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Ed Webb

Brexit and Boris Johnson Are the Legacies of Tony Blair - 0 views

  • British history has a problem with nationalism, and indeed the nation — they’re not supposed to exist, or they exist in very unusual forms. A central claim of my book is that something I call the British nation, corresponding to the territory of the UK, emerged after 1945, with a national economy, national politics, and a self-consciousness of itself as a nation called Britain. But it had a rather short life and was broken up from the 1980s.
  • Before the nation came both the empire and a set of places that were located in a global, free-trading space. What came after the nation? A fresh commitment to a globalist, and in particular European, liberal economic perspective.
  • Most recently, we’ve had a claim for the centrality of empire in twentieth-century British history, coming right up to the present. I think this very often involves a misrepresentation of what empire was, a failure to distinguish imperialism from nationalism, and an implicit continuity thesis that the empire as it was in 1914 remains a potent ideological force today.
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  • The imperialists certainly made the empire and in particular the white dominions central to politics and economics. In many ways, today’s anti-imperialists have followed them rather naively in this.
  • For the Conservatives, the white dominions in particular were central. They provided an image of the empire as a brotherhood of free white nations — a very important part of the overall story. But it was also important because the white dominions really were the important bits economically. That was where the investment went, and where a lot of the food for the United Kingdom came from.
  • India is a different matter. That was a place, of course, with a massive population. It was an important market for exports, but it was in a different league from the white dominions, and both were in a quite different position from what were strictly speaking called the colonies. It is very important to remember that before the 1940s — that is to say, in the great age of empire — trade with foreign countries was greater than with “British” countries, to use the language of the time. Liberals pointed this out again and again. They argued that the great glory of the British economy was not the empire but rather free trade. That meant trading with everybody and in practice trading a very great deal with Europe. That was where British bacon, British eggs, British iron ore, or British timber came from, and much else besides. Before the 1940s, the UK was a profoundly European economy, deeply integrated into trade and production within the European continent.
  • The UK was the largest overseas investor and the largest trader, but it was also the most industrial country in the world — far more industrialized than Germany or the United States at this time. It was more industrialized precisely because it was more globalized. It didn’t need to grow all its own food. The City was investing overseas in UK-owned enterprises, whose business was often to supply food to the UK, directly or indirectly. That in turn allowed the UK to be industrial and indeed to supply the railways, the factories, and the ships that made all this trade possible in the first place. In fact, the relations between overseas investment and industrialization were synergistic, at least in this period.
  • it’s striking how little impact decolonization had. Take the cases of India and Palestine in the 1940s: there were no major convulsions at home — nothing compared to what was happening in France during the 1950s.
  • there was actually a silent revolution brought about by “de-imperialization.” That was best exemplified by the extraordinarily rapid transition of the Conservatives from being the party of empire and Imperial Preference to being the party of free trade and of applying for accession to the Treaty of Rome in 1961. It is extraordinary that, just a few years after World War II, the Tory Party in government applied for membership of what was then called the Common Market.
  • There was a movement of people from the Caribbean in particular during the 1950s, but they were people coming from a colonial territory who had the same nationality as most people living in the United Kingdom. They were what were called “citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies,” so they weren’t really immigrants. They were people moving within the space of British nationality. Interestingly, there were more immigrants, in the sense of aliens or semialiens, coming from Ireland and continental Europe in the 1940s and ’50s. Indeed, the dominant movement of population from the 1940s right up into the 1980s was outward rather than inward. The UK was a place of net emigration in that period. A lot of that emigration was to the Commonwealth, and Australia in particular.
  • It comes as a surprise to many people that in the 1950s, the United Kingdom was still the most industrialized economy on Earth. This doesn’t fit with the “declinist” images that have so affected our understanding of this period in particular. In terms of growth rates, poorer European countries and countries elsewhere were often growing faster than the UK economy — they were catching up. The German economy caught up with the UK and overtook it in terms of GDP per capita in the 1960s, and France did the same in the 1970s. But the overall result was that the West European economies, which had been quite different in 1945 or 1950, came to be very similar by the 1980s and ’90s or the 2000s when one includes poorer countries like Spain.
  • In the 1970s and ’80s, the UK became broadly speaking self-sufficient in the foods that it could grow itself, much as Germany, France, and Italy were self-sufficient in food. What had been the great factor distinguishing the United Kingdom from continental Europe disappeared as a result of a fundamental change in British political economy. The UK became an exporter of beef and wheat, which would have been unthinkable not just in the Edwardian years but in the 1950s as well.
  • The reality is that the 1970s saw a global crisis. There were important transitions and readjustments in the British economy. That decade was also a period of political radicalism and cultural inventiveness — a period of innovation, of a sort that conservatives didn’t like one bit. That’s essentially why the 1970s have this terrible reputation.
  • She did transform the British economy, but it’s important to note that she did not increase the underlying rate of growth. Since 1979, the British economy has grown more slowly on average than it grew between 1945 and the 1970s. In that sense, she most certainly did not reverse the British decline. Nor did she reverse the British decline in relation to all the other major economies in the world
  • while manufacturing employment did go down very radically, manufacturing output remained high. Indeed, peak manufacturing output in British history came in 2008 — it wasn’t the 1970s, let alone the 1870s
  • North Sea oil was certainly important because, together with the new self-sufficiency in food, it meant that the UK no longer had to import the two things that had dominated its import bill in the past: food and oil. That meant that the UK no longer needed to have a surplus in the manufacturing balance, which went negative in 1981.
  • Quite soon, you had a permanent negative balance of trade in the British economy — a quite extraordinary thing. A tiny negative balance of trade was the stuff of politics in the 1950s and ’60s, yet in the more recent past, a permanent deficit of 4, 5, or 6 percent of GDP has no impact whatsoever. What made this deficit sustainable? The emergence of a new kind of City of London. It was not the City of the Edwardian years. It was something quite different, like an enclave, which was about bringing money into the UK as much as taking it out. It was precisely those net flows of capital into the UK that allowed it to sustain the negative balance of trade.
  • The most important thing Thatcher did, apart from opening up the economy to Europe and the world, was to encourage the increasing inequality between capital and labor and between the regions. There was an extraordinary reversal of the move toward greater equality of income, wealth, and regional development that had been taking place from 1945
  • The loss of trust in government that arose from the obvious, systematic mendacity of the Blair administration around Iraq had and continues to have profound consequences. It generated a new, deep cynicism in politics
  • It’s striking that the Conservatives have increased their vote share in every election since 1997. The idea that Boris Johnson suddenly transformed the fortunes of the party is quite wrong. That’s one legacy of Blairism — not just Brexit, but also a new, revived, and dangerous Conservative Party. If Thatcherism begot Blairism, I think Blairism begot “Johnsonism” by a very different process.
  • The UK has been a place where global capitalism does its business. There’s relatively little we could straightforwardly call British capitalism
  • there aren’t the sort of connections between business and the Conservative Party that there would have been when they were all the same people. There are, perhaps, connections between particular kinds of business and the Conservative Party — particular hedge funds, for example, or Russian oligarchs. Between them, they’re pushing the Conservatives to be a party that’s pressing for an even greater degree of tax-haven status for the British economy, making it even more of a rentier, liberalized economy than it already is.
  • We have an extraordinary politics, in which a particular fraction of capital, allied with hard-right elements of the Conservative Party, are pursuing a policy that they don’t really understand and can’t really come to terms with.
  • We’ve had great programs of political-economic change, from mobilization in World War II to going into the European Economic Community. But those were planned and thought through — there weren’t any great surprises. This one hasn’t been. It hasn’t even really been improvised. It has just been a very peculiar mess.
  • the politics of the Brexiteers themselves aren’t the politics of Brexit voters. The Brexit vote is an old vote, just like the Conservative vote. One has to credit the Conservatives with realizing that their vote was an old one and doing everything they could to sustain that vote — for example, by keeping NHS spending and pension spending up, systematically targeting welfare at the elderly and taking it away from the young
Ed Webb

Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes | UK news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.
  • The documents show that colonial officials were instructed to separate those papers to be left in place after independence – usually known as "Legacy files" – from those that were to be selected for destruction or removal to the UK. In many colonies, these were described as watch files, and stamped with a red letter W.
  • As independence grew closer, large caches of files were removed from colonial ministries to governors' offices, where new safes were installed.In Uganda, the process was codenamed Operation Legacy. In Kenya, a vetting process, described as "a thorough purge", was overseen by colonial Special Branch officers.
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  • Clear instructions were issued that no Africans were to be involved: only an individual who was "a servant of the Kenya government who is a British subject of European descent" could participate in the purge.
  • Many of the watch files ended up at Hanslope Park. They came from 37 different former colonies, and filled 200 metres of shelving. But it is becoming clear that much of the most damning material was probably destroyed. Officials in some colonies, such as Kenya, were told that there should be a presumption in favour of disposal of documents rather than removal to the UK – "emphasis is placed upon destruction" – and that no trace of either the documents or their incineration should remain.
Ed Webb

British Muslims reduced to 'second class' citizens: report - 0 views

  • British Muslims have been reduced to ‘second-class’ citizens in the United Kingdom, according to a report published by the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) on Sunday. 
  • Recently extended powers have given successive UK governments the power to remove citizenship from those who have access to another nationality. They “almost exclusively” target Muslims with South Asian heritage
  • “The message sent by the legislation on deprivation of citizenship since 2002 and its implementation largely against British Muslims of South Asian heritage is that, despite their passports, these people are not and can never be ‘true’ citizens, in the same way that ‘natives’ are,”
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  • the report also said that the reasons for losing one's citizenship have become more ‘nebulous and undefined’, thereby increasing the likelihood of the arbitrary action
  • No citizenship had been revoked in the thirty years prior to Abu Hamza, a Muslim preacher who was stripped of his nationality in 2003. Since then, the citizenship of at least 217 people has been removed
Ed Webb

