No Kings
Neal Ascherson
‘If George comes to Chicago,’ the mayor said, ‘I’ll bust him in the snoot!’ The ‘George’ was King George V. The mayor in 1927 was Big Bill Thompson, who ran the city in cahoots with Al Capone. He was politically smart as well as corrupt and physically massive, and he knew how well the line would go down with the city’s working class, especially its Irish-Americans. Most Americans then still fancied they had opened the way to their shining independence by punching King George III in the snoot. Many still do. ‘No Kings,’ said the anti-Trump placards carried by five or six million Americans in more than 2500 towns and cities during protests in June and October this year. Those two words go straight to America’s innermost myth, bypassing worthy appeals to the rule of law or human rights. ‘No Kings’: no unbridled executive power, no immunity to law, no entitlement by wealth or birth, no servile court of flatterers. But here comes a homegrown George III, with an orange snoot and a golf club for a sceptre.
‘No Kings’ is a public memory, the accessible myth of an achievement. Eric Hobsbawm used to define a special category among nations, those whose peoples had risen to overthrow a hated order and who remembered doing so. They had inherited the power to say to their rulers and to themselves: ‘We did it once. So beware – we can do it again.’ Two examples of this surly self-confidence, this myth of sovereign rebellion, come to mind. One is No Kings America, the republic that never learned European docility. The second is France. The legends of 1789, of the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 are dimmed but still alive. It’s the ultimate popular sanction: violent revolution, ‘descendre dans la rue’, to take to the streets and raise the barricades. It remains an option, as French political leaders are uneasily aware.
But there is a third nation with a ghostly presence in this company. Europe’s first modern revolution broke out in England in 1640: a king was beheaded, there was a surge towards social equality and challenges to the sanctity of rank, privilege and property. Nobody would dream of invoking that revolution as a living tradition today (a handful of left-wing historians in the 1960s were the last to do so). Civil war and Cromwell’s dictatorship broke its force. The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 obliterated its traces. Here’s a snide way of summarising modern British history: a 400-year campaign by the propertied classes to make the English forget about the 1640s. A highly successful campaign that counts the invention of a supranational ‘Britishness’ and a post-imperial ‘Yookay’ among its victories.
England doesn’t know how to say: ‘No Kings.’ Instead, it says: ‘Not this one, but perhaps his brother or his son.’ All Windsor crises, from the Abdication through Diana to this Andrew disaster, have been about personal morality – ironically revealing how much faith remains in the monarch as an ethical role model. But it isn’t the monarchs who are the British problem. It’s monarchism: the archaic top-down power structure of the Anglo-British state. In 1689, absolutism was stripped from the crown and transferred to Parliament, which today means the cabinet. The principle of parliamentary sovereignty is monarchism thinly disguised: government by supreme authority, with certain liberties allowed to trickle downwards.
Constitutionally, England has vanished. But it still has a flag. And there are moments, beyond sport, when English people forget the Union Jack and raise that English banner, the red-on-white cross of St George which flew at Agincourt and Blenheim. It’s a flag that makes British governments twitchy. They know it appears when there is real anger and grief, when there’s an overflowing sense that ‘those in charge’ have lost touch with the deep feelings of the people. This year, St George’s crosses dominated the early, often spontaneous demonstrations against immigrants and asylum seekers.
I found myself remembering ‘Diana Week’ in 1997, those immense mourning crowds camping around the palaces. All over England, families had sent a member down to London, bearing flowers, stuffed toys, handwritten poems and – everywhere – the flag of St George. It was an ocean of red and white. Walking through the parks I occasionally spotted a Union Jack, only to find a tearful Australian or Canadian visitor sitting underneath it on the grass. There was anger at me with my notebook: ‘You bloody journalists, you killed her!’ But unprecedented anger, too, at the royals, at the bare flagstaff on Buckingham Palace, at the queen herself staying away at far Balmoral. ‘They don’t have any feelings!’ I heard. ‘She was our princess but look how they treated her.’ And I began to understand something unspoken but obvious. The Union Jack was Trafalgar, D-Day, coronation ribbons, British Airways. It was loyalty: the flag of the state. But the St George’s cross was England’s flag of the heart.
