The monarchy is not the only target: from right to left, across a spectrum from the police via the church to the BBC, such bodies seem to be valued c… - J. C. D. Clark

PCism...is about manipulating public doctrine for private ends. The form it takes depends on the nature of national values. In America, PCism derives from three unchallengeable ideals. The ideal of equality is used to promote the interests of women and racial minorities, often ending in very inegalitarian provisions such as quotas. Collective moral improvement is used selectively to deny people what will supposedly harm them, formerly alcohol, soon tobacco. The sanctity of the individual is interpreted to demand parity of esteem for unconventional lifestyles, especially homosexuality, and can be exploited in all sorts of ways through the new sexual harassment industry. In Britain, the pattern is different. None of these things have gained nearly as much ground as in the United States, but the same technique of making a sectional self-interest unchallengeable and using totalitarian methods to inhibit criticism is used in favour of regional cultures against metropolitan culture; used in our endlessly various class war by plebeians against patricians, and, especially, used in that strange crusade of denigration of our national institutions.

Like other opponents of patriotism, Price failed to understand it: his critique was, consequently, ineffective. The new secular religion of universal benevolence never took hold in George III's England, and England in consequence never experienced the opposite swing of the pendulum: that flood of anti-Napoleonic romantic nationalism that swept Europe in the 19th-century, with its glorification of the impersonal nation state or the metaphysical race. England persisted with a national consciousness far more akin to its traditional patriotism, focused on institutions such as the monarchy rather than on an abstract nationalism, and upheld by Anglican religion rather than by secular romanticism or racialist theorisings.

The love affair of the British with their national institutions is no limp romanticism but an appreciation of the way that institutions embody and perpetuate, as well as symbolise, a certain way of doing things. That is why a predilection for hereditary peers and against high inheritance taxes is an affirmation of family integrity. That is why an established Church is widely endorsed, even by other Christian denominations, as an official acknowledgement that law is more than technical convention. That is why the national history curriculum has become a potent symbol of society's right corporately to affirm a vision of itself.