Abolish the Monarchy

The case for a right-wing republicanism

“Regretfully, I speak this fatal truth: Louis must die, so that the nation can live.”

—Maximilien Robespierre

The arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor for misconduct in public office is the greatest reputational crisis that the British Monarchy has faced since the abdication of Edward VIII almost a century ago. The images of a convoy of police cars escorting the bleary-eyed former prince out of his Sandringham residence on the morning of his sixty-sixth birthday are now etched forever into public consciousness.

That the Monarchy is the fundamental pillar of British identity has long been a hackneyed trope, favoured by both left-wing and centre-right histories of post-war national life. Indeed, it is a central feature in most metanarratives of ‘post-imperial’ Britain that the Windsor Dynasty are a focal point of affection in a wider context of increasing uncertainty about the nature of our nationhood. More recently, these analyses have taken an introspective turn, reflecting that Britain’s various crises are, to some extent, rooted in the ambiguous nature of our modern identity as a result of the loss of Empire, deindustrialisation, and shifting class boundaries. Here again, the strange indeterminacy of what precisely the House of Windsor represents is presented as either a reflection or a cause of these confusions.

Britain’s societal transformation has been subject to a variety of dramatisations, but it is the play King Charles III which best typifies the centre-left commentariat’s conception of the importance of the Monarchy to national mythmaking. Parliament, the Crown, the NHS, and the ‘Forces’ are all presented as perennial bedrocks of British identity — which are also forever in danger of institutional erosion. In the play, the Queen’s death sends the public into a semi-catatonic state, somewhere between terror and bewilderment. The coronation of Charles III subsequently engenders a constitutional crisis through the new King’s refusal to grant assent to an act of legislation which is perceived as restricting press liberties (even though we might reasonably anticipate that the actual King would be sympathetic to such a measure).

The play is interesting in so far as it captures an essentially conservative idea of the role of the Monarchy in national life whilst being deeply sympathetic to the motivations of the would-be absolutist protagonist (revealing, in the combination, the reactionary attitude of today’s centre-left towards our country’s institutions). Charles’ monologue describes the Monarchy as an ‘oak tree’ which binds the past, present, and future, and it is assumed within the plot that it is a genuine object of affection and loyalty for the British people in general. Charles’ dissolution of Parliament is essentially an idealistic challenge to a venal political class with ‘authoritarian’ instincts which are implied to be alien to Britain’s national culture.

Of course, the actual death of the Queen played out very differently. Besides the brief public mourning in central London, it was — by and large — a non-event. When her passing was announced that afternoon, people, contrary to prior expectations, simply went on with their day. That evening, everyone sat down for dinner as usual. There were no spontaneous displays of grief, no palpable sense of discontinuity and confusion. There was a strange dissonance between the poignancy of the projection and the insignificance of the reality. What was expected to be a moment of genuine uncertainty about the future, the abrupt disintegration of the lodestar of British patriotism, was in reality a basically normal Thursday evening.

Since then, King Charles’ reign has been relatively uneventful, beyond the not-unexpected drift into increasingly political partisanship (as demonstrated by the explicit celebration of multiracialism in the King’s most recent Christmas speech — more on that later). The forecasts from some conservative commentators of a new ‘Carolean’ era which would usher in some vague cultural and aesthetic revival have, as yet, failed to materialise. Similarly, the tragic cancer diagnosis of Princess Catherine (probably the most sympathetic member of ‘the firm’), and also that of King Charles, have received far less attention from the public at large than might have been expected.

Indeed, the only story concerning the Monarchy that has received substantial attention for some time has been the Epstein scandal. Historiographically, we can view Andrew’s arrest as a tawdry denouement to the high Windsorite identity of post-2008 Britain. Since the Second World War, Britain has experienced ethnic Balkanisation, and the Monarchy correspondingly assumed an increased importance in the attempt to define a national identity in the absence of any organic asabiyyah. This dynastic nationalism reached its zenith in the coalition era, with the gaudy celebrations of both the wedding of William and Catherine and the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II. Endless Union Flag bunting and monotone renditions of ‘God Save the Queen’ captured the self-consciously royalist aesthetic that the political mainstream embraced in order to present a picture of a modern, ‘diverse’ Britain at one with its past. In the absence of any substantive criteria for national membership, affinity for the ‘Crown’ constituted the sole reference point for understanding national belonging.

