The Queen Is Dead

Since the death of my father, I haven’t posted here much although there has been a lot going on in my life worthy of comment. There was the funeral, the probate, a holiday near Scotland, a visit to an old friend near Cambridge, our son going to the States and moving out. I’ve even worked on a post about Satan. However, none of it has yet persuaded me to set digits to keys until now.

The quote is, slightly paraphrased, “anyone’s death diminishes me”. I’ll start with my father’s and get on to the Queen’s later, as the two are, for me, psychologically related. My father was radically unlike me in many ways. He was a lifelong Tory, an atheist and quite aggressive, and also very good at making money. He worked in nine-to-five jobs for more than forty years until his early retirement at the age of sixty. By contrast, I am very left wing, with the proviso that I think it would be nice if a catholic economy was feasible but I don’t think it is, very peaceable and a depressive and anxious person, strongly theistic and religious and appalling at making money. Ironically, I’m the one with my own business and he was the one who worked for an employer. So there is a clash of values, beliefs and a vastly different skill set. All that said, we did have a few things in common, such as our apparent neurodiversity and interest in science and maths. He was also notable as being one of the two non-deaf people I’ve ever encountered with absolutely no interest in music, which places him apart from almost everyone in the hearing world.

Even so, his death is a loss to me. In many ways other children’s loss of a father is bound to have openly upset them far more than this seems to have affected me, but it’s not true to say it hasn’t done that at all. That man who read all those hundreds of books in the bookcases downstairs, derived a big enough income to buy a large house in rural southeast England with his largely mental labour, gained a degree from the Open University, published academic chemistry papers, was the metrication officer for his workplace and sat on International Standards Organisation boards for drawing instruments, is now reduced to a pile of ashes in a casket and a large amount of water and carbon dioxide in the water cycle and biosphere. This is a surreal and major landmark in my life, not least because, as I’m sure you can relate to, the death of any person is a memento mori.

The Queen’s death is also a reminder of one’s own mortality, as is anyone’s. Like my father, the Queen had little in common with me. She was a billionaire for a start. In particular, it has to be noted that I’m republican. I don’t believe in the monarchy as a political system, constitutional or otherwise. However, I am only quite weakly republican, mainly because I don’t think the existence or otherwise of the monarchy has much bearing on British politics. A situation where we had a figurehead president, like Ireland’s for example, wouldn’t really be that different to the situation we have now. It doesn’t really matter to me if laws are assented by a president or a monarch. Nor do I consider the monarchy to be particularly expensive compared to other things the government spends its money on. I also think it would be difficult to end the monarchy, because even if it officially ceased to exist, the people involved would still be in the minds of the public and be thought of as holding the positions they currently do in law, unless there were a major groundswell against them. However, I would prefer a republic. I just don’t think it’s really worth our energy to achieve one. I also say this in full knowledge of the plausible claim that the monarchy secretly has a hand in drafting our laws. I’ve discussed the actual issue of the monarchy in political terms elsewhere on this blog.

None of this has any bearing on the emotional import of the situation. Just as my father was largely opposite to me in values, beliefs and character, and I have much to resent him for, so was the Queen in many ways the polar opposite to what I think is best for the country.

I’d like to illustrate what I mean with reference to bloodsports.

I used to go hunt sabbing every Saturday and sometimes on Boxing Day. I strongly object to foxhunting, and of course the Royal Family has been heavily involved in it. I expended a lot of energy in doing what I could to disrupt foxhunts non-violently. Many friends of mine were passionately involved in this action. At the same time, there was an animal rights stall in town on Saturdays. After a few years, it occurred to me that if a single carnist individual, say in her early twenties, was persuaded to go vegan by the actions of the animal rights people by the Clock Tower in Leicester, that single success would be likely to save the lives of more vertebrates than a whole lifetime of hunt sabbing. That is a very low bar to clear. Imagine five hundred days on that stall and one person being persuaded in all that time. In the meantime, five hundred days of freakishly successful hunt sabbing would save fewer than a thousand animals. In other words, it isn’t primarily about the animals or animal rights, but class struggle. Appalling though foxhunting is, the motivation of many hunt sabbers seems to be to ruin the enjoyment of the sadists who pursue the uneatable, and notably the thousands of anglers who go down to the canal on a regular basis and cause immense suffering to large numbers of fish generally, but not always, carry on unchallenged, because they’re not upper class, and somehow this is supposed to make it better? I think hunt sabbing is a worthwhile thing to do, but I can’t get on board with the class envy aspect of it. The common juxtaposition of a rough sleeper kipping down next to a lavish portrait commemorating the Queen’s death speaks volumes, but do you really think if we were a republic that guy wouldn’t be there? Not if it wasn’t socialist.

