Empires of the Mind
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Although she had personally voted Remain, Theresa May gave the whip hand in government to leading Brexiteers: Boris Johnson was appointed to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Liam Fox took International Trade, and David Davis became Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. On 29 March 2017 May formally announced Britain’s intention to leave the EU under Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon: ‘I want Britain to be what we have the potential, talent and ambition to be – a great, global trading nation that is respected around the world and strong, confident and united at home.’2 She clearly enjoyed the support of much of the British public. That morning, a woman in the former colliery town of Hetton-le-Hole, Sunderland, interviewed for Radio 4, said, ‘I think it’s the right thing that we leave and build our better Britain back to where it used to be. You know, make Britain great again.’3 May’s Brexit agenda tapped into the sense that while the British Empire had declined, even fallen, it might be conjured back into existence by a historic sense of superiority and entitlement that only increased as that decline took place (Figure 10.1).
Figure 10.1 ‘Make Britain great again’: Brexit supporter at UKIP conference, 16 September 2016.
Getty Images / Matt Cardy / Stringer / 606180624
It did not take long for the hollowness of those fantasies to be revealed. In the first place, Britain followed the American lead in a renewed campaign of bombing against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. This provoked a backlash of terrorist attacks in London and Manchester that were inspired by ISIS. Second, the civil service leaked ironic comments about Britain’s bid to found an Empire 2.0, a balloon that was rudely burst by former subjects of Empire 1.0 or their descendants. Third, it became clear that the ‘global trading nation’ was a new incarnation of the neo-liberal, low-regulation, low-tax empire that had been developed since the 1980s and in which many leading Brexiteers had a financial interest. Fourth, the idea was propounded that while Britain would restore ties with old friends in the Commonwealth, her friends in the former white Dominions were more solicited than those in the Caribbean.
The US-led bombing attacks on ISIS, codenamed Operation Inherent Resolve, was stepped up under President Trump in March 2017, with the aim of destroying ISIS bases in both Mosul and Raqqa. British, French and American planes bombed Mosul on 17 March, killing at least 150 civilians. On 18 March a mosque near Raqqa was destroyed, killing fifty-two, while on 20 March a school being used as an air-raid shelter was destroyed at al-Massoura, near Raqqa, killing thirty-three people, including children.4 Back in London on Wednesday, 22 March, a driver drove a car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge, killing five people, and then knifed a police constable guarding the Palace of Westminster. The perpetrator was Adrian Elms, 52, the mixed-race son of a teenage white mother, who had been bullied as ‘black Abe’ at school in Tunbridge Wells and been sentenced to prison in 2000 and 2003 for slashing local men he quarrelled with in Wales and Eastbourne. In prison for the second time in the wake of 9/11 he converted to Islam and became Khalid Masood. He was known to M15 but regarded as a ‘peripheral figure’.5 No attempt was made to link his deeds to the coalition raids that had taken place only days earlier.