How Brexit marks the end of the British story | Latest Brexit news and top stories | Th... - 0 views

  • The pride and pomp of the British in the heyday of empire did not last long. Two world wars impoverished the country and destroyed its empire. (Our 'special relationship' with the USA consisted in getting desperately needed aid during the Second World War in return for a promise to dismantle the empire. Even if the UK could have maintained the empire, which it could not, as proved by Suez, it in effect traded the empire for survival in the 1940s.)
  • Entry to the EEC/EU saved the country's economy and saw it flourish, and offered a new and significant role as one of the big three states in one of the big three blocs in the emerging new post-Cold War world, alongside the USA and China
  • British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee
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  • There was no other reason for having such a referendum; it was purely an internal Tory party affair
  • The circumstances of the 2016 referendum, its nature, and its consequences, have multiple causes that jointly led to the stupefying mess in the country and its political and constitutional order that we are now in. The Eurosceptics made good use of these other factors
  • the policy from 2010 of austerity and the resulting large and rapid increase in inequality, which affected some areas of the country and economy much more drastically than others
  • a series of bad mistakes and misjudgements by David Cameron and Ed Miliband, the leaders of the two main parties
  • the quality of MPs after decades in the EU. Membership of the EU brought a degree of general consistency and equilibrium to the economies and states of the member nations, even taking into account the misguided austerity policies after 2010 in the UK itself. This has lessened the temperature of political debate in the UK, premised as it is (unlike most other EU countries) on a deeply adversarial style of politics. Before joining the EEC the UK was a theatre of intense struggles between left and right, socialism and capitalism, managements and unions, a pervasive 'us and them' mentality infecting every major decision.That moderated, with a more temperate tone entering politics in the period between the end of Thatcher and the post-2010 coalition. But as a result, politics became somewhat less attractive to energetic, clever and ambitious people, with the result that - with some extremely honourable exceptions - the general quality of MPs is not nearly what it was.
  • Banal careerism, the unchallenged sway of the party whips, unthinking sound-bite ideas as the staple of political discourse, the fact that literally hundreds of MPs in the Tory party can support a profoundly unfit person such as Boris Johnson in the office of prime minister - this is a mark of serious decline in quality of those elected to the legislature.
  • the innate fragility and dysfunction of the UK's outdated and ramshackle constitutional order. The uncodified constitution - 'a series of understandings that no-one understands' - is very convenient for any party that commands a majority in the House of Commons, because they can do whatever they like, always getting their agenda enacted and controlling the business of the House of Commons itself.
  • no separation of powers between the legislature (parliament) and executive (the government - meaning, the cabinet and prime minister)
  • Instead of holding the government to account, therefore, parliament is in effect the creature of the government, and does what the government wants.
  • "elective tyranny"
  • The clique controls the executive, the executive controls parliament, parliament is absolute in its powers: The clique is the tail that wags the entire dog.
  • when people of lower quality, less integrity, less intelligence and less honour populate these offices of state, danger looms. And that danger has burst upon us in the form of Brexit.
  • One of the major scandals of the 2016 referendum is that its outcome has never been debated in parliament. The question, 'Shall we take the advice of 37% of the electorate to take an enormous, uncosted, unplanned and unpredictable step?' has never been debated and voted upon in our sovereign state body.
  • our hopelessly undemocratic first past the post electoral system lies at the rotten core of these arrangements. It disenfranchises the majority of voters, turning them off politics. It puts majorities into the House of Commons on minorities of the popular vote. It entrenches two-party politics, in which elections produce one-party government by turns - with the foregoing 'elective tyranny' resulting. It is a mess, and reform is urgently needed.
  • there is a huge clean-up operation required in our political and constitutional order, in addition to addressing the serious inequalities and injustices in our economy and society
  • We in the UK have skated on very thin political and constitutional ice for a long time; the wealth and prestige of empire, the nostalgic dream it left behind, the self-deceptions and illusions of those who could not see how good a future was developing for us as a leading nation in Europe, made us unaware of the danger. We have fallen through that ice, and the bitterly cold waters we now flounder in must at last wake us up.
Ed Webb

Britain's colonial shame: Slave-owners given huge payouts after abolition - Home News -... - 0 views

