How will the UK change following the Queen’s death?

Addressing Parliament in 2002 as the nation celebrated her Golden Jubilee, Queen Elizabeth II said of her reign: “Change has been a constant, managing it has become an expanding discipline. The way we embrace it defines our future.”

Under her rule, the UK rose from “class-bound, dowdy postwar decline to increasingly fluid diversity and dynamism”, said Andrew Neil in the Daily Mail. But “even as the world changed”, said The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis, the Queen remained a “North Star in the night sky”.

The Queen was a “unifying figure” in a country “that had increasingly felt divided in recent years amid political upheaval with the Brexit referendum and a series of prime ministers”, said The New York Times. We “must now discover, after a reign that lasted seven decades, what England, and Britain, is without her”, added The Atlantic’s Lewis.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Will the union survive?

The Queen was “the glue that held our nation together for as long as most of us can remember”, said Neil in the Daily Mail. Now, “the risk of becoming unstuck and falling apart on so many fronts is all the greater”.

He points to “her symbolic role in keeping the four nations of the United Kingdom together when so much was conspiring to tear it apart”. Ahead of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the Queen urged voters to “think very carefully about the future” before casting their votes.

Nationalists “will never forgive her for” for that rare intervention, said Neil, but the Scottish population “did think very carefully – and voted to remain in the union”.

“With her gone, the risk of becoming unstuck and falling apart on so many fronts is all the greater,” he warned.

As Scotland once again “presses for independence”, said Bloomberg, King Charles’s kingdom “faces potential break-up”.

Although he “will love Scotland just as much” as his mother did, added Neil, “he simply doesn’t have her authority”.

Will the role of the monarchy change?

The Queen “steered the monarchy” through decades of change, said The Atlantic’s Lewis. But Charles takes over amid a growing chorus of voices questioning the role of the monarchy in modern-day Britain.

The monarchy is “an anachronism in the modern age”, said The Guardian. The Queen showed “enormous dedication” and “deserved the national respect and affection” that she commanded, the paper continued.

But “let us be sensible enough, as a changed and changing nation, to recognise that the monarchy will and must change too”.

“If the Elizabethan age just ended is anything to go by,” said Ben Macintyre in The Times, “the monarchy of the future will be smaller, older, cannier, funnier, more reticent and micromanaged, underdressed in private moments and lavish in public ceremonial, more informal but not more intimate.”

Royalty of the 21st century will have to “be run on business lines”, he added, and “show stakeholders a clear cultural profit”.

Speculation is also growing about whether “Commonwealth nations may start to reconsider their association with the monarchy”, said The New York Times.

The Daily Mail’s Neil suggested that the Commonwealth “might well have withered and died but for the Queen’s constant care and attention” to its people and leaders. Although Charles “will work hard to keep the Commonwealth vibrant and relevant”, Neil wrote, “it will be harder – though not impossible – to keep it together with the Queen gone”.

King Charles and his successors “will be required to be agile” in a world that is “moving at staggering speed, transformed by global influences on British society, economic transition, social and ethnic migrations and radical institutional reform”, said Macintyre in The Times.

The changes in wider society will “touch monarchy, and perhaps ensure its survival”, he continued. In “a judgemental, demanding and over-achieving age”, the next generation of Royals “will have to work harder for greatness than any before it”.