Article

Comment

Royalty

24 April 2023

5 min read

What a monarch’s meeting teaches about politics and permanence

A monarch meeting a prime minister is a symbol of a deeper truth in a fleeting world.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A frail old lady, the late Queen, rises from a sofa to shake hands with an approaching woman.

The longest serving monarch meets the shortest serving prime minister.

The Royal Family.

Just about the last constitutional act of our late Queen was to give an audience to Liz Truss, the (temporary as it turned out) Prime Minister and to ask her to form a government. The pictures of a frail but smiling monarch, weakened, but still doing her job, couldn’t help but evoke a mix of admiration and affection, especially when we look back and consider that this was just two days before she died.

But those pictures raised some questions. A Prime Minister, and a political party that forms a government, is normally chosen by the people. Queen Elizabeth was not. Neither is King Charles. She was, and he now is, our monarch by virtue of birth, something that can seem scandalous to republicans, and even to many who liked the Queen, or admire the King as decent people, but have their doubts about the monarchy. To our democratic instincts, it feels, at least to some, distinctly odd, a relic of a hierarchical past, a hangover from a less enlightened age.

But perhaps something more significant was hidden in that act. The idea of a constitutional monarch – a figure whose position is out of our hands, as it were – formally asking a politician to form a government - acts as a reminder to us that the will of the people is not the last word, or even the first word. It tells us that, important as democracy is (‘the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time’, as Winston Churchill famously put it), there is an order, an authority that stands above and beyond the will of the people. When it has worked well, the monarchy, a source of rule above that of people and parliament, has always been a symbol and pointer to a divine authority that can work through, but essentially stands above all human government.

Because, of course, ’the will of the people’, and governments that claim to enact the will of the people, sometimes get things badly wrong. History, even that of democracies, is littered with tales of nations that have elected bad governments, or regimes that went on to enact a rule of terror in the name of ‘the people’, or where a majority has oppressed minorities. Republics of various kinds have ended up as oppressive and authoritarian. Even Hitler was elected in the first place.

That a Prime Minister only governs at the pleasure of the Monarch is a reminder of a deeper truth - that all governments are subject to a higher accountability.

Of course, there are good monarchs and bad ones. For most of our lives, those of us who live in the UK are fortunate to have had a very good monarch in Queen Elizabeth, and we hope and pray Charles will prove to be one too. Bad monarchs, whose personal failings and moral selfishness betray the office they hold, blur the picture. They tell a different story, that authority is in itself abusive, oppressive and not to be trusted. But at its best, the continuous institution of the monarchy has served as an anchor for us, pointing away from itself to an unchanging divine presence in the course of history. The fact that a Prime Minister only governs at the pleasure of the Monarch is a reminder of a deeper truth - that all governments are subject to a higher accountability, to a moral law they did not invent, a law that tempers justice with mercy, that our lives are subject to a deeper and more lasting reality than the shifting sands of politics or times and that there is an even higher loyalty than that which we may have felt to our late Queen, or to our democratic political system.

At the coronation, King Charles will be presented with an orb – a symbol of the world with a cross perched on top of it. It is a sign that ultimate power in this world belongs not to the King, or even the people, but to God. It is a reminder to the King, and to us, that he (and we) are accountable to an authority that stands beyond our own desires, or even the general will of the people. It is an authority represented by a cross – the symbol of love and self-sacrifice for the good of our neighbour, or even our enemy. It is one of those valuable reminders that stops any ruler from starting to think he can become a despot.

As our constitutional system has evolved, it is the custom that Monarchs don’t get involved in the nitty-gritty of politics and it’s vital that they don’t. That is left, quite properly, to the crucial hard work of democratically elected government and politicians, who have to get on with the important but messy business of governing, working out what to do about the cost of living crisis, how to respond to conflict in Ukraine, or how to respond to those fleeing to our shores from war-torn or poverty-stricken parts of the world.

The monarchy is a symbol of ultimate permanence, not the source of that permanence

Over past decades, Queen Elizabeth kept to this custom. She avoided expressing opinions on particular political issues and disputes because that wasn’t her role. Her role was to be a reminder that there is an order of things beyond the temporal, a moral structure to the world that is just given, not created by us, a structure that tells us that compassion, truthfulness, integrity, justice and honesty matter in all the calculations and compromises of political decision making.

The Queen’s death removed something steady and sure from our lives, as most of us have never known another monarch. Her death shook our sense of permanence, as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it at her funeral. Many of the vox pops we heard during the period of mourning pointed to that longing for permanence, the sense she gave of something enduring and reliable. Yet she was a symbol of ultimate permanence, not the source of that permanence.

As King Charles is crowned, he becomes a pointer to the unshakeable and steady presence that surrounds us, upholds us and all things - the God that Christians see revealed in Jesus Christ. Queen Elizabeth understood that and showed it in her own faith – the one aspect of her personal life that she was quite open about. And there are signs that King Charles understands that too. Faith in that God is meant to be the foundation of a monarch’s rule. It can also provide a sure foundation for our individual and less public lives too, a sense of permanence in the changes and chances of this fleeting and unstable world.