British socialist groups on Reddit are unsurprisingly anti-monarchist, and of course I’m also anti-monarchist. However, a lot of the posts are particularly focussed on the monarchy rather than other things about which socialists might be expected to care, and I find it a distraction. It’s similar to the focus, either from a supportive or oppositional stance, on trans issues: what are we not discussing or campaigning on while we’re talking about those? Yes I’m against the monarchy, but really, does a country like the US or France really seem more socially just than this one? How much difference would it really make to most people if we were a republic? It seems to me that the animosity expressed towards the ultra-rich bloodsportspeople who are nominally running this country is not really about achieving a better world.

There’s a rather disconcerting prelude to Owl City’s song ‘Galaxies’, which is about the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in the form of a sound clip from Ronald Reagan’s speech on the matter. The associations many left wingers of a certain generation have with that despicable individual make this seem quite distasteful, but when it comes down to it, all he was doing was acting as the Head of State and speaking for the nation about a tragedy, and since he was a Hollywood actor, he was actually quite good at it. The associations, I presume, do not exist for Adam Young, since he was only two when Reagan left office. It could have been Walter Mondale speaking for the nation and the situation would’ve been the same, because the president, overtly politicised though the rôle is, also speaks on behalf of the country in a non-politicised way. Our own head of state is covertly politicised but can do the same thing.

I have recently lost a parent, my father. Those two words refer to an office which to some extent transcends the characters of the people involved, and it’s the same with the monarch, because a monarch is often the Head of State. The Queen’s head is on our notes, coins and stamps. Her initials are on the post boxes and the throne. In France, Marianne used to have the same function and in the US there’s the eagle and the Statue of Liberty. Our symbols of nationhood are oddly mixed. One of them happens to be a real person, but there’s also a unicorn, Scotland’s national animal, and a Turkish-Greek bloke killing a dragon. People are unlikely to get worked up about the unicorn but they have been known to take exception to a supposèdly animal-loving country having the slaughter of as magnificent a beast as a dragon as one of our symbols. That’s probably fictional (I suspect it’s based on a watering hole with a crocodile living in it, but that’s another story), but it’s still a figure representing the country, which is also what the Queen was. Unlike George or the unicorn, she could actually speak and interact with the people.

‘Out Of Africa’ is a film which annoys me because I get weepy about the death of Denys Finch Hatton, an upper-class big game hunter, at the end. The reason that happens, apart from the clever emotional manipulation of the people involved in making the film, is that we are all human and we cannot help but be moved by such things. That’s rather specific for me, but it will probably be someone else for you, another fictional character. This is the same kind of phenomenon as I experienced the other day when Sarada came home and I said I should do an emergency big shop just in case the Queen died, and found myself, to my amazement, choking up slightly inside. It does annoy me that I’m more influenced directly by the Queen’s death than my father’s in this way, and is cause for concern, but in fact I wasn’t just crying for the Queen but for all my losses, and the losses others have recently experienced, and I haven’t had that many, and for the very general experience of bereavement as part of life for us all. I felt the same thing more recently when I heard people sing “God save the King”. And I am absolutely not a monarchist. It isn’t about that. It isn’t even about specific respect for the Queen and King, except insofar as they are human and therefore worthy of respect, a respect moreover I wouldn’t confine to humans.

Diana comes to mind here. To us at the time, the reaction to her death seemed quite fake and excessive, but we had friends who had been more affected by the AIDS crisis than I was, and really, I was affected quite enough by it thank you, who were authentically touched because of her challenge to the stigma. Right now, although I’m getting on with my life, I do actually feel quite affected by it, so I’m on the other side of the situation this time. This is probably because of recent bereavements experienced at first and second hand.

In fact, the people on the other side this time are responding to her death just as much as most other people as a symbol. For them, she and her heir represent everything that’s wrong with this country, and that’s a fair take, but for me that is inauthentic. I don’t generally believe individuals are politically influential as such, but simply end up in the positions they are and have their behaviour determined by economics. The monarch before her didn’t even get to decide when to die: he was, it’s said, in a sense killed by his doctor so that the news could make the papers the next day. I don’t think there’s a much clearer demonstration of how little freedom he had, and the freedom of a monarch is if anything more restricted than that of the average well-off middle class person. I can’t generate the degree of animosity some other people seem to feel towards the over-privileged, and to pretend I felt that would be dishonest even if I talked myself into thinking that’s really how I felt about her death or her as a symbol. I just don’t.

