Why the hereditary principle has no place in British public life

My opening remarks from an IEA ‘markets and morality’ debate, entitled ‘Does the hereditary principle have any place in British public life?’. May 2021

I’m going to be upfront and say that I’m really not very interested in whether the Queen is good at her job. I don’t care whether she’s beneficent, or smart, or better at what she does — in any of these kinds of senses — than anyone else. Because, if she were, that wouldn’t be enough for me to support her remaining in position.

I mean, let’s take my opponent James here. He’s super-smart, extremely funny, dresses nicely. He’s even quite wise. I’m pretty sure he’d be better than me at doing lots of things I currently do — including maybe running my finances, decorating my house, deciding whether I opt out from the organ donor list, choosing my sexual partners for me, taking charge of any kids I decide to have.. But just because he has the relevant qualifications here, in terms of his superior personal qualities to mine, does that mean he should be doing those things? No! He has no authority to do so! And for him to take over and do those things would be an egregious misuse of power.

Now, that’s bad enough in the private domain, between friends.. But when it comes to political power? That’s what I’m interested in talking about today. The justification of political power. And I want to use the same principles that I’d use for determining whether a political regime is legitimate, to question the justification of monarchy. So, to me, a necessary condition (but not a sufficient one) of a legitimate political regime is that it respects every societal member’s basic equal political rights to deliberative participation. I know that not everyone agrees with me on this, but I’d hope that James does: I don’t think he’s anti-democratic!

I should say at this point that I do get that other people look at monarchy in other ways. They use different approaches, on which their assessment of whether they should support it or not is indeed related to whether it’s effective, or nice, or brings in the cash, or the value of its history to our culture, and so on. But I just don’t think those things are first-order issues here. You can be as great a ruler as you like, but if you don’t have the authority, then that’s simply irrelevant.. just like my example of James running my life, no matter how well he might do it!

So what really matters here, I contend, is the justification of political power — not just the way it’s exercised. And for political power to be justified, it has to be sufficiently respectful of the rights of those over whom it is exercised. And part of that is that they get the say about who holds that power, and what the power-holder does with it. In other words, this power is conditionally held. The governed must determine the governor’s appointment, and their continued holding of power. Power-holders must be able to be held to account; they must be replaceable.

So, what I’m basically arguing is that the only legitimate political regime is democracy, and that hereditary leadership is illegitimate within that. Heredity is out of kilter with the conditions I mentioned. You can’t vote a monarch out. You can’t choose them. Indeed, the hereditary method preferences one tiny set of people, all from the same family! (So it’s worse than some aleatoric approach…) It’s simply corrupt. And it’s massively exclusionary, in a way that’s hardly in line with the idea of equal respect — the equal value of all societal members — that’s so crucial to democracy.

Beyond that, to be honest, I have general problems with all kinds of hereditary stuff. I’m in favour of super-high IHT, for instance… And I’m keen to talk about House of Lords reform at some point today.

But my basic argument is that this monarchy thing is nothing to do with how effective a form of political power the monarchy can be, or how nice the Queen seems, or her effects on GDP, or anything like that.

I should also add that I think it’s simply empty to support stuff just because it’s been there for a long time. I get the classic conservative arguments about the value of stability — but stability cannot be enough in itself. You need something more than that. You don’t want to continue having, say, a tradition of murdering kittens, just because it’s always been that way… This kind of reasoning leads not only to ignoring horrific wrongs, but also props up dangerous relativism, which says, ‘Hey, it does seem pretty nasty, but it must ok because that’s always been how they do things there’. Similarly, it’s also not enough to say, ‘Well, the monarchy is popular’, or, ‘Technically, we could all band together and vote the Queen out’. Just because something is popular doesn’t make it democratic: there are basic preconditions to democracy, including respecting certain things like those basic political rights, and so forth. And if you vote those things out, then you’re no longer in a proper democracy. A democracy, for instance, that suddenly decides to ignore the rights of minorities to vote is acting undemocratically. And a democracy that involves unelected hereditary political power-holders is also, I contend, undemocratic.

So, to conclude, I do get that the UK brand of monarchy is less bad than many — it’s better than those countries where the monarch is treated as a god, and people starve while gold statues are build to the god-king, for instance. But just because something is less bad, doesn’t make it ok. The bad monarchy and the super-good monarchy both suffer from the same fatal flaw: illegitimate authority; unjustified political power.

Click here to watch the debate.