Keir Starmer misreads the C20th history of the Royal Family
The House of Commons has met today to pay tribute to Prince Philip.
Of course on the Conservative side this is unproblematic. The Party’s foundations lie in the Church and the Monarchy.
Labour’s understanding of the matter is more recent and more complex. That doesn’t mean that Labour hasn’t been monarchist- it has- but it has had, from time to time, different approaches.
Many Labour leaders haven’t exactly been that good at labour history so it would be unfair to criticise Keir Starmer too much for his comments in the Commons on Prince Philip.
Even so it is far from the case that over the last 100 years the British people’s faith in the institution has ‘never faltered’ (words and link below).
As the former Labour MEP Michael Hindley pointed out on twitter this ignores for a start the 1936 abdication crisis. This revolved around the then monarch Edward V111’s desire to marry someone who was divorced from their former partner. This was not just frowned upon but not allowed. He stepped down.
Keir Starmer really ought to have remembered however the period after the death of Princess Diana in 1997 when Tony Blair endeavoured to try and make the monarchy, whose reaction to the death had made it deeply unpopular, more in step with the twenty-first century.
Beyond that one of the things Prince Philip himself tried to do over the years, clearly not always successfully, was to try and keep the institution of the monarchy relevant.
I’m a socialist and republican but even this account of the last period of the British monarchy can be told in such a way as to reflect reasonably well on Prince Philip if that is what one wants to do. History is better than hagiography.
Keir Starmer, House of Commons 12th April
The life of Prince Philip was extraordinary, lived in a century on fast-forward and a time that saw world war, a cold war, the fall of empire, 20 Prime Ministers, and the invention of the television, the internet, artificial intelligence and technology so extraordinary it might have seemed to a lesser person as if from another world. Throughout that time, the monarchy has been the one institution in which the faith of the British people has never faltered.
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