The Labor Party, despite its strong infusion of Marxism, treats the issue as a dead letter. Not since the party conference of 1923 has there been a serious debate on the monarchy. At that conference a motion that republicanism should be the policy of the party was rejected by 3,694,000 votes to 386,000.
Criticism of the monarchy in contemporary Britain is most telling when it hits the cost of the institution. The great wealth of the royal family and the heavy expenses of the monarchial institution invite criticism in a period when Britain seems to live perennially on the rim of economic disaster.
Early in 1956 it was suggested that the Queen's Flight, her personal transport planes, be re-equipped with one, possibly more, of the big new Britannias, the nation's newest air liner. At the same time a new dining-car was ordered for royal travel, and it became known that the royal waiting-room at London airport was to be renovated at considerable expense. These matters received extraordinarily detailed coverage in the newspapers owned by Lord Beaverbrook. Letters criticizing the added expenses found their way into the letter columns of the Daily Express, the Evening Standard, and the Sunday Express. Columnists inquired the reason for such expenditures when the nation was being asked to tighten its belt, spend less, and defeat inflation.
Constant readers of these newspapers, which are among the most sprightly and technically expert in Britain, have long noted their oblique criticism of Duke of Edinburgh. Usually this deals with the Duke's "interference" in the field of industrial relations. It is believed to spring from Lord Beaverbrook's long-standing animus for the Duke's uncle, Earl Mountbatten. The criticism of the proposed expenditures for the Britannias, the dining-car, and the waiting-room gave the newspapers a chance to hint that the young man was getting a bit above himself.
The Sunday Express gave the widest possible publicity to its serialization of the autobiography of the Duchess of Windsor, an opus that, although interesting, cannot be considered an enthusiastic recommendation for the institution of monarchy.
The inevitable conclusion is that William Maxwell Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook, New Brunswick, and Cherkley, nurses crypto-republican sentiments at heart. He has confessed to being a propagandist in his newspapers, and he is so unpredictable that he might sometime direct all his energies against the institution. I mentioned this to a cabinet minister, who replied that the monarchy would welcome it. "Nothing helps a politician more than the enmity of the Beaver," he commented.
Although republicanism is no longer an issue in the Labor Party, the party itself contains a strong element that is hostile to the monarchy. Yet neither the Daily Mirror nor the Daily Herald, the journalistic pillars of the left, snipe quite so often or so accurately as the Beaverbrook press.
The New Statesman and Nation does. Its indirect attacks on royalty are based on establishing a link between royalty and the wealthy, showy, and, of course, non-socialist world of London's fashionable West End. The New Statesman's complaint, delivered in the tones of a touring schoolmarm who has been pinched by a lascivious Latin, is that the Queen should use her influence to halt ostentatious spending on debutante parties and the revels of the young. Its anonymous editorial-writer was severe with young people who drink too much (although abstinence has never been particularly popular on the left) and generally whoop it up. The editorial ended with a hint that the Queen would have to exercise some restraint when a Labor government came to power.
Despite such criticisms and warnings, the monarchy pursues its course virtually unchallenged. One reason for the lack of a serious political challenge may be that the monarchy is not now identified with a rich, powerful, and coherent aristocracy, as it was a century ago, but with the ordinary citizen. Then, too, there are many who look to the royal family as an example.
Long ago a compositor in a London newspaper, a good union man and a Socialist, explained this attitude. "I'd rather have my two daughters reading about the Queen and all that stuff than reading those magazines about the flicks. Who'd you want your daughter to follow, Lana Turner or the Queen?"