The biggest illusion – and utility – of royal events such as the coronation is that we are somehow a part of them. We are, of course, in a way; we need to be for the institution of monarchy to have any meaning at all. But not as equals. We have the worst of both worlds: the royal family gives us nothing, and we in turn legitimise it, give it meaning and audience and pay, through subsidies and tax exemptions, for its ability to wow us. The monarchy does provide a service, but not to us. It is to an entire system of political decline and economic inequality that cannot withstand closer scrutiny, and so it must be embellished and cloaked in ceremony.
And it was ever thus. The historian David Cannadine, in an essay on the “invented traditions” of royal ceremonies, wrote: “in a period of change, conflict or crisis”, unchanging ritual “might be deliberately unaltered so as to give an impression of continuity, community and comfort, despite overwhelming contextual evidence to the contrary.” That evidence to the contrary cannot be more overwhelming than reports that money for food banks has been diverted to pay for coronation events. What those funds bought was a coronation, much like the screens assembled to hide King Charles as he derobed, that for a moment erected an ornate cover that hid the nation’s hunger.
And my God, doesn’t it feel good? For a few moments to think of the country as the place of sacred ointments and special spoons, grand cathedrals and epically wealthy, exquisitely dressed people. In that moment we can see our own country in their image: a country that is sober, benign and loaded. A place of filial connection and a galvanising national identity. Who can begrudge people, as a cost of living crisis rages, a few hours of harmless escapism? It’s not only stomachs that need feeding, morale does too.
The problem isn’t the escapism, but why escapism is necessary. People flock to these diversions because, in a way, we are forced to. In subtle and explicit ways, consent is manufactured and dissent is stigmatised. Even more so under Charles, who doesn’t enjoy the sort of affection his mother did, there has been a need to sell the celebrations. Schools have recruited students to the cause of coronation celebration in such a dizzying variety of ways that an absolute monarchy would be impressed. For the first time in history, the nation had been invited to pledge “true allegiance to Your Majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.”
Some of this is just event hysteria, of course, like an England World Cup final, if we ever see that again in our lifetimes. A swirl of corporate marketing and a media grateful for some rolling coverage that requires the sort of banal, cliche-ridden commentary that will not exercise a single brain cell. It’s not so much a documenting of history as it is a gratefulness for material. During the ceremony, there were a few moving moments of familial plot – the rest is content.
Nevertheless, combine that mass observance, cynical or not, with the more earnest, menacing demands for submission, and it becomes clear that we must celebrate the monarchy because we have no other choice. The Metropolitan police enacted draconian new public order laws and arrested protesters before they had raised a single placard. The home secretary, Suella Braverman, described those laws as targeting “those who seek to attack our ways of life”.
And so frippery and force combine to make a political position – support for the monarchy – seem like the natural, sacred default. Much like the ceremony itself, which depicts kings and queens as ordained by God and not the people, the purpose of branding these political positions as “traditions” and “ways of life” is to stop us contemplating another way of life. We can seek comfort and shelter in the shade of our betters, but never answers about why our betters are so much better off. The monarchy is a law of nature, like death, taxes, landlords, structural inequality and food banks. And royal ceremony is a way to draw our eyes away from the fact that, increasingly, there is no sense of what the country is good at apart from this sort of invented ritual.
There is even less sense of what binds us together as countrymen and women, and there are virtually no causes for which we are so encouraged to queue and wait and march to support each other: for decent living standards and healthcare, or humane immigration and climate change policies. Patriotism is only allowed to flow upstream.
And again, it was ever thus. Commenting on the success of the golden jubilee in 1887, the archbishop of Canterbury said, “days afterwards, everyone feels that the socialist movement has had a check”.
The status and solidarity that people derive from royal ceremonies is one that is absent elsewhere, both in practice and in vision. In practice, our economy is barely dodging recession, our government is at the end of a traumatic extended season of malpractice, dishonesty and corruption, and what we are most proficient at globally is our ability to launder and park the assets of the global rich. “Butler to the world” doesn’t have as much of a ring to it as “God save the King”. In vision, our politics is devoid of any language that calls on us to make communal connections with each other, the sort that we fetishised in queues to pay homage to the departed queen. Instead, the right asks us to focus on the threat of small boats and minorities, while Labour offers us stronger law enforcement, focuses on individual aspirations of home ownership and prosperity and asks us to be “realistic about what is possible”.
Republicanism is threatening not because the monarchy is loved, but because its removal must be part of a wider movement that challenges these notions about “what is possible”. Last week, David Lammy wrote that Saturday was “a tea party for a country that sorely needs it, a pause to celebrate a civic version of British identity that is an alternative to the destructive ethnic nationalism promoted by the far right.” I agree with the first part. But it is bizarre to not pause and think for a second, why are feudalism and ethnic nationalism the only two options we have to celebrate British identity?
The answer is that there can only be one alternative to these two: one in which we question deliberate political decisions not to redistribute wealth more equally, in which our allegiances are to each other, in which there is a real modern appraisal of the country as a place that isn’t a glorious continuum of empire and global dominance, but where political and economic models are failing. This is a national project that no one who matters has any interest in, which is why any stirrings of it must be portrayed as radical and beyond the pale – assaults on a natural order. And so we can only look up and fawn, or look down, and fear.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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