SNP MP Stewart McDonald has said that this is the right time to debate the future of the monarchy in Scotland, as we head towards yet another orgy of British nationalist royalist hysteria with the coronation of King Charles in May.

There is no constitutional requirement for a coronation ceremony, and displaying the customary unerring talent of the Windsors for failing to read the room, Charles has reportedly rejected suggestions that his coronation should be a pared-back affair, in order to limit the burden to the public purse at a time when the Conservative Government tells us that there is not sufficient money available to pay nurses properly. 

But despite that, this immensely vain and self-regarding man still wants the whole show with all the bells, whistles, equerries, brocaded trumpeters, massed ranks of ermine clad lords, RAF fly-pasts and mounted cavalry in highly polished breastplates that public money can buy. All so he can sit on a gilded throne while an archbishop plonks a jewel-encrusted hat on his head – a head filled with nothing but an over-weening self-importance.

The coronation will stretch over three days in early May, with the actual jewelled-hat beplonking scheduled to take place on May 6. The costs of this exercise in gilded self-indulgence will run into the many tens of millions. Some estimates put the cost at as much as £100 million. This is at a time when we are told there is not enough money to pay nurses a living wage that means they do not have to rely on foodbanks in order to ensure that their kids have enough to eat and public service workers across many sectors are being driven to take industrial action. But never mind any of that, Charles wants his fancy-dress parade.

The coronation will be preceded by weeks of increasingly breathless media build-up during which BBC and Sky presenters will film vox-pop pieces up and down the land, sticking microphones into the faces of the poor suckers whose taxes are paying for this farce and asking them how excited they are on a scale from Woo-Hoo to having a stroke. Then it will be followed by assorted “how much did you love the coronation” and reports about how marvelous Chas and Cam allegedly are, sickening enough to provoke projectile vomiting in even those with the most robust constitutions.

Some estimates say that the entire sycophantic exercise may cost as much as £100 million. The expensive ceremony is not a constitutional requirement. Charles is already king, he automatically became king the moment that his mother passed away on September 8 last year. The constitutional niceties were taken care of when he was officially proclaimed king on September 10 when the Accession Council, consisting of members of the Privy Council, gathered at St James’s Palace in London in order to make a formal proclamation of Charles as the new monarch. The clerk to the council read out the Accession Proclamation and Charles swore an oath to uphold the independence of the Church of Scotland, and that was the constitutional requirements taken care of.

The coronation is not necessary. The Nazi-sympathising Edward VIII was king from January 20, 1936, until his abdication on December 11, 1936, even though he never had a coronation. Charles will still be king with or without a coronation.

The majority of contemporary European monarchies today have either long since abandoned coronation ceremonies or have never had them in the first place. Only the British monarch still insists on a coronation ceremony. Yet the coronation ceremony is not even, as it is presented, a hoary, centuries-old tradition. Most of the modern ceremony was invented in 1902 for the coronation of Edward VII, another vain and insecure prince who had spent decades in his mother's shadow and who demanded all the full-fat flummery and toadying that the British state could muster in order to further inflate his already bloated ego.

Of course, the decision about whether an independent Scotland should be a monarchy or a republic should be a decision for the people of Scotland to make after the fact of Scottish independence has been established. For my own part, I want a republic. That said, it is important not to muddy the waters of an already thorny constitutional question and in the process potentially alienate Scots who respect Scotland's own centuries long tradition of monarchy.

However, as Stewart McDonald points out, this is the perfect time for Scotland to begin to examine the question of head of state, and if we are to retain a monarch, to ask ourselves what role we want that monarchy to play. Do we want an expensive and intrusive monarchy like that epitomised by the Windsors, or a more restrained and civic monarchy along Scandinavian lines?

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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