Hardly a commentator who saw the flags, in 1997 or in 2025, asked if they had anything to do with English nationalism. That remains an almost taboo subject. The left hangs onto the useless old syllogism: nationalism equals racism equals fascism equals war. The right usually dismisses English nationalism as lower-class football hooliganism, threatening extensive damage to property. But there’s a frustrated identity here, soured by being so long ignored. The English are not significantly more xenophobic than other Northern European societies; in the 19th century, all classes seemed to feel proudly ‘English’ as they welcomed streams of foreign refugees and revolutionaries fleeing repression. But today the fear of ‘uncontrolled immigration’ has somehow become heartfelt, a wrong target for real rage flowing from a sense of abandonment, falling living standards, impotence under a professionalised political class that doesn’t listen.
‘The English, the English, the English are best,/I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.’ In 1963, Flanders and Swann could still count on a self-confidence that allowed the English to laugh at themselves and their own complacency. Not today. Especially since devolution for Wales and Scotland in 1999, England has become an unrecognised nation. What sort of partnership, what sort of union is it when one partner out of four holds 85 per cent of the population and almost all the wealth – but is gagged? Ultimately, the Scots and the Welsh can look after themselves. But how can England be liberated? How can its national feelings be saved from an increasingly reckless populism, in which liberal Brits react to the St George’s flag as if it carried a swastika?
England, like Scotland, missed out on the 19th-century European revolutions in which middle-class leaders tamed nationalist fury into struggles for democratic reform in independent republics. One rescue strategy would be to break up the UK into a confederation of independent states, forcing England to confront itself as a nation. That break-up would at least clear the way to a truly improbable upheaval: England turning monarchism inside out and introducing republican institutions based on popular sovereignty. The crown? Stripped of power and privilege, it scarcely matters. In these islands, it’s assumed that if you kick out a king, what you have left is a republic. But a real republic, under the supreme law of a constitution and the subsidiarity principle – the people’s power leased upwards by communities – takes some building. Grand visions. Time may be short. Demagogues and fanatics are rousing a stunted English nationalism to carry them into power, a government of stupid resentments and patriotic authoritarianism. This time, it isn’t the king whose snoot is asking for treatment.
Comments
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3 December 2025
at
8:04pm
Michael Sturza
says:
"Nobody would dream of invoking that revolution as a living tradition today (a handful of left-wing historians in the 1960s were the last to do so). " It may seem anachronistic, given the decaying societies we currently live in, but there remains value for leftists in understanding the revolutionary origins of capitalism and democratic rights. May I modestly suggest my book "The London Revolution 1640-1643," which seeks to rescue this perspective?
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3 December 2025
at
10:30pm
David Swift
says:
Loved this, and it's wonderful to see this in the LRB.
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3 December 2025
at
10:32pm
Anthony Lorenzo
says:
The people of this country want, and will never rid themselves of, monarchy.
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4 December 2025
at
6:03am
haroldsdodge
says:
I'd be curious to know what evidence supports the article's suggestion of a link between Englishness and republicanism - surely it's the opposite? - but wow, Ascherson can still write. If my sums are correct he's now into his 90s but his prose is as dazzling as ever.
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4 December 2025
at
11:08am
Robin Kinross
says:
@
haroldsdodge
Britishness = the Windsor-type monarchy (Balmoral / the Principality / Sandringham, Windsor, etc) + [after 1688] royal powers donated to parliament (in effect no. 10).
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4 December 2025
at
9:12am
Donald Preddle
says:
I would just like to echo thanks to Neal Ascherson for this article and all his others in the LRB and elsewhere over the years. He is right - we ought not let St George be kidnapped by a crowd of anti-immigrant hysterics.
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4 December 2025
at
11:35am
R Rice
says:
"in the 19th century, all classes seemed to feel proudly ‘English’ as they welcomed streams of foreign refugees and revolutionaries fleeing repression."
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4 December 2025
at
2:19pm
Richard L
says:
I'm never quite sure whether I'm English or British - and I'm never quite sure whether I care. In the widest historical sense, and noting the relatively short period between the Norman conquest and Acts of Union, the idea of an independent England seems like a slightly ephemeral thing: a flag and some sports teams. Given the ongoing economic separation between North and South, and imagining a republican future where the United Kingdom is no more it isn't difficult to imagine a separation failing to stop at the four nations, and England disappearing altogether.
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4 December 2025
at
5:09pm
Andre Salgado - Ragan
says:
a very timely essay for untimely politics
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4 December 2025
at
8:19pm
David Campbell
says:
The idea of breaking the old bus up into its historic parts would put prosperity and security at risk.. Either make the UK work as a parliamentary democracy or, if you want something a little more interesting, keep it going as a constitutional monarchy . Challenge the rules by all means; but respect the advantages of having them
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5 December 2025
at
3:33am
sandra griffin
says:
Discontent, like the inchoate, loud blasts of a coming storm, we convince ourselves we've heard it all before
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5 December 2025
at
7:22pm
Dr Paul
says:
'... England has become an unrecognised nation. What sort of partnership, what sort of union is it when one partner out of four holds 85 per cent of the population and almost all the wealth – but is gagged?'
