Abolish the Monarchy: Why we should and how we will

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However, I did feel that the book started to lose it’s way when it was talking about the House of Lords, seemingly ignoring concerns that a fully elected chamber runs the risk of having some of the same issues and the Commons. Smith is hazy on the itinerary, but that doesn’t stop him looking forward to a time when the ‘champions of our most cherished shared values’ appear in place of the king on stamps, and the likes of Carol Ann Duffy are put to work writing a republican constitution.

The 2020s should be the decade when we finally get to decide who we have as our elected head of state.He also ignores the many benefits and advantages that the monarchy brings to the UK, such as its role in promoting national unity, cultural heritage, tourism and diplomacy.

And the backend of the book title is also covered with process of removal of the monarchy and how a republican replacement can be introduced. Rather than the monarchy defending the constitution and, by implication, the British people, it has been the responsbility of subjects to defend the monarch not from injustice or tyranny, but from embarrassment. There is no engagement with the writings of the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz, who exposed the sophistication of monarchical conceptions of the state. While he does admit that the Union may not survive long enough to see a republic, he does appear to, ultimately, want our current political and economic system to stay mostly the same, but with the royal cyphers filed off.

The operations of government under the monarchy are supposedly no less offensive to public morals than the transgressions of individual kings and queens. One of the stronger passages examines the prorogation affair of 2019 and the paralysis that overcame the queen as she struggled to reconcile her role of constitutional backstop with the expectation that the monarch do nothing to impede an elected government. He offers up a familiar list of royal peccadilloes – King Charles’s petulance, Prince Andrew’s promiscuity, Prince William’s indolence – and slays sacred cows along the way: Queen Elizabeth II was a tax evader; her mother was a racist; their Tudor and Stuart precursors were slave traders. Prince Harry, seemingly on the run from his own family, and Andrew on the run from serious allegations of sexual assault.

My only wish is that the author will produce a cheat sheet of all the stats and arguments summarised and ready to either draw on - when doing demonstrations or in discussions on the streets - or, better still, commit to memory. He sets out a vision for the future that I could see easily dismissed by critics because he isn't a politician and so can't possibly know how the parliamentary machine could work. With accurate statistics, primary source material and interviews where he and his team have faced up to the relevant authorities and gleaned the truth out of them, Smith demonstrates how all the classic excuses for keeping the monarchy are not just mistaken - they're plain wrong. For the purposes of transparency, I'll state that I've been anti-monarchist for my entire adult life.In every case it was obvious the reviewer had never read the book at all and had just decided that Smith must have ignored all these classic arguments (because they're so strong, right?