Kinging in the Rain

The Last Days of a Better Nation

The problem with my people, Ernest Bevin is supposed to have said on occasion, is the poverty of their desire. It was a line that Bevin borrowed from the Labour MP John Burns, who once observed that ‘the curse of the working class is the fewness of their wants, the poverty of their desires.’ Whether that is really true of the English working classes, Bevin’s observation has always seemed to me an alarmingly accurate description of the English in general.

Whatever EP Thompson and others may have said about the incipient radicalism of the ‘freeborn Englishmen’, there are too many English people who are willing to put up with a great deal, and too willing to allow those who are richer and more powerful than they are to get away with a great deal.

When, for example, Margaret Thatcher allowed one industry after another to go to the wall, and stripped away the supports that held entire communities together, there were people who resisted that transformation, but there were millions more who shrugged their shoulders and accepted it, because Tory governments and the newspapers that supported them convinced them that there was no alternative.

When David Cameron and George Osborne began to bleed communities dry across the country in the name of austerity and good economic housekeeping at a time of crisis that these communities had not caused, millions of people accepted all the social cruelty and callousness that went with it.

When foodbanks began to pop all over one of the richest countries on earth, millions accepted this as if it were all entirely natural and even laudable. The passivity was such that when Tory MPs who voted to cut benefits dropped in at their local foodbank for the occasional gurning photo op, only a few complained, because wasn’t it nice to volunteer?

Given this history, it’s not at all surprising that England has largely submitted with the same passivity in the face of the worst cost-of-living crisis since records began, people dying while waiting in ambulances, or hundreds going blind because they can’t get a routine ophthalmologist’s appointment. Yes, I know there have been strikes, but when giant energy companies are raking in enormous profits while your energy bills double or treble, you can’t help thinking that something more concerted is required, and that the government responsible deserves a lot more hostility than it is getting.

Of course we moan, the way we moan about the weather, but few of us seem to question the political and economic choices that have allowed such things to happen. A German magazine might describe the UK as a declining nation on life support, but too many of us prefer to put our fingers in our ears, or get angry at migrants, leftists, ‘woke’ people, or whatever enemy du jour is presented to us. When we do rebel, it will be a rightwing reactionary rebellion like Brexit that leads nowhere; and when we discover that the eggs that were broken in the course of that rebellion haven’t produced an omelette, we shrug our shoulders about that too, and never question the people who promised us it would all be different.

It would be a considerable understatement to say that this is all very frustrating for those of us who believe that these things need not have happened, and that we have the potential to become a better country than we actually are. And there is no more glaring evidence of the poverty of English desire than our enduring infatuation with the Royal Family.

Millions of freeborn Englishmen and women do not question even for a single millisecond the vast power, wealth and inherited aristocratic privilege that royalty embodies. On the contrary, many of them positively fawn over it, or try to bathe in its reflected light. Whether they really believe that kings and queen were appointed by God or just ended up there by good luck, they are willing to maintain the Royal Family in exactly the same place it has always been.

Yes, there has been the occasional tremor of discontent, for example during the ‘floral revolution’ that followed the death of Princess Diana - a ‘revolution’ that had more or less disappeared like a candle in the wind even before the flowers had wilted.

How many eulogies to England and Englishness did we hear back then? How many pundits oohed and aahed at the softer nation we’d become, as the famously stiff upper-lipped English finally learned to cry over the ‘People’s Princess’.

Never mind that the same weeping public had pored over Diana for so many years, fuelling an amoral and ruthless pursuit of saleable photogenic material that eventually drove her to her death; none of this dented the new media consensus that the outpouring of performative grief represented the birth-pangs of a new England in which the English had lost their habit of deference, and that the Royal Family had to watch itself and ‘modernize’ if it wanted to survive.

If the House of Windsor was genuinely worried about this transformation at the time, it needn’t have. Because deference did not disappear, and millions of us, it seems, would rather be proud to be subjects of monarchs than citizens on an equal footing with each other.

Some say that the Royal Family is the only thing protecting us from dictatorship or President Boris Johnson, as if these were the only alternatives available. Others insist that we need the Royal Family to know what England is, and what Britain is, as if there were not other way of answering that question.