Two months later, on Monday, 26 May 2017, a suicide bomber blew himself up at a pop concert in Manchester Arena, killing twenty-two and injuring fity-nine, mostly young people. It was a British Bataclan. The bomber was Salman Abedi, aged 23, a Libyan whose family had fled the Gaddafi regime in 1980 but who had returned briefly with his father to fight against Gaddafi with the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in 2011. While his father remained in Tripoli, Salman returned to Manchester where he first ‘went off the rails’ with vodka and cannabis, then converted to Islam, wearing traditional Arab dress. No link was made to the British intervention in Libya in 2011, effectively destroying the state, until Jeremy Corbyn argued that ‘many experts, including professionals in our intelligence and security services, have pointed to connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries and terrorism at home’. Prime Minister Theresa May sharply scolded him for suggesting that ‘terror attacks in Britain are our own fault […] there can never be an excuse for terrorism’.6
An Islamophobic backlash was not slow in coming. Katie Hopkins immediately tweeted ‘22 dead – number rising […] We need a final solution’.7 On 18 June Darren Osborne, aged 47, who had been radicalised by the propaganda of the English Defence League and Britain First, drove a truck into a group of Muslims outside Finsbury Park mosque, shouting ‘I want to kill all Muslims’. He killed one and injured eleven and was saved from lynching by the crowd only by the intervention of the imam. Outside Downing Street Theresa May returned to the charge: ‘As I said here two weeks ago, there has been far too much tolerance of extremism in our country for many years, and that means extremism of any kind, including Islamophobia.’ The problem was that she had called the Manchester attack ‘terrorism’ while the Finsbury Park attack was mere ‘extremism’. For journalist Nesrine Malik the attack on Muslims was a function of both incitement to hate crime and of the ‘normalisation’ of such crimes which now simply ‘feel part of the scenery’.8
Meanwhile the coalition forces stepped up their bombing of Raqqa and Mosul with thirty-five attacks on 15–16 June alone and The Observer ran a leader entitled ‘We are part of a coalition dealing death in Syria and Iraq’.9 A week later, on Saturday night, 23 June 2017, a group of three led by Pakistan-born Muslim convert Khurum Shazad Butt, aged 27, who had once worked on the London Underground, mowed down pedestrians on London Bridge and ran amok in Borough Market, killing seven and injuring forty-eight people. Theresa May responded like a headteacher, declaring ‘Enough is enough’ and again that there was ‘far too much toleration of extremism in our country’. She then adopted a colonialist position, arguing that extremism would be defeated only when ‘we turn people’s minds away from this violence and make them understand that our values – pluralist British values – are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate’.10
This arrogance extended to dealing with international criticism of the coalition offensive. In July 2017 Amnesty International reported that coalition forces were using unnecessarily powerful weapons, killing many thousands of civilians, and committing human rights violations and possibly war crimes. Its spokesman rejected the claim of the Ministry of Defence that the RAF bombing of Mosul had caused no civilian casualties.11 The task of rejecting the reports as ‘irresponsible and naïve’ was left to General Rupert Jones, the deputy commander of the Combined Joint Task Force and most senior British commander involved. ‘The sad reality’, he said, ‘is that you cannot take a city like Mosul without risk. This is probably the toughest urban fight that has been fought since the Second World War.’ He had reason to defend the reputation of British armed forces, being the son of Colonel H. Jones who was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry leading the 2nd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment at the Battle of Goose Green on 28 May 1982.12
Intervention in Syria and Iraq, which was supposed to demonstrate that Britain was still a great power, was accompanied by the revival of claims that Britain would return even more convincingly to being an imperial power after Brexit. The term Empire 2.0 was originally ironic in its conception, coined by civil servants sceptical about Trade Secretary Liam Fox’s aim of building closer trading ties with African Commonwealth countries.13 One of them suggested that this was a revival of Cecil Rhodes’ dream of joining up the British Empire from the Cape to Cairo. Liam Fox dismissed the term, although it was later pointed out that he had chosen to hang a portrait of Cecil Rhodes in his Whitehall office.14
There were astonished reactions to this magical thinking from those who had experienced the reality of Empire 1.0. Shashi Tharoor, whose criticisms of the British Empire has taken the Oxford Union by storm in 2015, published Inglorious Empire, a sustained attack on the British Raj, in March 2017. He pointed out that ‘the British public is woefully ignorant of the realities of the Bri
tish Empire, and what it meant to its subject peoples’ and urged that ‘the need to temper British imperial nostalgia with postcolonial responsibility has never been stronger’.15 Joining the media debate, he warned that in India, which was currently celebrating seventy years of independence from Britain, the notion of Empire 2.0 would go down ‘like a lead balloon’. Quoting Tharoor, David Olusoga, author of Black and British, underlined that empire was discussed by the British only on their own terms.
