Illustration by Riana Modi
Last week, Netflix released The Crown’s new trailer. Thirty seconds of choral harmonies in, the royal family’s purpose is described as “binding the nation together”, and “setting an example of idealised family life”. The knot tying being British to supporting the monarchy is pulled tighter still in the next sentence: “It is a situation that can’t help but affect the stability of the country”. The “situation”, of course, is the disastrous marriage and separation of Diana and Charles.
There are two elements here suggesting these descriptions are hyperbolic of the royal family’s role in present-day Britain. Firstly, The Crown is an oftentimes-fictitious TV drama, and brash statements are made to draw in viewers. Secondly, the narration is meant to reflect the mood in Britain in the 1990s, and cannot be taken as a direct comment on the present-day.
Even so, you can’t help but see some truth in these declarations. According to YouGov, 62% of Britons believe the monarchy should continue. Only 22% say the country should move to have an elected head of state. The monarchy’s ongoing pull was recently proved by the reverence of ‘the queue’, and the 29 million who watched the Queen’s funeral.
The demographic I am most interested in is my own: the 18–24 year olds. 33% of these Britons believe that the monarchy should continue, while 31% believe that Britain should have an elected head of state. There is a gaping hole of 36% who don’t know, or don’t care. This disengaged group has been growing for the last decade.
The undecided trend continues even more noticeably when the age group is asked if the monarchy is good or bad for Britain. That disengaged statistic of ‘neither’ or ‘don’t know’ is a huge 60%. No other age group has comparable volumes of ‘neutral’ answers.
Before I had researched these statistics, the conclusions were things I had noticed at university. When the monarchy comes up with friends, they don’t often have a strong opinion.
At school, not far outside of Belfast, many of my peers revered the British monarchy, in an illogical manner I have rarely encountered since moving to university. Equally, there is obviously a strong anti-monarchy contingency of Northern Ireland. Ambivalence is not absent; the success of the Alliance party has recently demonstrated obsession with identity is declining. However, in my personal experience, a clear opinion on the British monarchy is something I hear more at home, and total ambivalence on the topic is more unusual.
Here, I have sometimes asked myself whether people possibly feel there isn’t an alternative option to the continuity of the royals. That could be way off base, but when something has been around for centuries, it can be difficult to see an alternative.
There is, of course, an already mentioned alternative – an elected head of state. In the Republic of Ireland, the Uachtarán, or President, is a person who conducts a largely ceremonial role. They are elected every seven years, and can serve for a maximum of two terms. The current President is Michael D. Higgins, an 81-year-old, who it is difficult not to find charming, as the linked article details. He shakes many hands on behalf of Ireland, and takes part in thoughtful projects, such as the recent Machnamh 100 seminars, providing insights into the history of Ireland’s formation as a formal free state a century ago.
Higgins is not without opinions. He recently described Ireland’s housing crisis as “our greatest failure”. Last year, the President rejected an invitation to a centenary event marking the creation of Northern Ireland. He felt it was a politicised event, represented by the fact he had been incorrectly invited as the ‘President of the Republic of Ireland’, rather than simply ‘President of Ireland’. In a statement you could not imagine exiting a British head of state’s mouth, Higgins criticised those “telling me what I have to do”. Equally, he gets criticised plenty.
When a head of state is elected, it attaches them more directly to the people they are representing on a global stage. Electing a representative gives them a certain legitimate mandate, even when it isn’t directly political. This theoretically leads to a less verbally-gagged head of state.
The British monarchy does not seem that directly attached to the British people. They are an ever-present group, floating ‘neutrally’ above the population. That is part of their appeal; people want to understand the ‘special ones’. A hereditary monarch implies that a tiny group of people are superior to the rest of the population, warranting immense wealth and attention, endowed by birth. Divine kingship is still here. ‘God save the King’ is divine kingship. People clamouring to shake the new King’s hand was divine kingship in action. This also helps to subdue the ugly history attached to monarchy.
The crux of the problem with my generation’s neutrality on the British monarchy is that it just shouldn’t be possible to be ‘neutral’ or ‘ambivalent’ to the royal family, comfortable as that may be.
The present-day royal family is constantly trying to present itself as ‘apolitical’. Perhaps the monarchy is apolitical, in that it doesn’t speak to ongoing politics. However, the British monarchy does not have to express any opinions to be political. That choice is itself political. The mere existence of the monarchy is political. Obviously. Having a monarchy is a conservative idea, and even if they apologise, the royal family cannot separate itself from its imperialist history. The crown jewels alone are largely made up of stones taken from various places in the British Empire.
The royals often don’t even come across as self-aware of their messy imperial legacy. That was obvious during William and Kate’s Caribbean tour, when they literally took part in imperial cosplay, mirroring Queen Elizabeth II’s actions and outfits of the 1950s.
When asked how present they thought racism was in UK society today, 73% of 18–24-year-olds answered either ‘somewhat’ or ‘a great deal’. 57% of the age group also believed ethnic minorities are discriminated against in the news. The young adult demographic of the UK is clearly aware of the prevalence of racism in the present day.
This current awareness of racism does not smoothly translate to an awareness of racism of the past, and how our present still reflects it. We presume that most people know that the British Empire was racist, but that doesn’t necessarily make the empire the main association in people’s minds when thinking about racism today. When asked if the British Empire was something to be proud or ashamed of in 2019, 54% of the same age group answered ‘neither’, or didn’t know. If we aren’t thinking about how the Empire might still be aiding racism today, then we miss an ever-present symbol of empire in public life; the Royal family.
Certainly, the stats about young adults’ perception of current-day racism show a generation which is more aware of racism than previous ones. That awareness doesn’t match up with neutrality on the monarchy, based on the simple facts of what the royal family represents. If you are ambivalent towards a concept, you must be comfortable with it to some extent. Ambivalence lets the monarchy live on, as an inevitable institution, even when there are obvious alternatives.
The monarchy makes me uncomfortable. This is for reasons which reflect my personal background, already partly described above. Beyond its global legacy, the British Empire and monarchy has had a damaging impact closer to home. Queen Victoria played a large role in leaving the Irish people with little to no aid during the Great Famine. It was an overwhelming crisis, but Britain was the richest country in the world, and held formal control over Ireland. Over a million people died between 1845 and 1851, a similar number fled the country – a loss of a quarter of the population. By 1901, the Irish population had halved. That is only one of many pieces of English colonial damage in Ireland. I am from a place which it isn’t difficult to argue only exists formally due to English colonial actions, and the centuries worth of ruptures and pain that it, albeit indirectly, leaves in its wake.
These facts aren’t spoken about enough. There is a silence over the legacy of the British monarchy. Young people often don’t speak in support of the royals, but nor do they really challenge their existence. That leaves a strange presumptive void which doesn’t have room for discussing the alternative. Avoiding the facts allows the ‘modern royals’ to present themselves as being with and for the people they represent. However, that simply doesn’t line up with their place as superior by birth. The connection between the British people and the monarchy is one of supremacy, not friendship. If this generation wants to be one of apparent ‘inclusivity’, as the statistics suggest, it cannot be as ambivalent to supremacy as it seems to be, despite that supremacy’s indirect nature.