POLITICS-BRITAIN: Fifty Years of Rule by a Minority of One

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jun 1 2002 (IPS) - There could hardly have been an opinion poll to determine this, but it seemed at the beginning of a long weekend in Britain that the British are thinking at least as much about David Beckham’s foot as their Queen’s crown.

Beckham because he is the star player in the England team when they take on Sweden Monday for their first match of World Cup football. Reports indicate that Beckham, who had suffered a fracture in what became a national calamity and a Cabinet issue, will be fit to play after all. The Queen, because this is the long weekend, all the way up to Tuesday, when celebrations peak to mark the Golden Jubilee of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth.

This is not the Queen versus Beckham. But the continuation of the Queen into her 50th year with prospects of going well beyond, as Her Majesty herself declared she intends to, has not got the British as excited about their new Elizabethan Age as much as the Palace would have liked.

Four-day royal celebrations began Saturday. They had all the stamp of royalty celebrating itself, rather than people celebrating royalty. A concert at Buckingham Palace for 12,000 people on Saturday evening was to feature soprano Kiri Te Kanawa, Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and operatic duo Roberto Alagna and Angela Gheorghiu. On Monday a pop music concert will include performances by Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins and Annie Lennox.

A chain of 2,000 beacons and bonfires will be lit up around the world to mark the Golden Jubilee. The last time such a beacon was lit was to honour the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth’s great-great grandmother Queen Victoria in 1887. This time the lighting will extend to a newly lit Empire State building in New York. The last time the building was especially lit was to honour Nelson Mandela in 1990.

But all is not bright beneath the beacons and the royal revelry. This Queen Elizabeth does not run this new Elizabethan age, and many in Britain have been asking persistent questions about the role of royalty, public funds for royalty, and about royalty itself.

Demos, a major think tank that is known for its plain-speaking reports on British society, produced a report on the eve of the Golden Jubilee celebrations suggesting that the Queen should quit in favour of her son Prince Charles ôwhile she’s ahead”. And that is necessary for a much needed modernisation of British monarchy, the report says.

The group suggests a mandatory retirement age for royalty to make sure that succession is ôproperly managed” so that future heirs can know when they can expect to ascend the throne. The Queen had announced in a speech to Parliament following the death of her mother that she has no plans to step down. Demos says ôthere is something absurd about someone declaring that they intend to keep going forever.”

The report says: ôBy saying that she plans to stay on the throne, she is silencing the debate about the future of the monarchy at the very moment when it needs to be opened up…if the Queen lives as long as her mother, Charles would be nearly 80 by the time he reached the throne. Britain is in danger of replacing its monarchy with gerontocracy.”

Criticism has grown following reports that British royalty has not been managing its money very well – either family money or the money it gets from the public purse. The Queen Mother died with her bank account overdrawn by about 1.5 million dollars, Buckingham Palace admitted later. That raised questions about inheritance, and as it would inevitably in Britain, about inheritance tax.

Both the Queen and the Queen Mother were exempted from inheritance tax under a deal agreed with former prime minister John Major in 1993. The celebrations now have silenced that debate in more ways than one: the Queen Mother’s collection of paintings and her rare art collection goes on display during these celebrations. Under British law such collections are exempt from inheritance tax if they are put on public display. But questions are raised periodically now within Parliament and outside why public money should pay for royalty when it seems to have enough of its own.

And whose Queen is she anyway? In what is claimed to be a new multicultural Britain, Her Majesty is everyone’s Queen. The royal tour around Britain has correctly included minority areas. On a visit to East London she was greeted by a Bollywood band playing songs from Indian cinema. But there have been uncomfortable moments.

During the funeral procession of the Queen Mother, her crown carrying the Kohinoor diamond was paraded through London and placed over her coffin while it lay in state. The prize diamond had been seized by the British after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the last ruler of Punjab before British annexation. During the funeral ceremonies there was hardly a Sikh to be seen.

In the course of those other Golden Jubilee celebrations earlier to mark Britain’s victory in the Second World War on the side of the Americans there had been little to honour soldiers from India and Africa who had fought for the British during the two world wars. A campaign launched by Indian-born Baroness Shreela Flather, member of the House of Lords, has succeeded now in having memorial gates to those soldiers erected by the side of Buckingham Palace. The building of that memory was almost forced upon London after a tireless campaign in the face of strong opposition. In the end Queen Elizabeth came last year to lay the foundation.

There is a strong core of Britons still loyal to the monarchy. Huge numbers attended the Queen Mother funeral and some of the Queen’s public events on her recent royal tour. But a MORI poll shows that two-thirds of Britons believe that royalty is out of touch with reality. The royal celebrations are drawing numbers, but far from the majority. She couldn’t dream of becoming a distant second even to Beckham. As her biographer Ben Pimlott put it, she is ôan ethnic minority of one.”