When it was common practice to write cheques, many people had the experience of accidentally putting the wrong year all through January and having to cross it out. Even though that year was Anno Domini, now often referred to as “Christian Era”, writing that year, or getting it wrong on the cheque, didn’t imply they were Christian. It’s just the dating system we use here in the West, with a few exceptions such as on Jewish tombstones, for the Islamic calendar and Julian dates. This, for almost all of us, is what the Queen’s death is like. It means we’ll soon have the King’s face on notes, coins and stamps, “C iii R” on any new post boxes, QCs will become KCs and people will be singing “Send him victorious”. All of this is odd and disconcerting, and will take some getting used to, not least because most of us weren’t even born the last time it changed. But for my mother, this is her fifth monarch. A person born on 11th April 1471 who lived to be eighty-eight would have seen ten monarchs, for instance Thomas Carn of London, who lived to be 107. We are relatively exceptional in British history not to have seen multiple kings and more rarely queens even in our fairly long lifetimes. This alone makes it exceptional and historic, and just as it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian or not when you cross out the wrong year on a cheque, nor does it matter if you’re monarchist or republican, or for that matter anarchist, if you recognise this as a disconcerting historical event. I would of course acknowledge fully that this is a great time to bury bad news, but there’s more to it than that.

There are also specific sadnesses resulting from the fact that we had a Queen. Although it’s a birthright rather than a position one could work to reach, I don’t believe it was any bad thing that generations of girls grew up with the knowledge that the Head Of State was a woman. We also had a situation where a young woman in her twenties became Sovereign in contrast to all the relatively old male presidents and dictators around the world, and eventually became older than them all as well, so there were two lengthy periods in her life where she was demographically exceptional in two ways at once. She has now been replaced by the rather less exceptional, and this is not to malign him for characteristics he can’t do much about, man in his seventies. We’ve ended up, just now, with a much less remarkable figurehead in that respect, and this will probably be the case next century too. Next Christian century.

It’s said that the most common dream people have in this country has been the Queen coming to tea. A third of the British population has had this dream, including me. This happens without respect to the political beliefs of the people concerned: you can be a red-blooded Communist and have this dream just as easily as a true blue Tory. The details also tend to be similar. It’s all the more remarkable that I’ve had it because I never drink tea, so for me the beverage is just something I make for someone else and I don’t partake of our national identity by either being a monarchist or having a nice cup of tea and a sit down. But there it is, because in this dream both the Queen and the tea are symbols of national identity which exist even in the minds of non-nationalistic republican coffee-drinkers. Also, for a long time as a child, and I don’t think I’m unusual in this respect either, I associated the Queen with my mother. I used to think they looked similar, for example. Given this perhaps comforting significance, it makes sense that people might wish to deny the less palatable aspects and allegations made against the Royals, regardless of their veracity.

I never met the Queen although I strongly suspect I once met her son, now King. Other than the fact that she’s head of the Church and I am C of E, I don’t feel the need to pay obeisance to her or the King in a visceral or profound way. However, if I met the King under different circumstances than I actually seem to have met him in (everyone needs a break sometimes), I would follow the usual etiquette as I understand it simply because it would be embarrassing not to, it would probably make him feel awkward or angry as a person one to one with me, and there’s not really any need to do that.

All that said, yes, Scotland and England should both be republics, but this has got nothing to do with current historical events, and 2022 will go down for me as the year my father and the Queen both died.

Therapeutic Republics

Most arguments for the abolition of the monarchy centre on the common good and the best interests of the subjects/citizens, and I have considerable sympathy with these arguments, but I’m on record, presumably on this blog somewhere, as being fairly apathetic about the whole thing. It is true that insofar as I believe in the state at all, I’m republican, but it really doesn’t seem to be a very important issue to me compared to most other pressing concerns in the political sphere. It’s like arguing about the colour of the handle of the executioner’s axe. However, there is another way of looking at the question. What if the monarchy as it is today, or even historically, is bad for the mental health of the people involved in it? In that case, the issue becomes somewhat more pressing.

