'Oh I know. But it's Tradition, isn't it?'

How do you foster your children's sense of independent thought during times of peak tradition? And can you do it without being a total party pooper?

Last week I had an interesting exchange with my eldest son. I say that non-sarcastically; as he grows, I find our conversations genuinely compelling as well as revealing in terms of broader realities which my personal identity preferences bubble me from. ‘Some people don’t believe in Jesus mum.’ Factually correct; mummy doesn’t. ‘Well, you’re wrong,’ comes the reply, ‘HE does walk amongst us because God sent his only son to save us. HE died for our sins.’ Ah. Looks like Easter caught another convert.

This piece is about what we really mean by ‘tradition’ and isn’t a broadside against organised religion. I am a committed and unrelenting atheist, but we assigned each of our sons ‘godparents’ or guardians at birth, each of whom were raised within different faiths, so should either of the boys ever require spiritual guidance, they have their people there, armed with the right vocab. You can’t not respect faith, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a vast leap for me to understand religious fervour. But just so we’re clear, I’m not here to belittle anyone or any religious philosophy, nor am I set against my children discovering their own creed. I believe in the idea that my kids could turn out to have a deeply diverging mindset to mine, but I also believe in debate and introspection.  

Instead, I want to discuss how we lay the foundations of tradition. To me, this encompasses everything from customs, practises and relationships which are collectively perceived to be normative or even neutral within a society. In the U.K., Christianity remains part of that backdrop. At my son’s school, inclusion and diversity is front of mind and thus far in reception, he’s celebrated Rosh Hashanah, Diwali and Eid with his classmates. At age 5, they’ve learnt about many religious stories, and he has Jewish and Muslim friends, as you’d expect in a London state school. However, the seeds of those religions haven’t rooted in the same way, because of course, there’s a hierarchy in religious exposure with Christianity at the top. Starting from a few months old, he’s gawped at the crucifix at church playgroups, been to the local church on nursery and school outings, performed in the ‘Jesus Show’ (nativity five years in a row) and has now embraced a very impactful school visit with a local church leader. He seems particularly compelled by the idea of how a nail could be hammered through your palm; the presentation on Easter logistics clearly captured his attention.

I’m so open to all kinds of education and I want my sons to grow up with knowledge to support tolerance and acceptance of every kind of life. All the different strokes, all the different folks. But I suppose, as he’s not at a church school, I hadn’t considered that the baseline of his worldview would be coloured by the contours of such distinct traditions. I suppose I’d imagined more of a smorgasbord.

When you live in London, it’s easy to believe in the smorgasbord. But it doesn’t take much to shatter the illusion as we’ve seen over the past week. ‘It’s tradition’ is an excuse, a motivation, the North Star on many people’s compass. By establishing traditions so young, we grow with a deep sense of connection and safety in certain ideas, customs and philosophies for the rest of our lives. When we feel unsettled, we often revert in a nostalgic sense, without analysing or questioning why these supposedly neutral forces exist. They just are and often, for the sake of our comfort in them, we hesitate to peel back the layers. That is true even if these shared values serve one set of people at the expense of others.

In this country, we traditionally support a hereditary monarch who sits atop the Church of England. The King also heads our aristocracy and the social system of elites, today based on both wealth and historical lineage, which serves to exclude the vast majority of us from its chokehold on inherited power and resources. The Tories, the party of all elites, are seen by the public at large as ‘the natural party of government’. The Conservative Party is one of the most successful political parties in history—both the oldest in the UK and arguably the world. Return this nation to factory settings and we’d be saying the Lord’s Prayer, swearing an oath of allegiance to the crown and the right front bench would be true blue. The majority of our population still supports The Establishment, or at least endures it, even though it—often unashamedly—benefits the few at the expense of the many. Somewhere in the velvetry of pomp we swallow the idea of deference, and acquiesce to subject-dom mostly, as far as I can glean, for the sake of tradition.

I understand that not every person lives critically engaging with ideas both big and small. I say that without condescension, we’re all different, the strokes are what makes us so fascinating. But it seems unimaginable that the hardships and misgovernment of recent times couldn’t have cut through. No matter what your background or political persuasion, you cannot, with a straight face, condemn the entitlement of a cadre of Etonians ruling with impunity, without condemning the principle and belief that there are people who are actually born to rule. The fact that we endorse a bloodline to power and riches will forever continue to perpetuate a class of others connected to that gravy train, who hoard capital and assets and make policies to secure their interests. Churchill was the son of a Lord and a direct descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, Alec Douglas Home had to resign his position as the Earl of Home in the 1960s to become a MP. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson are distant relatives to George III and while BJ is more of a foreign toff (who happens to share a mentor with King Charles, a teacher at both Eton and Gordonstoun respectively), Cameron’s mother is the daughter of the late Sir William Mount, the 2^nd Baronet. While obviously, there are notable examples of non-aristo Tory PMs including Thatcher and John Major, there has been a notable return to elite leaders (our current premier has circa half the estimated person wealth of our billionaire King). How can we ever hope to topple the idea that the ‘natural order’ of things is to have men from aristocratic or wildly wealthy families ruling us while we maintain support for the system that births them to believe such power is their right? If you had a problem with partygate and the notion that a certain class of people are above the law. If you hate how elitist the political and financial professions remain even after three female Tory premiers and a PM of colour. If you believe your kid should have the same right as anyone else to success no matter which school you went to or what your bank balance says…how can you possibly support the icon, the symbol, the personification of the whole shebang? We can talk about democracy all we want and go over the checks and balances and the limitations on kingly rule. But we all know the reality that it’s all an old boys club and HRH wears the striped tie pin. 

