Our Work

Why we campaign

For all the loud and often indignant claims made by hardened republicans, the monarchy has managed to hold on, quite firmly, well into the 21st century. And yet, it would be futile to pretend all is calm beneath the surface. There's a cultural unrest: ideological creep in our institutions, a fraying sense of who we are as a Nation, a media class more addicted to noise over truth, and a sharper, coordinated push against the Crown itself. Unlike the “vulgar republicanism” of Victorian Britain, there is a sense that modern anti-monarchism is deeply embedded within the establishment itself, and cloaked beneath the language of “modernisation” and “simplification”.

Our friends at the Australian Monarchist League refer to this strategy as “republicanism by stealth”, whereby anti-monarchy ideology is advanced under the guise of institutional reform. It is the gradual debasing of the monarchy’s function, its symbolism and its authority by embedding republicanism within the very organs of the state itself. It replaces tradition with proceduralism, and its ultimate goal is to render the monarchy so diminished and dislocated from national life that its formal removal from the constitution becomes a redundant proposal altogether.

Our challenge, then, is multifaceted. The Royalists must confront every strain of republican thought without apology, from whichever side of the political spectrum it rears its head. More crucially, we must identify the common tropes and provide accessible responses to them. We must think strategically and imaginatively, rearticulating the benefits of monarchy to a nation under immense, seemingly endless cultural and sociopolitical strain. There is a profound hunger for ritual and rootedness, and the monarchy has provided that common backdrop for centuries. We must cut through the fluff and provide those intelligible arguments.

James John-William Evans, Chairman