  • as many as one-fifth of wealthy Victorian Britons derived all or part of their fortunes from the slave economy
  • Some families used the money to invest in the railways and other aspects of the industrial revolution; others bought or maintained their country houses, and some used the money for philanthropy.
  • The British government paid out £20m to compensate some 3,000 families that owned slaves for the loss of their "property" when slave-ownership was abolished in Britain's colonies in 1833. This figure represented a staggering 40 per cent of the Treasury's annual spending budget and, in today's terms, calculated as wage values, equates to around £16.5bn.
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  • To have two Lord Chancellors in Britain in the 20th century bearing the name of a slave-owner from British Guyana, who went penniless to British Guyana, came back a very wealthy man and contributed to the formation of this political dynasty
  • The database is available from Wednesday at: ucl.ac.uk/lbs.
  • Slavery on an industrial scale was a major source of the wealth of the British empire, being the exploitation upon which the West Indies sugar trade and cotton crop in North America was based. Those who made money from it were not only the slave-owners, but also the investors in those who transported Africans to enslavement. In the century to 1810, British ships carried about three million to a life of forced labour.Campaigning against slavery began in the late 18th century as revulsion against the trade spread. This led, first, to the abolition of the trade in slaves, which came into law in 1808, and then, some 26 years later, to the Act of Parliament that would emancipate slaves. This legislation made provision for the staggering levels of compensation for slave-owners, but gave the former slaves not a penny in reparation.
  • in 1838, 700,000 slaves in the West Indies, 40,000 in South Africa and 20,000 in Mauritius were finally liberated
Ed Webb

UK riots were product of consumerism and will hit economy, says City broker | Business ... - 0 views

  • the rioting reflects a deeply flawed economic and social ethos… recklessly borrowed consumption, the breakdown both of top-end accountability and of trust in institutions, and severe failings by governments over more than two decades
  • an over-consuming west has borrowed and spent the surpluses of the increasingly productive and under-consuming East
  • Saving needs to be encouraged, and private investment needs to be channelled into asset creation, not asset inflation
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  • material values are only for the rich. The poor should get religion, etc. Marx understood the issue
  • Surprised it is from a City firm, especially one that encouraged its employees to leave the UK to avoid the 50% tax on bankers bonuses in 2009/2010. Now they are calling for more public investment
  • Blimey! What a terrible shock. Looting the result of consumerism, excessive advertising and a me-me-me society! I wouldn't have been able to work that out for myself. Two and a half cheers for Thatcher's 'There is no such thing as society. There are individuals and there are families.' So, we are now reaping the benefits of the legacy of the Thatcher/Reagan years. But how do we reverse a whole generation's worth of incredible greed, selfishness and vaingloriousness?
  • The full note isn't about the riots, it's more some ideas for reforming the UK economy. Ideas like investment to create assets rather than creating asset price inflation are valid, the same for the need for widespread public investment in infrastructure and housing.It's all useful for discussion, reflection and analysis but I expect the messenger to get shot to pieces in the comments below.
  • it has often struck me as ironic that on a planet of presently limited usable resources the measure of individual success is the one who can afford to consume the most. if a group of people were shut in a room with a finite supply of food and a choice of who stayed in the room i imagine that the individuals who were able to consume the least would be the preferred choice of companions.
  • The overall pattern has been that an over-consuming West has borrowed and spent the surpluses of the increasingly productive and under-consuming East.Increasingly productive East because Western CEO's have shifted production there to take advantage of cheap labour for short term profit.The West took centuries to build its wealth but this wealth has been given away in only a couple of decades by the process of globalisation. So far, the CEO's of big organisations have got away without being blamed for the disastrous globalisation process but I hope if we're going to examine causes of social malaise, that sooner rather than later, we turn the spotlight on their incredibly short term personal 'cashing in' at the expense of us all.
Ed Webb

The good ship Brexit's mission of free trade and empire | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • As Britain looks to make new trade deals, politicians are promoting a Brexit where multinationals rule over elected governments as well as over the people they are meant to represent. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox, Theresa May and co. have been clear in their ambitions for the global south. “The thriving economies of south and east Asia and, increasingly, Africa, are, and will become, ever more important,” said Fox in July as he gave the Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington. He spoke of the “golden economic opportunities” presented by “the rise of the collective wealth of developing countries.”
  • The drive to boost trade links with African countries has been branded “empire 2.0”, reportedly by Whitehall officials themselves. This latest scramble to capitalise on the Commonwealth and other countries in the South is just an extension of what Britain has been doing for generations.
  • “A free trade area between Britain, a largely developed country and Africa, a poor continent, was always going to exacerbate inequalities, trade deficits, and the dependency of the latter on the former. ‘Free trade’ is really just the name given to the ideology that justifies this power imbalance,” wrote Africa Kiiza of the Southern and Eastern African Trade Information and Negotiations Institute (SEATINI) last year.
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  • One of the most worrying aspects of new trade deals is the likely inclusion of an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, or similar provisions, that allow corporations to sue countries for alleged ‘discriminatory’ practices that hamper their activities or profits.
  • Last month an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favour of the oil giant Chevron after it sued the Ecuadorian government. Chevron’s subsidiary Texaco have been accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic wastewater in the Ecuadorean Amazon, polluting rivers and lakes, over the course of nearly 30 years. Campaigners told Latin American broadcaster Telesur that high rates of cancer and other disease were affecting indigenous people in the area, which they attributed to oil pollution of their watercourses. Chevron had previously been ordered to clean up extensive environmental damage, by a court in Ecuador, as well as pay £7.4billion ($9.5billion) compensation to local people. This latest ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration found that Ecuador had violated its obligations under a bilateral investment treaty signed with the US and said that the previous judgment against Chevron had been gained through fraud and corruption. Ecuador must now pay compensation to Chevron.
  • “These mechanisms under free trade agreements will give more implications not only for the state policies in our countries, but also the sovereignty of the people themselves,” said Hertani. “The people cannot sue the investors. If there are human rights violations, there have been are several cases where the people lost. We never win against the multinational corporations.”
  • Countries like Indonesia, and many others in the global south, are rich in natural resources. Multinational companies have been plundering them to the detriment of people and the environment for generations and new trade deals could make it even easier for them to do this.
  • Inequality is getting worse, as highlighted in the recent United Nations Conference on Trade and Development Trade and Development report. They point at debt – which is more than three times the size of global output – as symbolic of this.
  • “This mantra of free trade has been really central to the whole British empire, to the British imperial project, for a very long time now. It’s a very bloody history and I’m worried that the kind of Brexit envisaged by the likes of Boris Johnson, and indeed Liam Fox and Jacob Rees-Mogg, is precisely to replicate those kinds of relations which we’ve never completely got away from, but which could be made even worse after Brexit.”
Ed Webb

