Tuesday 20 September 2022: The main leader in last Sunday’s Observer concluded with these words: “Following the [queen’s] funeral many people will experience a release, a feeling of sunlight after darkness”.
While it’s unclear to me how the author of this comment could possibly know that, what can’t be doubted is the huge sense of release I am today experiencing.
For this is the first time since the queen’s death on 8 September I have felt free publicly to comment on the conduct of the ten days of mourning just ended, including the role played generally in the conduct of the country’s affairs by the institution of the royal family that has promoted and organised them.
During the past week and a half, out of respect for the emotions of so many people, I have kept my opinions to myself, excepting on those occasions when I have communicated them in private emails to various friends whose concerns about and criticisms of monarchy I sense to be roughly aligned with my own.
My concerns articulate with an ideological bias: my democratic socialist outlook for society, which has communist aspects, has straightforwardly no place in it for monarchy.
While then I acknowledge fully many people’s deep sense of loss at the death of the queen, recognising that their attachment to her is not merely obsequious, expressing rather an ideal of collective belonging that carries real weight, these are not feelings I either share or want to see and hear assertively broadcast.
Also, while the funeral ceremonies, as far as I can tell from reading relevant accounts (I did not watch the TV broadcast), were unsurpassed in their ruthless organization, and very moving, I felt no impulse to take an interest in them, other than as objects of cultural enquiry.
When they weren’t recalling positively the life of the late queen, they seemed to me to amount largely to a massive celebration of an institution whose legacy and relevance I consider at best anachronistic, at worse a drag on public resources and mature sensibility, not to say a symbol of what is fundamentally wrong with our highly unequal UK society.
One academic commentator described the lying in state and funeral as “technologies for engineering souls”. That’s as maybe. All I can say is that my soul was unaffected by both events, the royalist assumptions of which I found alienating.
Thus I did not shed a single tear yesterday. Not because I am a cynic; but because I felt no emotional attachment to the deceased. She was not “like a mother to me”, or a “role model”, or a “beacon”, to quote the sentiments of particular vox-pop interviewees.
Nor did the structure of feeling orchestrated during the last ten days promote in me a greater sense of patriotism or community, even though I am an English patriot to my core who is 100% committed to the common good.
And I didn’t need the queen’s much-lauded selfless devotion to public service to persuade me that such commitment is virtuous.
My ideological bias, allied to pursuing a career in teaching as a vocation, taught me that a long time ago.
Before that, it was the goodly example of my late father who got the ball rolling. He was an Irishman, by the way, for whom the English crown represented colonial repression not an ideal to be looked up to. As with Dad, the royal family played no part in my moral education and development. If anything, its very existence and conduct fuelled my contrariness.
For much of the mourning period, I therefore felt marginalised, even potentially a victim of harassment. And I also found myself increasingly annoyed by the blanket, cloying, cliché-ridden media coverage of it all. As one correspondent on today’s letters page of the Guardian said: “The suffocation of any public expression of dissent (or simply a different opinion), generally unchallenged by most of the mainstream media, has been deeply disturbing.” It was like that for me, too.
Another correspondent, very differently inclined, wrote this on the same page: “[The] monarchy defines who we are as a nation, and for that reason it should remain. For those who don’t support it, don’t impose your ideals on the majority who want to retain it.”
Impose? Fat chance of that, surely? Isn’t it more the other way round? And not everyone who is a UK citizen associates Britain’s identity closely with the royal family, if ever they think of such things, which many, I suspect, don’t. People aged over 50 might; but today’s teenagers?; the Scots?; the Welsh? Less than a third of under-30s right across the UK favour monarchy.
But more to the point, the idea of ‘national identity’ is surely too complicated and contested for it to be reduced to the life of any individual or family. Even Nelson Mandela, who undoubtedly ‘fathered’ post-apartheid SA, never used up fully his country’s national identity when he became president of it.
For those of my minority persuasion, it was then deeply worrying that it might be assumed by those in the majority that the royal family’s immense and conspicuous wealth and other unjustifiable inherited privileges qualify it to be any kind of defining characteristic of the UK as a nation. Isn’t ours an age of meritocracy?; aren’t we currently anxious to ‘level up’? What’s the royal family got to do with either? Nothing.
