Well I don't want any kind of monarch involved in having any say whatsoever in running anything other than their own flock of corgis. Not ceremonial, not nothing. The ones we have the misfortune to endure in this country are as thick as pigshit, as they make painfully obvious every time they open their mouths in public, unworthy of being consulted about anything more important than which brand of baked beans their armies of servants should go out and buy for them.

I think that there's no real alternative to full democracy. The trouble with democracy in the US and the UK, as has been made patently clear in the last few months, is that we have shamefully uneducated electorates. Political education in schools is a bit like sex ediucation, seen as a bête noire and attracting hawkish reactionary forces which oversee things to ensure that only right-wing, faux-moralistic establishment values are perpetuated. As with religious instruction, it isn't education at all. Of course, right-wing traditions such as school uniform and the unquestioning herding of kids off to services and other ceremonies help to cement the establishment hegemony. There is next to no countering of this in any school I've been in. The upshot of all this is an ignorant electorate that is easily manipulated. Prejudices are easy to appeal to, and unelected forces such as right-wing media, big business and lobby groups are cheerfully embraced by politicians as long as they sing from their populist hymnsheet. That's where people get their political "education" from, just as kids get their sex "education" from porn websites. Vacuums in knowledge will always attract unscrupulous exploiters. Proper democracy demands voters who actually know what they're voting about. This happens to a lamentably inadequate degree. The danger is that the powers that be, especially on the right, find this a rather attractive situation. So it looks like we're getting democracy because we can go into a booth and make a mark. But outside the booth we have Farage, Johnson, the Sun and the Daily Mail to ensure that educated democracy is no more real than Franco going to communion every day was a real Christian.