LONDON: Queen Elizabeth II turned 80 on Friday, and has represented Britons as the United Kingdom's head of state for 54 years.

The rock star Ozzy Osbourne recalled that when he met the Queen, his only thought was that he was face to face with "the world's biggest 20 pounds note."

For the Queen is ubiquitous in British national life in a way unmatched by any other human being. In Britain, her silhouetted profile is on coins and stamps, her face on bank notes.

Her life is intimately bound up with what now constitutes Britain's living memory.

A newborn baby before the General Strike of May 1926, she was present during the abdication crisis of 1936. She was already a visible public figure, a princess and heiress to the throne, during the World War II.

As Queen, she has received no fewer than 10 prime ministers: when Winston Churchill, a figure as remote from most young Britons as Horatio Nelson, served his final term at 10 Downing Street, his weekly audience was with the young Elizabeth. From Suez to the Beatles, the Sex Pistols to the miners' strike, from Lady Diana to Big Brother, she has been there throughout a kind of blue-blood Zelig, present in the background (and sometimes foreground) of most of the major events of the British 20th century and beyond.

So much has changed over these years, she may well be the only constant Britons have. She was the Queen before there was Elvis, when computers were the size of a large room. From the age of the steam train to the era of satnav, she has been on the throne through it all.

It is no wonder that she is in British dreams one survey reportedly found that the most common British dream was of taking tea with the Queen.

But it is not just length of service that makes her feel like a permanent part of our landscape. It is also the way she has done her job.

She has served in a demanding role, that of head of state, for half a century and has barely made a mistake. The job requires her to be politically neutral and, despite 54 years of attention to her every utterance, that is precisely how she is perceived.

Scan through newspaper clippings of the Elizabethan II era and you will not find gaffes and crises, leaks of private remarks and subsequent denials. Instead she has played it straight, watching the dismantling of the British empire, the Cold War, the industrial unrest of the 1970s and the Thatcher revolution of the 1980s, letting slip barely a breath of an opinion.

Debates going on

For Britain's fledgling republican movement, the 80th birthday of Queen Elizabeth II is as good a time as any to start the bold task of relegating the monarchy to the trash heap of history.

Launched in the early 1980s, and now claiming 1,000 paid-up members, the pressure group Republic "the campaign for an elected head of state" in a nation that never had one feels it has time on its side.

"When she's going to hit 90, people are going to start saying: 'We'll have to start talking about this.'

"It's time to start debating (an end to the monarchy) now," Republic's campaign co-ordinator Graham Smith said.

In an opinion survey a year ago, MORI the London-based polling institute that counts Buckingham Palace among its clients found that 22 per cent of the British public was in favour of becoming a republic.

That was the highest such proportion since MORI first asked the question in 1993 while the proportion who preferred hanging onto the monarchy, 65 per cent, was the lowest ever.

Smith whose group enjoys support from more than a dozen members of parliament, plus a number of writers and entertainers acknowledged that the Queen has a loyal fan base.

But he argued that that is beside the point.

"Quite possibly, people would choose her if we were asked," he said, "but we've not been asked. There's never been that option."

When it comes to tactics, Republic is every bit as English as the society around it pragmatic, middle of the road, scornful of vulgar publicity stunts, let alone bloody revolution of the continental kind.

It leans more towards "road shows" in cities up and down the country to get people talking about republicanism, and is declaring June 2 the anniversary of the Queen's 1953 coronation as Republic Day.

For the Queen's 80th birthday on April 21, Republic is considering its own take on the iconic royal souvenir a commemorative tea mug, unlikely to meet any royalists' lips.

Is Republic breaking the law? Strictly speaking, yes.

The Treason Felony Act of 1848, still on the books, makes it illegal for "any person whatsoever (to) compass, imagine, invent, devise or to deprive or depose our Most Gracious Lady the Queen ... from the style, honour, or royal name of the imperial crown of the United Kingdom."

Whoever does so "shall be liable ... to be transported beyond the seas for the term of his or her natural life" which in Victorian times meant one-way "transportation" from bleak, damp England to sunny Australia.

The Guardian newspaper once tried to challenge the law, only for parliament's upper House of Lords which acts as Britain's supreme court to rule that republican talk was effectively legalized by the Human Rights Act of 1998.

"No one who advocates the peaceful abolition of the monarchy and its replacement by a republican form of government is at any risk of prosecution," one of the law lords, Lord Scott of Foscote, wrote.

Indeed, in June 2002, when the nation was celebrating the Queen's 50th year on the throne, police swooped down on 23 members of Movement Against The Monarchy, an anarchist posse, as they staged an "execute the Queen" protest.

They were arrested, then released without charge and then paid 3,500 pounds (US$ 6,100) each in out-of-court damages by the Metropolitan Police, which apologized for their wrongful detention.

Source: China Daily