No Kings

‘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.