Government admits 'losing' thousands of papers from National Archives | UK news | The G... - 0 views

  • Thousands of government papers detailing some of the most controversial episodes in 20th-century British history have vanished after civil servants removed them from the country’s National Archives and then reported them as lost. Documents concerning the Falklands war, Northern Ireland’s Troubles and the infamous Zinoviev letter – in which MI6 officers plotted to bring about the downfall of the first Labour government - are all said to have been misplaced.
  • British colonial administration in Palestine
  • Other files the National Archives has listed as “misplaced while on loan to government department” include one concerning the activities of the Communist party of Great Britain at the height of the cold war; another detailing the way in which the British government took possession of Russian government funds held in British banks after the 1917 revolution; an assessment for government ministers on the security situation in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s; and three files about defence agreements between the UK and newly independent Malaya in the late 1950s, shortly before the two countries went to war with Indonesia.
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  • Some historians have been particularly distrustful of the Foreign Office since 2013, when the Guardian disclosed that the department had been unlawfully hoarding 1.2m historical files at a high-security compound near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. The hoard came to light during high court proceedings brought by a group of elderly Kenyans who were detained and abused during the Mau Mau insurgency in 1950s Kenya, when the Foreign Office admitted it had withheld thousands of colonial-era files.
Ed Webb

Things could be good | Dazed - 0 views

  • There is something haunting and desperate about the chokehold that white, sallow humans from southern England have over the identity of the UK. In his 2021 docu-series Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, Adam Curtis characterises post-war English society as strange and rudderless. During this period of mass emigration and rapid industrialisation, he suggests many white people entered a state of prolonged philosophical mourning over the loss of the empire; sleepwalking through a kind of ambient identity crisis, confused as to what their “story” now was. Speaking of the Black revolutionary and civil rights activist Michael de Freitas, who emigrated to London from Trinidad in the late-50s, Curtis says: “Having grown up with a picture of a strong and confident homeland at the centre of the Empire, instead, what he found was, what seemed to him, a sad and frightened country.” This feels very much the same now. Misery and spite can be felt in almost every corner of England, lying dormant like a landmine that will go off at the first sight of anyone enjoying themselves outside the parameters of white, middle-class acceptability. 
  • There is a powerful history of working-class revolt in every nation that makes up the UK, but we are taught very little about it and very rarely celebrate it. Meanwhile Brexit – a political agenda driven by right-wing politicians, aristocrats and landowners – has been consistently referred to as the working class having their voice heard for the first time in decades, which is so far from the truth it would be easy to call a “conspiracy” if it wasn’t so blatantly racist. As a result, our connections to actual working-class history are frayed and obscured, and that has a serious impact on how we act politically today.
  • Even the French middle-classes will chuck on a high vis vest and get involved in some street violence once in a while, whereas their equivalents in the UK mainly seem to deal with their grievances by bullying marginalised communities on Twitter.
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  • There is this assumption, particularly among the British middle and upper classes, that things exist to serve the individual. The shop better have the thing they want or they’re going to go sicko mode, hospitality workers are punching bags for a bad day, coastal Wales exists exclusively as a holiday destination. There is a lack of real connection to anything, which imbues society with an austere and passionless vibe.
  • At some point we’ll need to put the mindset that globalisation has instilled – one that dangles £18 flights to Italy in front of our noses while rapidly eroding the quality of life we have at home – into reverse gear, if only for a reason to get up in the morning. Many countries across Europe and the world are experiencing similar socio-economic problems following the 2007 financial crash, but when you can’t even have a decent sandwich about it… well, that is very sad.
Ed Webb

