Britain today is as deeply divided by class as we’ve ever been. As four days of pomp and circumstance for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee come to a close, up to a third of UK children will go to bed with hungry bellies. Not since the 1930s have we seen such a stark contrast between the affluence of the super-rich and the public squalor of Foodbank Britain—of ostentatious plenty amidst so much grinding poverty. Even the Ancient Romans offered both bread and circuses.

But Britain in the seventieth year of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign is a country plagued by exploding absolute poverty. In one of the richest societies in the history of the world, we don’t provide even the basic necessities for a growing number of people. For any true leader, that should be a source of deep and abiding shame and embarrassment at our failing society, not a moment for flag-waving celebration and vulgar patriotism. Our kids can’t eat bunting and Union Jacks!

So, as wall-to-wall coverage of parades and celebrations and golden stagecoaches continues, I will not be joining in. I am many things, and by no means perfect—but I am not a hypocrite. I have never believed in the monarchy or in archaic notions of a divine right of anybody to rule over anybody else through accidents of birth and class privilege, and I’ll be sitting this one out, thank you very much.

Interestingly, very few people I encounter in the real world where I live seem particularly interested either. This is a confected celebration, in which politicians cajole the people to do their ‘patriotic duty’ to celebrate, but most will simply go about their daily lives as before, perhaps glad for a little extra time off in the most overworked country in Europe. All the pomp is at best a temporary papering-over of the building outrages, scandals and social divisions that now characterize British society. The fish is rotting from the head down.

I am a Labour Councillor, and am struggling to understand why the party has a new push to tolerate an outdated system of monarchy and join the whooping patriotism over an institution that ought to be alien to our traditions and beliefs and built on an incompatible ideology.

Maybe this is now an offence I can be disciplined for—Who knows? We shall see!—but the try-hards at the top of my party look ludicrous as they try to out-compete the Tories in flag-waving deference and sycophancy. And too many on the Left are simply falling into line and bending the knee.

Even if you are not socialists, you are supposed to be democrats, believing that government should be by and for the people, not the private concern or property of our rulers and ‘betters’. On what other political basis can we contest for state power against Tories and class enemies who consider themselves ‘born to rule’?

We ought to be completely opposed to any pressure being whipped and applied to people to push them to identify as a flag-waving royalists by our current political and media establishment. The knee-jerk conformism and fawning deference are sickening. This ‘celebration’ is simply the icing on the cake for who and where we are right now as a country—in a very bad place. If you don’t support it, you are somehow ‘anti-British’, you hate your country, you are a miserable party-pooper.

In truth, what I feel when I look at it all is a bubbling rage inside at all the money, all the pomp and fake gestures and performativity, all coming at a time when we are living through a wages and earnings crisis, when absolute poverty in this country is rapidly on the rise, when the poorest-paid continue to have to work through the celebrations—and are expected to do so with a grateful smile on their faces and a tug of their forelocks.

The carriages and jewels and gold and silver sparkling all around are an abomination at a time when I speak to more and more people who don’t have enough to eat, whose houses are infested with vermin, and whose jobs are ever-more-precarious or being lost.

I have been told in response that ‘the people want a party’—and deserve one to forget all the misery going on. This is just perplexing to me. The misery many are facing is directly and completely intertwined and interlinked with the hierarchy and class system of which the monarchy is the apex and serves to keep firmly in place. The deep and corrosive inequality that we see all around us today cannot be dealt with in any meaningful way without tackling the institutions that sustain the ailing British social system—and the monarchy is one of the foremost of these.

Denials by some that the monarch is ‘political’ are just ludicrous. As the ‘Sovereign-in-Parliament’ and source of unlimited executive power in our unwritten and undemocratic constitution, the Queen has overseen a succession of ‘Her Majesty’s governments’—note: not the people’s governments!—who have acted to privatise public services and transfer wealth and power from ordinary people and working class communities into the pockets of the wealthy, while our rights have been eroded in an economy that operates for the few and not the many.

While all the cakes are cut and the bunting is hung, I cannot and will not plaster on a smile and join in with all the nonsense about ‘but she never picked this life’ and ‘has given decades of selfless service’. Most people do not get the opportunities to pick their lives, either—especially in a society in which upward mobility stalled out long ago, when wealth comes from owning assets and not from how hard you work, and when the biggest predictor of success and future income is who your parents are and how much they have.

Apologists for the monarchy need to imagine for a minute being skint, trapped in a life that you also never asked for, with little opportunity to ever escape, working long hours in multiple jobs just to have nothing left at the end of it after rent and debt repayments and extortionate rip-off bills for the basic necessities. My mind at least remains focused on the task at hand of how we change direction and organise people to demand their fair slice of the cake—in fact, the whole of the cake for the vast majority of the people, and not just crumbs from the tables of the rich.

Which brings us to the other big public event this month—one that will not benefit from media and elite cajoling of the public, but needs to be big and powerful and strong if we are to address the growing divides in this country and not just attempt to cover them up with little flags. The TUC demonstration in London on the 18 June needs as many as possible to attend.

