![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/9b5c8c5b4a81c1d9ea9ed3060317f130.jpg\")
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The campaign group Republic<\/strong><\/a>, working towards the abolition of the monarchy and its replacement by a directly elected head of state, have organised a day of protest and celebration on the 5th<\/sup> of May, the first anniversary weekend of Charles’ coronation. Republic Day will be marked by a major event in Trafalgar Square<\/a> featuring a wide range of speakers including Culture Matters<\/strong>‘ very own Martin Hayes! Sock it to ’em, Martin!<\/p>\n To lend solidarity and support across the digital ether we are also collecting and \u201ccurating\u201d a host of Republican content from a number of our contributors: poems that scrutinise and excoriate the monarchy, poems that apply pressure to the highly suspect nationalist scripts in which they are involved; poems that fight the erasure of our own working-class heritage and history.<\/p>\n It’s toothless and sweaty!<\/strong><\/p>\n The monarchy is not merely a toothless anachronism. It is not (despite what the strenuous exertions of their PR department would have us believe) a harmless cultural agent. It is a profoundly political one. The last ten years have seen increasingly desperate and sweaty attempts to free the monarchy from its difficult, morally compromised history, and cement it instead at the very heart of Brand Britain. There\u2019s been a series of cultural levers \u2013 music, literature, film, sport, art, and drama \u2013 intended to evoke a nebulous though crowd-pleasing notion of Britishness with which to distract the populace at home and to woo the global marketplace. It was\/ is deeply cynical, but it was\/ is deeply strategic.<\/p>\n The flag-waving spectacle created by mainstream media discourses empties the monarchy of political context, allowing them to become a hollow receptacle for whatever idea is useful to power. Cultural discourses have tended to heavily moralise the monarchy through representations of nationhood, philanthropy, and family, effectively masking their relationship to centuries of exploitation, accumulation, corruption, and conquest. The death of Elizabeth II sent this PR machine into overdrive: a daily torrent of sentimentalising guff that sought to silence debate about the future of the monarchy by equating pro-republican criticism with a hard-hearted absence of \u201csympathy\u201d; exhorting would-be protestors to remember the late Queen’s \u201chumanity\u201d.<\/p>\n As if humanity itself were some vaguely miraculous quality, and not the generic condition of everyone alive from Vladimir Putin to Britney Spears. No, theirs is a kind of Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s humanity: an arbitrary rhetorical expedient that phases into existence at the precise moment scrutiny is applied. We’re constantly told that the rich and powerful transcend our mere mortal existence; the monarchy spend their entire lives within the hazy, elevated aura of hereditary, institutional, and economic privilege, with all the exemptions and special dispensations this implies. They’re not us. They are better than us. The rules do not apply to them. But if that is the case, then it’s a bit much to expect readmission in the final extremis. Sympathy is a finite resource; our sympathy cannot and will not stretch to meet the irrational demands of our oppressors and class enemies to be loved. Especially, when history has shown us that they do not return the favour.<\/p>\n Republic are doing good work exposing the secrecy of the royal family<\/a>. And of course they have much to hide. In 2017 the Paradise Papers revealed the extent to which the Queen\u2019s private estate used offshore private equity funds to avoid paying tax on its holdings. The Crown is already exempt by law from taxation, and also from inheritance tax on ‘sovereign to sovereign’ bequests. As Laura Clancy has pointed out, the royal family ‘relies on the (uncodified) British constitution and political custom to play the same game’ as corporate tax avoidance giants such Amazon and Facebook.<\/p>\n We fund this shit!<\/strong><\/p>\n In the monarchy, historical custom and capitalist logic meet in the worst way possible. And we \u2013 that is PAYE workers \u2013 fund this shit, through the Sovereign Grant. As austerity bit, and the cost-of-living crisis escalated, causing upwards of 130,000 preventable deaths in 2019 alone, this was the thought that stayed with me: Britain needs better symbols, and a more inclusive, empathetic vision of itself.<\/p>\n A good place to start creating that vision would be by ridding ourselves of an institution whose wealth and history is inseparable from the depredations of colonialism, and whose cornerstone is inequality. In recent years, many former British colonies in the Caribbean have declared their intent to abolish the monarchy including Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica and St. Kitts. Barbados has already cut ties with the British monarchy to become the world\u2019s newest republic, and to rightly pursue reparations for the horrors of the slave trade.<\/p>\n Campaigners are right: an apology is not enough. King Charles \u201cacknowledging\u201d the atrocity of slavery isn\u2019t enough. An institution whose wealth was built on and maintained by slavery telling the descendants of slaves, whose families, cultures, and communities were scarred by colonialism, that they feel their pain is frankly insulting. You cannot cherry-pick which parts of Empire to whitewash and to fetishize. The foundation of Empire is slavery; slavery is the direct consequence of Empire. The same applies to hierarchy, poverty, and gross inequality at home. You cannot honour the victim if you are actively sympathising with their abuser.<\/p>\n To jail with you!<\/strong><\/p>\n The ascension of Charles zipped past with indecent haste, ensuring that no conversation about the necessity for a monarchy could even intervene. Stability is the status quo, and not everyone benefits equally from preserving that. Republican protestors were arrested. A woman in Edinburgh for holding a sign reading Fuck imperialism, Abolish monarchy, <\/em>and a man in Oxford who shouted \u201cwho elected him?\u201d during a reading of a proclamation. Both protestors were arrested for a \u2018breach of the peace\u2019. This is where we are, and this is what accretes around these figures, what concentrates within them, this is the state that they legitimate. Not sufficiently respectful? To jail with you. The state is criminalising protest. The monarchy lends tacit approval to this project.