Left-wing King

Opinion

By Abdul Masih —

It’s one of those ironies Britain does so well, like fish without chips or pubs without beer during a strike: Charles, the man who couldn’t keep his royal trap shut as Prince of Wales, has now gone all Trappist monk when it comes to the one moral crisis in modern British life that practically screams for a king’s voice.

The Prince who wouldn’t shut up, and the King who won’t speak up

This is the same Charles who, in the 1980s, famously “waded into politics” — which is a big no-no for a constitutional monarch — to take swipes at Margaret Thatcher’s budget cuts. Back then, he traveled the countryside, meeting the poor, the jobless and the just plain unlucky, fretting over welfare reductions as if Her Majesty’s Government had sworn off compassion in favor of a good old-fashioned workhouse revival. He sat with single mums and laid-off miners, offering the sort of earnest head-tilts and brow-furrows that make the BBC swoon. The political Left adored him for it; the tabloids praised his “courage.”

But here’s the thing about wading into politics: once you’ve done it, you’ve shown you know how to swim. And if you can dog-paddle out into the choppy waters of policy to defend benefit claimants, then you can jolly well dog-paddle in again when hundreds — yes, hundreds — of young British girls are being groomed, abused and trafficked by gangs up and down the land.

The Deafening Royal Silence

The grooming gang scandal isn’t some grubby little footnote buried on page seven. This is the sort of national shame that would, in any other era, have kings throwing ministers into the Tower or sending out the horse guards. The victims? Primarily working-class girls, often from broken homes — the very people Charles once insisted were “his people” when he was playing the benevolent prince on a housing estate tour.

And yet, when the nation learned that organized gangs — many with members from Pakistani backgrounds — were preying on girls in towns from Rotherham to Telford, Charles didn’t muster even a whisper of public indignation. Not a sternly worded letter. Not a royal speech. Nothing. Instead, a silence so thick you could spread it on scones.

Why? Because the crimes were committed by members of an immigrant community that Charles, in his unblinking commitment to the multiculturalism ushered in under Tony Blair, will not criticize under any circumstances. He will happily scold farmers about soil management and architects about ugly buildings, but God forbid he suggest that some cultural practices imported from abroad are not compatible with civilized British society.

From Thatcher’s Cuts to Blair’s Imports

Back in the day, Charles’s political meddling was excused because it was “above party politics.” Sure, it was inconvenient for Thatcher, but what could be more harmless than a prince who cares about the poor? But his studied silence on grooming gangs is not “above politics” — it’s groveling in the service of one specific political creed: the belief that Britain must forever pretend all cultures are equal, all immigration is good, and all criticism of minorities is racism, even when it involves the industrial-scale abuse of the country’s own children.

And let’s not pretend this commitment to multiculturalism is some quaint, homegrown tradition like the changing of the guard. It was a deliberate project of the Blair years — mass immigration as social engineering. Critics warned at the time that rapid demographic change would bring cultural clashes, particularly in communities with weak policing. But the political class — Charles included — refused to hear it.

Now we’ve had decades of cover-ups, police paralysis and bureaucratic cowardice, all to avoid being called bigots. The result: British girls fed to the wolves while the shepherds debated the proper language to use in the incident report.

The new inquiry: Trouble for Labour

Now, at long last, there’s a new national inquiry into the grooming gang scandal. This inquiry has the potential to devastate Labour — the party most associated with both the multicultural orthodoxy and the council-level negligence that let the abuse run wild. It’s also a golden opportunity for the king to show that he is, in fact, a defender of the realm, in the moral sense as well as the ceremonial one.

But does anyone expect Charles to say anything? If his record is any guide, the only public comment we’ll get will be about sustainable sheep grazing or the threat of climate change to some endangered fern. The young women of Britain — the ones whose lives have been shattered — will remain beneath his notice, presumably because their plight is too politically dangerous to touch.

A King’s First Duty: The Safety of His People

If we look at history, going back to King Alfred, the great unifier of England. If we go through the roll call of good kings and bad kings — the warrior-monks, the scheming dynasts, the mad ones, the fat ones. Not one of them, no matter how feckless, ever presided over a country where public safety collapsed to the point that organized gangs could prey on children for years without the crown raising an eyebrow.

Sure, kings have let their people starve in famines, sent them off to die in pointless wars, or taxed them into penury to build palaces. But losing control of basic law and order inside your own shires — that’s a new low. It’s a dereliction so complete that you almost have to admire its purity.

Selective courage and cowardice

Charles was always an awkward hippie. Raised in the 1960s, he quietly acquired 60’s values. But he also liked hunting foxes, a decidedly un-progressive sport. He indulged in putrid palace scandals and lost the love of his life, Princess Diana. His privilege and power were the very opposite of the values he held.

The British monarch’s power is limited to symbolic acts and speech-giving. He wasn’t afraid to be divisive in Thatcher’s time, but he was absolutely afraid to transgress values that allowed the grooming gangs to operate, thrive and very nearly take over Britain. The horror stories will finally be told at the conclusion of the recently christened national inquiry, which Labour (the Tories were no better) tried to squelch. When it comes out, a resounding condemnation will fall on King Charles, the man of deafening silence when his nation needed him.

In the long, checkered history of the British monarchy, we’ve had warrior kings, scholar kings, wastrels, madmen, tyrants and saints. But never — until now — a king who lost control of public safety so completely and then acted as if it weren’t his concern at all. King Charles has shown he can speak up when it suits him. The tragedy is that he won’t when it counts.

Related content: King Charles favors Islam/ Crown Prince Pahlavi sees it as dangerous, UK represses free speech, a UK priest fired for speaking up.