Back during the Coronation procession of Queen Elizabeth II, soldiers and police faced the procession along with the people.
However, Peter Hitchens makes the observation that they now stand with their backs to the precession, facing the crowd.
“In this coming week, the funeral of Her Majesty will take us from sorrow over her death and reflection on the past to a new stage of wondering what our future will be.
I suppose that, as the most pessimistic person in the country, it falls to me to point out that we have, in fact, lost a lot of good things in the past seven decades, and that this is probably the last chance we have to try to get them back.
A startling fact was pointed out last week in a letter to a newspaper by Dennis Rolfe, who recalled: ‘As a young lad, I stood in the Strand and watched the Coronation procession of Queen Elizabeth II. The police and soldiers lining the route all faced the procession. It is a sad reflection of our times that now they all face the crowd’.
I checked the archives and found that he was absolutely right.
In other old photographs fit to break your heart, as they show so clearly the Britain of my own childhood in its gentleness and austerity, when my own parents were young and full of vigour and hope for the future, you can see crowds standing in the rain as the funeral procession of King George VI passes by, his coffin on a gun carriage. Police in long raincoats stand with their backs to the crowd, though there are gaps in their line in which men, women and children stand, with nothing to keep them back but their own self-discipline and good manners.
Another picture of the same event again shows soldiers and police facing the procession, once again part of, rather than separate from, the multitude of mourners.
Police and Servicemen were our defenders, not our supervisors. In these pictures, they are really only there to demonstrate their own loyalty.
I do not know exactly when all this changed, and would be interested to find out. The police and soldiers at Sir Winston Churchill’s 1965 funeral also faced the same way as the crowd. But pictures of the Queen Mother’s funeral in 2002 show the people corralled behind metal fences, not trusted to show decorum, while lines of police bossily face them and weirdly turn their backs on the procession as it passes by them”. -Peter Hitchens, Daily Mail
The soldiers use to have their backs to the people to display that they are themselves of the people and trust the people.
Now they face the crowd with their backs to the procession, indicating that they are no longer of the people but rather of the rulers.
As the democratic state has grown more and more committed to make the British proletariat healthier and safer, it has also become keener on violating its own laws.
Unless and until society again moves towards monarchism and Christendom, people across the West will likely have to endure the long and arduous process of exploring the depths of post-Christianity.