Passive, if not overtly servile, we revel in the Royal Family as an essential token of Englishness concealed inside an ever-flimsier veneer of (Great) Britishness. We wallow in the ancestral rituals, in the faint odour of Alfred’s burned cakes. We behold the jewelled sword, the sacred oil, the screen, the robes and sceptre, and we tell ourselves that these things define us and bind us together as a country, and make us better than other countries.

We delight in what the Guardian’s theatre critic Michael Billington called the ‘Shakespearian’ coronation defined by ‘pageantry, procession, music, and mystery’. We camp out all night to catch a glimpse of ‘history’, forgetting that history is something that is made by the decisions taken or not taken by millions of people, not by a pampered and petulant upper class twit with a fountain pen.

Rather than make history ourselves, we prefer to be spectators of the great men and women who supposedly make it. We gape at the druidical rites of ancient Albion, and count off the celebrities and world leaders who confirm its greatness. Incurable romantics, in a Mills and Boon kind of way, we seek the look of love in Prince William’s face or Kate Middleton’s smile. Mesmerised by our ineffable grandiosity, we prefer the smell of incense to the stench of a decaying nation, the robes of priests and archbishops to the suits of our elected politicians.

We marvel at the ridiculous ‘Tory women’, as the Mail called them, in their coronation hats; at the ghastly shower of prime ministers who have wafted through Downing Street over the last twelve months. We watch Penny Mordaunt holding a sword and hey presto! it’s obvious that a woman who can do that must be prime ministerial material.

Perhaps there were those who just wanted to look up at the rainy skies, as Dan Wootton did, skulking in the crowds like some malignant ghoul, and imagine that the raindrops were Meghan Markle’s tears as she contemplated our greatness from Archie’s birthday party. Or perhaps we just needed a break, an escape from what Sarah Vine called the ‘myriad worries that assail us daily’, because there’s nothing that a little bunting can’t heal, and after all, as Lady MacGove pointed out, the coronation was ‘Britain at its most optimistic and spectacular’.

One thing is for sure: when someone uses language like that, they are probably not particularly ‘assailed’ by any worries at all, and don’t think for an instant that they are worried about you. And you can also take it as a pretty safe bet that the new king is not that worried about you either, and is more concerned with his leaking fountain pen. Yes, His Majesty talks loftily about ‘service’, and perhaps he actually believes it. Of course he wants us all to be ‘volunteers’, and perhaps the Queen Consort can discuss these possibilities next time she lunches with Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson.

But if the once and future king really cared about the very serious state many of our communities are in right now, he wouldn’t have made us pay for a coronation that he has more than enough money to pay for himself, and he might even have made a donation to a foodbank or two.

And volunteering is all very well, but volunteers can’t drive ambulances or check your eyesight or pay your bills. As for ‘service’, tell that to the nurses and ambulance drivers and all the millions of people up and down the country who serve every day for much less than they deserve, and a lot less than most of the guests at the coronation will be getting, and a lot less than the government is willing to give them.

The injustice of all this stares us in the face; yet millions of don’t want to see it. They prefer the bunting, the flyovers, the Household Cavalry, and the ‘optimism’ that such things supposedly express. Call me a ‘naysayer’, as Sarah Vine would have it, but these aren’t the things that make a country great, and they aren’t the things that a country in deep crisis should be placing such importance upon.

Unwilling to even think of moving towards a more equal society; unable to transform our corroded institutions or fix our broken country; unable to face up to our legacy of political, military, and economic failure, too many of us prefer magic and mystery, ritual and drama. Too many prefer to take comfort in reactionary notions of continuity and tradition, rather than address the disturbing questions about why a country that should be so much more than it is, is visibly failing to protect or show even basic solidarity to so many of its citizens.

As Penny Mordaunt might have said, nor shall my sword sleep in my hand/till we have built Jerusalem/in England’s green and pleasant land, but that will not be happening in the near future. And it will not be would-be Tory contenders or crowned kings, or any amount of magic and mystery, who will bring that possibility any closer.