IN WHAT is likely in the diamond jubilee season to be for Queen Elizabeth one of the most gratifying, albeit unstated, tributes to her enduring appeal, Scotland’s canny First Minister Alex Salmond has been talking in recent months about sharing the monarch with England when/if Scotland goes it alone. No doubt to the horror of the republican ranks of his Scottish National Party.
But as she celebrates at 86 the 60th anniversary of her accession to the throne, polls show a continuing, deep affection for her and the monarchy – a Guardian/ICM poll in May found that 69 per cent of respondents felt Britain would be worse off without the monarchy, while 22 per cent said it would be better off. And while such feeling is less marked in Scotland, where 36 per cent say the country would be better off without the Windsors, a solid 50 per cent feel the opposite. By severing the traditional political connection between the union and the popular monarch, Salmond clearly feels – as Arthur Griffith did – that he can plough fertile new royalist political ground for nationalism.
That affection was manifest in the million spectators who converged in the pouring rain on the Thames in central London to watch the river pageant, and in the thousands of street parties up and down the UK. But it was not a celebration of power. The tiny residual formal powers of the monarch, either in terms of the state or as titular head of the Church of England, mean that the queen reigns over her people only in a very limited formal sense, a reality clearly reflected in the underwhelming republican protests last weekend.
There is, however, also great power in symbolism, as the queen demonstrated when she came to Ireland last year to rebuild old bridges. We were engaged and won over not only by her undoubted charm, stamina and political adroitness, but by the sense that she embodied a nation and its history, good and bad, in the way that an overtly political figure like a prime minister can never quite do. It is to be hoped her visit to the North at the end of he month will be as groundbreaking, and most people on this island will wish her well in her jubilee.
But the monarchy as symbol cuts two ways. Here it also jars with our sense of modernity and democratic values. And it provides spurious continuing legitimacy to the inherited privilege that continues to dominate both economic and political life in the UK. Of course, our neighbour, in truth a democracy, though still recovering psychologically from the loss of empire, must be free to entertain its cherished delusions.