That is why we have said in recent years that we should stop using the terms "England" or "Britain" when, in reality, we are referring to the "United Kingdom." The United Kingdom was established almost 200 years ago, in 1801, when, under the so-called Act of Union, the English Parliament and Crown abolished even the semblance of a separate parliament in Ireland. Wales had already been incorporated into England for hundreds of years through military conquest, and the English rulers had imposed an earlier Act of Union on Scotland in 1707. Scotland retained its own legal system and schools, as well as its own state church (Presbyterian), whose head is the Queen when she steps across the border into Scottish territory.  
 

UK is the form of the bourgeois state

So there is more to Her Majesty's realm than just pomp and symbol. The United Kingdom is the form of the bourgeois state — today, of the imperialist state power — with its seat in London. That is why the issue of "reforming" and "trimming" the monarchy and the House of Lords can and does emerge as an issue in bourgeois politics. It is not just a matter of pruning the state budget. The stakes are bigger.

In a capitalist state that takes the form of a constitutional monarchy, as economic and social crises deepen, the crowned head of state remains important. It becomes one of the few institutions that can "speak for the entire nation." In a bourgeois republic without a monarchy, the president often assumes Bonapartist powers and authority under such conditions. But in a constitutional monarchy, remnants of feudalism preserved by the bourgeoisie with few intrinsic vested powers — the Crown, as well as an unelected House of Lords — grow rather than diminish in their importance for maintaining stability amid the increasing brutality of capitalist life and rule.

The Canadian bourgeoisie keeps trying and failing to write a constitution. Most major bourgeois politicians in Canada have not yet challenged Queen Elizabeth as head of state — although that will happen too (as it already has among bourgeois politicians in Australia).1 But Canada's bourgeois rulers have tried twice over the past decade to write a new constitution and failed both times.

Canada never had a successful bourgeois revolution, so it never had a real bourgeois constitution. But it is too late in history now. No constitution can be drafted for Canada that will satisfy the demands of French-speaking workers, farmers, and youth in Quebec for their unconditional right to national self-determination. No constitution can be drafted that will satisfy the demands of oppressed Native peoples. Nor can a constitution even be drafted that will resolve conflicts among capitalist interests in Canada who have greater or lesser amounts of capital at stake in various regions and provinces of the country. It is too late in history for that.

Many of us in the United States do not even know there is still a monarchy in Sweden. But now we'll start finding out. With the demise in recent years of "the Swedish miracle," the economic and social conditions of working people there are beginning to undergo qualitative changes like nothing they have lived through since World War I. With less leeway to grant concessions, the officialdom of the Social Democratic Party and trade unions needs additional help in the effort to become more effective tools for the bourgeoisie in Sweden in maintaining capitalist stability. So, we will begin seeing prominent capitalists there, too, trying to use the Swedish monarchy "to speak for the nation."

Under the same kinds of pressures in the United Kingdom, the bourgeoisie has begun to divide. [Prime Minister Anthony] Blair is speaking on behalf of those who think they have to present some answer to growing nationalist agitation in Scotland, fueled by regional disparities and inequalities that have widened in the depression conditions gripping the United Kingdom. That is why, off and on, there is even pressure around the issue of devolution for Wales, where the rapid decline of the capitalist coal industry has brought economic devastation and increased nationalist sentiment among tenant farmers and industrial workers….

The Irish battle against English tyranny, of course, is centuries old. In the modern class struggle it goes back to the earliest days of the rising English bourgeoisie. The seeds of the current conflict were sown by the forcible and bloody partition of Ireland in 1920. Today's Irish Republic had been established that year following a national-democratic revolution, but bourgeois forces in the Republican movement acquiesced in Britain's retention of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland.

Ever since, the Catholic population in the North has been kept in a caste-like oppression, ghettoized and facing official and unofficial brutalization at every turn. The ruling layers among the majority Protestant oppressor population retain a separate educational system, courts, and cops — the notorious Royal Ulster Constabulary. And they had a nominal parliament, too, the Stormont, until 1972, when London asserted direct rule in the wake of a new rise of Irish Republican resistance. British troops have occupied Northern Ireland for a quarter of a century, since 1969, carrying out martial-law repression against the rebellious Catholic population....

So, if you take Westminster's problems in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and then you add in the historic decline of the British pound and the state of world capitalism, you begin to see the strains pulling at the seams of the United Kingdom — seams that could begin to rip with a new rise in labor struggles and sustained social mobilizations, and the capitalists' inevitable need for tightened not loosened state centralization.

The historic forced retreat of the United Kingdom from acting as an effective world power continues.  
 
 
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