The death of Elizabeth Windsor highlights to our generation and working people across Britain that the abolition of the monarchy remains a pressing and important issue.
It is fundamentally clear, now more than ever, that Britain must become a modern republic. A tiny interbreeding sect of a decaying aristocracy cannot and will never reflect the interests of working people in Britain.
The imposition of an obscenely wealthy, unrepresentative, unelected head of state is offensive to all working people. But this is not just a matter of important democratic and egalitarian principles.
This monarchy continues to be an important symbol and tool of the British state and its apparatus for maintaining control.
Despite all the talk to the contrary, the monarchy continues to hold significant power under Britain’s broken constitution, including the selection of governments, and will remain a perpetual danger to democratic and social progress while that remains the case.
The Royal Family’s wealth and the Crown estates, vast tracts of land and resources across Britain, are centuries of stolen wealth from the working people of this country and the oppressed and exploited peoples in Britain’s colonies.
The monarch’s position as the head of state not just of Britain, but of various former colonies and as head of the Commonwealth plays an important symbolic and ideological role in maintaining British imperialism around the world.
Britain’s state and monopoly media already have and will continue to canonise Elizabeth Windsor as a ‘tireless public servant’. No one can genuinely define public service as never working a single day in your 96 years on earth and living in obscene wealth every day while surrounded by poverty and never doing anything to change it.
Elizabeth Windsor never criticised Britain’s racist colonial empire. She never criticised or apologised for her notoriously racist husband. She never shied away from consorting with dictators in the interests of the British state. She used public money to fund the legal defence of her paedophile son.
Elizabeth Windsor is also a symbol of the archaic, corrupt and racist institution. Hers is also the arrogance of hereditary and unchecked power and wealth.
Britain’s ruling class, through the state and the media, will try to use this death to distract from the so-called cost of living crisis and rising industrial militancy, and undermine strike action. We can’t allow their calls for 'unity’ and ‘respect’, which are in reality demands for class collaboration, to succeed.
Charles should never become ‘king’. Elizabeth’s death should be the death of the monarchy itself.
Britain’s Communists demand:
The immediate abolition of the monarchy and its replacement with a democratically elected head of state.
The nationalisation of the Crown Estate and the expropriation of the personal wealth of the Royal Family for the public good.
Redistribution of and reparation for all wealth stolen by the Royal Family from Britain’s former colonies.
Down with the monarchy!
For a republic!
For real democracy and socialism!
Central Committee
Young Communist League
9 September 2022
London, Britain.