It is worth noting that this royalist renaissance was different in character from that of the 1980s, which was by no means deferential in nature and was driven by a prurient interest in the affairs of the Royals as celebrities. It also sat alongside a genuine national renewal, in a wider context of military victories and economic recovery. The 2010s revival was, by comparison, more narrowly conservative insofar as it returned to historical norms of journalistic obeisance to the Crown but also coincided with a period of national decline in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, compounded by the failures of New Labour and the impact of the 2011 riots.

The collapse of royalism in the 2020s, then, is not a decline in genuine affection for the Monarchy (which has always been vastly overstated), but the collapse of the narrative that the Monarchy plays an integral functional role in British national life. Centre-right apologia for the Royals, even in the face of their increasingly leftist political sensibilities, has never seemed less plausible. How can this family possibly serve as a non-partisan centre of patriotic sentiment when, for increasingly large swathes of the British public, they are tainted by association with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s questionable proclivities?

One can reasonably assume that more revelations will come forth in the coming months as police actively investigate Andrew’s affairs, which could easily be worse than what we have heard already both in terms of corruption and sexual misconduct. The fallout from this can neither be nor should be contained to the figure of the former Prince. Andrew was purportedly the favourite of Queen Elizabeth, and it is implausible to suggest that his activities were entirely unknown to her and others within the Royal family. Sarah Ferguson would not have fled the country for Switzerland and the Republic of Ireland if she expected only the fallout of a single episode of Royal indiscretion, as it was presented in 2021. Her actions make far more sense in the context of an egregious and long-running cycle of lurid corruption, familiar to any denizens of a Third World country governed by a jet-setting elite.

There are other more fundamental reasons why the Monarchy’s popularity will decline in the near future. Britain’s demographics are essentially unfavourable to the Royals, and this is largely a result of policies they themselves have endorsed. Britain’s youngest cohort is now only ≈50% white British. As has been recorded, non-whites are, on average, less favourable to the Royals (and to historic British institutions generally). One of the great ironies of the Queen’s death was that whilst it was presented as a unifying moment of commemoration for the country as a whole, it was in fact primarily white British (and older white British at that) people who engaged in remembrance after her passing. Despite the reality that the Monarchy was a central factor in the development of multiculturalism in Britain — it was as subjects of the King and Queen that immigrants first arrived in Britain, and through their Commonwealth citizenship that their legitimacy as part of the nation was laundered — the evidence suggests that it is only (some) white British people who have bought into the Monarchy. One particular episode captured this projection perfectly, when demonstrations by blacks angrily protesting the defensive police shooting of the murderer Chris Kaba were mistaken for a vigil for the late Queen.

Many right-wingers might be tempted to dismiss the attitudes of unassimilated foreign-born or foreign-descended populations, and say that these people’s views should not be factored in to considerations of our constitutional order. After all, the same demographic trends are seeing Britain’s electoral politics drift towards the foreign policy preoccupations of the Ummah, and we oppose the integration of these concerns into our foreign policy because they represent a form of colonial intrusion at the expense of British domestic concerns. Indeed, some will predictably become defensively royalist, either as a reaction to the republicanism of foreigners and their native allies or as a declaration of loyalty to something which feels familiar in the face of cultural erosion, much as some on the nativist right (such as Matt Goodwin) adopt reflexive support for Israel for the very same reasons. Of course, the basic point that Britain’s future should be determined in the interests of native Brits is correct, but as the question of Israel demonstrates, it is a mistake to simply adopt the opposite view to your opponents, supporting something just because your enemies oppose it.

Our position on the Monarchy, as with any institution, must instead be based on an unprejudiced assessment of the extent to which it advances the interests of the British people. In 2026, there is zero ambiguity regarding the Monarchy’s ideological orientation under the leadership of King Chuck the Woke. The Crown’s historical record is not much better, especially regarding the British diaspora in the aftermath of decolonisation. Whilst Queen Elizabeth is often favourably contrasted with her son for being more politically neutral, it’s worth noting that there is a variety of anecdotal evidence to suggest she was in fact relatively left-leaning, including — amongst other things — Margaret Thatcher’s reference to her as ‘the kind of woman who would support the SDP’.

