Marina Hyde highlights the unpredictability of mass grief and how those at the centre of power can be unnerved by spontaneous public emotions (Britain could plan for the Queen’s death – but not for the risky tides of public feeling, 9 September). This observation is fair enough in so far as it goes. But we need to look into the nature of the events that inspire such emotions, rather than at the emotions themselves.
The Queen’s death marks a transition between two stable states: that of her own long reign and that of the reign of her son, Charles, that has now begun. Events over the past few days are designed to create stability in an otherwise unstable liminal phase that will last until King Charles’s coronation. The rituals that we have been witnessing are designed to avoid the potential disruption that all such rites of passage make possible (hence the repetition of words such as tradition and history).
The royal family is acutely aware of the potential threat to its hitherto accepted right to reign over the UK and various Commonwealth countries. Like all liminal personae, its members behave in a passive or humble manner, obeying their unseen instructors’ commands. They must be seen to be doing the right thing.
It is in such moments that “communitas” (Hyde’s “mass anything”) is often born – witness one woman giving the new king a kiss in front of Buckingham Palace. But communitas can also emerge as an opposing force (the response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, for example). This is what those in power are afraid of and do their utmost to prevent.
Prof Brian Moeran
Moretonhampstead, Devon
• Marina Hyde is wrong to say that “politicians and many of our institutions are most frightened of the public having emotions”. Has she never been to a party conference or heard a stump speech? At its worst, politics is the pushing of different emotional buttons, found in slogans such as “take back control” and “global Britain”, referencing our (glorious) imperial past. Slogans work because they carry an emotional punch.
When exchanging them becomes all that there is, without the backing of policies and real content, then it’s no wonder, as she writes, that 61% of 18- to 34-year-olds consider parliamentary elections to be a bother. The feelings most people are experiencing over the death of a widely respected 96-year-old lady who died peacefully in her favourite place are natural – linked, as all mourning is, to our own mortality.
Harold Mozley
York
• The outburst of mourning after the Queen’s death is precisely the kind of emotion that those in authority would prefer: distracted and entirely passive. The emotion of protest challenges the power of the ruling class. It is an emotion that must be stifled, as the recent police and crime bill showed. The focus on mourning keeps the emotion focused in a way that precludes any challenge to authority.
Robert Beavis
Bristol
• I normally laugh aloud at Marina Hyde’s writing, but her column left me with genuine fear. If the poll she quotes is remotely accurate, and around two-thirds of young people of voting age believe that we need a strong leader unfettered by parliament, then democracy in the UK is certainly in for a hard time. Another unwelcome legacy of the past three years.
Alan Whitehouse
Barnsley, South Yorkshire
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