We live in times when the government is pushing through legislation designed to stifle and stop normal people protesting and voicing their concerns. The state is creating a more brutal response through policing and direct threats. But it is clear that more and more ordinary working people have had enough. It is time to demand that Britain get a pay rise to deal with the growing cost of living crisis and inflation. Profits and the rich must be squeezed, not pay and the people.

The abuse of power that is happening at the top must not be tolerated. Of course, the media attack lines on trade union activity are ramping up, but the response must be to stand up and be counted as a collective. Now is not the time to be timid. Prices are rocketing. Six in ten people are struggling to make ends meet. Energy bills are up by 54 percent. Food prices are up, fuel bills are up, rent and mortgage payments are up, interest rates are up: everything is going up but wages!

The social security system has been decimated, and the conditions people are expected to live and work in are deteriorating rapidly. We must demand a real response that puts people before profits, and creates a different kind of economy that works for place and planet too.

The average household in the UK will be paying around £2,000 more for their annual energy bill come October. Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, thinks that a one-off payment of £400 will solve people’s problems. This shows clearly both the disdain with which the Tories view the general public and also their detachment from reality. Compare this with the billions of pounds that the government pumped into private businesses during the pandemic, and always remember that the richest people became wealthier still.

Workers must tackle the cost-of-living crisis themselves by taking action through their trade unions and winning better pay. We have to get more people to join that fight and see that their true allies are the people like them facing rising costs across the board, working longer hours with less benefits, and seeing their pensions robbed and curtailed.

We need people to understand that their neighbours, friends, those they exchange pleasantries with on the school run will no doubt be feeling much the same anxiety and stress they are as they try to figure out their finances. We need to move from shame and anxiety to anger and action. The vast majority of us have far more in common with each other than we’ll ever have with our out-of-touch ruling class—including those who live in palaces at great public expense.

The work needs to be done to build the pressure and empower workers and communities to take action to transform the way wealth and power are created and controlled in this country so that we will all then see the benefits. We have made great changes at times when we had far less with which to work. This is not a poor country, there is no economic problem—there is instead a very real political problem with how the economy is being run, and in whose interests.

There is no need for scarcity, poverty, hunger, social exclusion in twenty-first century Britain. We have the productive capacity and capability to run our economy very differently. We are one of the richest societies in the whole history of the world. We must feel it through our work, through our health, through our education and housing. That it doesn’t feel that way is testament to the rip-off that is being conducted at the top.

We must demand fundamental change. To do nothing and allow the thieving crooks like Johnson, Patel, and Sunak and their team of bandits to continue will only see them go further and further in stripping us of our rights and hopes and dreams. They serve not us but the super-rich, the upper classes—and, indeed, the Crown.

This month’s TUC demonstration offers a chance for the whole trade union movement and everyone who is sick to the back teeth of all the injustice and inequality to come together and tell the Tory government that they are to blame and that politicians can and must change the outcomes for those living in financial fear. This deployment of collective strength, through trade union activity, to demand more of the wealth that workers’ labour creates is essential if we are to truly build a better country. And building in the trade unions is where the real fight must begin. We need to see active membership increase and we must see political education improved to empower people to see the true benefits of being a trade union member.

Successive governments’ determination to do away with sectoral bargaining and weaken collective bargaining by restricting workers’ right to take industrial action is designed not only to ensure that the balance of economic power remains with big business and the wealthy few. It is also about disempowering those sections of the working class that need effective trade unionism most of all—the low-paid, unorganised, atomised victims of ‘flexibility’ who are denied decent wages, pensions, paid holidays, and sick and compassionate leave. Those who have been hardest hit by the pandemic, who greedy employers have been given free rein to further exploit.

So when we talk about love of Britain and what that means, I refuse to bow down to those who see it as acceptable that children go to school with empty bellies, or that houses are infested with black mould. I won’t chink my glass with someone who turns a blind eye to the proliferation of foodbanks or can brush off the fact that hundreds of thousands of people will likely lose their jobs or working conditions through practices such as fire and rehire. Call me a party pooper, but I don’t want to party with the elites anyway.

Believe me, the party that I want to be at is a party of the organised labour movement, winning against exploitative bosses and corrupt politicians. That’s something from our history that we should be proud of and celebrate—not some flummery that was only invented in the nineteenth century anyway at a time when the monarchy was unpopular, and the sovereign’s coach would be pelted with rotten vegetables when it ventured out on the streets of London.

The country that I love is the one that produced people who fought against the elites and the establishment to achieve the hard-earned democratic and economic rights that we have won—including holidays and the weekend!—and I am damned if I will stand by and watch those evaporate. They were the start, not the end, of our struggle.

So hopefully I will see you all at the TUC rally on 18 June, where we can truly show what it means to be proud—proud of the collective solidarity and fighting community spirit that we can and will create again in this country. The ruling class are terrified of it. And so they should be.