Behind this royalist frenzy is an attack on our civil liberties

In Edinburgh, four republican protesters – including the famous 22-year-old woman who dared to put the f-word on her handmade placard – are facing highly dubious “breach of the peace” charges. Similar police actions took place in London and Oxford.

Also in London, a barrister who turned up with a blank sheet of paper, asked a police officer if he would be arrested if he wrote the slogan “Not my King” on the paper. The cop confirmed that he would, indeed, find himself lifted under the Public Order Act because “someone might be offended”.

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This state repression has been accompanied by verbal and physical abuse of anti-royalist protestors by members of the public. In Edinburgh, Samira had her placard (which read “End the Monarchy. Up the Workers”) ripped from her hands before she was racially abused by a monarchist.

Often, this extreme hostility to critical voices has been justified on the grounds that “a family is in mourning”. Yet, far from being a mere mark of respect, the state-orchestrated circus of the last week is designed to shore up both the monarchy and the class hierarchy it represents.

The English monarchy lost its power with the beheading of King Charles I in 1649. By the time his son Charles II acceded to the throne in the Restoration of 1660, he did so on the basis of the historic compromise that the aristocracy would defer to parliament and the growing power of the bankers and merchants of the nascent capitalist class.

It is that compromise – which lies at the heart of the British state, its brutal history of Empire and its despicable, leading role in the transatlantic slave trade – that is symbolised in the pomp and ceremony of recent days. That, and not supposed “private grief”, is why dissent is not permitted.

The problem facing the British ruling class is that the House of Windsor has reduced itself to a soap opera, a sort of Eastenders in posh accents. One prince, Harry, is so disgruntled with the institution that he has fled to the United States.

Meanwhile, another, Andrew (above), is accused of sexual crimes so heinous that he dare not set foot in that country. The Queen’s death was the only possible window of opportunity for the state to clamp down on criticism of the monarchy.

This was not mere opportunism, but part of a planned strategy. The Tories have been attempting to whittle away at our civil liberties for decades, with the hideous Priti Patel just the latest home secretary to state openly her desire to all but criminalise protest.

However, from the Labour frontbench to the trade union leaders and, it must be said, the leadership of the SNP, the supposed political “opposition” across the UK have colluded in the great spasm of royalism following the Queen’s death. The media, too – with very few honourable exceptions, including this newspaper – has played a predictably awful role in (to use the very appropriate phrase of Noam Chomsky) manufacturing consent.

The BBC, as the national broadcaster, has been particularly abject. An Ipsos poll (taken late last year) showed that 60% of the UK population wanted the state to remain a monarchy, 21% wanted a republic and 19% were undecided.

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Yet to watch or listen to the BBC since Thursday of last week, you’d think the nations of the British state were comprised entirely of the kind of people who have commemorative royal crockery displayed on the walls of their homes.

As any politically conscious citizen knows, whenever the political class, its state machinery and its obedient media declare a national consensus, we can be certain that our civil liberties are in grave danger. Worrying though the events of recent days have been, however, they are a pale reflection of the combination of propaganda and state power employed to generate a supposed national consensus during the First World War.

At that time, young women were encouraged to distribute white feathers of cowardice to any young man who had not happily skipped along to the recruitment office to volunteer to have himself blown up on the Somme in the interests of the British Empire. That jingoistic frenzy – whereby any and every dissenter was labelled a “traitor” to king and country – led directly to vicious repression at home and mass executions of so-called “deserters” (be they anti-war agitators or the mentally war wounded) at the front.

Here in Scotland, as Jeremy Paxman reported gleefully in his often repellent BBC series on the “Great War”, the players of Heart Of Midlothian Football Club led many of their fans in signing up for the British Army at recruitment desks set up on the turf of Tynecastle Park.

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Such was the nature of the war fever being promulgated by the state and its many willing servants (which, in this case, included Hearts, an institution run by rich men who had influence over large numbers of, mainly Protestant, working men: this at a time when religious sectarianism was rife in much of Scotland, including Edinburgh).

If promises of battlefield glory and being “home for Christmas” provided the carrot for recruitment, the state wielded a heavy stick against dissenters. The health of John Maclean – the greatest and most principled activist against the imperialist slaughter – was broken by periods in prison for no other crime than exercising his democratic right to speak out against the war.

Deprived of his livelihood as a teacher and refused the basic right to speak on his socialist opposition to the conflict at factory gates and in meeting halls, Maclean was charged under the tellingly named Defence of the Realm Act.

He took to the dock as the last place where his voice could be heard, declaring, famously: “I am not here ... as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.”

He was sentenced, for his pains, to five years of penal servitude in May 1918. Although he secured early release when the armistice was signed in November 1918, Maclean’s health was already broken by the persecution he had faced. He would die five years later, aged just 44.

The state’s relentless campaign against Maclean and other anti-war voices was aided and abetted by an almost entirely compliant mass media.

The British state, led most often by Tory governments at Westminster, has tried this trick repeatedly since. The Thatcher government did it with considerable jingoistic success during the Falklands War in 1982.

Thatcher had less success during the Great Miners’ Strike of 1984-85, where efforts to portray the miners and their union, the NUM, as “the enemy within” failed to wash with millions of working people. In that instance, the power of propaganda played second fiddle to the brute force of a militarised police force that was seen by many working people across the UK as no more than “Maggie Thatcher’s boot boys”.

Less successful still was the New Labour government of Tony Blair (above, the political son of Thatcher in many ways) following the fateful decision to support the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Blair enjoyed the backing of the Tory frontbench and the usual suspects in the media (but not, interestingly, the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, which could see the way the political wind was blowing).

Nevertheless, the anti-war dissenters were not a despised minority but the majority of society. Their campaigning organisation – the Stop the War Coalition – would become the biggest political mass movement in British history.

If only Blair had been forced to change course, a humanitarian catastrophe could have been averted.

However, these are not times of war, and, following next Monday’s royal funeral, the British establishment will have to face the reality of attempting to generate support for a king of whom the public is largely sceptical.

We will have to be vigilant in defence of our civil liberties, for sure, but for those of us who seek a progressive, independent Scottish republic, the months and years ahead will also be a period of opportunity.