The Queen’s Jubilee, the Royal Family’s last hurrah?

This June Britain marks 70 years since Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne. Her Platinum Jubilee is being celebrated with the opening of a new rail line in London (the Elizabeth Line), the issuing of commemorative stamps and coins, concerts, TV specials, and calls for street parties and an outpouring of public gratitude.

The well-funded official campaign to drum up patriotic fervour to mark the Queen’s Jubilee is not surprising. The monarchy plays a centrally important role in both formally legitimating British state power (the Queen convenes and dissolves Parliament, appoints the Prime Minister, and grants Royal Assent to legislation), but more importantly in sustaining the broader British social system.

This point was captured well by the former Conservative MP Michael Portillo, who noted that the point of the monarchy is that “it is a national focal point … the source of the authority and legitimacy of government … Above all, it is the personification of the nation. It is vital to our national well-being”.

''In the coming weeks the media will be saturated with images of Union Jack waving, street parties, and the apparent unity of a nation celebrating their beloved monarch. This, of course, will be a lie. Britain is profoundly divided and getting more so. In the midst of the cost of living crisis the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the government is attacking workers’ rights and people’s rights to protest.''

It is no surprise, then, that official Britain should make such great efforts to celebrate the Queen’s 70 years on the throne. However, when it comes to “national well-being”, this ostentatious celebration of a hereditary monarch stands in jarring contrast to the poverty, inequality and social decline that defines modern Britain.

As the state rolls out the media onslaught to celebrate the bejewelled and tax-payer subsidised monarch, working class people in Britain are buried in a profound cost of living crisis. It is estimated that in the coming year 40% of households will be pushed into fuel poverty. Food banks (which provide free or subsidised food for people who cannot afford to meet this most basic of needs) proliferate; child poverty in Britain is among the highest in Western Europe, and inequality has reached levels not seen since the 19th century.

Simplistic narratives attempt to attribute all these morbid social symptoms to either the war in Ukraine, or the Covid-19 pandemic. But the reality is that Britain’s present social malaise was a long-time in the making. Declining living standards and the absence of a meaningful social safety net are the products of at least 40 years of neoliberal reform, ushered in by the Thatcher government and carried forward by Blair, Cameron and all subsequent Prime Ministers and governments.

The British state, through successive governments, has actively privatised public services, attacked workers’ rights, and overseen the massive transfer of wealth and power from the working class to the already wealthy. This created the conditions that the more recent crises of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine have simply exacerbated.

All of this, of course, happened during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. So the Britain which now marks her Platinum Jubilee is an immensely unequal and divided society. In this context, the institution of the monarchy, and the person of the Queen, take on even greater importance.

In his insightful work on the British monarchy, The Enchanted Glass, Tom Nairn noted that as Britain continued its global-geopolitical and domestic-social decline, the celebration of the monarchy played a crucial role in a culture promoting the “hysteria of counter-decline”. In other words, the less “great” Britain becomes, the more the need to hark back to and celebrate past greatness and glory.

The celebrations of the Queen’s Jubilee this year are a striking example of this. While British society fractures, the political system is emptied of all meaningful content and accountability, and people’s lives worsen - the Queen’s Jubilee offers the British state and ruling class the equivalent of the old Roman Emperor’s “bread and circus”, albeit without the bread.

In the coming weeks the media will be saturated with images of Union Jack waving, street parties, and the apparent unity of a nation celebrating their beloved monarch. This, of course, will be a lie. Britain is profoundly divided and getting more so. In the midst of the cost of living crisis the rich are getting richer, the poor poorer, and the government is attacking workers’ rights and people’s rights to protest.

No amount of pageantry and mandated patriotism can paper over these cracks. The celebrations of the Queen’s Jubilee will be gratuitous precisely because they are mobilised to conceal a much deeper crisis, and because they may well be the last great hurrah of the British royal family.

The heirs to Elizabeth’s throne are petty reality TV celebrities, limping from one scandal to the next. As Britain grows increasingly unequal, and the tensions between the haves and the have nots mount, it will become harder to mobilise an institution founded on inherited privilege and natural inequality to foster a tenuous sense of national unity.

However, for this year at least the diminishing lustre of the institution of the monarchy will be squeezed for all its worth. For a time, people will be encouraged to forget their troubles, put behind them any thoughts of government scandals and unpayable bills, and instead celebrate the shared national spirit, embodied in the Queen's decades of “service”.

Paul O'Connell teaches law at SOAS University of London.

Follow him on Twitter: @pmpoc

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