Can the royals help to patch up our disunited kingdom?
It’s as if we are simply a vast cacophony of individual dissenting voices
Iknow the Royal family famously doesn’t “do” politics – but, if you listen to what they’ve been saying lately, they seem to be getting as close to it as they can. On a surprise visit to Northern Ireland this week, the Duke of Cambridge praised the local Olympic gold medallist Mary Peters as one of “the United Kingdom’s sporting legends”, before going on to observe that “she’s also inspired generation after generation to come together in times of trouble and work for the common good – a lesson I hope many of us can learn from”.
The reminder of the notion of “the common good” was not some throwaway line, but a direct plea to a Disunited Kingdom, a country whose political debate has currently descended into a cacophony of squabbling voices in Parliament and on Twitter. As seen from abroad, the UK is rather like a large family having a rip-roaring argument in a train carriage, forgetting that all the other passengers are watching in horrified disbelief.
William’s reminder was in line with similar statements recently made by the Queen, who is reported to have directed senior royals, where they can, to emphasise the national need for compromise and courtesy.
At a Women’s Institute meeting in January, the Queen herself sent out a similar message, reminding her audience of the “tried and tested recipes” for success, such as “speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture. These approaches are timeless, and I commend them to everyone.”
That advice is certainly wise. The practical difficulty that Britain presently has in taking it, however, exists on two fronts.
The first is ideological, with the semi-dormant EU question now poked into action like Godzilla arising from the sea, scattering people and stomping through political parties: we are, quite genuinely, a nation divided by opinion and belief. The second is cultural. With the growing power of social media over the political agenda, silence is rarely now an option for politicians or pundits. The 24-hour news cycle, played out on television and Twitter, perpetually calls for action and reaction, denunciations and reconciliations, gaffes and clarifications, and the means to join the fray are right at one’s fingertips. The widening and acceleration of our political debate has also contributed to its coarsening. There are no gatekeepers. At the dawn of the internet, we saw that as a liberation. Now – as abuse proliferates – that freedom is creating multiple traps of its own.
I was thinking about just how much Britain had changed, as a country, on a half-term visit with my children to Bletchley Park, where its codebreakers, sworn to secrecy, performed the difficult, vital work of unravelling encrypted enemy messages. As living memories of the Second World War start to fade, the communal “war effort” is apt to be either satirised or sentimentalised, but at Bletchley one could glimpse its reality: the essential nobility of a group of people working long hours in uncongenial shifts in chilly huts, six days a week, for no public credit and an unknowable outcome. They did so because of a sense of duty towards something much bigger than themselves, and their ultimate contribution to the common good was enormous.
Yet at Bletchley, too, one could also be reminded of the shadow-side of a powerful, united authority to which people automatically deferred: the heart-breaking story of Alan Turing, the genius of Hut 8, who – after official learnt of his homosexuality – was later prosecuted, publicly disgraced and compelled to have hormone treatment, which is thought to have resulted in him taking his own life in 1954, aged just 41.
We would not wish the shadow-side of that era back again, but we could certainly learn something from the best of it – and the Queen herself, at 92, will still remember the best of it very acutely.
It sometimes seems now, listening to Britain talk to itself, as if we are simply a vast cacophony of individual dissenting voices, but without any central values from which to dissent. The rise of identity politics has given everyone a framework from which to emphasise their point of difference, but not to reassert the numerous ways in which we are the same.
I wonder, though, if that is partly just an impression arising from the continuous babble of our new media – for beyond Westminster and the Twittersphere, there are innumerable people doing essential, exhausting, largely unsung work to keep Britain and our public services running. And even in the political sphere itself, there are still MPS who doggedly cling to courtesy, and make their own points without imputing the worst motives to their opponents.
British politics is at its most feverish and chaotic pitch in decades, with Leavers and Remainers alike impassioned by the sense that, as we lurch fast towards the worrying possibility of “no deal”, there is still everything to play for.
But the bulk of the public is yearning for compromise and coherence, for some form of workable deal that can be agreed between parties – even if it must also agree to resolve some of the more granular structural questions over time.
And in the aftermath of any Brexit outcome, there will need to be a new deal for the UK itself, with thoughtful policies – on housing, social care, employment and education – which can decisively address how we got to the point in which there were such profound gaps in our understanding of one another. That stubborn belief in “the common good” still thrives among so many in Britain.
It just needs to be held up, soon, somewhere we can all see it.