British Identity and the Legacy of Empire | openDemocracy - 0 views

  • the extent to which the legacy of the British Empire continues to influence contemporary politics and society has also been overlooked by most parties. Only the Conservatives have acknowledged it as a policy aspiration, promising in their manifesto that they will ‘strengthen the Commonwealth as a focus for promoting democratic values and development’. However, their intention to establish annual limits on non-EU migrants suggest that Conservative views towards the former empire continue to be infused with elements of colonialism – a confused message that encourages stronger Commonwealth bonds through the promotion of British values and aid whilst restricting of historic patterns of population exchange.
  • The Commonwealth provides stark evidence that imperial withdrawal in some former colonies was not controlled or bloodless and that the post-colonial legacy of the British Empire is far from entirely positive. Sustained efforts to re-evaluate the legacy of empire have proven slight, suggesting a post-empire myopia that can be somewhat attributed to the contentious nature of empire and its inheritance.
  • The extent to which the UK can be seen as a post-empire state must be questioned. For some, such as Robert Cooper, British foreign policy continues to be shaped by an ascription to ‘liberal imperialism’. Moreover, transnational constitutional ties endure, with the Monarch continuing as Head of State of sixteen states - of which the UK is but one – and fourteen British Overseas Territories. The Crown is represented in a number of differing ways within the political systems of the Commonwealth realms, providing a key constitutional role with significant—though often theoretical—powers which reflect the enduring legacy of the British parliamentary model of government. The presence of the Monarch on coins and stamps in various Commonwealth realms, and the continued prominence of other ‘banal’ symbols such as the Union Flag on some national flags, suggest the persistence of a more generous transnational Britishness.
Ed Webb

Follow the petrodollars: Why Gulf wealth matters to Britain is a question everyone shou... - 0 views

  • “The strategic value of the Gulf Arab monarchies to British capitalism and the British state,” Wearing writes, “has meant that securing and defending those monarchies from the threat posed by their own populations has long been a priority for London.” 
  • “the data show that the British government’s response to the new wave of demands for democracy region-wide was to continue a sharp increase in arms supplies to its key authoritarian allies”
  • Without doubt, Britain’s impressively violent imperial history also raises all manner of “moral questions”. And as Wearing makes clear, it was during this very period of empire - comprising a century and a half of British dominance in the Gulf - that the foundations for contemporary interdependence were established.
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  • While British arms exports to the Gulf “help the UK to maintain the military-industrial capacity required as the basis for global power projection” in the neo-imperial era, Gulf petrodollars recycled through trade and investment deals also “play an important role in addressing the key macroeconomic challenges facing the British economy and in maintaining Britain’s status as a leading capitalist nation”.
  • Though Britain has of course long been surpassed by the US in terms of superpowerdom, it maintains an “active commitment to the continuation of US hegemony … with its own state and capitalist interests seen as best pursued within that overall framework”. Given that dominance of the Gulf is crucial to the maintenance of hegemony, Wearing argues, British dealings in the region “should be understood as complementing and reinforcing US efforts to entrench a conservative regional order oriented towards Western power”.
Ed Webb

Post 'Anglo-Saxon' Melancholia - Catherine Karkov - Medium - 0 views

  • ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies developed in the context of and alongside the rise of the British Empire in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its methodologies, classifications, and way of thinking about the English, the English language, the island of Britain, and the pre-1066 past, developed side by side with the idea and image of the empire. In fact, as numerous scholars have shown, it was used to provide historic justifications for that empire and its racism. It provided the fiction of a ‘pure’ English past and its often equally fictitious institutions (trial by jury, the navy, a proto-parliamentary system of government) alongside the idea that the English were in some way a chosen people.
  • historians such as Sharon Turner, whose History of the Anglo-Saxons, appeared between 1799 and 1805, claimed direct links between the moral and intellectual qualities of the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and those of the modern English. This scholarly rediscovery of Bede and translation of other early medieval texts allowed the English, as well as the colonial Americans who saw themselves as their direct descendants, to carry these ideas with them into the modern world and into their colonies.
  • how inextricably tied to racism and racial hierarchies the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is in English history and culture, and to reemphasize that this is not just an American issue.
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  • On both sides of the Atlantic Beowulfwas translated and adapted for children as a text that could instil in the young imperialist values, nationalist pride, racism, and a myth of heroic masculinity.
  • In Joseph Bernard Davis and John Truman’s Crania Britannicaof 1865, the size and shape of skulls and other skeletal features were used to liken the medieval Britons (especially the Welsh) to contemporary African and ‘Oriental’ peoples, all of whom were lacking in social and technological sophistication. The implication was that the historic colonisation of the Welsh provided just cause for the colonisation of other lands and peoples in the modern world
  • Given this history, it is impossible to claim, as do some, that the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ is free of racist meaning in the UK
  • The term cannot be separated from its racist past and the violence it helped to justify, nor from its racist implications today, nor from the violence committed by those who in their academic defence of the term incite attacks on their colleagues. The petition signed by a group of (largely) UK academics arguing for retention of an (arguably) historically precise and critically aware use of the term is now circulating amongst white supremacists as an academic endorsement of their views.
  • another proof, as if we needed one, of the toxicity of so much of contemporary academic culture especiallyin the UK
  • I find hope in the convivial and subversive interventions of those students and scholars who are fighting for a more just, inclusive, and egalitarian medieval studies
Ed Webb

