NO MORE FAIRY TALES
The English Monarchy is the last big myth left over from the Twentieth century. Like the little boy who could see that the Emperor had no clothes, the scales are dropping from our eyes and the reality is that the Welsh people, particularly young people, do not like what they see. This is despite the sickening humility shown by the British Mass Media to the death of the Queen Mother which is hypocritical and reveals them to be out of touch with their audience.
There is no future in the Twenty First century for a "British" hereditary monarchy that clings to its privileges and power while the British state rots and collapses into an English rump of right-wing government.
As the reunification of Ireland and the establishment of an independent Scottish state become an unstoppable process, the people of Wales are faced with a simple choice - either to cling to the shirt-tails of the English ruling class or rise up and create their own future by establishing an independent Welsh Republic which is democratic and socialist.
This pamphlet exposes the reality of the English monarchy, providing the ammunition we need to blast the myth of the English monarchy into oblivion. Only then will we be able to imagine another way, to believe that we don’t need the English monarchy and the British ruling class, and to rise up and create our own future in a Welsh socialist republic.
WELSH REPUBLICANISM, PAST AND PRESENT
IN Wales, republicanism has a long and honourable record, starting with Richard Price who wrote “Civil Liberty” in 1776, urging the Americans to rebel against King George III by ignoring English constitutional precedents and basing their struggle on the rights of man. This was revolutionary stuff, urging them on to a war for liberty based on the doctrine of sovereignty of the people and the pioneers of the American revolution like Benjamin Franklin were influenced by him. Price also had the startling idea that British MPs were simply trustees to carry out the wishes of their constituents and that communities such as Wales had the right to govern themselves. Nor was he alone, as Iolo Morgannwg, best known for his creation of the Gorsedd ceremony used at the Eisteddfod, wrote in the 1790s, the stirring words “If a Tyrant King I meet, Clench fist and knock him down”.
But, these were words in the wilderness and it took over a century before Keir Hardie the first Labour MP in Wales declared his opposition to the Investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1911 “Wales is to have an Investiture as a reminder that an English king and his robber barons strove for ages to destroy the Welsh people and finally succeeded in robbing them of their lands, driving them into the mountainous fastnesses of their native land like hunted beasts, and then had the insolence to have his son invested in their midsts”.
Modern Welsh republicanism started in 1949 when the Welsh Republican Movement was established to campaign for a Welsh republic and oppose the English monarchy. The WRM were Welsh patriots who were anti-Imperialist and
internationalist, with a tinge of green politics. A quotation from their paper, The Welsh Republican, (1951) gives some indication of how broad their politics was “In the sphere of 20th century politics, Welsh Republicanism must secure the backing of a united people, of miner and quarryman, of docker and landworker. Nor must our sphere of action be limited by any narrow racial impositions, the Arab from Tiger Bay is our concern, equally with the Welsh speaker from Cefngwlad.”
In the 1960s, Mudiad Amddifyn Cymru, (Movement for the Defence of Wales), opposed the Investiture of Prince Charles by taking violent direct action to promote the idea of liberation and independence.
More recently, in the first two years after the Devolution vote in 1979, the Welsh Socialist Republican Movement revived the tradition and tried, unsuccessfully to draw together the two republican traditions - the socialist and patriotic. Its failure to merge them was because it had no coherent political theory. But from its ashes, through the continuation of the newspaper, Y Faner Goch, a new force emerged in the late 1980s, Cymru Goch, the Welsh Socialists who have consistently argued a republican stance.
Today, Cymru Goch maintains the tradition and has fused a number of socialist and progressive elements behind a new Welsh republicanism that is confident in its arguments seeing Wales as a colony in which the class struggle has a national
dimension. Cymru Goch campaigns for the abolition of the Monarchy in Wales and, more importantly, the establishment of a Welsh socialist republic.