This stemmed from not only her opposition to Thatcher’s economic policies, but also their clashes over South Africa and the Prime Minister’s refusal to impose sanctions on the country. The New South Africa of which the late Queen was so supportive has subsequently descended into a failed one-party socialist state which has been arguably genocidal in its negligence in protecting white citizens from rampant, racially-motivated murders. The Queen may have been blinded by genuinely held universalism, but even had she understood these consequences her commitment to representing all her Commonwealth subjects equally would have bound her to support the transition to democracy and all the horrors that entailed.

This same tendency might also explain her indifference to the suffering inflicted on her British subjects by the (proportionally significant) criminal elements amongst her Afro-Caribbean and South Asian subjects. While her right-wing defenders will claim that she was bound throughout her reign by unwritten constitutional commitments to impartiality, this argument fails because — particularly in the latter part of her reign — there were in fact increasingly celebratory references to ‘diversity’ in her speeches. But to refute it on its own terms, we have to consider whether it can ever make sense to talk about neutrality on existential issues relating to national survival. The questions on which the Queen was neutral were not quotidian elements of policymaking, or even contested issues of public morality. These questions related not even just to the (often violent) demographic marginalisation of whites in urban areas but to the broader (democratically non-consensual) ethnic and cultural transformation of vast swathes of the country.

During the course of her entire reign, the Queen never saw it fit to comment on the systemic sexual abuse of white British girls by Pakistani rape gangs. Neither did she deign to comment on the corruption, complicity, and active collaboration of local government and the police services with these criminal organisations. We have a clear example of a public crisis which dwarfs any other and which relates to coordinated physical and sexual violence against the most vulnerable constituency within her realm. The difference she could have made to this issue by intervening rhetorically would have been significant — but she always refrained from doing so. It is a moral failing of the Monarchy that its ‘neutrality’ extended and extends to a passivity in the face of immense evil.

The King, of course, continues in this tradition, although has added to the celebration of multiculturalism a pseudo-intellectual ‘perennialist’ inflection. Charles is purportedly a fan of René Guénon, and this might explain his longstanding sympathy for Islam (interestingly, Anthony Burgess’ second dystopian novel 1985 envisioned the then-Prince of Wales leading a surreptitious Islamisation of the country upon his ascent to the throne). One of my childhood memories was that of a speech he gave on ‘Islam and the environment’ in the Sheldonian, and, as you would expect, it consisted of the same ecumenical platitudes about shared ‘Abrahamic’ values of stewardship delivered to an array of self-aggrandising ‘faith leaders’.

Of course, this dual ‘Green’ outlook stands at odds with the reality of diasporic Islam in Britain, as reflected by the rampant littering in inner city Birmingham and other ghettoised urban areas. In a different era, Charles’ affinity for humanistic Sufi traditions (which are, of course, a marginalised and victimised tendency within the faith) might be understandable, but it seems utterly incongruent and bizarre when viewed through the prism of twenty-first century Britain. Islam in this country is — by and large — Deobandi: puritanical and sterile, but also callously and venally indifferent to the wellbeing of animals who have their throats slit in backstreet abattoirs. The Deobandi tradition, especially in Britain, is materialistic, criminal, and essentially anti-social. Again, this is not a condemnation of Islam per se — the tradition of English Arabophilia is a long and in many ways a justifiable one — but to project idealisations onto the religion as it actually exists in Britain today is simply to neglect the duty of the sovereign to defend the people and culture of the nation.

But the King’s most egregious action so far, not just as a violation of the Monarchy’s own definitions of neutrality but as a demonstration of his anti-British political commitments, came in the form of his 2025 Christmas speech. In it, he declared ‘that the great diversity of our communities’ will help ensure that ‘right triumphs over wrong’. There is no forgiving this deceitful statement after the horrors of the last seventy years have been made manifest for all to see. To not only ignore the costs and injustices wrought by mass immigration, but to suggest that it is in fact the guarantor of moral virtue is as perverse as it is anachronistic. It cannot be emphasised enough that not even the Starmer Government is willing to defend the legacy of immigration in such strong terms.

We may reasonably anticipate that Charles will act as a centre of opposition to a future right-wing government when the serious business of righting these wrongs through mass deportations begins in earnest. Indeed, reports that he referred to the Sunak Government’s feeble Rwanda Plan as ‘appalling’ confirm this. Whilst the Monarchy’s constitutional power is (in theory) limited, it would be naïve to suggest that an institution with such substantial ‘soft power’ over the media and the state cannot form a significant obstacle to a Prime Minister if it so desires.

