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by Douglas Ayling

As the day of the Queen Mother's funeral passes, we look back over our shoulders towards Britain and see a nation in mourning; A Britain that has lost a dear relative; A Britain which has lost some of its history.

But for all the pathos we will see in front of the cameras, what we won't see is a nation united in grief. I suspect that there will be a silent majority, as there was at the time of Diana's death, for whom this national display of grief is peripheral to their lives.

Of course the same is partly true for Sri Lanka. Having thrown off the shackles of Empire, what relevance has the death of a formerly usurping monarchy? Yet what surprises me as an Englishman visiting Sri Lanka is on the contrary how much of this country has strong feelings of attachment to the British monarchy.

In The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley famously wrote "The past is like a foreign country. They do things differently there". Well, when it comes to monarchist sentiment, Sri Lanka is like the past - the attitudes here towards the Royal Family hark back to a Britain of twenty years ago. It seems that Sri Lanka - the modern, independent republic - is perhaps closer to the Royal Family than the United Kingdom itself.

It all started to go seriously wrong in Britain with the break up of Prince Charles and Diana. If their Royal Wedding of 1981 was one of the century's high points of public pride in its monarchy, then the divorce was surely the turning point in public support for the monarchy. Suddenly the magic that we wanted so much to believe in, had gone.

The Royals are Royals because they are set apart. For the glamour and fairy-tale allure of a royal wedding to end in public back-biting and divorce was desperately bourgeois. Divorce rates in the UK have climbed since then from one in four to one in three and worse, yet many have continued to question whether it is right to exemplify the modern dysfunctional family and still remain a royal standard bearer.

It didn't matter that the Queen Mother was a drinker and a heavy gambler; Or that she annually received the equivalent of Rs 85 million from the taxpayer to subsidise her lavish lifestyle. It didn't matter that Prince Edward's bumbling television company was a loss-making enterprise. We don't mind that Prince Philip perpetually makes diplomatically heinous gaffes or that Princess Margaret had alcohol problems. They all fit a royal archetype which expects and allows for the blue-blooded aristocrats to be decadent, socially inept and out of touch.

But when Diana cavorted across the tabloids in her daily holiday romance (August 1997) and Charles began - for want of an official stance - "seeing" a lady whom the visual media would never learn to embrace, it was suddenly difficult to regard them as different from us.

In the modern multicultural Britain, it becomes increasingly difficult to hold any beliefs strongly - be they religious beliefs, political principles, belief in the value of tradition, or a patriotic belief in Queen and Country.

The British Armed Forces struggle desperately to find new recruits, and wonder why the present generation is less prepared to die for the idea of nationhood. The Church of England wonders why congregations appear due to vanish in 2030 at the present rate of decline.

I would suggest that mass media in a such culturally diverse society as Britain's, breeds a kind of pluralism in which all ideologies must be deemed equally valid for fear of excluding sections of the target audience.

This cacophony of value systems can grant no individual ideology true validity, authenticity or authority - and in consequence, only one drum beats clear: that is the self-centred and primitive compulsion to consume. Where gratification is the only justification, "duty" becomes an anachronism and principles give way to expediency.

In the global age, the younger generations are more likely to find that our identity is tied to a style of jumper from the new GAP range, than define ourselves as subjects of Her Majesty.

As economies of scale and the totemic power of global brands ensure that we grow more uniform as consumers; and as telecommunications and cheap airfares allow us to see a less foreign world; at the same time in Britain, the political project of a European Union is further eroding any cogent conception of nationhood. Fighting for the love of Queen and Country seems very far away.

This is the context in which the mythical status of the Royal Family fades. The Queen Mother was Empress of India in an entirely different era. One wonders if royalty will ever be revered again.

And yet, I very much doubt that the death of the Queen Mother spells the end for the Royal Family as some have foretold. Yes, as with any family, the passing of the oldest generation robs us of some of our historical legitimacy.

It is natural that our weightiness, our meaning and sense of purpose is temporarily disorientated by bereavement when it cuts our link with an established accretion of past experience. But I believe that it will take more than this to turn Britain into a republic with a bicycling monarchy.

Prince William is the Royal Family's secret weapon. This is a media-led age and the cameras love the charismatic young Will. He fits the mould of Prince Charming and is reminiscent enough of his quasi-beatified mother to make any politician think twice before taking away his entitlement or his silver spoon.

William has yet to start using words like "carbuncle" to describe public buildings, and as such he has yet to isolate himself from the surrogate mothering instinct of the public at large.

Talk of abolishing the Royal Family is like proposing to get rid of the class system in Britain.

However egalitarian society attempts to become, we have a psychological need as a society to create hierarchies. Hierarchies inevitably involve the elevation of "the Great and Good" to give us a status, aspirations, role-models, and the hope of recognition and endorsement from on high.

However defunct the class system ought to be in modern Britain's hegemony of the middle-class, we continue to chase after social affirmation, and this means all the more to us when it is bestowed by an elite. We have a psychological need for royalty.

If we remove the Royal Family, other elites will take their place: media barons, company directors, political leaders, film stars, the King and Queen of Pop, and former chat show hosts. They will be just as arbitrary, but they will not have the benefit of history as a social justification.

At the Oscar ceremonies, Hollywood film stars are treated like royalty, but nobody can really justify why this should be. Is it because they are beautiful? Is it because they acted well? It is a triumph of redefining success as spectacle. Since being a Royal is for life (and not just for the Holiday season) there is at least decorum and a possibility that the public figure will involve themselves in sustained work for social good.

The third reason why I doubt that the Monarchy will be removed is purely economic. The amount of revenue generated by royalty-related tourism is a good enough reason alone to retain the Royal Family in its present form.

If the Queen were to be removed as Head of State would her symbolic attraction wane? Perhaps not, but a rationalism that destroys an essentially harmless tradition and - a potentially enriching one - has gone too far.

This is why, when I watch the Queen Mother's funeral, it is with a spirit not of reverence, patriotism or personal grief, but of respect for a lady who lived for over a century.

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