On the Monarchy

A move is being made once again to change the way in which the British royal succession is determined.

'Unfair' male right of succession to the throne set to be scrapped

Like other monarchies around the world, the British royal succession is based on a system of ‘male primogeniture’. That is to say, the first-born son of the Monarch will succeed to the throne upon the Monarch’s death.

Feminists are claiming that this is unfair, and moves are made periodically to try to change it. Let’s make one technical point first. People often say at these times “The government is proposing to abolish primogeniture”. This is the opposite of the truth. The government is proposing to extend primogeniture. ‘Primogeniture’ means ‘the first born’, and at the moment, we have a modified system of primogeniture, in that it is only the first-born son who can succeed; the idea is to remove this modification to give us a system of pure, unadulterated primogeniture, in which the first-born child will succeed.

It is worth asking how we came to have a system of male primogeniture in the first place. Evolutionary theorists might comment that humans are a member of the chimpanzee family, and as such, territories are held by a group of males, with females being exogamous, which is to say that they marry out; on marriage, they leave their parents’ troupe, and go to join their husband’s. This helps to promote genetic diversity. Exogamy is reflected today in the fact that married women take their husband’s name, and property passes down the male line. In ancient times, when communities would find themselves threatened by other communities, they relied on the military for survival, and that means the males. The strongest male was simply the best person for the job. Females could not successfully challenge the alpha male in combat, and moreover, they were too biologically valuable to risk losing, as they constituted the community’s ability to reproduce itself.

Monarchy is an ancient institution, and it follows male primogeniture because in ancient times, the King was also the head of the army, and marched to war with his men. He was the gang leader, the godfather, the alpha male, the toughest kid on the block. There were many other men who wanted the job, and if they could topple him, they would. Very few women could survive for long in that environment, nor wanted to try. In those days, unlike today, women would have valued masculine strength.

The real question is not “Why didn’t women succeed to the throne on an equal basis with men?” What we should be asking is “Why did women ever succeed to the throne at all?”

Those who managed to get themselves into power wanted to cling to it by any means, including passing it on to their children. A breakdown in the royal succession often led to civil war and foreign invasion, and everyone wanted to avoid that. The worst outcome for a monarch was to die childless. It is no surprise that the Royal daughters became Plan B. If the King had a daughter but no sons, then she would often succeed to the throne in order to maintain political stability. At the same time, do not imagine that Royal women in the past were passive idiots; they were just as rich and arrogant as the men, and they maneuvered on their own behalf.

Male primogeniture, like much else in society, is a cultural reflection of human nature, not some sinister misogynist conspiracy. Feminists constantly bite the hand that feeds them. It is the effort of males over centuries which has created the relatively stable, rich and peaceful society which we currently enjoy. Women today can consider standing for political office, safe in the knowledge that they are not going to have to ride into battle carrying a sword, or be stabbed to death by a rival in their beds. The nature of leadership has changed. Rather than express gratitude for the comfortable and safe life which male-dominated society has provided for them, feminists can only complain.

It is not as though women have fared particularly badly in English history. If you ask English patriots to name the greatest leaders of English history, they will typically name five.

Queen Boudicca (died c.AD 60)
Ancient British Queen who led a revolt against Roman occupation. Her army defeated a Roman legion, and burned London, Colchester and St Albans to the ground. As a result, the Roman Emperor Nero considered withdrawing from Britain altogether, before she was finally defeated.

Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603).
Her reign took place during the golden age of European maritime exploration, and saw the early colonization of North America, the defeat of the Spanish at sea, the origins of the British Empire, and helped undermine the Vatican’s despotic control of European thought.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901)
The longest-serving British monarch in history, the ‘Empress of India’ presided over the world’s most powerful nation, and the largest Empire the world has ever seen.

Winston Churchill. (1874 – 1965)
Although not a monarch, no list of the greatest moments in British history would be complete without mentioning Churchill, the great war leader who inspired us to stand alone against Hitler, when most other politicians, including the Communists, were advocating appeasement and the USA was neutral.

Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister, 1979-1990)
Again not a monarch, but undeniably one of Britain’s greatest leaders, she confronted communism both at home and abroad, and helped to reverse a period of national decline.

No doubt some historians might dispute this list of the greatest British leaders, but if you were to ask ordinary people for their opinion, this is probably who they would name. The fact that our two greatest modern leaders were not monarchs reveals the fact that the monarchy today does not have any real political power anyway.