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5 December 2025
at
8:10pm
steve kay
says:
An excellent piece, but somewhat based in Englishland. Elsewhere there is no Union Jack, it has the universal title of the Butchers Apron. Except in the flute polishing parts of NI, of course.
Read moreM. Sturza
New York
Aside from our great literature, there is not much we can be proud of that isn't tainted by war, colonialism, slavery, Empire and conquest. The wealth is ill-gotten, the advances the result of those gains. There is not very much that is popular and easily understood that is pure enough to celebrate nakedly. In fact, hard stare at our past 'glory' and contemplation of our tawdry present elicits shame and embarrassment. We were the most powerful nation on earth and look at us now.
So we cling to WW2, and the false narrative that we 'stood alone' and defeated Nazism. And we cling to the royal family because they are living reminders of a glorious and powerful past that is long gone, but which we desperately need to evoke continuously, for collective self-esteem.
Why don't we mind about the palaces and their expensive renovations we pay for? Why are we so vociferously against the return of the stolen crown jewels to their nations? Why do we admire the tacky pomp and ceremony? Because the trappings of monarchy serve as the sole reminders in the modern age of the power we once had.
The queen was a living relic who connected us to the war through propaganda and simple age. It is why Charles is completely ineffectual as a king; he doesn't possess enough linkage to the past, to a bygone era of might, success and glory. The stoic queen, who said nothing, enabled us to project whatever we wanted onto her, that she may comfort us and remind us of our own grannys. She was the blank canvas we needed to paint our tattered egos on. Charles talks to too many trees, and has sexual fantasies that tether him firmly to earth, where his mother floated above. William has even less linkage to the past.
The longer it goes on, the further away from its function as a reminder of the glorious past it gets, the quicker the country will come to its senses and throw off the shackles of monarchy which infantilise us all. Worse, they embed a class hierarchy which damages the nation in a fundamental way. Born believing this hierarchy is natural and normal, convinced by the very coins we need to get by that some are simply better than others, we bow and scrape and woe betide anyone who criticises the royals because to do so is to batter our precious egos egos which entirely rely upon ancient false narratives about who we are.
This inability to mature is what will metastasize into a Reform government, with the masses bovinely waving the flag as they imagine that just round the corner, our fabled greatness is waiting for its glorious return.
What will the disappointment look like?
There would be something potentially very poetic about Charles III putting an end to it all, saving his heirs from the charade they are too embarrassed to actually want. The first King Charles was beheaded and lost the monarchy its absolutism. The second beckoned in and stabilised a form of (unsatisfactory) parliamentary democracy and saw artistic flourishing take form. The final and third Charles could complete this progressivism by forming a republic. Charles the Last, delivering to the nation it's chance to make itself, free of the constraints and lies of the past. How historically neat and tidy that would be.
Alas, no doubt it will drag on with William and possibly his son too. But surely it can't stretch beyond that? The people won't let it go- they psychologically cannot. So which royal will take up the responsibility?
Then Englishness = is a rebellion against that construction, a break-up of Britain, with a republican aspect.
As usual when reading Ascherson, I felt as if my own muddied thoughts had been clarified for me. Many thanks
We're ignoring the slavery, genocide, and forced displacement by the same English that created many other refugees in the centuries that preceded, coincided, and followed this period then? Ascherson sure has a very narrow conception of English history and Englishness.
That's the twist. Let's look at another example. Russia was the only republic in the Soviet Union not to have its own Communist Party, but Russia was definitely the core nation of the federation, the big cheese, as it were. It didn't need its own party, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was the de facto party for Russia as the two entities -- Russia and the Soviet Union -- were effectively synonymous; the other republics being powerless accessories. How many times did one hear people say 'Russia' when referring to the entire Soviet Union?
England is the big cheese in Britain. That Scotland has its parliament and Wales has its Assembly doesn't mean that England is 'unrecognised' or 'gagged'; it means that the parliament in Westminster is effectively both English and British: England doesn't need an exclusively English parliament as Westminster does the job.
Just as the CPSU could outvote all the national parties in the Soviet Union, the English MPs can outvote the Scottish and Welsh MPs, irrespective of what the latter might say or do in their Edinburgh and Cardiff bailiwicks.