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When we look at the Monarchy today, then, we see an institution which is:

1. Tainted with heinous tales of corruption and abuse.

2. Increasingly unpopular with native Brits as a result.

3. Facing unfavourable demographic trends which it nonetheless continues to encourage.

4. Not just indifferent to, but actively complicit in the obfuscation of crimes against our country and its people of the most serious nature.

5. More and more likely to act as a focal point of resistance to a future right-wing government.

In the light of these facts, the case for a British Republic has never been stronger. We should not be tricked into adopting a losing position in defence of a decrepit institution just because Zarah Sultana also opposes it.

Any hopes that the coronation of Prince William might offer a chance to refresh the Monarchy’s image and reinvigorate its position in public life seem overly optimistic at best. As Will Lloyd wrote in the New Statesman recently:

William, the heir to the throne, is perhaps the most underexamined of all. We are briefed that like Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, Elizabeth II and Charles III before him, he will be a fresh, positive, modern influence who will delouse the archaic fabric of monarchy. He cries in commoner’s kitchens about mental health and is praised for his empathy. He watches Aston Villa and may even be able to name their second-choice goalkeeper. He even made sure his press secretary went to a comprehensive, not a public school. We know from the royal super-biographer Robert Hardman that William is unable to name a favourite author, but that this “box-set guy” does love “Batman-related” superhero movies.

In some respects William might simply reflect what the average British bloke is like today. But average isn’t the expectation of the Crown, and he differs a great deal from Charles and his grandmother. Thanks to Valentine Low, another long-time royal observer, we learn that: “William is not a great reader: he prefers an oral briefing.” In Power and the Palace, Low reports that William will be the first monarch in several generations not to have read Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution. Read between the lines. What are they telling you?

I will make explicit what Lloyd did not. William is a dullard, uninterested in the history that shapes the nation that he is destined to inherit and the constitutional role he is set to take up. In happier times, this might not matter. But given the situation we are facing today, how can we expect such a person to lead any kind of institutional rejuvenation? Why would we taint ourselves with loyalty to such a person?

Given all the current trends outlined above, and the hopelessness of a future dependent on the current heir, it seems reasonable to suggest that the abolition of the Monarchy is likely in the coming decades. Whilst it would not, in fact, be necessary to combine this with substantial constitutional reforms (one could easily just abolish the legal fiction that the Prime Minister’s powers are exercised on behalf of the King and be done with it), it is nevertheless the case that this will present an opportunity for broader change which whoever is in power at the time is likely to take up. If we take ourselves out of this conversation by sticking to the defence of the Monarchy, it will be our opponents who define this new settlement.

How might abolition come about, and what form could we hope subsequent constitutional revisions to take? It is impossible to predict the precise circumstances under which conflict between the Monarchy and a right-wing Parliament will arise. No doubt, this could begin with the attempt of the King to rhetorically intervene against a repeal of the Human Rights Act and a withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights. It might also come in the form of veiled or open attacks against a ‘British ICE’, particularly if during the course of its operations it accidentally kills or injures an obstructive illegal migrant or an extremist agitator. A government which went further — for example with large-scale denaturalisations — would almost certainly see an intervention from the Monarchy. We might even see it in the context of something as puny as the removal of the (insane) voting rights we grant to so-called ‘Commonwealth citizens’.

Regardless of the particulars, there is an open goal waiting to be scored. It will be easy to mobilise populist angst against the multicultural paternalism of the King. The Crown Estates have an estimated value of £21.3 billion, while the Sovereign Grant, the untaxed allowance derived from profits from the Crown Estates, has tripled in real terms since 2012. It doesn’t matter if this is actually a relatively trivial sum when compared to the national debt and annual governmental expenditure: it sounds like a lot to the average voter, and can easily be tied into some resolving some populist cause, whether housing veterans and homeless people or contributing towards a student debt jubilee. It would be easy to attack Charles on the basis of his longstanding political inclinations, especially given the general ill favour with which he is viewed by many older Brits due to the Diana scandal, as well as the general indifference of younger generations.

Despite all of this, it must be recognised that the sections of the public which do maintain lingering affection for the Monarchy are overrepresented among the social base of right-wing parties in Britain. Advocating for direct opposition may therefore be politically harmful for a right-wing government with its own base, even if the position were popular in the country as a whole. As such, the correct path forward in the face of Royal opposition would be to call a referendum not directly on the future of the Monarchy, but in support of an Act of Parliament which fundamentally alters its constitutional status.

