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. 

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.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/uk-news/957896/how-will-the-uk-change-after-the-death-of-the-queen