Owen Polley: The Queen’s jubilee is a reminder of the durability of the UK

The platinum jubilee was unique, because even Queen Victoria, who was previously our longest reigning monarch, reached only her diamond jubilee (marked after 60 years on the throne).

The celebrations were uplifting, but these events always involve a degree of soul-searching too. We take the opportunity to ask ourselves whether the UK is in a healthy state and compare it to the nation that witnessed previous landmark occasions.

As always, many people are eager to imply that the country is on the brink of disaster or disintegration.

That’s not to say that there aren’t genuine problems in the UK in 2022. Inflation and the rising cost of living threaten to create a new era of poverty and economic depression. We are only beginning to understand the long-term after-effects of lockdown and the Covid pandemic.

And the kingdom is starkly divided politically, with people’s attitude to the Brexit referendum still playing an important role in how they see themselves and others. In Northern Ireland, we’re particularly aware of how the Northern Ireland Protocol has undermined the Union and raised questions about the UK’s long-term future.

In contrast, the Queen’s diamond jubilee was celebrated in 2012 and many commentators now portray that year as a high point for modern Britain.

The London Olympics took place later that summer, mixing celebrations of genuine sporting and cultural achievement with a liberal worldview, captured best at the opening ceremony, that effectively portrayed the UK as an extension of the national health service with some symbols of state attached.

In retrospect, everything seemed rosy, but there were the usual arguments and divisions back in 2012. The UK was recovering from the great recession of 2007 and the Conservative Party’s attempts to control the national debt were attacked as ‘Tory austerity’ by its opponents.

The government was already in the process of negotiating the details of a referendum on Scottish independence with Alex Salmond. It would eventually win this vote in 2014, but separatism in Scotland was established as one of the defining political issues of the day.

And the BBC’s coverage of the jubilee attracted a huge number of complaints from viewers, who felt its attitude was disrespectful to the monarchy. One of the corporation’s most celebrated presenters, Michael Buerk, accused his employer of ‘mocking’ the royal family. The BBC, he wrote, had “shamefully lost its way”.

Before that, the Queen’s golden jubilee in 2002 was a successful event, but again some commentators used the occasion to imply that monarchy was on its way out. These were the years of New Labour, and its success went along with a mood that questioned whether the country’s most enduring institutions should be revamped or removed entirely.

As a consequence, after Princess Diana’s death in 1997, the royal family suffered a spell of relative unpopularity. In contrast to the ‘people’s princess’, some people felt that the monarchy had become too stuffy and old-fashioned for the modern era.

The 2002 jubilee celebrations, which saw the Queen and other royals attend pop music concerts and other festivities, dispelled this gloomy mood. In the Guardian and other left-wing newspapers, columnists predicted widespread indifference from a population that no longer cared about the monarchy, but instead there was huge public enthusiasm and mass participation.

The point is that jubilee celebrations will always be used to attack the royal family and other historic British institutions, but that does not mean they will not last.

I wasn’t quite one year old in 1977, when the Queen marked the 25th anniversary of her accession to the throne, but I gather it too was met with gloom in some quarters.

After years of strikes and decline, the British economy was about to experience the ‘Winter of Discontent’. The punk band, the Sex Pistols, marked the royal family’s big occasion by singing “God save the Queen, she ain’t no human being,” and that lyric took them to number 2 in the official singles chart.

During all these previous celebrations, just as in 2022, jubilees were used to voice political disaffection and even republicanism, as well as enthusiasm for the monarchy and pride in our country.

These were big national moments that inevitably caused us to think about some of the UK’s problems, as well as the strengths that made it one of the most successful and long-lived political unions in the world.

On this side of the water, the jubilee weekend follows another major public event, when people finally got to mark the centenary of the formation of Northern Ireland.

It’s a good moment to celebrate the fact that, while there are always difficulties and uncertainties, the UK and its great institutions are resilient and can endure many decades or even centuries into the future.