Kmflett's Blog

QMourning Queen Elizabeth II: Inventing traditions

The historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger wrote a book on the Invention of Tradition and the points it makes are continually relevant.

All traditions are invented at some point. Many are flexible and often re-invented.

The Christian Church has been especially good at this, taking over traditions of others and re-branding them to fit.

The death of Queen Elizabeth on 8^th September and the funeral which will take place after a 10 day period of mourning (made up at some point) will no doubt be lauded in some places as great examples of how Royal tradition deals with such moments.

There are many Royal traditions including revolution (1688) and abdication (1936) but those won’t be on show.

The tradition kicked in when the BBC in a mark of official forelock tugging scrapped all programmes on any channel it has that it had heard of (iPlayer escaped) on Thursday and replaced them with something about Queen Elizabeth. The result, as with the death of Prince Philip, was no doubt that many viewers switched off or found other channels still broadcasting normal programming. Perhaps that is a new tradition in the making but the scrapping of programmes appears to have related mainly to the point that when the last significant Royal death took place before that of the Duke and the Queen- the Queen Mother in 2002- the BBC had been insufficiently obsequious

In the age of social media and the interwebs all kinds of people were to be found paying their respects to the Queen who in another age would not have been heard. This is a new democratic tradition of sorts. The Palace reminding us of its own traditions noted that while people could open books of condolence, physical or electronic, if they wished, it didn’t want to see them.

The funeral itself will be described in the greatest of Royal traditions. According to various flunkeys that one will find on the BBC news website and in the right-wing press, it will all be in accordance with various long-time Royal traditions. It won’t be. The tradition of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth 11 will be made up over the next few days.