Tom Griffin (London, OK): The debate about reforming the Act of Settlement has prompted some interesting musings over at the Slugger O'Toole website:
I have known a number of unionist republicans: most would be fairly liberal, though still clearly unionists. However, there are also unionists, albeit fewer, from a more hardline view point who support what has recently been suggested as the United Republic rather than the United Kingdom. Others who hold sometimes surprisingly ambivalent views on the monarchy include some fundamentalists.
That might seem a unexpected admission from Turgon, a supporter of Northern Ireland's most hardline unionist party, the TUV, but as he points out such views are not without their historical roots:
It must be remembered that the idea of monarchy was not considered the ideal in The Bible (1 Samuel 8:7). In addition across Oliver Cromwell’s tomb it is said the inscription read “Christ, not man, is king.” Many fundamentalists may well owe significant allegiance to the UK and indeed its head of state; there is, however, another country to which they vow true fealty, as indeed is clear in the third verse of that hymn. (Best tune ever to my mind).
One 'unionist republican' from the more liberal end of the spectrum is the Ulster Unionist Director of Communications, Alex Kane. He wrote in January:
I have absolutely no objection to Her Majesty on a personal level. Indeed, I think she does a remarkable job. But as someone who regards himself as a democratic purist I have said that my personal preference---and it is only my personal preference---would be that we have an elected Head of State. Putting it bluntly, everyone in authority, from the humblest parish councillor to the Head of State should be both elected and removable. But that State would remain the United Kingdom...
...Believing in an elected Head of State doesn't make me an Irish Republican and it certainly doesn't diminish or undermine my sense of unionism or my British identity.
The Protestant ethos that Turgon describes played a more significant role in the early history of Irish republicanism than is often recognised. Nevertheless, early republicans of all denominations reached the opposite conclusion to Kane, believing that republicanism and unionism were incompatible.
This reflected an older tradition of Irish nationalism, but also a calculation based on republican principle. Owen McGee reports that the founder of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, James Stephens reputedly "favoured the idea of the United Kingdom becoming a federal republic (minus the crown and House of Lords), with both Britain and Ireland possessing an equal status, and it was only because he realised its constitutional impossibility that he was a separatist."
Is a British republicanism any more possible today?
Certainly there is a growing interest in democratic republicanism reflected in the writings of David Marquand, the recent debate on the Levellers at the Modern Liberty Convention, and blogs such as the Fabians' Next Left.
Recent opinion polls might suggest this trend is a marginal one, but as Stuart White argues, abolishing the monarchy is only one part of a wider republican ethos that might best be summed up as a demand for popular sovereignty. It's a spirit seen in the 'yes we can' slogan of Barack Obama's presidential campaign and the invocation of Tom Paine in his inaugural address.
David Marquand has argued that the campaign for devolution provided a key instance of this ethos in the UK. In different ways, Labour, the Lib Dems and the SNP all asserted Scottish popular sovereignty.
Irish republicanism also conforms to this model. Sinn Féin did not call for the abolition of the monarchy when it was founded in 1905. What it possessed in the words of Richard English was "a politics of attitude. We’ll do it Ourselves" that reflected a much broader wave of activism across Irish civil society.
That these manifestations involve forms of nationalism is not surprising. The sovereignty of the people can only be realised in practise as the sovereignty of a particular people.
There is no a priori reason why that couldn't mean the sovereignty of the British people. Gordon Brown's constitutional reform agenda has been, perhaps, a missed opportunity to assert that possibility.
Yet the very timidity of that agenda suggests that Britishness is more closely bound up with the traditional model of parliamentary sovereignty than Alex Kane acknowledges.
The real choice may be between British parliamentary sovereignty and the popular sovereignty of English, Scottish, Irish, (perhaps even Northern Irish) and Welsh nationalisms. And the best chance of building a British republican ethos may lie in embracing those popular movements rather than opposing them.