An op-ed writer, previously unknown to me, Moya Lothian-McLean, was thus speaking for me when today she wrote: “If I find myself moved to any particular emotion then it is anger, that enforced mourning will bring further suffering to the already struggling, that dissenting voices are being repressed, that the concept of ‘respect’ is being invoked by so many people and yet afforded to so few.”
Yes, say my critics, but consider less the royal family and more the late queen. To quote a correspondent in the Church Times: what about her “steadfast dedication for 70 years . . . her wisdom and grace, humour and humility . . . her sense of duty and selfless service”? Doesn’t all of that warrant respect?
Of course it does, providing it is true as stated. Undoubtedly, the late queen did a lot of good things. The Economist’s list published in its most recent edition can’t be gainsaid: “in foreign affairs she communicated clearly her negative attitude to Ian Smith’s racist government in Rhodesia; and her visit to Eire in 2011 had huge political significance. And, domestically, “she went about opening things and meeting people, as visibly as possible . . . endlessly visiting small towns, industrial estates, colleges and relatively minor firms. She sought sincerely to identify with ordinary people”. I don’t doubt any of this for a second.
But there are other stories to tell, which aren’t so flattering. The Labour MP, Clive Lewis, told one of them in a Guardian op-ed last Thursday. Here’s a telling pair of paragraphs from it:
For half of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, our common life was destroyed by the privatisation of water, energy, public transport and council housing, by the desecration of our land through fracking and sewage in rivers, and by the despoliation of our common wealth in the selling off of children’s and elderly care homes to private equity groups. This all took place without so much as a royal murmur of disapproval.
Yet, at the same time, the royal family managed to avoid income tax from 1910 to 1994, entirely exempting itself from more than 160 different pieces of legislation for its own economic advantage, such as the waiving of the 40% inheritance tax in the crown estate’s estimated £15.2bn of royal assets.
Some of us think this is wrong, not to mention an outrageous provocation. And we are amazed that the majority don’t think the same, turning a blind eye to what is a right royal selfish pursuit of economic benefit. The late queen was party to all of this, we say, allowing it happily to happen on her watch. Why aren’t you as annoyed as we are?
But maybe this is too crude an analysis. Isn’t it more likely that the general public which attended the state lying-in and who then watched the funeral from the roadside held happily in their imaginations two views that ought not to easily coalesce: a huge distaste for selfish wealth accumulation, on the one hand, and a liking, on the other, for the ideal of monarchy as a stable, calm and reassuring potentiality, providing a dignified presence in an otherwise troubled and uncertain world, offering a symbol of confidence, which can be ‘tried on’, enabling them to face the future less daunted?
It’s not difficult to discover people who think often in this fashion, which one of my email mates perceptively describes as a form of ‘cultural schizophrenia’.
It was evident in the same general public’s response to the Christian messages that held centre-stage during the ten days of mourning – notably crudely communicated notices about literally surviving death and travelling to heaven, there to be in communion with pre-deceased family members.
No one turned a blind eye to any of this stuff, including of course the idea of God, the ultimate mystery.
They comfortably dared the conditionality of the faith being literally paraded before them. They bought fully into its mystical embodiment because they needed to.
People loved the ‘readings’ from the Old Testament, John’s Gospel and Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth which featured in the services held at the Abbey and at Westminster Hall, despite the fact that their theological meaning was mostly lost on them, entirely because they don’t regularly attend church, normally thinking what it has to offer is a load of bunkum.
Their schizophrenia about it all was found emotional helpful: it enabled them simultaneously to go along with the naïve Christian literalism on show with one side of their heads and to reject it as fantasy with the other.
They do this at Christmas time every year, after all. What’s the difference? And it might be true. Best not to over-doubt. Keep the faith as a sort of backstop or safety valve.
For others it constituted a tradition which made sense in the way other traditions do, having the benefit of being believable because it could be defended in a traditional way – by reference to tradition itself. To that extent, it didn’t need to be reasoned over.
The thousands who enthusiastically attended in London didn’t then take it all quite as seriously as many republican critics have assumed, labelling mourners as reactionary and anti-democratic.
They were neither. Their motivations were as much personally strategic as publicly mournful – “to be part of history in the making”; “to say thanks for a life well lived”. They were not consciously making any political point.
On the other hand, many of them regularly allowed themselves to be recorded saying some very daft things.
