Tom Nairn (1932–2023)

Republicans are edged into such an absurd cul-de-sac because there is no effective space for them in the public arena - no respectable or dignified corner to be occupied and held. There is no serious Republican campaign or movement, no Republican press, and no recognised or avowable anti-Monarchic stance in everyday argument or debate. It is this climatic fact that defines Republicanism from its first syllable as posture and wilful eccentricity.

In fact, attacks upon the British Crown arouse what one might call identity-rage: the everyday taboo generates an instant and furious counter-attack. The point seems to be that the National Soul is threatened. Whatever this sacred abstraction is, we are supposed to live by it. They (the Royals) are not just nice; they represent and embody Niceness. The latter quality is our special, inherited capacity for civilised conduct - our moral identity so to speak. Without this heart we would sink down into the heartless, modern world alongside everybody else. Another prominent aspect of instant popular reaction to criticism of Royalty [...] is normally the implied awfulness of elsewhere: the Queen 'saves us from dictatorship', 'It's better than a President and costs less', [...] 'Would they prefer Reagan or Gorbachov?'

It matters deeply to nearly everyone and is of no significance whatever. Grotesque self-contradiction of this order is so common in both popular and official native commentary about the British Royals that one has to put it down as systematic. It has the air of something built into the lived ideology of Royalism, and for that reason goes unregarded. Why is this?
The only plausible explanation is that a defensive machinery is at work, whose very success simultaneously suppresses awareness of the contradiction. The magic emblem is displaced by an accompanying taboo from the sphere of the criticizable, and the act of displacement itself paralyses any critical sense of what has been done. Then, thoroughly protected by redefinition as 'acceptable nonsense', its actual importance can go on being accepted and enjoyed.

Since its 17th century agonies, the Anglo-British dominant class had ceased to be a closed nobility of the mainland kind. It had turned into a mercantile oligarchy, where landownership was linked to commerce rather than to the exclusive feudal professions of warfare. [...] In short, a largely synthetic 'traditional' social order had already been built up in [18th century] Whig Britain. It associated aristocracy with an early-modern form of capitalism, commercial rather than industrial in orientation; and far from demanding a farther rush forward into modernity - a 'bourgeois revolution' - this system was, at least in Britain's favourable conditions, both stable and (within limits) adaptable.

The paradox of George III's 'modernisation' and what followed under Victoria is therefore this: Britain couldn't do without a 'nationalism', in the sense of an ideological armour for coping with modernity. But it had to have a strongly dissembling one, a national identity simultaneously above and beneath all that - an undoctrinaire formula bridging directly from the popular to the transcendent, from the 'ordinary' to the supernally grand and ethical. This passage had at once to mimic political nationalism and to occlude its dangerous side - diffusing the populist threat, as it were, by awarding its Volk house-room in an older or 'traditional' structure. That is exactly what the country's cultivated modern over-obsession with Monarchy has made possible: a pseudo-nationalism fostering 'community' from above and bestowing a sense of 'belonging' without the damnable nuisance of ethnic and rudely democratic complaint.

Etiquette was much more external than the old courtesy. This element of mimicry made it both learnable and easy to ridicule. The adoption and display of high-status moeurs and belongings (particularly in the home) fostered that parrot-like side of British bourgeois life which is one of the main components of the 'class' psychosis. Fashion and mimicry are of course universal traits of modern society; but nowhere else did the aspiring class inherit such a solid hierarchy, such authoritative and apparently natural models for emulation.

In the Royal-family sense 'class' has very little to do with the wider and more typical concept evolved by Marxism and academic sociology to explain the general process of industrialisation. British class-in-inverted-commas represents a historical pathology of stratification, and not (as once so widely and piously believed) its standard anatomy. In terms of this study, what it stands for could be called the Royal Wound: the holy ailment both constitutive of and inseparable from all the strengths and the weaknesses of a powerful but anachronistic identity.

This enduring congruence between the symbolism of the British Crown and the enduring economic conditions of British society is the real 'secret' of what will be the Third Millennium's single specimen of late-capitalism encased in an early modern Monarchic Constitution. The secret derives from the very origins we looked at earlier: from an early or pre-bourgeois revolution which installed Capital and Property in power long before an urban middle class had evolved sufficiently to become a national standard-bearer of modernity. Since capitalism 'triumphed' in that sense too soon, it found itself decisively locked into the early modern forms of commercial and financial dominance: a chronic pre-modernity. [...]
What the Crown-Constitution stands for is simply the secular or long-term ascendancy of one sort of capitalism.

This Crown-and-Capital land is not really a national state: it is more accurately described as a Southern-lowland hegemonic bloc uniting a hereditary elite to the central processing unit of commercial and financial capital. For the latter, the 'nation' has always been too small: a hinterland of romance and industrially 'spoiled' river-valleys configured precisely in the Home County pronunciation of the word 'provinces'. Those unversed in the Queen's tongue may not appreciate the full sodden misery of the concept.

The Crown's obvious elements of fragility had to be turned into something like a magic, untouchable fungus: only if the underground 'symbol' was rendered inviolable would its underground spore-system - the traditional identity-code conveyed in Gladstone's short-hand as 'class harmony' - be truly safe from subversion.

The whole trade of commentary upon the Constitution is in any case a realm of quasi-legal necromancy in Britain. It is performed on a mist-shrouded academic plateau by a specially-evolved breed of academic lawyer-philosophers, whose totemic lore is remote from everyday politics.

Contrary to many appearances the United Kingdom Monarchy is not decorative icing on the socio-political cake. It is an important ingredient of the whole mixture - important enough to render both justification and critique of the institution remarkably difficult in isolation. It was necessary to tackle general national conservatism and all the claptrap head on, in order to make any sense of it.