Queen celebrates longest reign - let's make it the last!

Tracy Edwards

Not a month goes by without enduring the fawning tones of the British establishment and its media supporters spewing out gushing sentimentalities about the royal family. There's no escape.

The latest drivel celebrates the Queen becoming the longest reigning monarch in British history. But she's the "longest reigning" simply because she is still alive, not because 'she's earned it'. She is the Queen because she is the Queen!

Despite a publicly funded retinue of hundreds of royal household staff to keep the monarchy show on the road, the media repeatedly says that she is 'hard working'. This is an absolute insult to the rest of us who struggle to maintain our public services despite an avalanche of government spending cuts.

The Queen and her family represent the biggest welfare scroungers ever, costing us Ł334 million a year. The royals and their institutions exist to maintain an illusion of nobility for British capitalism.

Relics from a feudal past, these parasites have been paraded as a symbol of 'security' and 'stability' in a world torn apart by conflict and poverty, despite the fact it's their capitalist system that causes human suffering and war in the first place.

The monarchy and aristocracy is rotten to the core. Friendly with warlords and dictators, they swan around the world maintaining imperialism and selling weapons.

In 1975, against a background of economic crisis and rising worker militancy, the monarch's reserve constitutional powers were used to topple Gough Whitlam's Labour government in Australia. If, in the future, a left-wing government is elected, the monarchy could become a rallying point for reaction.

So the monarchy isn't a nice and fluffy British institution that aids our tourism industry as the media would like us to believe. The current Queen is the longest reigning UK monarch, but let's hope she's also the last.

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