Time for King Charles to be the Man on Horseback?

No monarch has actually ruled Britain since the 1700s, but desperate times call for desperate measures

King Charles has more than a half-century’s worth of experience dealing with world leaders who were in charge of their governments. Could he become one himself? (White House photo by Pete Souza)

By William S. Bike

Great Britain is in deep trouble.

The Bank of England has predicted that British inflation will be the most onerous since the early 1980s. Heat and electricity bills are rising so high that experts expect people will have to choose between heat and food, and that many people will die from the cold during the winter. British cities are working on creating warming centers, just to keep alive people who will not be able to afford heat.

Strikes are active or planned for the London Underground and national rail network, the funeral industry, garbage collection, mail carriers, nurses, and others. The National Health Service is being privatized, and more than 6.5 million people are waiting for hospital treatment. The gap between wages and rising prices is ever widening. Milk prices are up by 20%. Almost 80% of food banks are running low.

The country is plagued by drought, and drinkable water is getting harder to find. Raw sewage is being dumped into the ocean and is washing back up on the beaches. Commerce with Europe, the UK’s biggest trading partner before Brexit, is almost nil.

Who can save a country lacking heating fuel, food, medicine, trade, and water?

Probably not the government of new right-wing Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has appointed a cabinet group of climate change deniers, critics of woke culture, price-freeze opponents, tax-cutters, billionaire and corporation acolytes, and privatizers who favor 20th and even 19th and 18th century “solutions” for 21st century crises. Expect the Truss government to do nothing about societal inequality and wealth concentration, support unregulated markets, and oppose investment in the public sphere and government activism.

But Truss is not Britain’s only new leader. It also has a new head of state in King Charles III.

The assumption has been that the king or queen is little more than a figurehead, but that is because British monarchs since the 1700s have acquiesced to that assumption — particularly Queen…