I'm not aiming to be unbiased here, I will be forthright. I don't like the Monarchy. Not as people or anything, I don't know them as people, but as an institution I find them every bit as disgusting as I do child poverty. In fact, I will show how those two things - royalty and child poverty - are different ends of an unpleasant spectrum to which royalists are, maybe stupidly or ignorantly, disgustingly committed.
The Monarchy. More specifically our British Monarchy, but monarchies in general also. Some staunchly support them, mistakenly claiming increased tourists visit thanks to them and thus overall they are an economic asset, or maybe thinking they do us well when it comes to diplomacy, or some other misguided claim. I hope to give here an argument that means we don't need to think about these arguments. We don't need to do some empirical test to find out if the Monarchy is a good or a bad thing to have. What I want to do is show that, just by thinking about it, we should be appalled by the very notion of royalty.
My argument is a simple one. A child who is born into poverty, even the relative poverty of a rich nation, does not deserve the erosion of life-chances (or opportunity) just because they were born into a poor family. This is because no child has had the chance to behave or act in ways we would say mean the child deserves their circumstances. From the implicit cause of our anger at child poverty we should also draw the conclusion that no child deserves, because they have not had the chance to act in a way that would make them deserving, of undue wealth and power by dint of being born to a specific family at a specific time and place.
The choices should be clear. To know this and still support a monarchy is to support the idea of child poverty. To be repulsed by child poverty should mean you are also repulsed by the idea of a monarchy. Having this made clear, monarchists can now decide whether to commit themselves to a clearly repulsive position on child poverty, or they can abandon their position that there should be, at very least in principle, any monarchy at all.