Max Hastings: Brexit's Predictable Crises in Gibraltar, the Channel, Ireland - Bloomberg - 0 views

  • All that is certain about this dispute, concerning a territory with but 34,000 residents, is that it needlessly amplifies aggravation between Britain and Spain. Logic suggests that the U.K. should cede the territory, which no longer has any possible strategic value. I urged this on Douglas Hurd, foreign secretary in the 1990s, when he bemoaned to me the hair-raising secret service reports detailing criminal activity bankrolled through Gibraltar.But I am not a politician. The view of successive British governments about such things — including the refusal to surrender the Falkland Islands to Argentina — is that to quit Gibraltar would enrage jingoistic opinion at home for no political benefit. 
  • The more neurotic a nation becomes about its place in the world, the more likely it is to cling to micro-symbols. 
  • Going back to the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson and his colleagues have dismissed the obvious impossibility of reconciling Brexit with the terms of the Irish Good Friday peace agreement, as a mere technicality. 
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  • “Trust in this British government’s good faith, never high, is now minimal … on all sides in Northern Ireland.” 
  • Johnson declared recently that Northern Ireland is a part of the U.K. in exactly the same fashion as are its other constituent parts: England, Scotland and Wales. This is simply untrue. No U.K. prime minister since Irish Partition in 1921 has sought to pretend such a thing. Modern British governments have acknowledged that Northern Ireland remains a part of the U.K. — as long as that is the wish of its own people. And polls have shown a majority in the north now favors holding a referendum on exactly that proposition.
  • Unless Britain treads very carefully indeed, which recent events suggest that this government is not good at, militant Irish Republicanism could revive, the killing on the streets resume.
  • In the grand scheme of things — compared with U.S. confrontation with China, Afghanistan threatened with anarchy, Russian disruption of the democratic West — none of the friction points between Britain and the EU threatens an immediate or severe crisis. It was always inevitable that Brexit would generate issues and disputes. But the tensions involving Gibraltar, migration and Northern Ireland highlight the perils facing Johnson’s nation as a consequence of having made the historic choice to go it alone. The standard-bearers for Brexit made grandiose claims that it would “set Britain free” to develop its full potential. But freedom can also bring loneliness. Johnson is accumulating foreign adversaries — not quite enemies, but people who do not wish him well — much faster than he is winning allies and admirers.
Ed Webb

Behind the UK government's false flag 'free speech' campaign | Education | Al Jazeera - 0 views

  • Instead of addressing a very real crisis in teaching and learning conditions that threatens to seriously degrade British universities, Boris Johnson’s ministers have thrown their energies into manufacturing a campus “free speech crisis”. Having deliberately excluded higher education from COVID-19 support, they have spent the pandemic making nonsensical claims about campus “cancel culture” and crafting legislation to protect exactly the kind of hateful speech Durham University students exercised their right not to listen to. The point is less to enshrine freedom of thought than it is to force discredited ideas upon young people.
  • The Higher Education Freedom of Speech Bill now progressing through Parliament seeks to prevent invitations to speakers from being rescinded if they are discovered to have peddled discredited or hateful ideas. The legislation targets the tactic of “no-platforming” which was adopted by the National Union of Students in 1974 to stop fascist organisations, like the National Front, from using universities to disseminate their views.
  • A 2018 Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights investigation found that there was “no wholesale censorship” at universities
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  • It is obviously easier to decimate the higher education sector after painting it as intolerant and partisan
  • what is at stake for the political right here is the opposite of freedom of expression. As draconian laws effectively criminalise political protest, the goal of the fake crisis is to foist retrograde and discredited ideologies like race science and climate denial upon universities which are among the few remaining spheres where knowledge is valued
  • Since universities also have a statutory obligation, alongside academic freedom, to uphold academic standards, repudiating specious thought is a scholarly duty, not cancel culture.
  • Education Secretary Gavin Williamson warned English universities to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism in its entirety or face sanctions despite widespread concerns. My own university has adopted the IHRA document wholesale even as scores of its academics have warned that some of the examples it gives conflate criticism of the policies, constitutional doctrines and laws of the State of Israel with anti-Semitism, and will silence those who work or speak on the topic of Israel and Palestine
  • The sharpest end of governmental cancellation is reserved for those who assess Britain’s imperial past critically. Attempts to undo silences and amnesia around empire and slavery, or question mindless glorification are frequently met with enraged denunciations of “town hall militants”, “woke worthies” and “baying mobs”, to use Communities Minister Robert Jenrick’s epithets.
  • Heritage organisation National Trust has also come under attack. Its “Colonial Countryside” project which sought to modestly illuminate some colonial and slavery connections for properties in its care was met with political fury from Conservatives. A particular red rag was Winston Churchill’s family home, Chartwell, in relation to which his imperial connections, hardly a state secret, were mentioned.
  • Dowden’s warnings to heritage bodies to act in line with government policy or face funding cuts have rightly worried museum staff about political interference in the sector.
  • the extent to which the concocted free speech crisis is influenced by far-right forces in the United States and their culture war agenda. An exposé by Open Democracy last year found that the freedom of speech White Paper, not only cited Policy Exchange (complete with false claims) liberally but also the US-based Alliance for Democratic Freedom International (ADF), a Christian anti-equality organisation which has been classified as a “hate group”. This organisation has spent £410,000 ($542,000) on lobbying in the UK since 2017, also getting involved in campus disputes.
  • Behind the fabricated cultural battles and false flag “free speech” campaigns, a real battle is now unfolding, a fight to defend critical thought, robust scholarship, and the right to challenge the line that wealth and power would have us all acquiesce to.
Ed Webb