As I watched my little boy proudly flutter his postcard-sized Union Jack at school, I felt incredibly conflicted. I’m a joyful leftie and certainly not one to poop a party. At the end of the day, he’s five and wants to wave a flag and sing the national anthem with his friends and it would be easy to leave it at that. But he’s at the age now where he will remember the pageantry of this weekend. He’ll recall the sense of community and fun, of colour and cake. The king, the crown, the non-uniform day. And all of those positive associations will lay the groundwork of ‘it’s tradition’ offering him the warmth of nostalgia to return to whenever he might feel alienated or threatened by change at any other stage of his life from now onwards. We didn’t watch the coronation, instead we made pasta and talked about our experiences of travelling through Italy. But we did go to a street party, and he had his face painted with Union Jack, wore a paper crown and jumped on a bouncy castle. Images of bunting and cucumber sandwiches may very well have lodged into his brain. For me, the whole thing felt like an uneasy compromise; I wished we’d flown to see my family, but I also need to practise what I preach. I can’t isolate him from everything I don’t like.

This may all sound like I’ve been sucked into some kind of Robin Hood-esque YouTube conspiracy spiral, but I think I am able to detangle myself more easily from what makes our culture feel like home because I had another one. Having been born abroad, in Munich, and living out so much of my childhood and teens in the biergarten, there are a whole host of other things that make me feel warm inside, that engender that magical sense of belonging. Many of those are obviously wrapped up in a different flavour of conservatism: my Dirndl, Lebkuchen, gingham. Germany obviously has its own elite lineage, but no monarchy. There’s a lot of wealth in Bavaria, but the majority of people (by a sliver, including my dad for 28 years) rent. It’s totally acceptable to take your top off at an outdoor pool, carrot juice and wurst for breakfast is par for the course and it’s possible to survive without ready meals, natürlich. The differences in the two environments of my upbringing offered stark evidence that systems aren’t neutral or natural—they’re are constructed by various forces of power. I learnt that you can feel differently about national values without becoming rootless and untethered and that my identity has space for Britishness, or at least being a Londoner, with scope left for gemutlichkeit too. You can pick and choose your feeling of home, and you get to be the architect of your own traditions, ones which ideally serve you, rather than those which are presented as a fait acompli. I’m not saying that an experience of another culture during your youth is the only way of gaining perspective on tradition, but it certainly fosters a filter.

Obviously, if you raise children in any country, they will be subliminally inculcated with its shared mores whether or not you personally share them. They will drink from the font of normalised culture and regurgitate it uncritically. If we lived in the States, perhaps they’d tell me guns are a good idea. What I’ve realised is my main ambition as a parent, is to support and nurture my kids’ filters and enable them to reject or embrace normative values based on their actual value rather than just because ‘it’s tradition’. I feel like the week has been a bit of a damascene moment, though certainly not one any of the army of PR execs spinning the ‘slick’ coronation or the visiting church leader might have intended.

I wasn’t being a prig or self-righteous this weekend. I didn’t go deep into any of this with anyone aside from saying I wasn’t celebrating. Not that I support the silencing of disestablishmentarianism, nor the republican gaslighting that’s currently going on in the media (support for the monarchy is certainly not ‘rock solid’, it’s actually at a historic low especially amongst younger generations, no matter what the Daily Mail might be telling us). I didn’t wave a flag because I believe in equality of opportunity, and I want my children to live in a country where it doesn’t matter who your dad is or was. I don’t subscribe to any traditions which breed privilege or exclude people because who they are or who they love. The picture released of ‘three Kings’ this week, with the 9-year-old George suited up in his page boy outfit tells you what the job will look like for the next 80 years. I understand some people might find that reassuring, I personally find it antediluvian.  The King is the ultimate nepo baby and every element of the still-bourgeoning Establishment supports successive generations of nepotism ahead. That is the true ‘it’ of our tradition and no amount of fragrantly spiced chicken is going to obscure that for me.

We’ve very recently gone through very unsettled, but also very royal times. There was the Jubilee, a royal funeral and the Coronation in close succession and on top of that, our media has been full of the Windsor soap opera. The Covid age has been a very royal moment and that also means we’ve seen and heard a lot from the Archbishop of Canterbury. On top of that there’s been 13 years of Tory rule, the Church of England refusing to marry gay couples, the legitimacy that Brexit has lent to xenophobia and the lurch of so much discourse away from the centre. We live in a very different country from the one I grew up in. Obviously, all nations and their traditions evolve. Once upon a time, we saw progress as the point of civilisation. The fact that so many are desperate to slam on the breaks, or even put us into reverse away from progress and evolution is the same kind of energy that once led us into the dark. As a final note to all those who say people who feel like me should leave the U.K., I’d like to remind them that you don’t have to go too far back in British history to remember that we have long and fruitful Republican and revolutionary religious traditions too. Just ask the first King Charlie.