The Crown Estate and the analogous Duchy of Cornwall, along with privately-held assets such as the Duchy of Lancaster, the Sandringham estate, and the Balmoral estate would be nationalised along with all other British real estate held by the Royals personally or by the Crown. The Royal Family will be granted permission to use some of these residencies — perhaps Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Balmoral — which will be maintained by the state. On top of providing residences and the requisite staffing, the Royals will be reimbursed for expenses incurred in the conduct of their duties, and will receive a personal family allowance of £2m, to be distributed as the King sees fit, which should keep the number of ‘working Royals’ to a minimum and force the rest of them to do something useful with their lives. The Royals will also retain existing privately-held assets (excluding land), possibly with the exception of any historically-significant jewellery or artifacts — no need to feel too sorry for them. The effect of these measures would be financial regularisation of the Monarchy, transforming the Royals into highly-paid civil servants with a few extra perks, and stripping the unjustifiable privileges and feudal hangovers that currently define Royal wealth.

Constitutionally, the powers of the Royal Prerogative which are currently held by the Monarch but exercised by the Prime Minister will be formally conferred upon the office of the Prime Minister in its own right. This includes the power to summon, dismiss, and dissolve Parliament (as constitutionally permitted), the granting of final assent to legislation, the ultimate command of the armed forces, and the granting of honours and peerages. These powers had functional purposes in the past, but they have evaporated as the Monarchy has stepped back from its constitutional role. A democratically legitimate Prime Minister would be able to wield these powers as intended, and a strengthened executive would be no bad thing for a reformist or radical government. Additionally, the elected government will be given powers to control and direct the public activities of the Monarch and other Royals, as employees of the state. This includes the power to approve or deny public statements and interventions. Neutrality cannot mean supporting only those aspects of government policy with which the Monarch personally agrees, and the Monarchy must be a tool of the British state if it is to serve a useful function for the British people.

As for the Windsor family, they would retain a purely ceremonial role, and would have the same constitutional status as the Japanese Emperor — that is to say, they would be a symbol of state with no invested authorities. These reforms would mark a significant move towards the modernisation, rationalisation, and defeudalisation of the British state. These terms may scare more conservative-minded readers, and there may be a place in national life for ceremony and for historical peculiarities, but that place should not be in the legislative process or the executive function of government. Byzantine procedures and financial structures serve only to retard the state, to make its actions less explicable, and to make it harder for necessary reforms to be carried out.

This approach is premised on the expectation that, whilst the Monarchy will continue to decline in popularity, a confrontation which necessitates reform is likely to occur whilst it still maintains some support, at least among the more conservative voters who will form the bulk of any right-wing electoral coalition. It is, of course, entirely possible that upcoming revelations might be so bad as to erode the institution’s legitimacy sufficiently to render this intermediate step unnecessary. If not, these measures will at least minimise the power of the Monarch to interfere with an elected government, and what remains of the Monarchy can be phased out in due course, hopefully before any succession occurs.

In concluding this article, it is worth stressing that there is nothing unpatriotic about opposition to the Monarchy. I am not an ideological republican as such, and I recognise the value that a variety of constitutional regimes have contributed historically. But to conflate dynastic patriotism with British nationhood is a grievous political mistake as well as an error of historical interpretation. Britain was unified under a monarchy, but it only became a single state under a republic. It emerged as a global power under an oligarchic regime which vested near-absolute power in Parliament. The British, more than any other nation, have maintained a flexible constitution under the recognition that no single form is preferable at all times and for all people.

It would be deeply unwise to hitch the future of our country to an institution which has no clear purpose or sense of its own identity (at least an identity and purpose which accords with the political goals, sentiments, and interests of the British people) in the modern era. Much as the Monarchy has historically damaged the national cause by confusing our self-conception of nationhood and perpetuating an outdated notion of imperial citizenship, today it damages the British right by forcing it to treat the associates of Jeffrey Epstein, and those who defend them, as the focal point of national loyalty. I look forward to the day when we might raise anew the arms of the Protectorate over Buckingham palace; when we once again have leaders who wish to make the names of Englishmen as great as ever those of the Romans had been. This should be the hope and aspiration of all Britons.

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This article was written by George Ruska, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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