By New Communist Party of Britain

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is the first member of the Royal Family to be arrested since Charles Stuart was held by the New Model Army at the end of the First Civil War in 1646. Charles remained in custody before his trial and execution in 1649. The Republic of England, or Commonwealth as it was styled in English, was proclaimed soon after. Oliver Cromwell, the MP for Huntingdon who was the leading Parliamentary commander during the civil war, later became head of state, the Lord Protector, a post he held until his death in 1658.

Andrew’s arrest is not going to bring down the House of Windsor nor is he likely to share the fate of his loathsome predecessor. Nevertheless, the high-life of the former prince that revolved around Jeffrey Epstein, a degenerate American brothel keeper who supplied young girls to prominent politicians and businessmen on both sides of the Atlantic, has brought the Royal Family into disrepute not seen since the Abdication crisis of 1936.

In those days, the bourgeois parliament and the leaders of the Church of England believed that Edward VIII’s morals and his sympathy for Nazi Germany made him unfit to head the Anglicanchurch let alone an Empire that spanned a quarter of the entire world. These days Andrew’s antics have merely embarrassed our current king, who’s clearly washed his hands of his errant younger brother.

The monarchy, of course, is part and parcel of British bourgeois democracy. During Elizabeth II’s long reign they built up a cult around the House of Windsor based on two powerful myths – the first being that the Royal Family are paragons of virtue and the second that they have no power at all in the modern British state. Neither is true. The first is blatantly obvious. The second ignores the nature of the bourgeois state and the role of the ruling family that heads it. To be sure, the Westminster parliament is a sovereign assembly that can pick and choose monarchs – it got rid of James II in 1688 and it forced Edward out in 1936. The monarch is, on the face of it, a figurehead, But at the end of the day it is absurd to think that the House of Windsor, one of the richest families in the world, has no power at all.

New voices are now questioning the role of the monarchy – a natural feature of the early days of the British communist movement. There were also outspoken republicans in the social-democratic movement such as Tony Benn and Ken Living stone. Even some right-wing social-democrats such as Willie Hamilton, the Fife MP who branded the royal family gold-plated scroungers, joined in the calls for the monarchy to be scrapped. But republicanism was barely, if ever, mentioned during the post-war decline of the revisionist Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Calls for a democratic republic were said to be “divisive” given the supposed popularity of the monarchy amongst the working class and irrelevant in the forward march of labour that was conjured up in the British Road to Socialism.

Our position, from the day we were founded, is clear. The New Communist Party calls for the abolition of the Crown, the House of Lords and all titles of nobility. They serve no democratic
purpose whatsoever.