WHILE the royal family might like to sell its role in the UK as something closer to Alton Towers than a powerful estate with its own vested interests, the news that the Queen recently lobbied the Scottish Government to exempt herself from a bill that aims to tackle climate change has somewhat fractured the illusion.
The fact the general public have so far failed to separate the head of state from the shoulders of the body politic is in part because our governments have been so heavily complicit in upholding this royal fiction.
A vicious devotion to protecting Britain’s class system is a position I expect to see re-inforced in the House of Commons; a parliament made up from an endless line of political succession and 17th century cosplayers whose usage of the word “democracy” is so warped from the real thing that it comes prefixed with the descriptor “British”.
However when it comes to the Scottish Parliament, a supposedly modern and forward-looking administration, the news that the Queen vetted at least 67 separate pieces of legislation sits a little differently.
The archaic tradition of crown consent, inherited from Westminster, means any legislation that may affect the Queen or her private wealth must first be seen and approved by the monarch before passing into law. This relic is something outwith our control, and a burden that we’ll likely have to carry until our independence from the British state.
However, the extent to which the SNP have gone to uphold this archaic practice, and keep its repercussions hidden from the public, deserves the full extent of our scorn. While we now know that the crown was given advance access to dozens of pieces of legislation before they could pass through Parliament, the Scottish Government has refused to say just how many were altered to satisfy the demands of our reigning monarch.
Despite the ruling party’s warm words on behaving like an independent nation, on the issue of the royal family’s secretive influence in Scottish politics the SNP have always seemed quite content to continue playing the role of serf.
Former First Minister Alex Salmond enjoyed multiple overnight trips to Balmoral. The 2014 White Paper on independence explicitly stated that it would be right for Scottish taxpayers to continue funding the monarch’s estate, and any challenges to her authority during that referendum only came from outwith the official Yes campaign.
The current backlash is purely down to this being another moment when the SNP’s moderate and tame style of governance has come crashing up against its more radical, but purely decorative, self-portrayal.
So yes, it is disappointing that the SNP has played its part in upholding the fiction of the Queen as a politically neutral entity in the UK so well but it is also unsurprising. What I find particularly galling about the situation, though, is that, on some level, our government clearly understands the role it’s playing.
In responding to calls for the Queen’s correspondence to be made public, and thus to provide the Scottish public some much-needed insight, a senior official for the Scottish Government responded as follows: “[If] the content of these consultations became known, it might serve to undermine the appearance of the political neutrality of the sovereign, and so the rights of the sovereign could not be exercised effectively without this expectation of confidentiality.”
IF openness and transparency are such a direct threat to the appearance of the Queen’s political neutrality, the logical conclusion would be that it probably doesn’t exist. The fabrication of impartiality cannot be maintained in the face of evidence to the contrary and without that the Queen could not continue to act with such self-serving disregard to the laws of Scotland.
Because in the end that’s really what sits at the crux of the argument, not only against the special treatment afforded any monarch, but the entire institution of the monarchy itself.
Coded into the laws and expectations of our country is an exemption that let’s one of the wealthiest and biggest landowners in Scotland examine laws and decide whether or not they should apply to her. What does it say about the SNP that they have so diligently allowed this gross misuse of power to continue without challenge?
READ MORE: MPs urged to change law allowing Queen to vet Scottish legislation
Last year, when the Agriculture (Retained EU Law and Data) (Scotland) Act was being passed, Nicola Sturgeon’s principal private secretary John Somers reached out to the Queen’s most senior aide to warn that the bill could “result in an increase or decrease in the amount of subsidy that can be claimed” on her private estates.
Somers reportedly offered to exempt the crown from being prosecuted over offences relating to food quality or labelling rules and from the collection of farming data – data that could have informed the government on how the Queen’s estates were contributing to climate change or on the health of animals living on them. The crown agreed to these terms.
In essence, the Scottish Parliament has given a powerful estate the means to effectively veto any bill that could impact on its obscene wealth without consequence, and it’s done so with zero transparency with the public.
Should the SNP have told the crown where to stick it, what would the consequences have been? Either the bill would pass without comment, or the Queen would have used her veto and in doing so brought the illusion of her as a benign force in British politics crashing to the ground.
And with that illusion dispelled, with the grasping, power-hungry parasitism of the royals on full display, how long could support for the monarchy truly last?
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