Could Corbyn get rid of the Royal Family?
the Bennite anti-monarchist brotherhood, took charge of the party.
Labour’s links with traditional working-class supporters have been disintegrating for years and the party is now wholly focused on attracting angry protest voters, particularly among disaffected youth. Promises to boot the royals out of Buckingham Palace fit perfectly into the Left’s anti-capitalist blustering.
DURING the election campaign the Labour leader played down his commitment to the republican cause and insisted that ousting the monarch was not on his “agenda”. “I had a nice chat with the Queen,” he said. He also pointed out that abolition of the monarchy was not in Labour’s election manifesto.
Neither was unilateral nuclear disarmament yet Mr Corbyn privately boasts to friends that scrapping the Trident nuclear deterrent would be delivered within months of taking office. For revolutionary socialists of Mr Corbyn’s ilk, manifestos are tools for mobilising support and seizing power that can conceal ambitions for far more sweeping social change.
For Labour’s growing republican wing the monarchy is seen as “antidemocratic” rather than as an institution that provided continuity of governance while allowing Britain’s democracy to evolve and flourish.
The party’s newfound tolerance of open anti-royal sentiment in senior ranks is an indication of how the old cross-party settlement about how our democracy works is breaking down. Today’s two speeches will be yet another sign of how dangerously polarised Westminster politics have become.