide the United Kingdom "as gradually and silently as possible" into the United States of Europe. Paranoia and xenophobia, of course, but the preferred tactic of the anti-Europeans in this emerging federal context is to opt for an undivided England, whose 47 million people (out of the British total of 58 million) would give an exclusively English parliament the clout to fend off the wicked Europeans and curb the ambitions of the greedy Celts.

Blair made a public commitment to this reform before the 1997 election, when it seemed that that might be the price of getting the support of the Liberal Democrats, Britain's third party, after a close outcome. His manifesto promised a referendum on the issue, so it will be hard for him to walk away from it now -- though it may have to wait for Labour's second term if the next election looks easier to win under the existing rules.

But the accidental anarchist's most significant initiative, in the long run, may be what seemed at first the least controversial: the reform of the House of Lords, recently condemned by Jack Cunningham, the Cabinet Office Minister, as "preserved, petrified, politically prehistoric; a relic wrapped in a time-warp."

The 'hospital of incurables', as the Earl of Chesterfield once called the Lords, is certainly a bizarre place. Alongside 510 'life peers', appointed by the government on a system of patronage, sit 26 bishops, 26 'law lords' (the House of Lords acts as Britain's final court of appeal) -- and some 750 hereditary peers whose sole justification for being there is that some distant ancestor was a sufficiently successful thug to forge a lasting alliance with the monarch.

Even the hereditary peers themselves, however, found it hard to defend the hereditary principle when Baroness Jay of Paddington, the Leader of the Lords, introduced the government bill to end their right to speak and vote in the Lords on 14 October. "When I came in today," observed the Earl of Onslow, "the light which normally shines on the Onslow heraldic sheep (on the family crest) was out. I think it was because the electrician may have been hereditary." And Lord Mackie of the Benshie declared that he was "all in favor of (the hereditary principle). In cattle."

But what is to replace the hereditary principle? Merely an upper house appointed by patronage, where "old, undemocratic chaps like the Earl of Onslow (are replaced by) new, undemocratic chaps like Lord Toady of Blairdom," as a Guardian editorial put it?

This is where things get interesting, for the Blair government is treating reform of the House of Lords as a two-stage process: get rid of the hereditary peers now, and set up a commission to consider what the new basis for choosing members should be. "Everything is up for grabs," said a Whitehall source.

A fully elected upper house like the U.S. Senate is unlikely because it could challenge the authority of the House of Commons: "The other place (the Commons) would hate a more powerful and authoritative second chamber," said Lord Cranbourne, current Opposition Leader in the Lords. And the Demos think-tank, always closely aligned to the thinking of the Blair government, agrees: "We already have enough nationally elected politicians."

But in a paper called 'The Athenian Solution' that appeared last April, Demos suggested the alternative of choosing the members of the upper house by lot: simply pick 300 people at random from the electoral rolls after each election, controlling only for regional and gender balance, and give them the job of reviewing the legislation passed by the professional politicians in the House of Commons. Certainly, nothing could be more representative.

And one last thing. As a senior Labour peer remarked during the debate on House of Lords reform, "I think the monarchy works well. But if you want to say that people who hold a hereditary position have no place in the Constitution, then of course you have to look at Her Majesty."

Tony Blair never intended that sort of question to come up. What he seems to have had in mind originally was only a tactical ploy to disarm the Scottish nationalists, and a little tidying up in the House of Lords. But these may turn out to be the pebbles that started an avalanche -- and even the monarchy, in the end, could be swept away by it.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose articles are published in 45 countries.