Other Royal Traditions: Tony Benn on the marriage of Prince Charles July 1981
Sat and watched the Royal Wedding on TV. There were perhaps two million people out in London and this tremendous ceremonial display was watched throughout the world by 750 million people- without any doubt the biggest television audience that had ever seen anything. The image presented to the rest of the world was of a Britain about as socially advanced as France before the French Revolution! We are slipping back to eighteenth century politics. We’ve got to fight like anything to recover the position that we had even in 1945… It was feudal propaganda, turning citizens into subjects.
Diary Wednesday 29th July 1981.
Benn was then and remained in his views in a minority in the Labour Party and the labour movement. Some see themselves as loyal subjects and many others take the view that there are more important things to do than go on about the monarchy. If the comparison is made between Britain’s hereditary constitutional monarchy and the elected Presidency of America one can see the point.
The republican tradition moreover has not always been associated with the left, although I’m not sure there is a huge market for Tory republicans.
The left however has been a significant part of that tradition going back at least to the Chartist paper, the Red Republican, edited by George Julian Harney in the late 1840s and early 1850s. It published the first ever English translation of the Communist Manifesto and Harney was, up to a point, a co-thinker of Marx and Engels
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