Britain is a happy country, and not just because we have been blessed with the most extraordinary queen of the last 70 years. The constitutional monarchy she heads has proved to be one of the strongest countries in our country, the main reason we remain a refuge of peace, prosperity and freedom in a world of chaos, revolutions and wars.
The monarchy is not a belated thought, symbol, relic of the past: it is one of Britain’s central institutions, the engine of who we are as a nation, the engine of renewal and unification, engulfing the present in our past, fueling our extraordinary ability to rediscover ourselves. without discarding our essence. It serves as a bulwark against extremism, against demagogues, tyrants, fascists, communists and alarm clocks.
The 1136 years of royal succession after Alfred the Great are a remarkable story of evolution, from absolutism to consent, from feudalism to a form of capitalism, from Catholicism to a multi-religious society, from the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to the Brexit empire. The monarchy, paradoxically, given what the Magna Carta and Bill rights were before, now protects people from power. The monarch serves as a reminder to politicians that, after all, they are not in complete control: there are forces and institutions over them.
There are other methods of protecting nations against extremism or tyranny, such as the separation of powers at the heart of the American constitution. But the disadvantage for America is the constant paralysis and inability to reform institutions that are broken. Thanks to our constitutional monarchy, we are able to develop when necessary; others must destroy everything if they want to change. This is not a naive admiration for the Whig view of history: many of the changes made in this country over time have been bad, as exemplified by failed transfers. But we can cope and take on harmful ideas or ideological revolutions without losing our soul; the French and the Russians and even the Americans cannot.
Republicans once argued that meritocracy was incompatible with the monarchy: the huge changes of the last few decades, the Big Bang in the city, the drastic progress made by the working class in the 1980s and minorities in the 2010s, showed that this was not true. Anyone in Britain today can be a prime minister or a billionaire.
Crucially, the central role of the monarchy in British life softens our politics and society. This drastically reduces the threat of extremism, violence or ideological overload, a quality that the rest of the world values highly for Britain.
A monarchy, with its titles, palaces, carriages and servants, is clearly incompatible with communism, although it may coexist with quite radical left-wing governments. The royal family is inherently internationalist, as is the British community: autarky or total isolationism would be psychologically difficult. When servicemen enlist in the armed forces, they take an oath of allegiance not to the prime minister but to the queen: the threat of a coup organized by some hot demagogue is vanishingly small.
The queen’s role as head of the Anglican Church – and the possibility of one day extending the role of the monarch to that of a defender of all religions – also opposes mandatory official secularism. The Queen’s heartfelt Christianity, moral language and leadership helped break down barriers between religions, made it easier for minority worshipers to feel fully British, and in a way that puzzled legalistic French and American observers, helped consolidate religiousism in Britain. Over time, we hope that this will help appease both Islamism and far-right sentiment and build a more tolerant and integrated society in times of mass immigration.
The time horizons of monarchies are extremely long, a useful counterpoint to the social media age, where attention spans, where senior roles change too quickly in the public and private sectors, where ministers come and go every year, and where wisdom and experience are underestimated. . Western societies also tend to downplay the importance of the family: nepotism is rightly taboo in educational institutions, large companies and the public sector. But in the personal sphere, in the real world, family and blood ties are important and often more than anything else. The royal family reminds us of the continuity between generations, even when there are tensions, disagreements and scandals. When millions struggle with atomism, demographic implosion, loneliness, and the search for meaning, anything that balances our perceptions of the good life is certainly welcome.
Yet the greatest danger to our societies today is disintegration from within, the idea that our countries are inherently evil, racist and white, that freedom of speech, the rule of law and democracy are a cover for “micro-aggression” and “Violence”, that gender and ethnicity must oppose each other and that anyone who disagrees must be “abolished” and destroyed.
Here again, I hope that in time Britain will be better off preventing much of this awakened revolution. The monarchy has become a unifying focal point around which any group can unite without degenerating into a politics of identity: everyone can be proud. It is an institution that reminds us of our unique history, of the expansion of rights, individual and political freedoms and the enormous economic opportunities that characterize British history. No honest reading of the last 1000 years can say that we are uniquely bad – despite all our shortcomings, all our mistakes, we have long been a beacon among nations, improving and evolving before others and dealing more quickly with injustice.
The Queen’s government and her deeds expose the aroused criticism as absurdly wrong and stupid. Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi, captured perfectly the remarkable qualities and devotion of Her Majesty in her special jubilee prayer: “Her crown is honor and majesty; her scepter, law and morality. Her concern was for prosperity, freedom and unity, and in the lands of her dominion she maintained justice and freedom for all races, languages and religions. ”
The monarchy, and the queen in particular, has given us a built-in advantage in the fight against the destabilizing forces that are beating Western democracies. For this, as well as for everything else that Her Majesty has given us during her 70 extraordinary years on the throne, we should be eternally grateful.
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