The thing you will notice about our greatest leaders is that four out of the five are women. I remember being a teenage Leftie in the early 1980s, and listening to poisonous feminist harridans hissing and whining about how awful it is to live under the yoke of The Patriarchy. I remember thinking “Who rules this country? The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, and the head of the government is Margaret Thatcher. Some Patriarchy”. But that argument didn’t wash. It was a Patriarchy, despite the fact that it was ruled by women. One of their favourite sayings was ‘Margaret Thatcher is not a real woman. No woman would behave like that’. Cognitive dissonance can be a terrible thing.

As a teenage Leftie I was an instinctive Republican, and believed that the monarchy should be abolished. A few years later I moved to Turkey to teach for a few years. One of my students gave me a different view.

“When we went to school, they told us that the Republic was the best form of government, and that Monarchy was primitive and medieval. But we looked to our neighbours on one side, Iraq, Iran, Syria, the Soviet Union, and we saw that these are all republics, and they are all authoritarian police states. Then we looked to Europe and we saw countries like Great Britain, Holland, Belgium and Sweden, and these are all rich democracies where people are free, and yet they are all monarchies. We knew which ones we preferred.”

I stopped being such a knee-jerk republican after that. The world is often more complex than it first appears.

Hitler thought that democracies were inherently weak, and he had no fear of them. The only country he feared in Europe was Great Britain, because he thought that it wasn’t really a democracy. Maybe he had a point. A think-tank in the 1990s published a survey of how democratic various countries are, and Britain came out well below places like the Czech Republic, on the grounds that we have an unelected head of state, an unelected upper house, and no written constitution. But for all that, Britain is still one of the most tolerant nations in the world, although feminists and cultural Marxists are doing their best to change that. They, not the Royal Family, are the real threat to civil rights in these islands.

The proposed change will not make a great deal of difference. Here is the royal family tree.

The current heir to the throne, Prince Charles, is the Queen’s oldest child, so his succession will not change. Some don’t realize that the succession follows what software engineers call a depth-first search, rather than a breadth-first search; if Charles should unexpectedly die, the succession will not pass to his younger siblings, but to his first son, William. As William is also the first child, this will not change.

The current line of succession shows that, even though she is the Queen's second child, Princess Anne comes behind all three of her brothers, and all of their children (including their female children, interestingly). Perhaps this is what vexes the feminists so much. The main effect of the change will be that Princess Anne's position will move from 10th to 4th, and of course her children will move up with her. I don't anticipate any civil wars any time soon.

This raises the question that if it really makes such little difference, then why bother doing it? I'm fairly agnostic about the Royal family, and I have no objection to abolishing male primogeniture. It will probably not happen anyway, as any such move would have to be approved by the parliaments of every nation of which the Queen is the head of state. I can't see that happening before the next election.

Video: Indoctrinate U

Watch this excellent video, from Indoctrinate U, the movement which aims to combat Left-wing bias on American campuses. The full video is here. To download it, right-click and select "Save Target As..."

It's well worth watching. The most interesting thing that struck me about the college administrators is how cowardly they are. When the film crew try to interview them, they call the police.

RIP Carole Barnes, Victim of Child Porn Witchhunt.

The ITN newsreader Carole Barnes, who died recently, was investigated for possession of indecent images of children during the 1990s.

She took some innocent shots of her toddler in the bath, as many parents might. When she took the film to Boots the Chemist for processing, a technician saw the images and reported her to the police.

Such was the level of hysteria gripping the UK. Since then, the situation has only got worse...

Where is Heretic's Technorati Authority?

Am I missing something?

I thought that to get 'Authority' on Technorati, you had to have other sites back-linking to yours. I seem to have around 100, but my authority is still listed as zero. Can anyone help?

Should I assume a feminist conspiracy...?

New Blog: Unto The Breach

Men's movement veteran Angry Harry has kindly asked me to participate in his new online venture, a blog entitled Unto The Breach.

The idea is to post links to stories on mainstream sites which attract a lot of comments. We hope to concentrate fire on to mainstream sites like the Guardian. There are several authors on the blog, myself, AH and others.

Support us by following the links and posting comments. Make your voice heard!

Be Right Back

Heretic is currently abroad, oppressing some women of color.

Article: Sexual Utopia in Power

This article 'Sexual Utopia in Power', by F Roger Devlin, is one of the best I have read for a long time. I highly recommend it. Thanks to bola for pointing this out.

