Queen Elizabeth II, who was 90 yesterday, has been on the British throne since 1952, a symbol of continuity during which the country has been transformed. Her ability to respond to those changes as head of state, her talent for advising successive prime ministers and their governments and above all her capacity to read and respond to the public mood have ensured the monarchy remains a remarkably popular and legitimate institution.
Recalling some of the ways Britain has become a better and more civilised place over those six decades, Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party and a convinced republican, said in a warmhearted speech to the House of Commons yesterday that they include the end of colonisation, equality legislation, the National Health Service, the welfare state and the Open University. "As head of the Commonwealth she's been a defender of this incredible multicultural global institution," he added.
These, of course, are not Queen Elizabeth's creations but those of Britain's governments and people. But they have become interwoven with her role to a far greater extent than would have been expected of a less gifted and enduring monarch drawn from the hereditary aristocracy. The British class system endures despite the country's democratisation. The country' s newer social and regional inequalities together with uncertainties about its place in Europe put its future as a United Kingdom in doubt as never before. That is one strong reason why the queen is a continuing symbol of unity.
Her relationship with Ireland is also longstanding and committed. She knows Northern Ireland well but was not able to visit the Republic until the Belfast Agreement was well bedded down and relations with the UK had become properly normal and neighbourly. The indelible impression from her visit to this State in 2011 is of a warmth and dignity embodied in her eloquent phrase about "being able to bow to the past, but not be bound by it". That sentiment can also be applied to her record as the constitutional monarch of a changing UK.