<\/p>\n I want to be part of a country where everyone has a right to be heard. I want to live in a country that faces its difficult history head-on and with humility. I want to be part of a country where my head of state is accountable; where the most vulnerable citizens are treated fairly and with dignity, and where those in power are not so terrified of a dissenting opinion that they’ll do just about anything to stamp it out. I believe that ridding ourselves of the monarchy has the potential to catalyse more radical and egalitarian demands. If we can question the power of the monarch, we can also question the power of bosses, politicians, economic elites. It is a beginning, but it is a hopeful and necessary one. One that is not only anti-monarchy, but pro-republic.<\/p>\n I hope you enjoy the parade of poems below, collected for Republic Day. If you would like to support this branch of our cultural struggle please consider buying our anti-monarchy anthology Dungheap Cockerel<\/a>,<\/em> edited by Rip Bulkeley and Mike Quille and\/ or the republican-themed Wolves Come Grovelling<\/a><\/em> by Alan Morrison.<\/p>\n If you are interested in joining Republic<\/strong> and finding out more about their campaigns and how\u00a0 you can join the fun, please visit them here<\/a>.<\/a><\/p>\n Make way for more polemic!\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The monarchy is the pinnacle of the British state and that state\u2019s increasing authoritarianism has been on full display since Charles came to the throne. Police swooped on peaceful protesters at events proclaiming him king in several British cities. Some were arrested simply for holding up blank pieces of paper. Royal assent has just been given to the Public Order Act, the latest in a long line of repressive laws passed since the 2019 election.<\/p>\n The thuggish intimidation of republicans is inseparable from the project to shrink the range of permissible political opinion after the shock the Corbyn surge gave the ruling class. […] The character-assassination campaign against Corbyn himself regularly involved allegations of disrespect towards the monarchy\u2014and the monarchy\u2019s place above Parliament was cited by generals briefing the press that the army might have to remove an elected socialist government.<\/p>\n Nor should it be forgotten that the monarchy, greedily supported by a sycophantic aristocracy, is the main foundation of the inegalitarian and corrupt system of land ownership in Britain, an outrage that is centuries overdue for reform.<\/p>\n So the monarchy is not neutral. It can appear so when the status quo is not threatened, but its undemocratic state power will be deployed if the ruling class consider it necessary to prevent radical change. And the growing opposition to monarchy should not be separated from wider political trends either. It is bound up with anger at an unrepresentative and oppressive British state and an economy rigged against ordinary people.<\/p>\n – Excerpt from the Introduction to Dungheap Cockerel, by\u00a0<\/em>Rip Bulkeley & Mike Quille<\/em><\/p>\n Stand clear! Watch out! Here comes the parade of poems!<\/strong><\/p>\n To Crown It All<\/strong><\/p>\n As far as the news went, all the wars The glaring shortage of factoids left Next day people went about with a strange By Rip Bulkeley<\/em><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n I don’t care whether the monarchy stays or leaves but I wish they wouldn’t be presented as a Godly power one minute, and human beings\/an ordinary family the next. I also wish people would ask simple questions like ‘Why do the \u201croyal\u201d family need so many houses when there are children in the UK who don’t have beds to sleep on?<\/p>\n – Jenny Mitchell<\/em><\/p>\n The Queen Turned Black<\/strong><\/p>\n When granny dies, her skin transforms, Her hair has lost its kink, becomes a stately crown. through her letterbox. Neighbours called police More than once in \u201963, the local press reported She used the settlements to build a large extension. with the other immigrants. Home was called Now ever since she died, the Queen has been next to my granny in a special plot, white By Jenny Mitchell<\/em><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n That decade in the middle of the 17th century seems to have been airbrushed out from our royalty-dominated history. But republicanism has remained, among a significant minority, as an enduring dream of generations who have dared to imagine a true democratic society with no hereditary head of state and whose sovereignty is properly represented by Parliament, and implicitly in the People.<\/p>\n – Alan Morrison<\/em><\/p>\n Wolves Come Grovelling\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n With a video by Vanessa Sadri:<\/em><\/p>\n![\"republic2\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/republic2.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"republic3\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/republic3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Republic6\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Republic6.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Wolves](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Wolves_CG_cover.jpg\")
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0![\"Dungheap](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/Dungheap_Cockerel_cover_jpeg.jpg\")
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in Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen, and anywhere
else were suspended; no one whatsoever
died of Covid; no celebrities did anything
remotely celebretitious; no crimes were
committed, whether violent or otherwise;
there were no major accidents and no
natural disasters; nothing went extinct;
bizarre coincidences failed to coincide.<\/p>\n
the media havering between panic and
a self-destructive blamefest. But someone
had happened on an interminable ceremony
in a minor, post-imperial European nation.
The vultures descended, gorged for hours,
regurgitating regularly for an audience
denied any choice of infotainment.<\/p>\n
look on their faces, a blend of shame,
bewilderment, and momentary flashes
of relief as they realized that neither they
nor anyone else were ever going to say
one word about the orgy of inanities
from which they were slowly coming round.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/05\/The_Queen_is_Black.jpg\")
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not limb by limb but all at once \u2013
dark brown becomes red, white and blue.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not surprised. She loved Great Britain
even when in \u201956 a turd slipped<\/p>\n
in \u201958 to say her bible class \u2013 loud prayers
to a blond-haired Jesus \u2013 sent them mad.<\/p>\n
that her house became a den of vice \u2013 Black
Madame Must Be Stopped!<\/p>\n
Most recently, the man next door, caped
in a Union Jack, ordered her to go back home<\/p>\n
the Mother Country where the Queen
once welcomed her, waving from a balcony.<\/p>\n
transformed, her skin turned black,
her hair a tall, soft afro. She lies<\/p>\n
roses planted close. Are they holding
hands, having shared so much?<\/p>\n