Tomorrow is the royal wedding – so some wag at Great Western Railway has done this to Windsor & Eton Central station:
Windsor & Eton renamed #royalwedding pic.twitter.com/hdRdBqWBId
— Tom Edwards (@BBCTomEdwards) May 18, 2018
Tomorrow is the royal wedding – so some wag at Great Western Railway has done this to Windsor & Eton Central station:
Windsor & Eton renamed #royalwedding pic.twitter.com/hdRdBqWBId
— Tom Edwards (@BBCTomEdwards) May 18, 2018
Which inspired reactions such as this:
I long for death. https://t.co/3lJhLKJqdr
— Matt Drinkwater (@matt_h2o) May 18, 2018
I’m with Matt. I’m sure Harry and Meghan are perfectly lovely people, and I wish them every happiness, but the assumption that this entire country is going to start frantically tugging its forelock every time a member of the royal family so much as blinks gets right on my wick.
More than that, there’s a widespread national assumption that naming large bits of the public realm after specific members of a hereditary ruling dynasty is in some way a neutral act. Here is a partial list, garnered from roughly seven minutes on the internet.
(London, you will note, has not been able to build a new underground railway line without naming it after the royals in nearly a century.)
I’m bored now so I’m going to stop. I don’t know how many schools there are named after dead members of the royal family, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess “quite a lot”. There are probably a few named after non-dead members of the royal family, too, but I’m guessing.
I assume the reason for all this is that the royal family are seen as neutral national symbols. Only a tiny share of Britons consider themselves republicans, and the career of Donald Trump is a reminder that elected heads of state are not always all they’re cracked up to be. For all its obvious theoretical flaws, in practice constitutional monarchy seems to work, so there really seems little reason to change it.
But the royal family are not neutral: they represent a particular political and social model, a class system based on hereditary privilege.
And even if they were neutral… My god, Britain – do we really have to be quite so crawling about all this? It’s making us look ridiculous.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and on Facebook as JonnElledgeWrites.
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