It’s one thing not to be well-versed in the arguments in favour of a constitutional monarch, which certainly exist; it’s quite another to mouth banalities like: “I always loved her hats”; “The queen reminded me of my mum”; “She was for everyone”; “She’s all I’ve ever known”.
Priest-broadcaster, Richard Coles, however, rounded on the likes of me for saying as much, tweeting:
So many pro-republican arguments at the moment seem to be framed in a way that assumes those in favour of the monarchy are simpleminded or infantile and need to grow up. This is a mistake, I think (not to mention insulting). Think Bagehot, rather than Paddington.
Yes, let’s “think Bagehot”, Richard. The English Constitution, which he published in 1867, which today is the bible of monarchy, says this about the institution you so easily go along with:
“The masses defer to what we may call the theatrical show of society. A certain state passes before them; a certain pomp of great men; a certain spectacle of beautiful women; a wonderful scene of wealth and enjoyment is displayed; and they are coerced by it.”
Bagehot here is being totally upfront: the monarchy is a theatrical display of wealth which the general public is expected to pay for and take pleasure in. Applaud; be a patriot; or be a traitor.
While Richard is happy about this prospectus, many of us aren’t. As Fintan O’Toole put it in a recent Irish Times op-ed, “it is not innocent. It solidifies a structure of gross inequality. The queen’s lavish funeral was a display of fabulous wealth in a society that [often] treats the poor with contempt”.
(Thomas Paine’s words, uttered on the occasion of Queen Antoinette’s death, resonate, don’t they?: “We pity the plumage, but forget the dying bird”.)
Elsewhere, Charlotte Higgins, wrote: “The point of the giant immersive drama into which the UK has been drawn since 8 September is to persuade us to collude in the fantasy that the royals are more than human. That the monarchy itself, and the transference of the crown from mother to son, is legitimate.”
That op-ed of Clive Lewis, which I quoted from earlier, says something similar:
“Why show such deference to an institution that is the very embodiment of the inequalities of wealth and power that permeate our country? The fundamental truth about the monarchy is its role as a national distraction.”
Fintan and Clive aren’t both wrong, are they? If they are, I challenge those who think so to defeat their arguments, offering an answer as well to this rhetorical question asked by another Guardian letter writer: “For all the good things that the queen did for us, did she really help create a ‘modern world’ of justice, fairness and equality?”
Frank Cottrell-Boyce, writing in the same newspaper, thinks she did: “with her died the last Zeitzeuge of a time when humans were determined to build better societies”. Really?
But there are important ‘truths’ to be discerned and learnt from the past ten days.
It’s clear to me that people need to feel part of something more than themselves; that they believe in the idea of community; that they find meaning in the aesthetics of ritual; and that they expect society’s leaders to act with probity and in favour of the common good.
If we are one day to become a republic, or at least consider how we might do monarchy better, ways surely have to be found, in the absence of religious adherence, to meet these reasonable felt needs without recourse to an entitled fabulously wealthy family.
As Clive Lewis says:
Republicans must offer something that goes beyond the material technicalities of politics and governance. Sacrifice and ritual need not be bound up in ermine and gold. We need [a way of being] that demands of people that they themselves act and feel in a way that goes beyond themselves and which is connected with the past and future of our society and community.
And we surely also need to identify and take up a way of thinking about such things that does not over-rely on feelings.
Am I the only one to think that the past ten days has literally been too emotional for words, with not nearly enough measured reflection and authentic contemplation? As I have written elsewhere about this tendency:
A person’s feelings about anything of consequence, of course, are important. But no less relevant is the need to evaluate what one senses rather than simply to emote what one experiences. In this connection, I sometimes think far too many people have the mistaken view that the high intensity of the feelings they have about something is somehow directly indicative of the seriousness and validity of that experience. Indeed, I also frequently think that many of the feelings experienced in contemporary culture are overly indulgent, manufactured and contrived, lacking authenticity and integrity as a result.
Arguably, the ‘measured reflection’ I write about the need for was not easily possible during a period of national mourning. But in the months ahead, it surely ought to get underway. For the curtain has gone own.
Jonathan Freedland helpfully sets the scene, writing yesterday that “even in families that are not royal, funerals serve as healing events, to be sure. But they can also see the eruption of arguments that have long been postponed. In burying its matriarch, Britain may at last have to confront what has been laid buried for so long”.