Monarchy In The UK

Julie Burchill is right about the upper-middle-class takeover of pop music and of journalism, although she does not say what she is trying to do about it. But that has nothing to do with the monarchy, unless for some reason one wished to blame it for everything.

The description of this country as one which abolished its monarchy but has now restored it rings true. It is true that a character like Willie Hamilton is today unimaginable in British politics, or increasingly even in Australian politics. Even Ken Livingstone is an enthusiastic monarchist, even royalist, now, like one of those people with houses full of commemorative plates and tea towels. Even the SNP makes the retention of the monarchy one of its own conditions for Scottish independence, and campaigns for a new Royal Yacht. Even Julia Gillard rules out actually trying to do anything to abolish the monarchy. Even Respect heavily defeated at its founding conference a motion that the R in its name should stand for "Republic"; the only anti-monarchist party, as such, of any note is the BNP.

Burchill pines for the year of the Silver Jubilee and the Sex Pistols, but these days Johnny Rotten advertises butter dressed up as the country squire that he might very well now be. She pines for the Beatles, but those who swung in the Sixties and benefited from the lowering of the voting age gave an unexpected victory in 1970 to what they thought were the Selsdon Tories, before going on to elect first Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair.

I for one very much hope, and rather suspect, that Burchill is right to see the Diamond Jubilee as, like (although she does not mention it) Queen Victoria's, the moment at which we emerge out of the other side of anti-monarchism as the proposed constitutional canonisation of a certain generation's several extremely nasty and destructive tendencies generally.