AS a republican, watching the news can be a lonely, despondent experience. When any royal event rolls around, you’re saturated in it, and unless you turn off the TV, cancel your papers, burn your sim card and go and live in another solar system, you’re part of the “occasion” by default. On the BBC, the broadcaster routinely derided for its cultural Marxism, you can’t move for red, white and blue, for gushing vox pops with confused, sunburned punters and sycophantic voiceovers from Nicholas Witchell. There isn’t even a fig leaf of a debate, a token republican to make up the numbers.

And it’s all for a good reason, we’re told. Republicans are an infinitesimal minority who can’t be allowed to dictate the coverage of national events. The bulk of British people, conservative or socialist, apparently love doffing a cap to the royals. More than that, they love a bit of good, old-fashioned fun. They resent the out-of-touch intellectuals who carp on about written constitutions and fancy foreign ideals.

It’s sobering, therefore, to look at some of the polling evidence on this. Firstly, two-thirds of British people were in my camp: they did not give a hoot about Prince Harry marrying Meghan Markle. Nearly three in five British people agree with me that Harry and Meghan, not the taxpayer, should pay for the security costs incurred by the wedding. And, like me, a clear majority told pollsters that they would not tune in for the royal wedding.

It’s often said that honest, salt-of-the-earth working-class folk love the monarchy while middle-class, preening intellectuals hate it. But, in truth, class makes little difference. Asked about the Harry-Meghan engagement, a minority (40%) of working-class people were pleased by it; the middle-class figure (39%) was virtually identical.

In almost all categories, a majority are disinterested. Like me, they have no particular reason to dislike Meghan and Harry as individuals, or to dislike the principle of them marrying: they just don’t care. Only among people of pensioner age and among Conservative voters do those who give a damn really outnumber those who don’t.

Notably, the whole discourse of this particular wedding, that it was appealing to young, identity-conscious millennials, that the “modern” wedding would sort the snowflake from the gammon, failed to pan out. Some 58% of 16 to 24-year-olds didn’t care. Only 36% of 25 to 49-year-olds were pleased by the engagement. They weren’t hating on it either. The wedding simply didn’t matter to them, and I can relate to that.

Strikingly, 62% of Scotland didn’t care. Almost certainly people were more interested in the FA cup final, where fans were audibly chanting: “You can stick your royal wedding up your arse.” This sentiment at least showed some active disinterest, which is more than I can say for much of Scotland.

According to polls, just 41% of Scotland actively support the continuation of the monarchy. Meanwhile, 28% are actively opposed and a striking 27% are ambivalent.

But you wouldn’t know all of this from the coverage. Watching the news from afar, you’d think that Britain, as one, was united in ecstatic celebration. You’d think that republicans are a minority of such statistical insignificance that they would be easily outnumbered by those who class their religion as “Jedi”.

I’d like to make one thing clear: debating the royal family isn’t my number-one political priority. War, poverty and oppression are the big issues in Britain. The royal family are a carnivalesque sideshow, a pantomime, a frumpier, taxpayer-funded Kardashians; getting rid of them won’t make Britain a better society overnight.

But if we’re going to have blanket coverage of the royals at public expense, let’s at least have a debate that reflects the living, breathing public. Even once the ranks of ambivalent people are crossed out, republicans are a significant minority. In Scotland, it’s likely they will soon become a majority. When royal occasions happen, they should get space to explain their views.

As Richard Seymour recently observed, when it comes to working-class conservatism, we are guilty of framing the problem in the wrong way. We shouldn’t ask, why do some working-class people have conservative values? Instead, we should ask, given that our institutions of education and information are so thoroughly dominated by conservatism, why is anyone radical at all? Given that the BBC, that supposed vanguard of British Trotskyism, screens nothing but blanket royalist propaganda. Why are millions of us republicans? And why do millions more refuse to care? Are they all joyless Marxist-feminist intellectuals? Or is it, maybe, just maybe, difficult to care about a boring, silly anachronism?

I won’t go to the wall to make Britain a republic. But when people say that leftists dominate the media, it’s time we had the courage to laugh in their faces. We live in a society of institutional conservatism. We live in a British state that’s incapable of intellectually defending its basic institutions, a state that instead relies on blanket propaganda coverage, whether it’s over “security”, the arms industry or the monarchy. We live in a state that openly commits war crimes, then invites the millionaire perpetrators on TV to earnestly debate racism.

Some believe the nonsense they’re fed. Some educate themselves and actively reject the consensus. And others have simply got too much to worry about, and don’t have time to ponder what Meghan wears to the ball. One thing is clear: the royals are like UFO conspiracy theories and Scientologists. They are living proof that, given the right conditioning, people can invent silly reasons for believing in just about anything.