Ten Days of Bloated Pageantry and Ritual Overkill: By All Means Pay Your Respects to the Queen, But It’s Time for the Monarchy to Go
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In 2022, when it’s often difficult to get people to pay attention to anything for more than a few minutes, when the country faces an economic crisis unprecedented in our lifetimes, and the spectre of total environmental collapse looms ever closer, it seems to be extraordinarily anachronistic for the British establishment to insist that there must a ten-day period of national mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last Thursday, at the age of 96, after 70 years on the throne.
Obviously, some sort of period of mourning is appropriate for a monarch who was so popular (the most recent polling, in June, showed that 81% of the British people held a positive opinion of her, with only 12% seeing her negatively), but I have to ask whether it is really appropriate for ten days to be given over to obscure rituals and ostentatious pageantry designed not only to honour the Queen, but also to seamlessly endorse the succession of her eldest son, Prince Charles, and, by extension, to prop up, in an unquestioning manner, the entire edifice of the monarchy, and what it represents: the preservation of a largely old, almost entirely white British establishment involving aristocrats, the military, politicians, international trade (and especially the arms trade), and the UK’s ongoing colonial and post-colonial aspirations.
Operation London Bridge
According to the British establishment, the answer to the question, “Is this ten-day period of mourning appropriate?” is a resounding yes, although I suspect that few of Her Majesty’s subjects are aware that extraordinary detailed plans for the aftermath of her death — spelling out every step of the ten-day period with regard to the media, the funeral, and the transition to her successor, her eldest son, Prince Charles — were first conceived in the 1960s, and “refined in detail at the turn of the century”, as Sam Bright explained in a detailed article for the Guardian in 2017.
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