11.05.2023

Kinesics of defiance

Open rejection of the coronation circus from Charles’s mischievous subjects are a reminder that the image of Britain as overwhelmingly pro-monarchy is a lie, hurrahs Paul Demarty

The coronation pranks began, no doubt, months ago, as the date was set and the May 8 commemorative bank holiday booked in.

The starting gun, however, was truly fired in the picturesque Georgian paradise of Bath. Just days before a grand party was to take place on the lawn in front of the famous Royal Crescent, a person or persons unknown went to mow a meadow. And they mowed into the grass a 30-foot phallus - one trinket, alas, not to be found dangling from Charles Windsor’s royal finery.

No news on the culprit yet, of course; and, for all we know, nothing more political was involved here than in the average crudely Sharpied todger on the pub toilet wall. Yet it is notable that this prank is being reported as if it were more or less certainly a light-hearted piece of stochastic republican terrorism.

No such mystery at Anfield on May 6, of course. As with every other football game that weekend, the fans were subjected to a special round of the national anthem, in honour of our new overlord. As was entirely predictable, given pre-match chatter, the anthem was met with a chorus of boos so loud that the Mirror’s correspondent said he did not realise that the singing had actually started.

The club had been reluctant to go ahead with the anthem, precisely because this was the predictable result, and is an uncomfortable reminder to the money-men back in the United States that football is a combustible substance that occasionally blows up in your face. The footballing authorities effectively overruled the club’s misgivings, and in a way that was a good thing too. It gave us one spectacular display of republican defiance that weekend which could not be plausibly written off as the work of pious liberal-elite spoilsports.

Tradition

Booing the national anthem is, at this point, something of a tradition at Anfield; or perhaps singing the words, “Liverpool, Liverpool”, over and over again in tune with the band. While its fan base is not so closely associated with the left as, say, Livorno or St Pauli, there is a distinct sentimentalist socialism around the club; its official organisation for charitable do-goodery, Spirit of Shankly, takes its name, of course, from Bill Shankly, the club’s greatest manager, former coal miner and lifelong socialist. It is not so much the heroes, however, as the villains who are responsible for this abiding leftish anti-establishmentarianism: the callous indignities suffered by the city in the Thatcher years; the conspiracy of lies about the Hillsborough disaster that united the yellow press, the Tories and the police; and so on.

Prince Charles - as he was then - may have been the only person in the establishment not to retail some grotesque calumny about Hillsborough. For once, this braying gasbag could keep his mouth shut. But no matter: Liverpool fans, and happily Evertonians too - some of whom sung over the anthem at their game two day later, know that he is one of Them, and indeed now - as king - the one who symbolises the very reality of Them.

Liverpool fans were not, of course, the only ones to protest at the forced diet of royalism. Unsurprisingly, the two Scottish teams most closely associated with Irish nationalism - Glasgow Celtic and Hibernians - staged protests of their own. Celtic’s, which took place at the recent Scottish Cup match with Rangers, was presumably at least in part a provocation to their Protestant-unionist arch rivals; but no less sincere for that. Though that is certainly only representative of one side of a cultural divide, it does indicate that we are not dealing with - as Boris Johnson once claimed of Liverpool - a single city uniquely marked out by unlimited self-pity and ressentiment.

On the face of it, these are small things, compared to the grandeur of the ceremony, the wall-to-wall media saturation, the pound-shop Kremlinology as to what sort of king Charles will be (my prediction: an old one, with bizarre swollen fingers that look like andouillettes). The ship of state, it seems, sailed happily on through the long weekend. Yet gestures of this sort matter, even if they are not, in the end, politically decisive.

Dignified

To see why, we should consider the contrast with those brave souls who protested against this grotesque circus in London itself - subject to dawn raids, screened off by huge barriers when they made it to the circuit, and so on. We might call out as particularly exemplary the case of some people arrested who, to all appearances, had no intention of protesting at all. They were volunteers for a Westminster council initiative called Night Stars, and wandering the streets of Soho in the wee hours of Saturday morning, handing out - among other safety gear - rape alarms to young women who might be at risk after a few refreshments. But somebody had put it into the heads of London’s finest that, after all, you could really disrupt a coronation with a few rape alarms, and decided that these volunteers were some sort of direct-action grouplet.

The case of the Night Stars Three is an unusually comical example of the heavy-handedness at work, particularly as - with regard to the ostensible purpose of police work - it is directly counterproductive (one really does hope nobody was raped in the Soho area after 2am on Saturday). But comical things can be, at the same time, very serious. All this lamentable overreach is enabled, after all, by the slow ratchet of restrictions on the right to protest, latterly unresisted by Sir Keir’s Labour Party (and, for that matter, London mayor Sadiq Khan, who lamely protested against the dawn raids and so forth that inevitably followed from his desire to crush the various post-Extinction Rebellion direct action groups). Why were the milquetoast liberals of the anti-monarchist Republic group - never mind the totally unrelated bystanders of Night Stars - attacked so absurdly? Because the coronation - for all its flummery and theatre - is very serious, and it is taken very seriously by the establishment; and the most important thing is that the appearance of uninterrupted consent should not be seen to be undermined by mere mortals like you and me.

The constitution, famously, has its dignified and efficient parts; and one of the jobs of the efficient parts is to protect the dignified (and vice versa). Yet no state - not Hitler’s Germany, Hoxha’s Albania, nor anything else - has unlimited reach. Still less this rotting post-imperial operation, lurching from one political crisis to the next. The importance of the Anfield boo is that it could not be silenced by the club; and the club could not be silenced by the footballing authorities (and, in any case, no police force in the country could arrest every home fan at a major football stadium, except perhaps by merely putting it under siege).