Article

Comment

Freedom of Belief

Politics

20 October 2025

5 min read

The UN promised freedom of belief — but 80 years later, it’s still elusive

Flawed, fragile but still vital to those without a voice

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

Trump addresses the 80th session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The White House.

It’s been 80 years since the United Nations was founded, at the end of the Second World War, primarily in an attempt to avoid a third global conflict.

So on that score, at least, I suppose one must accept that the UN has achieved its primary objective. But why, then, does the overall feeling towards the organisation today seem negative?

The UN’s founding charter outlined three other major goals alongside maintaining “international peace and security”: developing “friendly relations” among nations; international cooperation in solving economic, social, cultural or humanitarian problems; and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, “without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion”.

Given that the UN is comprised of 193 countries, it is perhaps little wonder that “friendly relations” and “cooperation” between all sides have not always been forthcoming, and that instead clear cliques have formed between Western countries on the one hand, and much of the rest of the world on the other. (Perhaps the clearest such clique at the moment is the 2021-founded “Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter”, the identities of whose members - China, North Korea, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, et al - may lead one to wonder what exactly it is in the UN charter they wish to defend. Short answer: “sovereignty”, code for doing whatever they wish, without interference.)

As for the pursuit of “human rights” - my primary focus as an employee of an NGO - perhaps the greatest obstacle remains the lack of a truly united consensus over which rights should be included in the definition.

The closest that the nations of the world have come to an agreement on this score was the adoption in 1948, three years after the founding of the UN, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which was backed by 48 of 58 member states at the time, but which failed to secure the support of others, including apartheid South Africa, the former Soviet bloc, and Saudi Arabia.

A primary objection in the case of Saudi Arabia was to Article 18 of the declaration - the bit about religious freedom and which includes the claim that everyone should have the right to change their religion or belief, an issue that remains problematic for many of the not-so-united nations of the world today.

The UK, meanwhile, was happy to ratify the UDHR but expressed frustration at its lack of legal force, and it was nearly 20 years before another treaty, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, attempted to correct this.

But while the 174 signatories to the ICCPR - including Iran, Russia, Cuba and China (though the latter two without ever ratifying the treaty) - are at least on paper legally obliged to uphold this international treaty, the challenge of enforcement remains. For example, while the signatories of the ICCPR are obliged to provide freedom of religion as defined by Article 18 of the covenant, which closely resembles the same article of the UDHR, few practical tools exist to hold to account any state that fails to meet its obligations.

In the case of persistent violators like Iran - the focus of my work - it seems the best we can currently hope for is to see a “resolution” passed by the majority of member states, outlining the ways in which the particular violator has failed to provide its citizens with the religious freedom (among other things) that should be their right according to the international treaties it has signed, and calling on them to do better.

But when pariahs like Iran can merely continue to deny that such failures exist, call them “biased” and “political”, and all the while prevent access to the country to the independent experts (“Special Rapporteurs”) best able to ascertain the veracity of the allegations, such “resolutions” can at times appear rather hollow.

At the same time, for advocates of human rights in non-compliant countries like Iran, the public shaming offered by such resolutions at least provides an opportunity for otherwise voiceless victims to be heard on the international stage. And when real change inside the country can sometimes appear nigh-on-impossible, you tend to take the small wins, such as hearing the representatives of member states mentioning the names of individual victims or groups in the public arena.

Many mentions are made, for example, about the plight of the Baha’is during every UN discussion of human rights in Iran, and while it is less common to also hear about my own area of interest - the persecution of Christians in Iran - there is usually at least one mention, which for us advocates (and we hope also the victims we represent) provides some comfort and hope for future change.

So 80 years since the establishment of the UN, it is clear the organisation has much room for improvement, but I remain persuaded by the argument that if we didn’t have the UN, we’d have to invent it.

“Friendly relations” - a helpfully loose term - between our disunited nations will always be a challenge, but increased economic ties globally over the past 80 years have also provided potential pressure points for those who fail to follow the rules. (If, for example, Iran wishes to see sanctions removed, Western countries can and should continue to demand improvements in the area of human rights.)

As for the UN’s endeavour to see increased “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms”, the question of what such rights and freedoms should entail will continue to be debated, with persistent areas of challenge including not only religious conversion but also abortion and same-sex relations.

It is not uncommon, for example, to hear representatives of Muslim states such as Iran questioning what Western nations really mean by “human rights” and accusing them of using the term only as a “pretext” for their own “biased” agendas.

But for all its challenges, 80 years after its establishment the UN continues to offer the only forum today where countries of contrasting beliefs can come together to discuss their differences on the world stage.

Whether that is a worthwhile exercise remains a matter for debate, but to the degree that it is, the UN remains the primary channel through which such conversations can take place.

Support Seen & Unseen

Since Spring 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,500 articles. All for free.
This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin
Editor-in-Chief

Pledge your gift