Stephen Paton: This is why getting rid of the monarchy is necessary for any modern country

Regardless of how it is portrayed, the royal family is anything but a benign influence in British politics. In fact, since the beginning of the Queen’s reign more than 1000 laws have secretly been vetted by the monarch, including draft laws that could have had an impact on her many properties.

The extent of the royals’ wealth remains unknown to us, in part due to the Queen successfully pressing the UK Parliament into helping conceal her family’s immense fortune – though it is estimated to run into hundreds of millions of pounds.

In 2011 the head of state also tried to divert money earmarked for low-income families, schools and hospitals instead into covering the cost of heating Buckingham Palace.

It’s hard not to picture the Queen sitting above her vast vault, al a Scrooge McDuck, instructing servant after servant to dive into the great pools of gold below, shattering their bones on the unmoving mounds of dense metals for her pleasure.

On account of that wealth, and Britain’s bizarre fetish for anachronisms, the royal family broadly pass through life without serious challenge. Raised in the belief that they are leaders by right of blood, this is the perfect breeding ground for the arrogance, ignorance and superiority that defines the aristocracy.

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How else could you explain Prince Andrew’s decision to appear on television to answer for his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, secure in the belief that viewers would swallow that he couldn’t have been the “profusely sweating” man that described by one of Epstein’s accusers because he doesn’t sweat?

The British media hold a serious degree of blame over how the various transgressions of the royals have managed to pass by so quietly. Our press tend to stick with who had an affair with who rather than any serious challenge, turning the record of the Windsor family into the world’s most expensive soap opera.

For every uncovered archive from the Guardian, or disastrous interview with Andrew, there are a hundred “Top 20 Hilarious Prince Philip Gaffes”, where the Duke of Edinburgh telling a group of British students visiting China “If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed” is reduced to a comical mis-step rather than outright racism. That “famous quip” was described in a BBC article as “teetering on the edge of being offensive” as late as 2017. Racism isn’t always quite as blatant as a slur, or the time Philip asked an indigenous Australian leader if they still throw spears at one another. Often it hides in the smaller cuts of language that pervade the everyday, masquerading as “concerns” rather than outright hostility, such as when an unknown royal mused whether Meghan Markle’s baby would be “too dark to represent the UK”.

I wholly believe that whoever made this statement does not think themselves to be, or their comment to have been, racist but that is the result of being shielded from the outside world by such privilege as the royals have.

MARKLE later confirmed that this comment came from neither the Queen nor Philip, which would suggest the rot runs far deeper than the Duke’s various public outbursts.

Meanwhile, Scotland remains a cultural hostage to their whims.

As a result of his recent hospital stay, and given he is 99, the question of what happens after the death of a prince has been quietly asked in recent days. Following the inevitable, there will follow a period of national mourning that will impact our day-to-day lives for some time. And for what?

In the 1960s, Philip was happy to spend time with the genocidal dictator Alfredo Stroessner, a man who quickly escorted his opponents and enemies to the torture chamber and sat on the phone listening to the secretary of the Paraguayan Communist Party being dismembered limb from limb with a chainsaw.

Perhaps one of the Duke’s lesser-known famous quips occurred during that visit, when he told Stroessner: “It’s a pleasant change to be in a country that isn’t ruled by its people.”

Philip’s history is in my opinion a catalogue of sexist, racist and ignorant statements made to people without the power to tell him where to shove it – and this is the man we’ll soon be expected to bow our heads in sadness for.

While I’d never wish for his end to come sooner, I certainly won’t be marking the occasion with anything other than indifference.

Our media have long way to go to address its relationship with the royal family.

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Earlier this week the Society of Editors issued a statement saying there was no racism in our press, in response to the Oprah interview with Harry and Meghan, and were so roundly criticised for its tone-deaf and profoundly blinkered position that the organisation’s chief had to stand down while the Press Awards were delayed. This was in the same week in which the Daily Mirror branded the Oprah interview the “worst royal crisis in 85 years”, neatly skipping over Philip’s many outrageous comments and Andrew’s patronage of Pizza Express.

No, it was in fact Meghan Markle talking about her experiences as a mixed-race woman in the House of Windsor: Meghan, who has been treated horrifically by Britain’s obsessive and, yes, racist press.

Abolition of the monarchy is a necessary goal for any modern country, but that too comes with reforming the relationship our press has with Britain’s institutions and its own biases and bigotries.

At least with independence Scotland has the opportunity to leave the parasitical royals in the past, if only we take the steps to both confine it to our history and break chains with what remains of the empire.