King Charles coronation: Gilded silliness will only divide us further

Where will you be on Saturday? I’m going to be in the best of all possible places: Ullapool, where the unrearranged annual book festival will be in full swing.

“We would like to assure everyone that the festival will take place as planned,” the organisers posted online last year, after the coronation date was announced. “The writers are booked and our programme is set in place,” they continued, describing the festival as “a unique event not available on iPlayer or repeat”. Ouch.

This decision will chime, one senses, with the majority of Scots. A highlight of the reopening of the Scottish parliament in 1999 was folk singer Sheena Wellington’s stirring a cappella rendition of Robert Burns’s egalitarian anthem, Is There for Honest Poverty. It seemed to capture who we are. Shrugging indifference in Scotland to Saturday’s tinsel show underscores that egalitarian streak.

A recent YouGov poll found that almost three-quarters of Scots don’t care about the coronation of Charles III and his consort. Less than half want the monarchy to continue. Among younger age groups, that figure plummets to 20%.

Even across the wider UK, younger people feel kind of “meh” about the royal family. Only 31% of 18 to 24 year olds believe the institution should persist.

How could it be otherwise? In the digital age, we know far too much about these people to be fooled into thinking that they’re special. And, if they’re not special, what’s the point?

Over 200 years ago, the bard understood the essential truth of all aristocratic titles when he wrote that the rank is but the guinea’s stamp. We can hardly miss it now.

The truth is that the British monarchy is an opaque and undemocratic institution with too much hidden power. It really makes no sense to draw our head of state from one family that has sidestepped equalities legislation and paid off a victim of sexual grooming. And, yet, the pretence continues.

We need radical reform and renewal

Our state broadcaster, the BBC, bombards us with bizarre details about sceptres, orbs, blunt swords, special oil from Jerusalem and gold carriages with electric windows. If it weren’t costing so much – to make the £100 million figure less abstract, think of it as 5,000 junior nurses in England – it might be comedic.

Then again, maybe not. It’s easy to think that it doesn’t matter, but it kind of does. The idea that the coronation will bring people together and showcase the UK on the world stage is not just delusional, it’s dangerous, for it obscures reality.

This cannot be fixed by allowing an elderly couple, forged from adultery, to commandeer the dressing-up box

Glinting diamonds and clippety-clopping horses will be the order of the day in London on Saturday but, somewhere in the loft, is a hideous portrait of today’s UK that we’re not facing. Our public services are crumbling. Our economy is staggering from the self-inflicted wound of Brexit. We are divided among ourselves. Income inequality is higher than it was in the 1960s and 1970s.

This cannot be fixed by allowing an elderly couple, forged from adultery, to commandeer the dressing-up box. We need radical reform and renewal, not a self-indulgent soak in the warm waters of imperialism lite.

We must face that image in the attic and recognise who we are: a failing, mid-sized European country in desperate need of some common cause.

May this coronation be the last

Amidst the gilded silliness, it has fallen to Sinn Féin’s vice president and Northern Ireland’s first minister elect, Michelle O’Neill, to be the adult in the room. An Irish republican, she will attend the coronation because she is committed to being a first minister for all.

If only the UK establishment would extend a similar courtesy to British republicans. Instead, it acts like we don’t exist, and exhorts us to pledge allegiance to a frankly not very impressive man in front of the telly. Like, no.