As Britain changes, the Royal family changes, too
In today’s relaxed society, Harry and Meghan’s interracial relationship is not an exotic rarity, it is just the new normal, says Sunder Katwala
Many people will always have a soft spot for Prince Harry. Who will forget that heartrending image of the 12-year-old boy walking alongside his older brother behind his mother’s coffin? “No child should be asked to do that,” he was to say many years later. It is hardly surprising that the public found it easy to forgive indiscreet high jinks in Las Vegas, as well as being glad that Harry seemed to find a purpose in the Army. There is a long tradition of Royals who have been blocked from marrying who they want to, but Harry’s happiness at not joining them, instead getting to marry who he chooses, will be widely shared.
In falling in love with Meghan Markle, an American, a divorcee, and a television actress of mixed ethnic heritage, Harry may have crossed several red lines that might have prevailed among the courtiers in the Thirties, the Seventies or even the Nineties. But British society has changed, which explains why the Royal family is changing with it.
Prince Harry’s lifetime has seen a rapid transformation in attitudes towards mixed-race relationships in Britain. When he was born in 1984, more than half of the public expressed discomfort with mixed-race relationships, according to British Social Attitudes data. As late as 1993, 44 per cent thought they would be worried if their child was to marry across ethnic lines.
Yet that anxiety has collapsed in a generation, with only 15per cent expressing such discomfort by 2013, falling to just 5per cent among under-25s.
For the Harry and Meghan generation, interracial relationships are no longer an exotic rarity but the new normal. In today’s Britain, one tenth of relationships cross ethnic lines and a tenth of children are growing up with parents of different ethnicities.
The mixed-race population doubled in the 2011 census to over one million, though research suggests that twice as many people have ethnically mixed parentage. If Harry and Meghan have children, they would probably find themselves part of the ever-increasing number of Britons who struggle to decide which census “ethnicity” boxes to tick. That welcome example of the lived reality of integration will put pressure on the way we talk about race and categorise it, too. This royal engagement won’t transform social attitudes towards race in Britain – not least because it does not really need to do that. What the monarchy can do is to play a role in helping to ratify some of the social changes that have already happened.
It would be absurd to think a royal engagement could do any of the policy heavy-lifting to address the scale of racial inequalities captured by the government’s race disparity audit last month. Yet one reason that we retain our constitutional monarchy is because symbolism plays an important social role, too.
There has been plenty of black in the Union Jack over the last couple of decades, to which our sporting teams, literature and music bear testimony. It has been suggested that those changes reaching all the way up to the Royal family would be
The long history of the British monarchy is one of immigration and integration
too hard for a public “obsessed with purity” to stomach.
“To bring non-white blood into the Royal family is seen as the ultimate scandal,” historian Kate Williams wrote in an Observer feature last autumn.
That scandal seemed very well disguised indeed on the newspaper front-pages celebrating the engagement yesterday morning. It is certainly possible to find vile racist comments about Meghan Markle by scraping the bottom of online comments sections – but we should never take the toxic digital fringe as a proxy for what Britain really thinks.
Nor is there much need for the Harry and Meghan wedding to transform ethnic minority views of the monarchy – where it is already popular. The journalist Yasmin Alibhai-brown doubtless exaggerates a little when she writes: “I am the only black or Asian republican I have ever met.” But British republicanism is a strikingly white affair in part because the monarchy is central to the Commonwealth story of Empire and decolonisation, which underpins the strong ethnic minority sense of being British.
Has not the long story of the British monarchy itself been that of a thousand years of both immigration and integration – recasting its Norman, Dutch and German origins into the sturdy English oak of the Windsors?
Seven decades after our current Queen married her dashing migrant prince, Britain will now greet its first mixed-race princess with a shrug of the shoulders and the usual festivities. A multi-ethnic Britain was bound to have a multi-ethnic monarchy eventually.
The royal wedding of 2018 will not just be a happy day for Harry and Meghan: it may be a day, too, to put out the bunting as we notice both how Britain has changed, and how our changing Britain is still Britain, all the same.
Sunder Katwala is director of the identity and integration think tank, British Future