By Pankaj Mishra / Bloomberg Opinion
On Saturday, a 74-year-old British man formally assumed a job that was promised to him when he was born; a strange event by itself in a country with record levels of underemployment and a severe cost-of-living crisis. But the coronation of King Charles III, one of the world’s richest men, was funded by the taxpayer — estimates are running over $100 million — and commemorated with a national holiday.
Moreover, as the new king receives the sovereign’s orb, scepter and coronation ring, and is anointed with oil specially sacralized in Jerusalem, his subjects around the United Kingdom and abroad will be invited to say the words, “I swear that I will pay true allegiance to your majesty, and to your heirs and successors according to law. So help me God.”
“The absurdity … can be total. It appears to ridicule analysis. It takes the onlooker beyond anger and despair to neutrality.” These words by V.S. Naipaul, originally used for post-colonial India and paraphrased slightly, apply today to post-imperial Britain, arguably also a deeply “wounded civilization” that is ruled by “ritual and myth” and seems “incapable of lasting reform, or of a correct interpretation of the new world.”
Child poverty is rising and life expectancy is slowing down while corruption scandals engulf the ruling Conservative Party. Britain, once widely admired, has become a subject of international derision. One sign is the dignitary count for the coronation, which is lower than that of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. President Biden, among others, declined to attend (much to the fury of the overwhelmingly right-wing British press).
Nonetheless, just as unremittingly as they did during the royal funeral last year, Tory politicians and much of the British press are urging citizens to take pride in their ancient rituals and institutions. Indeed, the week of the coronation provides another disquieting lesson in how orchestrated deference to Britain’s past serves to perpetuate its social and economic inequalities, and to postpone necessary questions about the integrity and competence of the country’s elites.
Under them, Britain has suffered successive moral, political and economic disasters; from the Tory program of austerity, which decimated social welfare systems and pressed down wages, to the witless pursuit of Brexit, the manifold corruptions of Boris Johnson and the economic lunacy of Liz Truss. As Naipaul warned, those proud of their “ancient, surviving civilization” are “in fact, its victims.”
There are signs that the reflexive British regard for posh people and hoary institutions may be fading. A YouGov poll this month revealed that 64 percent of Britons don’t care very much or at all about the coronation. According to a survey by the National Centre for Social Research only 3 of 10 people in Britain think the monarchy is “very important,” the lowest proportion on record. Nearly half of the respondents said it should be abolished.
More importantly, only 12 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds view the monarchy as “very important.” Young people have watched aghast as Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, were hounded out of the country by a racist press, and as Prince Andrew, King Charles’s brother, paid off his accuser to settle his sexual assault case in the U.S.
They know all too well the tricks of the “stalemate society,” where, as Prince Harry pointed out last week, the establishment media diverts the public with “the most mundane and petty things” to obscure “critical issues.”
Support for the British monarch is more rapidly declining in the handful of countries where he is still head of state. Even Australia is set to become a republic, as the country’s new ambassador to the U.K. revealed last week. Charles himself attended the ceremony last year in which Barbados officially removed the Queen as its head of state.
The new King spoke then about the “appalling atrocity of slavery”; he has yet to respond to recent revelations in the Guardian that his own ancestors owned slave plantations in Virginia, and that priceless jewels looted from India by British imperialists ended up in the royal collection. It is possible that Charles is profoundly embarrassed by his tainted legacy. His passion for environmental issues marks him out in a family that has historically been more engaged by horses and palaces.
He has also said he wants to modernize the monarchy, although his elaborate plans for the coronation suggest the opposite. In any case, incremental moves — such as paying tax, like other Britons, on the inheritance from his mother — may not be enough.
His Majesty’s greatest service to his kingdom would be to abolish his pompous office. The expensively preposterous coronation can then be justified, in his own mind at least, as the last indulgence of its kind; a grand farewell party. Certainly, Britain needs more than ever to grapple with urgent challenges of the present and future instead of yet again lavishly reenacting its past. “The past has to be seen as dead,” as Naipaul wrote about another wounded civilization, “or the past will kill.”
Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is author, most recently, of “Run and Hide.”
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