Mind the Gap

Two days before the royal funeral I was sitting with a group of friends getting ready to go to a 21st. As all of us are staunch anti-monarchists, we were taking it in turns to go round and tell a daft, fabricated memory of royalty.

One, through the best fake tears I’ve ever seen, said “I saw the Queen give a talk during a school trip in year three. It changed my life. Her girl-boss attitude was what inspired me to become a feminist.” Another went on, “My 92-year-old grandmother has taken a five-day journey to stand in The Queue. We don’t know how it has taken so long, but it’s such a beautiful display of dedication.” The last in the circle confessed: “My favourite memory of the Queen is when her armed forces invaded my family’s country.”

I find myself part of a generation where ill-feeling towards the monarchy – and an increasing lack of connection to royals in general – is becoming more common than not. For many of our parents and grandparents, the monarch has always served as the head of the national family: a key source of British pride and unity. But for most people of student age, monarchy is not a figurehead but an institution – one composed of an unforgivable excess of wealth, hundreds of years of colonialist crime, and the remnants of all that is divisively archaic. While the late Queen has been mourned as the grandmother of the nation, all I’ve been able to think about is how that makes Andrew the creepy uncle of Britain – if your average creepy uncle could access £12m to pay off women they are alleged to have assaulted.

Just take a second to think of all that un-taxed, inherited wealth. Then think of the random, undemocratic causes it can be put to… like saving a perv from an embarrassing court case. And that’s before we even consider how much taxpayer money is invested in these people, too. Like many of my peers, I’ve spent the summer juggling full-time work with getting through my mile-long reading lists for uni, in order to be able to afford to live through this winter. So when I saw an Instagram post that did the rounds from @ukfactcheckpolitics (citing Al Jazeera) which estimated the costs to the taxpayer of changing the monarch to total as much as £6.9bn, I could have thrown up. Why should the rest of the nation have to battle to survive the “cost-of-living crisis” when one family is allowed to spend millions on a single ceremony without anyone batting an eyelid?

I can only hope that advertising students of the future will use the British monarchy as the ideal case study of marketing gone right. The iconography of the monarch as a guardian figure that watches rather than rules over the nation is what has caused millions to become so attached to the royals. Yet, in adoration of the crown, there’s a wilful blindness to the monarchy’s indifference to the lives of everyone else. This is a blindness people my age lack; we simply can’t ignore the food bank closures, postponement of hospital appointments, and funeral cancellations that were just a handful of the “national sacrifices” forced upon the population to mark the passing of the monarch. The halting of the nation for the royal funeral was just a microcosmic example of the sacrifices this nation is expected to make for the crown, an establishment that realistically does nothing to acknowledge or repay them. I, along with countless others my age, see the Royal Family clearly as an institution of false images, double standards, and exploitation of those it reigns over.

In the last few weeks, I’ve also become hyper-aware of how the monarchy engenders hypocrisy in the country. Those who were vehemently anti-lockdown and pro-free market are generally the same people who want to enforce a compulsory state of mourning upon the nation. It’s been hilarious to see right-wing campaigners for “freedom of speech” being triggered by republican sentiment. Less comedic were the arrests of non-royalist citizens peacefully protesting the naming of a new King. Why should anyone be carted away by the police for their unwillingness to lick royal arse? Which is precisely what took place on 11 September when a 22-year-old woman was detained outside St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh for holding a sign saying “fuck imperialism, abolish monarchy”. Then again, so many people are held captive in a state of royalist Stockholm syndrome that perhaps they imagine one day our rage will transform into worship.

I, along with countless others my age, see the Royal Family clearly as an institution of false images, double standards, and exploitation of those it reigns over

The only pro-monarchy argument I’ve ever heard from one of my peers is that abolishing the monarchy would run the risk of giving over even more of society to late-stage capitalism. This person feared the sudden appearance of horrors such as Coca-Cola’s Regent’s Park. They worry that if the monarchy were to be abolished in our current political state, the likelihood of any royal assets being made over to the public would be slim. Other friends discussed what the reality of abolition would look like, fearing the need for some kind of revolution to truly rid us of the crown. Yet at the heart of these conversations is a recognition that the harder it seems to put an end to the Royal Family, the more urgently we should attempt it. The fact the crown is so entrenched, and the process of dismantling it so difficult, the more imperative the challenge. Don’t get me wrong, the potential for even more of the country to be sold off to big businesses is a grim one. But grimmer still is that portion of the country continuing to be owned by imperialist crooks, purely because of the “divine right” bestowed upon them centuries ago.

In preparation for writing this piece, I did an Instagram poll about my friends’ feelings towards Charles and the crown. Responses I got included “they’re all lizards”, “why are his fingers like bloated sausages”, and “I can’t look at the king without thinking about how he’d rather be a tampon”, though I think the answer that most accurately captured the mood was “abolish the monarchy because it’s literally 2022 and I don’t even think that needs explanation”. But hey, at least we stand a chance of getting a new version of the Horrible Histories “Kings and Queens” song.

Lily Webb is a third-year student of English Literature at the University of Oxford