The Monarchy and civic identity

My latest for 1Peter5. It begins:

In 2023 Angelico Press published A Defence of Monarchy: Catholics under a Protestant King, in which I and my co-contributors defended the British monarchy and the principle of monarchy in general. We did this in reaction to the attacks on both occasioned by the death of Queen Elizabeth II, in which even some of our fellow Traditional Catholics took part. We didn’t imagine the book would settle the argument, but we hoped, and we still hope, that it would help to clarify the issues.

Today, the focus of attention has moved on. Great Britain, like many countries in western Europe, is experiencing an escalating crisis of identity. One cause of this is the twenty years of large-scale immigration we have experienced. The other is the attitude of the mainstream political class, who suffer from the characteristic self-hatred of Liberal Western elites. To the growing number of people who are concerned that British culture and identity are under threat, the current governing class seems to be saying: if it is, that would be a good thing. As I write, British social media is gripped by the question of whether there is such a thing as the English or British race: whether, in fact, only those members of our multi-ethnic community who can trace their origins outside the island of Great Britain are entitled to an ethnic identity of any kind.

Where this ends, I do not know. What I do know, is what we need to hold on to if we are to avoid descending into civil strife, and what we would need to escape from that strife, should it start. A political community can only function if its members feel they have important things in common with each other. In fact, it would be better to say that a collection of people can only constitute a political community if they have important things in common with each other. A functional state is one in which, when one set of people are asked to make a sacrifice to benefit another set of people within the state, they have enough fellow-feeling to consider the pros and cons seriously. Without this it is politically impossible to build a motorway or a reservoir or a power station over the houses of people in one place to benefit people in another place; to tax the rich to help the poor; or to recruit strong young men to protect the old and the weak, not just of their own sub-group, but of the other people living in the country.

Read the whole thing there.

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