[T]he national conversation about the lost empire is too often an internal monologue, largely focused on what ‘we’ did or did not do, and whether or not ‘we’ should be proud of it. What ‘they’ – the peoples of the former empire and current Commonwealth – felt about it then and think about it now, rarely enters the solipsistic debate […] Empire 2.0 is a fanciful vision of the future based on a distorted remembering of the past. It’s a delusion and, like all delusions, has the potential to lull us into a false sense of security and lead us to make bad decisions.16
Examples of how this delusional thinking might lead to inappropriate views and bad decisions were not long in coming. Boris Johnson, visiting a pagoda in Myanmar, formerly Burma, in January 2017, began to recite Kipling’s line, ‘Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!’, and had to be stopped by the British ambassador before he got to the insulting ‘Bloomin’ idol made o’ mud / Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd’.17 When Spain announced that it would reassert its claim to Gibraltar if Britain left Europe, former Conservative leader Michael Howard tendentiously reminded viewers of Sky News on 2 April 2017 that:
thirty years ago this week another woman prime minister sent a task force half way across the world to defend the freedom of another small group of British people against another Spanish-speaking country. And I’m absolutely certain that our current prime minister will show the same resolve in standing by the people of Gibraltar.18
The idea of the ‘great, global trading nation’ was the centre-piece of the Leave argument. Only a hard Brexit, leaving the single market and the customs union, could give Britain the free hand to make her own free trade treaties. Outside Europe, Britain would be able to restore the ‘great commercial republic’ of which Adam Smith had spoken, or in David Cameron’s words, make it the ‘swashbuckling […] buccaneer nation’ it once had been. Meanwhile Nick Timothy, Theresa May’s Joint Chief of Staff, proposed that the new hero of Brexit should be Joseph Chamberlain, a Unionist who broke with the Liberal Party over its policy of Home Rule for Ireland, becoming Colonial Secretary in the Salisbury government of 1895. This case was attacked by former Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, Nicholas Macpherson, who argued that Chamberlain’s ‘imperialist vision of a Greater Britain proved to be a fantasy’. His ‘provocations led to the outbreak of the Boer War’ while his project to make the empire into a protectionist area split the Conservative Party. Timothy was obliged to resign from Downing Street after the Conservatives’ poor performance in the June 2017 elections.19
First attempts by the British government to do its own trade deals did not meet with great success. Theresa May travelled to India with a large trade delegation in November 2016 but her enthusiasm for free trade was contradicted by her obsession with reducing immigration numbers, which greatly affected Indian students coming to study in the United Kingdom. There was a strong sense that Britain was interested in India’s business but not in her people. Headlines in India when she was Home Secretary ran ‘Take our money and then get out’.20
Meanwhile it became increasingly clear that the ‘great, global trading nation’ free from EU red tape and the European Court of Justice that was the dream of Brexit ministers and their business friends was a Singapore-style low-regulation, low-tax, low-wage financial and commercial empire that exploited workers in developing countries and was designed to hide profits where the taxman would not find them. The leak of the so-called Paradise papers in November 2017 revealed that global businesses like Nike, registered in Portland, Oregon, employed low-paid workers in Vietnam and Indonesia to make their shoes, which were warehoused in Belgium. The UK profits of Nike were hidden in Bermuda, a British overseas territory where the law firm Appleby serviced an offshore tax haven for many other global companies. One of them, the UK company Serco, ran immigration detention centres for the Australian government at Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean and for the British government at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre for women in Bedford, where numerous cases of sexual abuse were reported. What The Guardian called a ‘globally mobile republic’ was a hydra of multinational corporations and webs of the super-rich making money out of slave-like labour and desperate migrants of the developing world and using some of the oldest parts of the British Empire in order to avoid taxes.21
This neo-liberal project demonstrated the vacuity of promises to tackle ‘burning injustice’. Ironically, the Conservative electorate was being kept on board by promises that Brexit would deal with social issues by reducing immigration, rather than any social investment or social reform. On 2 December 2017, Alan Milburn, former Labour minister, resigned from his chairmanship of the Social Mobility Commission, taking the rest of the Commission with him. In his letter to Theresa May he said that ‘whole communities and parts of Britain are being left behind economically and hollowed out socially. The growing sense that we have become an us and them society is deeply corrosive of our cohesion as a nation […] more and more people are feeling that Britain is becoming more unfair rather than less’.22 Four weeks later Andrew Adonis, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, also resigned, telling Theresa May that her government was ‘hurtling towards the EU’s emergency exit with no credible plan for the future of British trade and European cooperation, all the while ignoring […] the crises of housing, education, the NHS, social and regional inequality which are undermining our nation and feeding a populist upsurge’.23 Increasingly it appeared that while growing inequalities had fuelled the vote against the EU, leaving the EU risked making those inequalities worse.
