Lizzie. There are no princes in my ancestry. Plenty of paupers certainly. In fact according to a relative of mine who has researched our family history, we come from farm labourers, narrow boat people, barge people, iron ore miners, servants, flax mill operatives, carters, dockers, shoemakers, shipwrights and, wait for it, the mangle keeper for the village of Barnton in mid-Cheshire.

As far as I can see, nobody in my family has ever started a war or got rich and fat on the sufferings of his fellow human beings. None of them lived in idleness and luxury, or sat in the house of commons - still less the house of lords - and ordered the invasion of Afghanistan or the brutal subjugation of Ireland or India, or any other parts of the empire on which the sun never set.

They were ordinary hard working, law abiding folk, who brought their children up decently, who slaved their lives out in poverty, yet somehow managed to keep alive that spark of respectability and dignity which so fundamentally characterises the ordinary people of this island of ours.

They are the people who deserve to be celebrated tomorrow. Not the overblown stuffed shirt descendants of "An old, mad, blind, despis'd, and dying king", as Shelley once so ably described George 111.

Here's the entire poem, but before anybody accuses me of unnecessarily dredging up the past, that is precisely what the establishment does every time it drags out that goddamned tumbril.

"An old, mad, blind, despis'd, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn – mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starv'd and stabb'd in the untill'd field,
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edg'd sword to all who wield,
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay,
Religion Christless, Godless – a book seal'd,
A Senate – Time's worst statute unrepeal'd,
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day."