Jubileave 'em to it

My feelings for this weekend's festivities are mixed, to say the least. I'm not, and never have been, remotely interested in what the royal family are up to. I am, though, very happy to take a couple of days off work. If I'm being less flippant, though, there is a serious question as to the monarchy's place in our culture these days behind all the bunting and flag waving.

I do not, of course, feel particularly comfortable with the idea of a family who, through simple accident of birth, enjoy wealth (or at least the trappings of wealth), privilege and the apparent servility of millions, none of which they've earned. It's an anachronism which in pretty much any other walk of life would have gone a long time ago. But I'm not a radical republican, ready to abolish the monarchy and all that goes with it.

There's a strong argument that many of the tourists to London in particular come to see the Royal palaces, the changing of the guard etc. And what would happen to Windsor's economy if the monarchy went south, for example? Or the area around Balmoral? Whether they're a net benefit financially is very difficult to tell, but they're certainly much less of a drain than some people seem to think.

More importantly, though, for me, is that we would not throw any of the other British constants, the things that help make us what we are as a culture, so readily. It's a source of great pride to me that British people are regarded as tolerant, open-minded, modernist, living in a genuinely multi-cultural society. I believe that the maturity in a society necessary to develop such tendencies comes, in part, from the things that don't change giving us a background of stability. An old Parliament with a long-standing democratic process. A long tradition of immigration and the assimilation of those immigrants into the British way of life. And the monarchy.

This is one of the things that make us what we are. Just as people come from all over the country to stand in the rain for eight hours, waving a tiny flag at a Queen who nips by in a few moments on a boat hundreds of feet away, so are we free to ignore it completely if we so choose. Ditch the thing, and those of us who ignore it will barely notice, but all those poor sods to whom it does still mean something will miss it. We will all, though, have lost a small something of ourselves.