“We’ll try and keep the atmosphere light, but our aim is to make it impossible to ignore,” said Graham Smith, chief executive of the anti-monarchist group Republic.
The place where they plan to mount their symbolic displeasure, Trafalgar Square, has a statue of Charles I, who was deposed and executed in 1649.
The coronation, he said, is “a celebration of a corrupt institution. And it is a celebration of one man taking a job that he has not earned.”
Republican activists have long struggled to build momentum to dislodge Britain's 1,000-year-old monarchy. But they see the coronation as a moment of opportunity.
Opinion polls suggest opposition and apathy to the monarchy are both growing. In a recent study by the National Center for Social Research, just 29% of respondents thought the monarchy was “very important” – the lowest level in the center’s 40 years of research on the subject. Opposition was highest among the young.
“I think it’s definitely shifting,” said Smith, whose group wants to replace the monarch with an elected head of state. “People are quite happy to criticize Charles in a way they weren’t willing to necessarily in public about the queen.”
Millions in Britain will watch broadcasts when Charles in crowned in Westminster Abbey, but millions more will ignore the ceremonies.
Some will attend alternative events, including a gig in Glasgow by tribute band the Scottish Sex Pistols, recapturing the spirit of punks who sang “God save the queen, the fascist regime” during the late queen’s 1977 silver jubilee.
London’s Newington Green Meeting House, a gathering place for religious dissenters and radicals for 300 years, is holding an “alternative community party,” complete with food, drink and “radical and republican” music.
General manager Nick Toner said that the event is for people who “don’t want to sit through hours of footage of ceremonies, carriages and endless Union Jacks, perhaps because they think it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money or even just plain old boring.”