For that reason, perhaps, the rightwing media strategy has largely been to brush over this embarrassment in silence. It was reported factually by the Daily Mail and others, and Piers Morgan was stupid enough to take the bait and denounce the protest as “pathetic”, but beyond that it is a case of the dog that didn’t bark - no relentless agitation for the heads of club hierarchs, no demand that Liverpool star defender Trent Alexander-Arnold clarify his position on the Act of Union - nada. What would be the point? Lee Anderson, the self-parodically authoritarian Tory, suggested that if people did not like the monarchy, they should just leave the country. Is he proposing to cede Liverpool - blue and red alike - to France? Drawing endless attention to the matter may be worse than merely issuing a pro forma denunciation and moving on.

That is the value of a gesture - in the right place, at the right time. It punctures the screen erected by the Met in front of the Republic protestors in London, and makes plain a fact that cannot be stated plainly in official circles: the British public is not universally royalist. There is a large minority who at least think of themselves as republicans; who understand, in some inchoate way, that on occasions such as Saturday’s coronation, we were being sold a bad bill of goods. If the forces of royalism were as virtuous as they think they are, they would be faced with the job of convincing the rest of us that we are mistaken. But they are not virtuous, and so their only recourse is to play whack-a-mole to preserve the illusion of national unity. You can only whack so many moles, however: such illusions are almost pathetically short-lived in practice.

There remains, finally, the further problem - why must this illusion be maintained? Bourgeois society is perfectly capable of acknowledging that there will inevitably be divergence of political opinions; even supposing the ideal political regime from the point of view of the capitalist class (that of votes according to capital ownership), there is still an irreducible need for agonistic competition between viewpoints, given the inherent anarchy of capitalist production. Take the difference of opinion between the good bourgeois liberals of Republic and mainstream monarchists - should the head of state be hereditary or directly elected? We take one approach in Britain; they take another in France and the US; there are no doubt pros and cons for the various bourgeois factions to squabble over, but surely nobody would find this to be a defining civilisational difference. And yet, people who dress their kids up in T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan, “When I grow up, I want to be president!” have just been arrested as if they were an Islamic State sleeper cell.

Circus

What can account for this? Merely that the flipside of the inherent agonism of capitalist rule is its arbitrariness. The fundamental contradiction - labour and capital - demands sacrifices from capital; insofar as the working class is organised (and really only a very low level of organisation is necessary to pose this problem), there is the question of Joseph Chamberlain’s “ransom” that “property [must] pay for the security it enjoys”. And that ransom must be paid by somebody: there is always a political choice involved in subsidising social peace this way and that.

The cheapest available way to do it (a snip at £250 million!) is through pure nonsense - circuses rather than bread. If you can convince the unwashed that their interests are really identical to those of their exploiters, then you have got it made. The point of such unity must always be reified - there must be a specific thing to which higher loyalties are owed, that overrides the particular narrow interests at work.

In the bourgeois era, and in spite of their apparent irrelevance, kings and queens have done a pretty good job of this. I remember living in student halls with a fellow student whose father was Belgian - so deep were the divisions between Walloon and Fleming, apparently, that “the king was the only Belgian”. Though the British monarchy is very different in comportment to the other examples in northern Europe, it operates similarly: both in relation to our own national fractiousness and in the idea of the monarchy as a principle of unity.

That can only work if the monarchy can appear to be above the fray - above the Walloons and the Flemings, the Scots and the English, Labour and Tory. The open rejection, however crude, of the principle whereby we suspend our antagonisms is thus to be crushed, however modest its real influence may be. It pierces the veil of royal neutrality, of the monarch standing above the fray of mere politics, and therefore cannot be forgiven.

It may be said that, in recent history, a certain concordat has been in place. Republicanism has been tolerated, through the various misfortunes of the Windsor tribe, from Diana Spencer to Jeffrey Epstein, so long as the inertia of the neoliberal consensus has held. So it has been for most western countries - whether the grand bargain involved a hereditary monarch or not. The slow death of this consensus has produced - largely in the absence of a serious organised left - a rightwing opposition. In its ‘soft’ forms, it melded the old economic programme to a more astringent form of social conservatism: one could think of the Tea Party, but frankly even the anti-social behaviour orders and anti-terror acts of the Blair government functioned as a foretaste of things to come.

Today, we have something else: a so-called ‘national conservatism’, which unites American integralists, Hungarian irridentists and Lee Anderson types. The neoliberal consensus is rejected as a form of ‘globalism’ that wants to smooth over local particularities in the face of the frictionless space of the market, and those particularities lifted up as a kind of resistance in themselves. Yet such particularities do not, in fact, offer any real resistance to the universal corruption of global capitalism. They are thus constituted as mere shibboleths, loyalty tests, opportunities for the selection of scapegoats. The extreme allergic reaction to liberal republicanism - found, remarkably, among American conservatives, as if their national myth did not originate in far more severe acts of rebellion than a terrace chant - is founded on impotence: the brute reality that the national stage is no strong redoubt against the ravages of the system. No king will change that - not even one as ideologically committed as Charles.

On our side, we still lack the organisation, centralisation and sheer street smarts necessary to fight back. The libertarian Marxist, John Holloway, in his famous manifesto Change the world without taking power, hailed the ‘no’: the defiant act of refusal. We do so as well. But we do not, as he did, mistake it for an answer to an increasingly irrational political scene, and its obligatory bacchanals.