The plan that Britain would leave Europe and become a more global power through its ties with the Commonwealth was highlighted by Boris Johnson in September 2017. ‘We will be able to intensify old friendships around the world, not least with fast-growing Commonwealth economies, and to build a truly global Britain’, he declared, finishing with, ‘I believe that we can be the greatest country on Earth’.24 One burning question was, of which Commonwealth was he thinking? Was it the white Dominions, which had become known as the Anglosphere, which he had praised during his 2013 visit to Australia? Or was it the Commonwealth in general, including India and former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean? For Philip Murphy, director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, there was little doubt. He argued that ‘Eurosceptics, currently in the ascendant, are implicitly rehabilitating the racialized, early twentieth-century notion of the Commonwealth as a cosy and exclusive Anglo-Saxon club’, and in this was providing ‘new clothes’ for the British Empire.25
Opening the Commonwealth Games on the Australian Gold Coast on 4 April 2018, Prince Charles declared that ‘over forty years these friendly games have shown the potential of the Commonwealth to connect people of different backgrounds and nationalities’. Unfortunately, some backgrounds and nationalities were excluded. Indigenous Australians protesting with chants of ‘Always was, always will be Aboriginal land’ were driven away by mounted police.26 Back in Britain, a scandal broke over the ‘Windrush generation’ of immigrants from the Caribbean, many of whom had come as children and also as British subjects in the 1950s and 1960s. It became clear that, to quote Theresa May’s speech on taking office, ‘If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly […] than if you’re white.’ In the ‘hostile environment’ she had created British Caribbeans were now being classed as illegal immigrants in order to meet its draconian target of reducing immigration to 100,000 per year. Because of multiple checks on their status as British citizens for which they could not provide docume
ntation many of the Windrush immigrants had lost their jobs or been refused accommodation or NHS treatment. Under a policy of ‘deport first, appeal later’, an undisclosed number had been sent to detention centres ahead of deportation. The Reverend Guy Hewitt, High Commissioner of Barbados, said that ‘Seventy years after Windrush we are facing a new wave of hostility. This is about people saying, as they said seventy years ago, “Go back home”. It is not good enough for people like this who gave their lives for this country, to be treated like this.’27 David Lammy, born in London to Guyanese parents and MP for Tottenham, told Home Secretary Amber Rudd that ‘this is a day of national shame and it has come about because of the “hostile environment” policy that was begun under the prime minister’.28
Salman Rushdie argued in 1982 that the notion of ‘the British people’ silently excluded non-white populations. Despite the racism they encountered on their arrival and confrontations with the police in 1981 the ‘Windrush generation’ acquired a privileged status as the pioneers of postwar immigration. Amber Rudd was forced to resign but the relegation of the Caribbean immigrants to the status of illegal immigrants demonstrated the pervasiveness of the colonial mentality. Keith Mitchell, prime minister of Grenada, attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in London, said ‘I think we have been making the point that Britain, being our former colonial masters, has not necessarily treated us in the postcolonial period in the way we expected.’29 ‘I’ll be crucified for saying this’, responded Jamaican-British poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, who had lived in South London for fifty-five years, ‘but I believe that racism is very much part of the cultural DNA of this country, and probably has been since imperial times’.30