Women on Spitzer and the Hooker

Cassandra: The really annoying thing about Eliot Spitzer
But the morality of public servants and the hypocrisy of high office, the fact that he wanted “unsafe” sex - this wasn’t what people were talking about. Most of the focus was on “Kristen”, the prostitute he met at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC and booked for $1,000 an hour. She was described as, “American, petite, very pretty, brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds”. My female friends in New York were outraged. “105 pounds? No way.”

The professional way to protect a marriage
If so, prostitutes have an invaluable function - meeting such inconvenient needs without undermining the institutions of marriage and family. In my view a man - even a man like Eliot Spitzer - may be doing a far better thing in using prostitutes than in having torrid affairs with his wife’s best friends. It is far less threatening to the marriage - so it’s odd that people reserve their strongest disapproval for sex without strings.

Edwina Currie: Why men in power cheat
"The aura of power makes the plainest men attractive". Ever wondered why men work harder at their careers than women? Sex is a great incentive.

Outstanding Work by Camilla Cavendish, Journalist

Here are links to some of the excellent articles by Camilla Cavendish, journalist at the Times of London.

Guilty until proved innocent: the grotesque reality of family courts
John Sweeney, an investigative reporter and presenter on the BBC’s Real Story, describes reporting on the family courts as being as difficult as reporting from Zimbabwe. Of the seven child abuse cases he has covered in the criminal courts over the past few years, all have ended in the quashing of convictions. Some of the defendants — Angela Cannings and Sally Clark — have become household names. But of the five cases he has covered in the family courts, all have ended in the parents losing their children for ever. You will probably never know the names of those people. Their names must be changed and their faces blocked out, to “protect” the children. It is hard to expose miscarriages of justice when the stories are drained of human content.

Free the 'Grandfather One'
A man named Charles Roy Taylor has been sent to prison for 20 months for being in contact with his stepgrandson. Charles Roy Taylor is a 71-year-old with a heart condition. He knew that a jail sentence was the penalty he might pay if he did not take steps to avoid his stepgrandson. But this seems desperately unfair. The teenager, whom we shall call John, has been in care since his mother died of an overdose. He has been phoning his grandparents and running away to see them for some time. In the end, social services became concerned that the grandparents were “undermining the care plan” by continuing to see John. It does not appear to be clear to the grandparents what the care plan is. But it does not seem to include them, even though they could presumably be John's first port of call when he leaves the care system at 18.

The rank hypocrisy of family court judges
A few long-suffering readers may remember that this peculiar case concerns a woman whose baby was removed by social workers, not because the child came to any harm but because there was a suspicion that her father might have injured a child from his previous marriage. That suspicion was never proven, no charges were ever brought and the child of the earlier marriage was never removed. But a woman who everyone agrees is blameless has lost her only child – for ever – because she is deemed to be besotted with a man who may pose a danger.

British justice: a family ruined
Last autumn a small English congregation was rocked by the news that two of its parishioners had fled abroad. A 56-year-old man had helped his pregnant wife to flee from social workers, who had already taken her son into care and were threatening to seize their baby. Most people had no idea why. For the process that led this couple to such a desperate act was entirely secret. The local authority had warned the mother not to talk to her friends or even her MP. The judge who heard the arguments from social services sat in secret. The open-minded social workers who had initially been assigned to sort out a custody battle between the woman and her previous husband were replaced by others who seemed determined to build a guilty case against her. That is how the secret State operates. A monumental injustice has been perpetrated in this quiet corner of England; our laws are being used to try to cover it up.

Child protection? No, ruination
If you look up Hansard, the parliamentary record, you can read the name of a man I wrote about three weeks ago. Prisoner X, whom I called Hugh, was jailed for helping his pregnant wife and her son to flee the country to escape from social workers. An MP has named him in the House of Commons, to express concern at his treatment. But The Times still cannot print his name. It is a longstanding convention of British law that individuals who are incarcerated should be identified, and the charges against them made known. That is an age-old protection against tyranny. But today the “privacy of the child” trumps every other principle, whether or not the child in question wants his or her privacy protected. In this case it seems very unlikely indeed that the gag on everyone involved serves the interests of anyone except the authorities who put it there.

The Industrialisation of the Family

In previous articles, I have criticized the Left for its attack on the family, but the Right has also played a role in constructing the current mess.

