Why Kate Middleton Royal Baby Hysteria Gives Me Morning Sickness

Morning sickness, afternoon sickness, then with the six o'clock news bulletins comes evening sickness. The gushing deluge of sickly royal baby news has left me a vomiting mess.

In the sort of doe-eyed, wishy-washy coverage of our deified regal overlords that the North Korean state news agency can merely aspire to, we are being force-fed, like foie gras geese for fattening, on a diet of happy-clappy, sugary sludge.

Endless speculation about what is going on inside Kate Middleton's womb is plastered across the web, on the front pages, littering newsstands, and every television show that can shoehorn it in somehow with whatever tenuous link a producer can dribble out.

Boy or girl? What's it going to be called? Is she cooking up a pair of twins in there?

Some even went as far as mocking up a picture of what this foetus will one day look like, something that if anyone but a journalist had done then the men in white coats would be wrapping them up like a mummy in a cell with cushioned walls by now.

Then there are the reporters sent to the hospital where Kate was being treated for acute morning sickness, offering us the kind of penetrating insight as her family entering and exiting via the back entrance.

Tragically, such drippy bilge masks the most important question needing to be asked about the cluster of cells which is now third-in-line to the throne - why should it ever be head of state at all?

This child will be born into a family that holds significant power of influence over political decision-making in this country, with no democratic mandate whatsoever.

It is a family that receives millions of pounds of public money, yet is subject to no freedom of information legislation.

Despite never having been elected, the Queen holds secretive monthly meetings with her Privy Council of the country's most senior current and former politicians, many of them saps for the royal family, where monarchs can lobby, unaccountably, on whatever they want.

This will be of particular concern when someone like Prince Charles, who actually believes in the hocus pocus of homeopathy, takes the throne.

Charles's attempts at lobbying the government to change its policies, despite this being entirely unconstitutional and an abuse of his royal status, are well documented.

Royals represent Britain across the world, gaining unrivalled access to the most powerful people on the planet on the sole basis that they emerged from the right vagina.

The more the public and media fantasise about the royal family as being a harmless bunch of posh, big-toothed celebrities, the more this huge anti-democratic stain on modern Britain is trivialised.

As Republic, the campaign for the abolition of the monarchy, puts it: "Hereditary public office goes against every democratic principle. And because we can't hold the Queen and her family to account at the ballot box, there's nothing to stop them abusing their privilege, misusing their influence or simply wasting our money."

We needn't go as far as Oliver Cromwell and start lopping heads off, but let's at least moderate this pathetic adulation and get a real debate going about doing something most other countries managed to achieve, in some cases hundreds of years ago - moving society on from monarchy.

Shane Croucher is an IBTimes UK business writer