Last night’s interview with Megan & Harry, as we are encouraged to call them, brought up a number of issues in this respect. I can’t say that I’ve studied it that closely although I did pay attention to some of it, because it concerns me that a lot of what’s said about the royal family is a load of flim-flam used by the mass media, and sometimes the government, to distract the public from other concerns. This in itself might be a good argument for abolishing the monarchy, not only because it’s dangerous for the public to be unaware of other issues which are going on at the same time, but also because it’s that kind of attention which has led to the likes of the death of Diana and the extreme care with which the Windsors seem to have to manage their public appearance nowadays, although this has probably been true for centuries. The problem is, however, that it may not be possible simply to opt out of the attention, because even if the UK were to become a republic, many people would doubtless continue to regard the Royal family as special.

This need to micromanage one’s image is bound to be very stressful and have serious consequences for one’s well-being in the long term, but it’s notable also that before this was as big a problem as it is now, George III was Britain’s longest-living monarch up until that point, and Edward VIII ended up outliving his brother by two decades. George III, I suspect, owed his long life to the fact that he wasn’t actively king for very long although the way mental illness was treated back then wasn’t exactly a picnic either. It’s said that Edward VII and George V and VI all had their lives considerably shortened by tobacco smoking, which could of course be a response to stress, or on the other hand the result of having too much time on one’s hands, but probably the former. It is of course also true that in the first half of the last century, tobacco smoking was the norm and a scientific study would have to involve matching the kings with their peers, but it could be said to be a “smoking gun” in this respect, so to speak.

Even leaving this aside, the prospect of knowing that your life is mapped out in advance for you is likely to have some impact on your sense of fulfilment. What if you want to be a doctor or a farmer? You can perhaps play at that, like Marie Antoinette, but you know you’re never really going to be able to do that. Having said that, it is true that the Queen and Anne have both been involved in horses in one way or another, and the Queen has come up with a new breed of dog. However, there are always ceilings to their ambitions.

I tend to think of the monarchy as a good illustration of how nobody really has any control over their life. Power always seems to flee from a particular position in society the more it’s examined. It’s true to a certain extent that feudalism involved a lot less perceived freedom than today’s society in most of Britain, but the monarchy still seem to be trapped in that system because they are born into a predetermined series of roles which they can never really leave.

It’s also true that whereas poverty is probably the most important human problem in history, not being poor doesn’t make you happy or healthy. You can still be subject to various kinds of abuse from your family, to alcoholism and to all sorts of other problems in your gilded cage. Like anyone as rich as them, the royal family cannot have earned its wealth, no matter what they do, because there’s a clear limit to how much one can be fairly recompensed for anything, but this applies to all sorts of other people, some of whom did work tirelessly to get rich. The main reason I don’t hold their riches against them is that it’s insignificant compared to the whole UK economy or government spending, so to me it’s not very consequential that they’ve got lots of money. It can only really be of symbolic significance.

One very significant point about our monarchy is that our head of state will probably always have been a White person. If I recall correctly, the last arguably non-White person responsible for Britain would be Lucius Alfenus Senecio in the third Christian century, and since there have been monarchs in Great Britain, all of them have passed for White. They will of course ultimately have had Black ancestry but not so as you’d notice and that’s the key point. This is all the more significant given the talk about Megan’s baby’s skin tone within the Palace, although I’m not clear whether that was a member of the Royals or the “institution” as she put it. This is in particular a public interest argument for a republic.

Or two republics. Our monarchy is kind of Scottish although not really, and as a supporter of Scottish independence I also support Scottish and English republics. Hence the plural in the title.

For me as a habitually practicing Anglican, there’s a further issue I don’t really know what to do with. As well as being my head of state, which I can either take or leave as I see myself as more Northwest European than British, the Queen is the head of my Church. As far as I can tell from the image which seems to be successfully projected, the Queen does take her faith seriously and even if hers is very different from mine, it’s an article of the Christian faith that nobody is perfect. At the same time, the moral integrity of the Church could be compromised by it being established and of course there shouldn’t be bishops in the House of Lords. A country which does such markèdly non-Christian things really shouldn’t be proclaiming itself as such. Moreover, many non-Christians are born into membership of the Church, which neither Christians or non-Christians may have a clear conscience about.

Ultimately though, I feel no animosity towards the Royal family (I realise my capitalisation has been inconsistent) and ultimately it would probably be in their best interests for these countries to become republics.

There you go. You were going to get a post on radioactive porridge but that can wait until tomorrow.