The Grenfell Tower Fire Was Part of Britain's Colonial Legacy - 0 views

  • As the tower which took Field Marshall Grenfell’s name was being completed in 1974, the empire he had helped build was in the final stages of its collapse. The countries where he had served, fought, and killed to enforce British control were finally freeing themselves of their colonisers and becoming independent nations.
  • a global clash of economic interests: between those from the newly independent states who wanted great state control of businesses, and those from the former colonial masters who wanted to ensure these new governments could not disrupt the flow of goods and profits along the old imperial lines.
  • The new global economy was deregulated, and a new philosophy took control: states should not interfere in the market; they must remove regulation and allow business to thrive
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  • Such was the belief in this new economic model that Thatcher and her allies also ensured it was imposed in the UK. Sweeping acts of privatisation and deregulation transformed this country’s economy, and buried in the long list of changes was a small footnote: when the construction sector was deregulated in 1984, a longstanding restriction was lifted preventing the use of combustible materials on the walls of tall buildings.
  • why had so many people from around the world arrived in the UK and found themselves consigned to lower paid jobs which required reliance on social housing? Part of the answer is, of course, the British Empire.
  • of the 68 Grenfell residents killed (four of the victims were visitors), only 11 were white (a mix of British, Irish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian victims).
  • on 14 June 2017, Grenfell Tower—a building named after a former colonial leader—was covered in combustible plastic and filled with a community who traced their family or personal history back to countries conquered by Britain in the two centuries before. Race has repeatedly been described by lawyers acting for bereaved families at the Grenfell Tower Inquiry as ‘the elephant in the room’. This is true—but it is also empire.
  • six of the victims were either Egyptian or of Egyptian descent, meaning they died in a tower bearing the name of the British army commander who had led a force which had invaded and then controlled and plundered their ancestors’ home
  • if you turn over the stones of many stories about Britain today it is not long before you find the legacy of our imperial history
  • to acknowledge imperial history and its ongoing legacy is not to be disrespectful—it is merely to tell the truth
Ed Webb

Muslims mourn the Queen under Prevent's watchful eye - 0 views

  • while offering condolences is part of the Islamic faith, a question remains as to what motivates both the need to issue these statements as well as the urgency with which they were thrust into the public domain. For British Muslims, as we know, citizenship has always been conditional. And now, counter-terror and anti-extremism measures such as Prevent work hard to ensure that Muslims stay in line. So an occasion such as the Queen’s death isn’t an opportunity for sincere reflection or honesty – rather it serves as a test of loyalty.
  • maybe the effect of Prevent’s surveillance and thought-criminalisation is so insidious that Muslims have internalised it, causing them to believe unquestioningly that these are their true feelings
  • There are, no doubt, British Muslims who feel anger over the romanticisation of the Queen and the whitewashing of her reign. There are British Muslims who would like to see the monarchy abolished, not least because it is a fundamental symbol of inequality in this country. And there are British Muslims whose grief is reserved for their grandparents who lived, and died, under the boot of British colonialism.
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  • Prevent, and the associated fear of counter-terror surveillance, has caused a throttling of Muslims’ collective and individual voices. Britain wants Muslim immigrants to embrace being British, but without allowing them the rights and freedoms to which white British people have a claim, including freedom of speech
  • whether or not the responses from Muslim organisations were a conscious attempt to shield these organisations, and Muslims at large, from state suspicion and criminalisation, they succeed in both depoliticising and de-historicising Muslim civil society
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