Brian Morton: Britain's Atavistic Royalism

Brian Morton is a former academic, Times of London journalist and BBC arts and music presenter. He currently writes and farms in the West of Scotland.

There is a strangely atavistic slant to British political culture at the moment. Bombs, strikes, religious hatred, a Tory government, a plot to kill a man called Lennon, a “fairytale” royal wedding . . . it might be the ’80s all over again, though whether the 1980s or 1680s is an open question. Closer inspection of some particularly strange headlines confirms a present dateline, with notable differences from the past. The policeman killed on April 2 by a car bomb in Omagh, Northern Ireland, was a Roman Catholic, a rare species even now, but vanishingly rare even a couple of decades ago. Ronan Kerr’s death is part of a wave of sectarian violence, and threatened violence, that has spilled across the North Channel to Scotland, where a leading football manager, Celtic FC’s Neil Lennon, two fans of his (ostensibly “Catholic”) soccer team and the country’s leading Catholic, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, have all recently received crude bombs or live ammunition sent through the mail. The media have routinely denounced these acts, and an imminent wave of industrial unrest following draconian public spending cuts, as a return to the “bad old days,” but the times are different, and the British political map has changed....

With only outward perversity, the reopening of Parliament coincided with the revival of an ancient political philosophy that had long seemed entombed in museum myth—who would have thought Jacobitism would have another run-out? The other atavistic aspect of recent British news has been the appearance of Jacobite candidates on the election hustings for the now-devolved Scottish Parliament. Most of them have more to say about the health service, ferry subsidies and crime than about the divine right of kings and the restoration of the Stuart line, but their mere presence on the scene is a reminder that all this atavism in the air isn’t merely a seasonal return of the repressed but reflects the single disturbing reality at the heart of British politics.

However one disposes what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” and the “efficient” in British political life, the fact remains that the Queen, an unelected, hereditary monarch, is the head of state and that she and her offspring are only limited by legislation now more than 300 years old. The 1701 Act of Settlement inevitably has a remote and Ruritanian sound to republican ears, but it remains a cornerstone of the British polity and is again under attack. There have been previous attempts to have the act repealed, but the volume of protest and demand for reform, if not root-and-branch repeal, has now sharply increased....