Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

  Meanwhile the refugee crisis intensified over the summer of 2015. Far from being moved to compassion the right-wing press ratcheted up scare stories. Writing in The Sun, Katie Hopkins dehumanised the refugees and proposed tried and tested nineteenth-century methods. ‘Rescue boats?’ she exclaimed. ‘I’d use gunships to stop illegal immigrants. Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches.’58 One of those insects turned out to be Hamza, an English teacher from Syria who was interviewed when she reached Budapest in September 2015. Powerfully she exposed the contradiction between the West’s bombing of Syria and its shutting the gates against the refugees it created. ‘All the governments make this war on Syria. I don’t know why’, she said. ‘They put their hands in everything, even in the war. And now they stop us, preventing us to go to their countries. I don’t know why. So where we go, where we go? We can’t stay in the war. The president there will kill us. They will do something bad to my children, to my daughters.’59

  Intervention was about to intensify. On 2 December 2015, three weeks after the Paris attacks of 13 November, the House of Commons approved military intervention in Syria alongside the United States and France by 397 votes to 223. David Cameron argued that in the previous year British security services had ‘foiled no fewer than seven different plots against our people […] we will be safer and better off in the long term if we can get rid of the so-called Caliphate which is radicalising Muslims, turning people against us and plotting atrocities on the streets of Britain’. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn riposted that British bombing, on the contrary, would ‘increase the short-term risks of terrorist attacks in Britain’. Green Party MP Caroline Lucas agreed that bombing by what Daesh called ‘the crusader West’ was ‘an incredibly effective recruiting sergeant’ that had brought 30,000 volunteers from a hundred countries to fight in Syria. The debate, however, was turned by Labour Shadow Foreign Secretary Hilary Benn who argued somewhat perversely that ISIS was fascist and that in intervening against it Britain was not acting as a crusading or imperial power but in a time-honoured British anti-fascist tradition.

  What we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. It is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists, trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco. It is why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for justice. My view is that we must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria.60

  Benn lightly sidestepped the fact that volunteers who had fought fascism in Spain had been roundly criticised as communists by the pro-Munich establishment and that the last time Britain had intervened against a ‘fascist’ dictator in the Middle East was Suez.

  Critics who warned that bombings in Syria, as in Iraq, would provoke jihadist responses were right, although the responses in Britain did not come until the US bombing campaign Operation Inherent Resolve led by Donald Trump in the spring of 2017. In the meantime, however, immigration and fear of terrorist attacks intensified an embattled British nationalism that fed directly into Brexit.

  Brexit: The Revenge of Colonial Nostalgia

  The redefinition of British and French identities, largely in response to perceived threats from Islamist jihadism and mass migration from the Near East and North Africa, which reached a high point in the summer of 2015, had a powerful impact on the relations of these two countries with the European Union. Of course, Eurosceptic attitudes had a history and dynamic of their own, and had been gathering force since Margaret Thatcher’s Bruges speech and the Maastricht Treaty, but they were reinforced by colonialist and imperialist sentiments that were shaped by these global factors.

  In both Britain and France extreme nationalist parties gained traction since 2010, hammering away on issues of national difference, national sovereignty, and national ambitions apart from and outside what was seen as the European Union ‘superstate’. This success had an influence on mainstream parties of both right and left which feared the slippage of their vote to the nationalist Right. At this point, however, the national narratives parted company. The British Conservative Party opted to deal with divisions within its own ranks by offering a referendum on membership of the European Union, while in France a new presidential candidate and movement emerged, independent of the mainstream parties, to take on and defeat the challenge of the nationalist Right.

  Speeches delivered by Nigel Farage to the UKIP party conference in Birmingham in September 2013 and by Marine Le Pen to her supporters in Marseille the same month were strikingly similar in argument and rhetoric. They were hostile to immigration, defensive of sovereignty and rooted in a proud history. According to Farage:

  The fact is we just don’t belong in the European Union. Britain is different. Our geography puts us apart. Our history puts us apart. Our institutions produced by that history put us apart. We think differently. We behave differently […] I believe that leaving the Union and reclaiming our destiny will create the most exciting opportunity for national renewal in our lifetime […] We get our money back. We get our borders back. We get our Parliament back. We get our fisheries back. We get our own seat in on the bodies that actually run the world […] There are those who say we can’t go it alone. That our global influence will decline because we are small. Those are the true voices of Little England. We speak for Great Britain.61

  In Marseille Marine Le Pen spoke likewise of French independence and exceptionalism, while using more abstract terms such as liberty and appealing to very French tropes such as ‘honour and glory’:

  First of all, France must regain her liberty. Her liberty as a state and as a nation. A free France is a sovereign and independent France […] To regain our sovereignty is to regain our liberty to make laws instead of having most of them made in Brussels without our knowledge or against our will. It is to regain control over our budget and control over our currency […] It is to regain our frontiers at last […] All that, my friends means immediately rethinking our relationship with the European Union […] The policy of independence that I proclaim has its models and its previous incarnations that have often covered the history of our country with honour and glory.62

