A HEFTY PRICE tag for a “publicity stunt”, a man being anointed with holy oil and dukes sipping on champagne paid for by the UK taxpayer.
Those are a few of the images conjured up by members of the British public who have questioned the need for King Charles III to have a coronation ceremony estimated to cost £100 million.
Former Liberal Democrats MP and republican Norman Baker told The Journal that, from a constitutional standpoint, the coronation is completely unnecessary and that the pageantry and carriage rides on display tomorrow is like something from Disney World.
Despite what many people think they know about this weekend’s event, it will not make Charles the new king of the UK because he has been the king since his mother died last September.
“What is the point of a coronation? If you believe in the mystical powers of the Church of England and Charles being anointed with holy oil then it’s a God-given mystical experience,” Baker said dismissively.
Despite supporting a democratically elected head of state for the UK, he attended the Accession Council where Charles was formally proclaimed the new king on 10 September 2022 because he saw it as a once in a lifetime experience.
The lowkey event was attended by a small number of important people with titles such as ‘Realm High Commissioner’ and ‘High Sheriff’, and fulfilled the purpose most people think the coronation will do: officially announcing Charles as the new monarch.
“The council meeting was best summed up by the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons who said to me on the way out, ‘And now we go through the gift shop’,” Baker joked.
Aside from the fact that this week’s event doesn’t technically need to happen at all, he believes the massive price tag is incredibly wasteful.
This is especially true, he says, when considering the fact that Charles – who is exempt from income and inheritance tax – has an estimated net worth of £1.8 billion.
The coronation will cost £100 million, or possibly more, according to some estimates.
Baker said: “That’s more than twice the cost in today’s prices of Elizabeth II’s coronation. You have to ask where all this money is going at a time when there’s an energy problem, there’s people having difficulty putting food on their table, and wages are falling behind inflation?”
That’s enough money to donate £40,000 to each of the UK’s 2,500 food banks and most members of the public aren’t even that interested in the event.
In a survey of more than 3,000 UK adults conducted last month, 35% said they “do not care very much” about the event, and 29% said they “do not care at all”.
“The image of widespread national support for the monarchy you get from the BBC and other media is misleading,” Baker added.
He noted that coverage of large crowds along the coronation procession in London makes for more interesting television than the tens of millions of British people at home who don’t care.
The cost of security for dealing with crowds is likely to be high, with the Met Police stating that 11,500 officers will be on duty tomorrow, while the anti-monarchy group Republic intends to hold protests at Trafalgar Square.
Dr Ken Ritchie is a former Labour councillor and leader of Republic’s movement within the Labour party.
Ritchie likened the coronation to the “world’s most expensive tradition”, which he said was particularly egregious considering the fact that NHS nurses went on strike over pay disputes earlier this week.
“The things that could be done with that money, but we have the Tories negotiating nurses’ pay saying, ‘You cannot have anymore.’
“This is a pseudo-religious ceremony. The ceremony is a public relations stunt to try to boost support for an institution that is in big, big trouble at the moment.”
Although representatives from Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and Hindu communities will play a role in the coronation for the first time, some questions have been raised as to the role of Christianity in a state-funded event.
The coronation will see him anointed with holy oil in an Anglican Cathedral by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the most senior cleric in the Church of England.
Ritchie points out that the number of British people who are Christian has been on a decline and the number of Brits who are in the Church of England is less than half of the UK population.
“There’s a huge questioning as to why our head of state has got to be tied to a particular denomination. He’s going to be swearing to uphold the Protestant faith, we still have a situation where our head of state can not be a Catholic.”
The UK king or queen must be Anglican in order to fulfil the monarch’s role as supreme governor of the Church of England, and until 2013 even marrying a Catholic would cause a person to be removed from the line of succession.
Ritchie added that the coronation raises serious questions about the separation of Church and State when a huge sum of public money is to be spent on a religious event for the leader of a Christian denomination that most of the UK aren’t even part of.
Despite aiming to represent the people of the United Kingdom and its 14 Commonwealth Realms as their head of state, the monarchy has little in common with the average person, Ritchie believes.
“The main influence the monarchy has is the way that it creates a national mindset in which it’s quite normal to accept that some people are going to be more important and privileged than everyone else,” he said.
“Labour is trying to create a society in which everybody is born equal but one of the pillars of our constitution, the monarchy, says the opposite.
At the coronation we’ll see all these people born into ranks and titles with their chests covered in pointless medals, dukes and viscounts.”
Ritchie’s alienation with the birthrights of the British elite was shared by many on social media after the UK public was asked to pledge its allegiance to Charles last week.
Baker noted: “In every other European monarchy, the king or queen will take an oath of allegiance to the democracy and to the public at large. It’s only in Britain that it is the other way around, and we take an oath to the un-elected monarch.”
He added that although the monarchy remained popular during Elizabeth II’s reign, he expects public support to plummet now that the new figurehead is Charles, “who many view as an adulterer”.
“People liked the job she was doing and nobody really wants to have a go at some old woman, she was in her 90s,” Baker said.
“The level of support for Charles is probably a more accurate representation of support for the monarchy as a whole.”
One recent poll has shown that only 29% of British people think the monarchy is “very important”, with that number even lower among younger age groups.
However, a larger survey found that 56% of people would vote to keep the monarchy with 23% in favour of a republic and the rest undecided.
Ritchie noted that while the UK would require a referendum to become a republic, he doesn’t think that is immediate solution.
A republic would be achieved eventually after years of “keeping the royals out of politics, reducing their spending, reducing their power and making them more transparent in what they do”.
“Then we could have an elected head of state like your president in Ireland,” he said.
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