Prince Andrew has given up his Duke of York title following the release of Virginia Giuffre's memoir, in which she claimed that the disgraced royal saw sex with her, when she was 17, as his birth right. Here Kevin McKenna argues that getting rid of the Royal Family could land Britain with even more problems

I am tempted to imagine that if social media had existed 200 years ago, the House of Windsor would have crumbled before its implacable scrutiny. The corrupt and rotting edifice of the British aristocracy would probably have tumbled too and – like France – we’d have had our revolution.

In a period spanning less than 100 years until the middle of the 19th century, much of mainland Europe and the Americas were ablaze with the flames of revolution. Professor Eric Hobsbawm called this turbid period The Age of Revolution in his 1962 historical masterpiece of the same name. It was marked by violent and civil strife resulting in an old absolutist and privileged order being dismantled and replaced with representative governments and written constitutions.

The popular fervour that fuelled the American wars of independence enkindled Napoleon’s revolutionary wars which annexed most of mainland Europe, before the little dictator was undone by his own reactionary militarism. Yet, even after Napoleon’s defeat, revolutionary fervour had set much of southern Europe ablaze, engulfing Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece.

Inevitably, ancient power, land and money combined to quench the flames, but not entirely. The Russian Revolution in 1917 represented their apotheosis, the ultimate expression of a people’s right not to be ruled by the scions of corrupt, savage and inbred bloodlines. Britain’s ruling classes should also have been swept away in this cleansing firestorm. The corrupt excesses of their........

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