Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor got a nasty birthday present on 19 February, when the police arrived at the Sandringham Estate and arrested him on charges of ‘misconduct in public office’.
This comes in the wake of the release of the latest tranche of Epstein files documents. The revelations coming out of the files are truly shocking, including emails from Ghislane Maxwell seemingly proving that he lied about never meeting Virginia Giuffre, photos of the then-Prince crouched on all fours over a young woman or girl lying on the floor, as well as evidence that he supplied Epstein with classified information while working as a trade envoy to the US. In a grim display of the capitalist elite’s priorities, it seems that it is only the passing of information which has prompted his arrest – rather than his alleged proximity to the trafficking and abuse of children!
The Royals Enabled Andrew and Epstein’s Abuse
This arrest comes after years of Andrew being protected by the monarchy, including reportedly receiving millions of pounds from the personal fortune of Elizabeth II to pay an out-of-court settlement to Virginia Giuffre. His arrest was only won in the face of overwhelming public outrage. In the meantime, he has enjoyed not just his freedom, but a lifestyle of luxury and privilege. Whatever comes next for Andrew, he may well face far lesser consequences for his actions than an ordinary person accused of far less serious crimes.
It goes almost without saying that the former Prince’s alleged crimes are rooted directly in his position as a member of the royal family. Growing up with massive wealth, unfettered access to the whole establishment, and being treated as though he was special and important, seems to have taught Andrew that he was entitled to do whatever he wanted without consequence.
It is no wonder, then, that support for the monarchy – already at its lowest recorded level in history at the beginning of the year – has taken yet another tumble. Latest polls show a quarter of the public want to see the monarchy abolished. Just 37% say they think abolishing the monarchy would be a bad thing. People are getting increasingly sick of this symbol of massive inequality and unearned wealth and privilege.
Not Just For Show – A Tool of Capitalist Oppression
These events would be reason enough to abolish the monarchy. But Marxists have a much deeper explanation about why this feudal institution needs to be consigned to the history books. The monarchy is an institution that plays a crucial role in helping the ruling capitalist class maintain control over society.
In Britain, we are raised under a kind of cult of personality around the monarch and the royal family. We are taught to revere and empathise with this small group of individuals with whom we have very little in common – more so than with members of our own class. The royal family is portrayed as selflessly performing its duties on behalf of the British people. We are perversely encouraged to be ‘grateful’ to the royals for sitting on mountains of unearned inherited wealth – all while millions live in poverty.
In this sense, the monarchy’s role is ideological. The propaganda around the royals has long been designed to promote a completely fictional ‘national unity’ among the British population. This is to obscure the fact that the interests of the working-class majority and those of the capitalist class couldn’t be any further apart.
The royal family also serves as the embodiment of the status quo for British capitalism, acting as a symbol of ‘stability’ and continuity. The history of the monarchy, going back more than a thousand years, is held up to show that it would be unthinkable to abolish it now, and, by extension, to make any other radical changes to society.
However, far from being a constant in British history, the form and the role of the monarchy has actually changed significantly over the centuries. Much of its supposedly ‘ancient’ traditions, such as the ceremonial opening of parliament and the lavish pageantry of coronations, are not nearly as old as they are made out to be. Many other countries have abolished similarly aged monarchies, such as in the Russian and French revolutions. Even in England itself, the English Revolution of 1640-1660 led briefly to a republic, following the beheading of King Charles I.
No Such Thing as a Democratic Monarchy
Another important myth about the monarchy is that Britain’s status as a ‘constitutional monarchy’ means the king no longer has any real political power. This is untrue. In fact, the King is head of the armed forces, the civil service and still retains the formal power to dismiss the government at any time.This is treated as a mere technicality when the monarch’s powers are discussed. We are assured that in ‘real life’, the King would not be able to remove the government without triggering a constitutional crisis. But this power has in fact already been used in living memory to remove elected governments from office.
In 1975, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was dismissed from his position, not because he had lost an election, but because he was removed by the Governor General Sir John Kerr – the Queen’s representative in the Australian state. Whitlam was something of an Australian Corbyn – a left-wing reformer whose policies upset the Australian ruling class. These included pulling Australian troops out of Vietnam and introducing free healthcare and higher education. Under the pretext of resolving a deadlock in the Australian Parliament, the Crown had an elected Prime Minister removed and replaced with a more ‘acceptable’ alternative.
We should be under no illusions about the potential for this to happen today. Had Jeremy Corbyn won the election in 2017 or 2019 and committed to pushing through his left-wing programme, this ‘constitutional reserve’ could well have been used against his government at a certain stage, with the supposedly ‘neutral’ monarchy claiming to act in the ‘best interests of the nation’. Famously, after Corbyn took office as Labour leader in September 2025, an unnamed general of ‘Her Majesty’s’ Armed Forces spoke of the chances of a military or military coup against an elected government.
The existence of the monarchy isn’t just undemocratic in principle, it is actively anti-democratic in practice.
Not Just the monarchy, But Capitalism Too
Abolishing the monarchy is a vital step. But we have to be clear: it would not, in and of itself, resolve the fundamental causes behind the problems we face. The monarchy, of course, is a central pillar of capitalist rule in Britain. However capitalism does not inherently need a royal family in order to function, as we can see clearly in other countries.
Countries where the head of state is elected, such as France and the US, are in no better state for the working class than Britain. Indeed, we are increasingly seeing how where there isn’t a monarch, capitalism still finds ‘strongman’ figures to defend their system – whether that be the likes of Trump, Viktor Orban in Hungary or Javier Milei in Argentina. Capitalism innately needs a strong, repressive state in order to keep the working class in line. For this reason, a British republic under capitalism would not prove itself to be a fundamentally more equal or democratic society than Britain under a monarchy.
As Peter Mandelson and Trump have clearly demonstrated, rich, powerful members of the capitalist class do not need to have a claim to the throne to get away with years of close friendship with individuals complicit in trafficking and sexual abuse. Nor would the royals need to keep their titles to keep their vast looted fortunes if the abolition of the monarchy did not come with the nationalisation of their estates. Huge sums of money and thousands of acres of land are no better in the hands of a normal millionaire than they are in the hands of a prince.
This is why dismantling the monarchy must go alongside dismantling the whole capitalist system which goes along with it. That includes abolishing the House of Lords, doing away with all hereditary titles and ultimately undermining the basis of hereditary wealth as a whole.
This is why Socialist Alternative fights for a socialist republic, where the millions of pounds spent every year on pageantry are used to fund public services, to eliminate poverty and to address the climate crisis. One where the estates and properties owned by the royal family are taken into public ownership under democratic control, along with the giant monopolies currently owned and controlled by the capitalist class.
