For a long time now, the monarchy has been entirely out of step with modern Britain.
If the monarch had multiple children, the succession would be given to the eldest boy, rather than simply the eldest child. For the grave sin of being born a woman, you would be passed over by your younger brother, because men are obviously generically predisposed to be better at ruling a kingdom.
But no more! A new royal succession law is passing that removes said gender discrimination, meaning the eldest child, regardless of gender, will now inherit the Crown.
I have to say though, I can’t really believe we spent parliamentary time on this.
Ending discrimination is always a good thing, but the reality is that almost nobody is affected by this. Indeed, even if you look at the past thousand years, how many people would be affected by it? My guess is, it’s very, very few people. You would be able to count them on one hand.
That is far less than the amount of women who are going to be raped in the next 24 hours, or the number of transwomen who will be murdered in the next month. Maybe that would be a good place to spend some parliamentary time?
You can then argue that it is the principle that it is important – that the monarchy are the head of the UK, and indeed the Commonwealth, so it is important we show from the top that we don’t discriminate on gender.
This is a much better argument, but if we are going to recognise that the monarchy is a ridiculous unfair archaic system, why are we still tolerating it? Why not finally make the move to a republic? The phrase polishing a turd comes to mind, because we still have a system where 99.9999% of the population are excluded because of the circumstances of their birth – we have hardly fixed discrimination in this area – this isn’t a victory for women, it’s a victory for Kate Middleton’s daughter. That we spent our parliamentary time on.
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Tags: monarchy, royal family, royal succession
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2012 at 1:52 pm and is filed under Religion & Politics, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.