Divorce the monarchy, Markle notwithstanding

IT’S NOT likely that Prince Harry, or any of his and Meghan Markle’s children, if they have any, will ascend the throne of Great Britain and thereby become sovereign of Jamaica. And perchance their line becomes monarch, Jamaica may well have moved past outsourcing its symbol of authority to the British sovereign.

Many people in Jamaica won’t be holding their breath on that. The promise of moving Jamaica to a republic has marked time over several decades, across multiple administrations, and appears to have returned firmly to hibernation after its most recent poking by the Holness Government early in its term, more than two years ago.

In the 1970s, Michael Manley vigorously promoted the idea of Jamaica becoming a republic, but the proposal foundered over Manley and his People’s National Party’s (PNP) vision of an executive presidency and the Jamaica Labour Party’s insistence on a largely ceremonial president, operating very much like the governor general.

Two decades later, a constitutional commission, in 1995, settled on the proposal for a nonexecutive presidency. But while the suggestion was successively embraced by three prime ministers – P.J. Patterson, Bruce Golding, and Portia Simpson Miller – it didn’t find its way into the constitutional reforms that established a Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms in 2011.

Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ government, however, did place the issue firmly back into public consciousness in the Throne Speech of 2016 when Sir Patrick Allen, the governor general, promised, as part of that year’s legislative agenda, a bill that would “replace Her Majesty the Queen with a nonexecutive president as head of state”.

This constitutional change would require a twothirds vote in both chambers of Parliament, buttressed by the support of the majority in a referendum, which, given bipartisan political support for the idea, might not have been difficult to achieve. Mr Holness, however, in reflection, may have found it difficult to reconcile pushing ahead with this change while his Government and party continued to resist Jamaica’s entry to the civil and criminal jurisdictions of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and maintain the Privy Council, based in England, as Jamaica’s final court.

Mr Holness’ Government has not indicated its current thinking on the matter, but some Jamaicans, with the advent of Ms Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, are probably more sanguine about keeping the constitutional link with Britain. They can relate to her and the changes they perceive are being wrought in the royal family.

EMBRACING HER BLACKNESS

Like many Jamaicans, Ms Markle is biracial, having been the daughter of a white father and black mother. And her wedding ceremony last month, which would have been endorsed by the Queen, gave a heavy nod to Ms Markle’s embrace of her blackness – from the style of sermon by Bishop Michael Curry, the head of the Episcopal Church in the USA, delivered with the full cadence of a black preacher, to the black choir singing spirituals.

In that sense, the marriage of Prince Harry and Ms Markle brings an entrepreneurial freshness to the royal brand. And while it may not have moved the dial on the injustices against the Windrush Generation, it suggests a willingness of the Mountbatten-Windsors to embrace a multiracial, multicultural Britain. Unlike his great-great-uncle, Edward VIII, who had to leave the throne to marry a divorcée, Prince Harry was not only able to marry one, but one whose mother is black and, perhaps would seem out of place in Jamaica. That, however, doesn’t mean that Jamaica shouldn’t divorce the monarchy.