  Conservative leader David Cameron told his first party conference in 2006 that Conservatives would regain power only when they ‘stopped banging on about Europe’. Euroscepticism, however, would not go away, and was the lifeblood of the right wing of his party. The European Union was seen as a foreign power, a German empire, with federalist pretensions that disregarded British national interests. European institutions were deemed to be unelected, bureaucratic and opposed to popular sovereignty. Matters were made worse by the Eurozone crisis after 2009, which required bail-outs of struggling Mediterranean economies by central European institutions, and by the rising tide of migrants who, once in Europe, could not be stopped until they reached the Channel.63 In a bid to silence the Eurosceptic Right once and for all, Cameron announced in his Bloomberg speech of January 2013 that a new Conservative government would negotiate a new settlement with its European partners on the basis of which there would be an in/out referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.64 This did not prevent and even encouraged the rise of UKIP, which topped the poll in the European elections of 25 May 2014 with 27.5 per cent of the vote, just as the Front National topped the poll in France with 17.9 per cent.

  The arguments of those wishing to leave the European Union combined an uneasy mixture of Little Englandism and a global version of Britannic nationalism. The Brexit mantra was to ‘take back control’ of Britain’s laws, money and borders. Immigration was the main concern, both as a material threat to jobs and demands on the NHS and schools, and as a cultural threat to British national identity. Overall, the ambition was for Britain to regain the national unity and greatness that she had last enjoyed in the Second World War. Many of these sentiments were captured by the roving reporters of the national press and BBC. In the West Mi
dlands town of Dudley, where 10 per cent of the population was foreign-born, mainly Asian, a local Briton interviewed in a pub asserted the superiority of the white British over non-white migrants. ‘At the end of the day they are guests here. This is a historic country for England’, he said, meaning no doubt ‘for the English’.65 A year later, on the eve of the referendum, three generations of a family were interviewed on a council estate in Hull, elected UK City of Culture in 2007, also with an immigrant population of 10 per cent and one of the most deprived cities in the country. The grandmother, aged 88, was said to have ‘survived the war’. Sharon, her daughter, said that she would not vote for Nigel Farage because ‘you always see UKIP as racist. But I like what he says, that British bit. He’s not saying, “let’s kick them all out”, he’s saying, “stand on your own two feet and get on with it”’. ‘Like we used to be,’ added her husband Geoff, ‘stand by ourselves again’.66

  A global version of Britannic nationalism was also powerful in the argument for Brexit. The referendum, it was felt, would finally resolve the tension between membership of Europe, with its inconvenient rules, and leadership of the empire or Commonwealth. This debate had been raging since the days of Churchill, Bevin and Macmillan. Because the decline of the Great Britain seemed to coincide with her entry into Europe as well as with decolonisation, it was argued that to leave Europe would open the way to the recovery of some kind of imperial role. What this might mean covered a number of possibilities. One was to refashion the ‘great commercial republic’ of which Adam Smith had spoken and which had been the driving force of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even David Cameron told The Independent on 19 March 2016 that he wanted Britain to be ‘a swashbuckling, trading, successful buccaneer nation of the twenty-first century’, but ‘within the EU’.67 Terms such as ‘swashbuckling’ and ‘buccaneer’ were especially dear to Brexiteers, an empire seen through the lens of Pirates of the Caribbean but also alluding to the reality of a trading empire underpinned by the man-of-war and gunboat. This option was not lost on City bankers, who occasionally played at the limits of the rules. They imagined, according to one of them, that ‘the UK can thrive by “reverting” to the model of an entrepôt trading and financing island-nation. Behind this is the notion that Britain’s imperial, trading DNA still flows through the veins of places like Singapore and Hong Kong.’68 There was no doubt in the mind of the Brexiteers that this was possible, given Britain’s illustrious history. ‘We used to run the biggest empire the world has ever seen’, boasted former Mayor of London Boris Johnson in February 2016. ‘Are we really unable to do trade deals?’69

  Another idea of empire was that of Greater Britain, the white settler Dominions, which had been the heart of the Commonwealth and were now to be revived in a new incarnation, the ‘Anglosphere’. These Dominions had criticised Britain when Macmillan engaged in talks to join the European Community, for fear of losing their trade deals with Britain. Now the boot was on the other foot, and Britain was looking for trade deals with former Commonwealth countries. Visiting Melbourne in 2013 Boris Johnson cited the case of a teacher in London of Australian origin who had been sent home as an

  infamous consequence, as we all know, of a historic and strategic decision that this country took in 1973. We betrayed our relationships with Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand, and entered into preferential trading arrangements with what was then the European Economic Community […] By a fluke of history [Australia] happens to be intimately cognate with Britain. I don’t just mean that we once supplied them with the dregs of the Victorian penal system, or that we have cricket and rugby in common. I mean that we British are more deeply connected with the Australians – culturally and emotionally – than with any other country on earth.70

