I suppose it is fair to say that I’m in two minds about the monarchy. I can certainly see it’s good points: having a queen, I usually say, is part of our national identity. Yet yesterday, as I was watching the river pageant on tv and thinking how beautiful it was, it suddenly struck me that, on quite an important level, it was utterly stupid, obscene even. All this money and effort, in the middle of a depression, to ‘celebrate’ an unelected old woman becoming head of state sixty years ago. If you think about it, why do we need the monarchy? It is a symbol of everything that I usually despise: the undemocratic figurehead of the class system, the human representation of the idea the outdated idea that some people are born to rule. Why should that be part of our national identity? Tory-types will say that the queen is ‘prepolitical’, and holds the nation together, but, when you think about it, that is utter bullshit. That is an excuse to maintain an innately unfair class system, designed to keep power in the hands of the few. They argue that the queen is just a figurehead with no real power, which is true; but she is also a symbol of inequality and unfairness – a symbol of an outdated, extremely expensive system which we all unthinkingly accept because we all swallow the idea that it is part of our identity. Why should some people be born to rule? Why should we all just accept the unfair, repressive class system so obviously symbolised and therefore maintained by having a monarchy? The tories want to keep the monarchy because they have a vested interest in maintaining the class system, a system they claim is meritocratic, but when analyzed is revealed to be a system covertly designed to keep power in the hands of the few. Isn’t it time we all engaged with such ideas, realising how oppressive they are, instead of just accepting them because they are tradition? Why do we accept spending so much on something so outdated, especially these days?