During the Thatcher years of the 1980s, we saw profound economic changes in the UK. There was a significant decline in traditional manufacturing industry, caused partly by the inexorable winds of globalisation, but also exacerbated deliberately by the Thatcher government in order to overpower the trade unions. Coal mining, steel-making and other heavy industries were deliberately closed down or sold off, even when they were profitable, specifically in order to break trade union power.

At that time there was much talk from the government of the ‘flexible work-force’, which in practice meant that workers had almost no legal protection, and employers had all the power to hire or fire casual labour on a whim. With official estimates of three million unemployed, it was a buyer’s market. ‘There is a queue of people waiting outside, so if you don’t want the job, get out, and I’ll find someone else who does. Take it or leave it.‘

This climate was deliberately created by the Thatcher government for political and economic reasons. There is no doubt that the unions in the 1970s had been extremely powerful, and largely dominated by Marxists, and were not acting in the interests of the nation or the wider society, and something had to be done to rein them in. However, this had profound social consequences which we are still living with today.

Norman Tebbitt, Thatcher’s Employment Secretary, famously stated that when his own father was unemployed in the 1930s, he didn’t riot; instead he got on his bike and he looked for work. This turned out to be a powerful metaphor for what followed. People were encouraged to travel in search of work.

The other buzz-word of the Thatcher years was ‘the transition to a service economy‘. No-one I know works in manufacturing. They are lawyers, teachers, social workers, management consultants, IT or financial services staff, or, perhaps the lowest rung of all, call centre agents. The decline in heavy manufacturing was matched by an enormous rise in the knowledge and service based sectors. The paradigm case of the worker today is not the farmer or factory-hand of the Soviet hammer-and-sickle, but the educated middle-class professional. Rather than getting on his bike and trailing around the factories and ship-yards looking for work, he (or she) will put up a brass plaque outside the office door (or more likely a web-site) and wait for clients. This is a profound cultural and economic shift in work-patterns in less than a generation. Needless to say, this has had far-reaching effects on family and community life.

London has a large population of young, single professionals who have gravitated to the Capital, from every corner of the world, in search of work. In most cases, they have left their families behind, and are on their own. Just like the disenfranchised black youth I wrote about previously, these workers form groups, surrogate families, for mutual support.

The astronomical rise in property values means that the indigenous families have been driven out of the neighbourhoods, to be replaced by professional tenants. Many of them, even people in their thirties with professional jobs and good salaries, are living in flat-shares like college students, because they cannot afford a place of their own. The flat-share is one of the obvious routes into a surrogate family, the adult gang. The middle-class adult gang is vastly more numerous than the violent street gang, and although a good deal less destructive, it is still a significant social phenomenon, worthy of consideration.

People enter into short-term tenancy agreements, and tend to move on after a year or two, often going back to their home country. These workers, although in many ways model citizens, have little or no emotional investment in their local community. Usually, they have never even met their neighbours. When Mrs. Thatcher said that ‘there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals’, in this sense she was quite right. But a transitory population with no investment in its community, which values houses and streets only in financial terms, is not good for social cohesion. The lack of community in such areas, the lack of solidarity among the adults, is one of the reasons why the street gangs are able to flourish unchallenged. The corporate-capitalist Right has created this economic and social landscape. This is where the Left steps in.

By encouraging this geographical mobility, many of the economic forces unleashed by the Right during the 1980s tend to militate against community and family life. It is surely the job of the Left to counter these forces, to try to ameliorate the worst effects by caring for those at the bottom. But the Left has absolutely abandoned its responsibilities in this area. The two things that might help to bind communities together, the family and the education system, have been systematically sabotaged by the Left.

Driven by a feminist agenda, it argues that marriage is an outdated relic of the 1950s, that the family is an antiquated institution designed to oppress women, and that all family structures are equally good. ‘All family structures’ includes a teenage mother living off state hand-outs. That, apparently, is ‘just as valid’ as a married couple working to support their children. This position is complete nonsense on every level.

From the point of view of the single mother herself, she is vastly worse off than her married sister. She herself is more likely to live in poverty, more likely to suffer health problems, more likely to commit suicide, and her children are more likely to be abused, more likely to fail at school and more likely to grow up to be delinquents.

