As the Queen’s coffin proceeded solemnly up the Royal Mile to St Giles’ Cathedral from Holyroodhouse on Monday amid packed crowds, I texted a colleague out on the sunlit streets of Edinburgh. These were extraordinary scenes, we both agreed, but would they have lasting consequences in and for Scotland? My friend’s reply was quick and emphatic. “I’ve got no doubt about it. All this unity!”
Thousands are gathering this week to mark the death of the Queen, not just in Scotland. The crowds will grow even larger as Monday’s state funeral draws nearer. The need to be part of the shared story, and to attempt to process the personal loss, is strong and widespread. In spite of the occasional protest, which it is crass to penalise, we are living through an immense collective event. It is silly to deny it – but equally vital not to misinterpret it.
Even before the Queen’s death, there was little dispute that she, and the monarchy itself, were generally unifying forces in most of modern Britain. That feeling was not undivided – a quarter of Britons and a third of Scots told polling organisations last year that they would like to become a republic after the Queen died. This week’s upsurge of public feeling for the Queen, so visible in Scotland and now in England, will probably have tamped down that republican support for a while, but there is a significant dissenting minority.
The evident goodwill towards King Charles’s generally adept and graceful assumption of his new role will have helped too. At the end of a gruelling week in which the King has made moving and well-received visits to all four parts of the UK – he was in Northern Ireland on Tuesday and will be in Wales on Friday – the new monarch’s wish to act as a unifying force is every bit as strong as his mother’s.
But to be a unifying force does not by itself result in unity. The country must also want to be unified. This aspect is less certain. The events of the past week have undoubtedly strengthened both the monarchy and the union. Yet the goodwill of today may not endure so strongly. In any case, the monarchy is no more capable on its own of securing the longer term unity of the country than were the feelgood successes of Team GB at the London Olympics. Something more widespread is required. And it is an open question whether modern Britain wishes or is able to sustain that.
It is one of the curiosities of this moment that, by dying at Balmoral, the Queen thrust Scotland into the spotlight at the centre of the national stage in a manner that would never have occurred had she died in London or at Windsor. If she had died in southern England, the media coverage would have been more remorselessly metrocentric, and the diverse texture of the Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh dimensions of the succession far less salient.
Instead, the event and the coverage have been more truly, but perhaps only briefly, national. An accident of geography gave us the hearse’s poignant passage from Deeside through the glorious Angus countryside, its progress back and forth through Edinburgh’s magnificent Old Town and the more intimate service at St Giles’. For anyone living in England, the last few days have provided a crash course in Scotland and its institutions, of which most English people know nothing, and an all-too-rare chance to see Britain as a more complicated, three-dimensional country than generally occurs under London’s cultural dominance.
All this, though, will cut little ice with the country’s real political rulers. Far too many British politicians care nothing and know little about this three-dimensional Britain. They don’t go there if they do not have to. Too often, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are out of sight and out of mind. Whether they intended it or not, too many politicians have imbibed the devolve-and-forget approach to the other nations. As a result, they have presided over a growing apart not a coming together.
The Scottish writer Gerry Hassan drily observed this week that it was unlikely that the crowds on the streets were “actively celebrating their subjecthood” under Britain’s constitutional monarchy. They were, he argued, giving voice to something more subtle. “They may show deference and faith,” Hassan wrote, but they also want “to believe in good authority and leadership”. The prize-winning author and rapper Darren McGarvey, no apologist for the monarchy, said something similar, tweeting that the scenes in Edinburgh “provide meaning and solace and a sense of connection and unity”.
Both past and current Conservative governments seem incapable of seeing this. Boris Johnson inevitably bears a particular responsibility. His indifference to Scotland, and even to his own party there, has fed nationalists with a perfect cover for their own failings. His treatment of Wales – no visit to the Welsh government in Cardiff after the first month of his prime ministership – was cavalier and insulting. His destructive opportunism in Northern Ireland has made everything there more difficult, not less.
Liz Truss claims to be a child of the union, largely on the basis of having spent part of her life in Paisley. But her lazy and partisan campaign comments about Scotland, Wales and, in particular, Northern Ireland tell their own story. Truss has been present with King Charles on all of his visits around the UK this week. But if she thinks she is witnessing a spontaneous outburst of revived unionism in the collective national respect towards the Queen on our streets, she is deceiving herself – and us.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
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• This article was amended on 16 September 2022. The hearse’s route took it through Angus, but not down the Angus coast as an earlier version said.
