As waves of strikes continue across the country, leading economists have, with breathtaking arrogance, instructed Britons to not ask for wage increases and just ‘accept they’re worse off’. They, like other Britons, are reeling under a stupendous rise in the cost of living as inflation hits 11 percent, the highest rate in 40 years. Even so, a staggering 250 million pounds ($315m) of magicked-up taxpayer money will be spent on this single day even as thousands of nurses, doctors, teachers and other key public workers have been told for months there is no money in the coffers to offer them a meaningful pay rise.

Unlike George V’s Delhi Durbar, which glittered with the imperial puissance of a nation that controlled vast swathes of the globe, behind the velvet curtains of Charles III’s extravaganza is a much-diminished entity in which a majority of the population isn’t much interested.Īccording to a recent poll, more than 70 percent of Britons under the age of 50 are indifferent to the coronation. Even the Mughals, however, did not propose that the entire population chant fealty in unison to the new monarch as Britons are being urged to do. About 6,000 troops will march in full regalia in the largest military ceremonial in 70 years. Like the British Raj’s fabled 1911 Durbar in Delhi, also held to celebrate a coronation, that of George V, Charles’s crowning will aim to showcase British pre-eminence to the apparent admiration of the world, an imperial power move actually taken, like much else, from the Mughals of India. For fans of Netflix’s The Crown and other period dramas, the coronation of King Charles III will have it all: ermine and tiaras, horses and livery, kneeling and curtseys, expensively refurbished gold carriages and choral music soaring into vaulted ceilings.Ī sufficiency of kings, queens and aristocrats will bear international witness to pomp and circumstance as the BBC repeats on a self-congratulatory loop that “no one does pageantry quite like we Brits.”

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