From the State‘s point of view, she is a net liability rather than an asset. The married couple work, pay taxes, raise new citizens and contribute to community cohesion. For the single mother, the State has to support her so-called ‘alternative family’, and pay for the resulting fallout for decades, in terms of increased health-care and crime, keeping her adult sons in prison, and her adult daughters in the same miserable position as herself.

Feminists never tire of saying that single mothers do a great job. They do not. They may do their best, but that does not constitute doing a good job. Most of them do a terrible job, leaving a trail of social wreckage for decades. Her sons today are the gang-members of tomorrow. Her daughters today are the teenage mothers of tomorrow. The taxpayer picks up the tab.

Mrs. Thatcher’s grand plan of a transition to a knowledge-based economy depended crucially on education. Having been made redundant from heavy industry, the idea was that workers would re-train for the new economy. For many, including myself, education was a traditional route out of poverty, something the Left should encourage. Instead of that, they have systematically undermined education for the last forty years, undermining the authority of teachers, decrying educational excellence as elitist masculine thinking. This was based on nothing more than envy, with humanities graduates resenting the fact that science and engineering were held in higher esteem than literature and art history, and feminists resenting the fact that men succeeded in these fields better than women. The Left’s response was to tear educational values down. This has given rise to a kind of adolescent ‘too kool for skool’ attitude, that it is cool not to do your homework, and cool to stick two fingers up behind the teacher’s back. This juvenile impulse has been given free-rein by a Left which seeks to undermine all social authority, particularly male authority

Our broken families and sabotaged schools are ideal factories for turning out hoodies, and that is exactly what they are doing. A society in which the streets are dominated by gangs of teenage boys is a frightening place to be. One of the few things which teenage boys are likely to respond to is male authority, yet male authority has been forcibly abolished. The fault for this lies squarely with the feminist-dominated Left.

With the Left and Right jointly responsible for undermining family and community, Mrs. Thatcher’s service-based economy has stepped in to fill the gap. In the broken society of individuals, people now have to pay for services that they once got from their family. This constitutes in effect, the industrialization of the family.

Once upon a time, there was no difficulty in finding a baby-sitter. There was always an aunt or a grandmother willing to step in and help. Nowadays, hard-working parents have to pay for professional childcare, which is not only expensive, but is often less effective, and ideologically driven.

The single mother receives her economic support from the State, rather than her husband. The family courts and social services arbitrate in family disputes which would once have been settled in private. The police are getting involved in school discipline. Women are being sold insurance policies promising to carry out repairs to their house, or to change a wheel on their car, services they would once have got for free from their husbands.

At the same time, globalization and the collapse of the Soviet bloc has given rise to an influx of foreign prostitutes, helping to fuel the rise of a commercial sex industry. It should come as no surprise to find that many men are paying for services that they once would have got from their wives. Feminists of course, are all in favour of state-funded childcare, but against prostitution. They are all for the industrialization of the family whenever it suits them, and against it when it does not.

Not only have many aspects of family life been commercialised, but in many cases, these services are being provided by the State. In other words, the taxpayer. I do not share the Thatcherite aversion to the concept of tax, but I see no reason why I should pay for someone else's self-indulgence, and if we must pay for their reckless mistakes, I would prefer that the money was spent up-front in educating them, rather than on keeping them in poverty after the damage has been done.

And what of those poor white families driven out of their traditional communities and workplaces? New Labour has no interest in them, because they are not a recognized ‘Victim’ group, as defined by a post-1968 agenda imported from the USA. Neither wealthy nor glamorous, they do not provide many good photo-opportunities for smarmy politicians like Blair. The middle-class feminists like Harridan Harmmen cannot bear to admit that some men in society are more in need of support than they are. It is ideologically unthinkable for them to give support to 'white families'.

Completely abandoned by the political establishment, many poor white communities are turning out to be a fertile breeding ground for neo-fascists. The British National Party is the only party that shows the slightest interest in them. This does not bode well for the future. Beset by the street gangs, poor and poorly educated, they are largely powerless to help themselves, and they have only two realistic choices. Embrace the gang culture yourself, or listen to the neo-Nazi message that the problem with street gangs is that they are black, and the reason why you struggle to find a house and a job is because of all the foreigners taking them. This was a seductive message for many in the 1930s, and, for some, it still is today.

The feminists are no better than the neo-fascists. The same simple-minded message can be heard from both sides. It’s their fault, their fault. It’s all the fault of immigrants. It’s all the fault of men. The difference is, the neo-fascists are not the ones in power.