Marriage of novelty with nostalgia

The British royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton was a festival of exclusion which denied the reality that exists behind the image of impeccable decor.

Jeremy Seabrook

EXACTLY 30 years after the disastrous fairytale wedding of Charles and Diana, it was the turn of their son to rewrite the recent matrimonial history of the House of Windsor. This was accomplished by doing everything imaginable to erase the ghosts of 1981. It was as different from that alliance as could be imagined: a love-match, an anomaly in perpetuating royal dynasties. The couple knew each other intimately, and had spent much time together since they met at St Andrew's University almost a decade earlier. Kate Middleton is a 'commoner', although her family figure among the top few percent in Britain in terms of both income and education. Even the dress - object of such effusions - eschewed the grandiosely corseted confection that had constricted Diana in 1981; indeed, the wedding-gown itself was a symbol of the made-over monarchy. The bride is a very different personality from the unstable and unhappy Princess of Wales. The rules of the game - marry for dynastic purposes but make love separately - were suspended between the couple, whose 'normality' and 'ordinariness' have been stressed.

Apart from that, it seems that everything else was in duly regal order. The glittering processions, the colour, the choreographed ceremonial, the high fashion, the apotheosis of the fusion between royalty and celebrity, the eager crowds camping out for days on the hard stone pavements, the idiosyncratic dress and patriotic fervour of people waving the union flag and singing ancient imperial ditties, 'Rule Britannia' and 'Land of Hope and Glory', to keep themselves warm in the chill April night. A floodlit Buckingham Palace, trees transplanted into Westminster Abbey in readiness for a record TV audience across the world, showed Britain at its polished best, with commentators gushing over the Scottish state coach, the restored Edwardian landau, the 1950 Bentley and Rolls so shiny the trees of the Mall were reflected in its scoured veneer. A flawless performance of a country in which, it appears, there is neither dissent nor poverty. A day of national rejoicing, in which we are supposed to identify ourselves, renew our vows to an altered monarchy and relearn once more who we are.

'Big society'?

But there are at least three elements that deserve closer scrutiny. First of all, efforts to reinstitute erstwhile popular activities such as the street party, of which some five and a half thousand apparently took place up and down Britain, including one in Downing Street, with its invited celebrities behind the black iron railings, eating what looked like retro nourishment of jelly and cupcakes. This is of a piece with Prime Minister David Cameron's determination to create the 'big society': a reassertion of the power of community, which is to take over from a retreating state. No matter that this is in defiance of reality; since community has been fragmented and broken into pieces by the florid individualism of the past 50 years. It might also be noted that Cameron's dedication to the benign hypertrophy of Society stands in stark contrast to the efforts of his inspiration, Margaret Thatcher, who famously announced that there was 'no such thing as society'.

These were the nuptials of nostalgia with modernity. A fly-past by Lancaster bombers from World War Two also reminded us of the togetherness of Britain during the Blitz - an unfailing reaffirmation of our finest moment: that an event from almost three-quarters of a century ago has to be constantly replayed says a great deal about the destiny of Britain in the intervening years. The event also celebrated a militaristic present: not only were the uniforms of the officer class ubiquitous, but jets also screamed over the Palace as a reminder of the work of Britain, recent or current, in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, as an ancillary agent in the bringing of order to outposts of the new imperium of global capital.

The second noteworthy quality of the day was the distinct triumphalism of the traditional ruling castes. Absorbing one commoner is as much social mobility as we are going to get in this generation. To remind us that this was simply a daring experiment, everything else spoke of continuity, irreproachable propriety, the reactionary reflex of a royalty whose foreign representatives constituted a sadly depleted phalanx in the Abbey. Much was made of the omission from the guest-list of the two most recent Prime Ministers of Britain, Labour's Blair and Brown. The sparkling assembly seemed to declare with a single voice that the levelling doctrines of socialism had finally received their quietus. Labour, it appears, ingested by the Establishment, has been chewed up and spat out again, notwithstanding the wan presence of Ed Miliband. It was almost as though Labour had never existed: Kate Middleton is a symbol of the only form of progress now on offer - the personal ascent of the individual high-achiever.

That Tony Blair was absent also shows the remarkably selective memory of the Windsors. After all, a mere 14 years ago, after the death of Diana, he had been instrumental in reconciling a dangerously disaffected public to the aloof and unforgiving monarchy. He did much to save them from themselves, and appeared to have softened the stony heart of power, when the Queen returned to London to be close to her subjects in an unprecedented outpouring of public grief.

Tony Blair's even greater service to the preservation of the social edifice of Britain, of which the monarchy is the peak, went equally uncelebrated. For it was his purpose to demonstrate that Labour poses no threat to the existing order. Instead of gratitude for this priceless gift, the royals behaved with the same punitive hauteur with which they reduce to invisibility everyone of whom they do not approve. The historic mission of labour has been accomplished, and it can sink back into the forgotten turbulence of the industrial revolution whence it sprang; landscaped now, grassed over, planted with saplings and ornamental shrubs; the 'satanic mills' to which the congregation referred as they sang 'Jerusalem' have been safely sanitised or exported to the slums of Asia and Africa.

The third aspect of these celebrations was the virtually monochrome nature of the people, not only in the Abbey but also on the streets. BBC cameras sought out, with some anxiety, and in a traditional reversion to cliche, the happy smile of non-white faces on the Mall and elsewhere; a mock Hindu wedding was held in Southall, where members of the Middleton family once lived. Ritual obeisance was made to the 'commonwealth family', but if the spectacle was for global diffusion, the political message was strictly for home consumption.

Amid the spectacle and majesty, it seemed that a redundant imperial pomp had been forced back upon itself, too extravagant to be contained within the narrow confines of these islands; clearly the ceremonial had been designed for wider horizons than those of Britain; and the projected 2-billion-strong TV audience served as surrogate for the once-captive millions of empire. The 8,000 journalists, 'the eyes of the world on London', reassured us that we are unrivalled in presentation, if not in power, the burnished image and the precision engineering of Victorian pantomime.

The TV channels, uncritical, fawning, sycophantic, gave the impression that this all captures the essence of Britain. It is a Britain of fantasy, in which the impoverished and the disaffected, the downtrodden and the despairing, the unemployed youth, the student protester, the disemployed public service worker, the marginalised and the spurned seeker of refuge, have no place.

This royal wedding was not just a love story, as TV presenters declared it to be. Nor was it 'a private family occasion.' It was difficult not to feel sympathy for the nervous gaucherie of the groom, the fate of whose mother cannot have been far from his thoughts, and the poised charm of his bride. This ought to have transcended the mummery. But it was impossible to ignore that this was a festival of exclusion, a denial of all the other versions of Britain that exist behind the impeccable d‚cor.

Perhaps the assertiveness of the restoration of government by millionaires and boys from Eton is a little premature. The 'austerity' they propose to the people has not yet really begun to take effect. The relegated and unruly, the uninvited and disregarded have barely realised what is going to hit them in the coming years. When they do, they may prove to be, not the meekly dispensable minority of this fictional world of inturned imperial supremacy, but a force to be reckoned with in a country which proclaims the imperishability of its traditions all the more vociferously as it is bypassed and overtaken by the urgencies of an impatient and restless 'real world', which it evokes constantly but from the asperities of which it believes itself exempt.                                      

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 249, May 2011, pp 40-41