WITH the newly named Andrew Windsor Mountbatten in the headlines for the wrong — but at the same time absolutely the right — reasons, a wider debate about whether Britain in 2025 needs an hereditary monarchy and the vast public expense it entails is under way.

The mood can perhaps be sensed with the cover of the centre-left magazine the New Statesman leading with a “No More Kings” banner headline.

At the same time in the US continuing reports that Donald Trump plans to somehow have a third period in office as president have inspired huge “No Kings” demonstrations across the country.

These anti-monarchy sentiments, while they appear — and often are — quite radical, do have their limits. They mostly do not seek to change existing market capitalism-led systems but simply to run them a bit more democratically.

It’s not something that one expects to find mentioned in official political circles even when another royal crisis is on, but, it’s worth recalling that there is a tradition of red republicanism.

George Julian Harney (1819-97) was born in Deptford and active in every phase of the Chartist movement from 1838 to its demise around 1860.

By the late 1840s he was a leading figure in Chartism and editor of the Northern Star, the biggest-selling newspaper of the period.

Disagreements with the paper’s owner Feargus O’Connor led to his departure and by June 1850 he had launched the weekly Red Republican paper.

Harney was a left Chartist and internationalist, friendly with — and on occasion influenced by — Marx and Engels. The Chartist colour had been green but after 1848 it changed to a socialist red.

Harney was clear in an editorial in the first issue of the Red Republican on June 22 1850 that it was about more than getting rid of a monarch, in this case Queen Victoria. Simply replacing a monarchy with a republic, as France had done, was not enough. There was a need to get rid of all exploiters.

Harney realised, and was proven correct, that the paper’s name would lead to it being burked (boycotted) by the news trade and changed its name to Friend of the People in December 1850.

Before that happened, however, the paper published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto by the female Chartist activist and co-thinker of Marx and Engels, Helen Macfarlane.

It was this translation that had a fearful hobgoblin stalking Europe, rather than a spectre of communism with which we are familiar today.

Harney promoted a programme called The Charter and Something More. By this he meant not just political democracy, that is the vote for all, and the abolition of the monarchy, but also economic democracy. The socialist historian John Saville called it the most advanced political programme to appear on the left until the time of the Bolsheviks.

While Harney was to an extent a co-thinker of Marx and Engels, Marx was critical of his support for republican nationalist movements that had limited left-wing content. He labelled Harney “Citizen Hurrah, Hurrah.”

In the 1850s Harney moved to Jersey and ran a radical paper there but in later years he moved back to Twickenham, where Engels, who had remained on friendly terms with him, visited.

Despite its limitations, Harney’s red republicanism and socialist programme is a reminder of an anti-monarchy tradition in Britain that moved some way beyond simply changing who ruled the country to changing the very nature of the state itself.

It is a history which is largely forgotten that in the present moment must be remembered.