  This quasi-apology for the ‘betrayal’ of 1973 asserted a common identity and destiny of the English-speaking peoples, based on a shared culture and history, a spirit of enterprise and free institutions, all of which were different from what was found in continental Europe. Early in 2016 David Davis, who had lost out to Cameron in the race for the Conservative Party leadership in 2005, reinforced the point:

  We must see Brexit as a great opportunity to refocus our economy on global, rather the regional, trade. This is an opportunity to renew our strong relationships with Commonwealth and Anglosphere countries. These parts of the world are growing faster than Europe. We share history, culture and language. We have family ties. We even share similar legal systems. The usual barriers to trade are largely absent.71

  A third fantasy of empire, which would come to be called Empire 2.0, was nostalgia for lost colonies in India and Africa. A rose-tinted image of the British Raj had been nurtured by many a Merchant-Ivory film, and a new but familiar take on the Raj, Indian Summers, with British officials and businessmen and their flowery wives gathered in Simla, away from the heat and dust, was screened in the springs of 2015 and 2016. A public opinion poll of July 2014 found that 59 per cent of UK respondents thought the empire was ‘something to be proud of’ against 19 per cent who said it was a source of shame; 49 per cent thought that former colonies were better off as a result of British rule against 15 per cent who did not; finally 34 per cent wished that Britain still had an empire.72 This was nevertheless a divisive issue. Only 48 per cent of young people were proud of the empire against 65 per cent of those aged over 60. And when Shashi Tharoor, former UN undersecretary-general and Indian Congress politician, argued before students in the Oxford Union on 28 May 2015 that ‘Britain’s rise for two hundred years was financed by its depredations in India’ and that ‘We were denied democracy, so we had to snatch it, seize it from you’, the video of his speech on YouTube went viral.73

  There were, however, contradictions between the campaign for a Little England and that for a global Britain. Many of those who voted to leave the EU were in parts of England that felt ‘left behind’ by globalisation. The development of the global economy had wrecked the staple industries of coal and cotton, steel and shipbuilding, which had underpinned empire in its heyday and kept their communities together. They then found themselves paying for the global economic crash of 2008 by nearly ten years of austerity through cuts to social services, education and benefits. They took out their anger on the Cameron–Osborne government which was seen to be allied to the global elite and had imposed that austerity. They also took it out on the EU, which was seen to be allied to the same elite and which at the same time was letting immigrants penetrate its borders in the Mediterranean and Balkans.

  The referendum vote of 23 June 2016 was a victory for those who subscribed to Little England, orchestrated by those who believed in global Britain, a rebooted fantasy of the British Empire. While London voted by 60 per cent to remain in the EU, England-without-London voted by 55.4 per cent to leave. Wales voted narrowly to leave but Scotland voted by 62 per cent and Northern Ireland by 56 per cent to remain.74 Leave voting was heavy in former manufacturing areas ‘left behind’ by globalisation and deindustrialisation, such as Stoke-on-Trent (69 per cent leave) and Sunderland (61 per cent leave) but also in seaside resorts like Scarborough (62 per cent leave) and Eastbourne (57 per cent leave) who felt ‘left out’ by the liberal elites of London and Brussels. Among those hostile to immigration fully 80 per cent voted to leave.75 Hostility to immigrants was acted out before and after the vote. A week before the referendum pro-Remain Labour MP Jo Cox was killed in Birstall, Yorkshire, by a local man shouting ‘This is for Britain!’ On 25 June, The Sun proclaimed, ‘Goodbye Germany, France and the rest […] a new Britain is rising from the ashes’. Inside it published a picture of African refugees adrift on a rubber boat with the caption, ‘It’s business as usual in the Med’.76 In the eight weeks after the referendum 2,300 racist incidents took place as white Britons told East European migrants and Muslims to ‘get the fuck out of our country’ or physically assaulted them, aiming to reclaim ‘their’ country.77

  And so the Empire struck back. Firs
t, in response to the allied bombing of Syria, in the shape of jihadist execution of Western hostages and attacks on soldiers and Jews in mainland France and Britain. Second, also as a result of war in the Middle East and more widely, in the form of a wave of immigrants into Europe that reached a peak in the summer of 2015. The response of Britain and France was to pull up the drawbridge against immigration, to tighten security and to redraw the boundaries of national identity even more tightly. This had the effect of excluding and alienating immigrant population, especially those of Muslim origin, a tiny minority of which took up arms to punish the colonial aggressor. The strengthening of national identity, including in the British case renewed fantasies about a global Britain free of the EU, together with the anger of those suffering the effects of the global economic crisis, often blamed on immigration, were driving forces in the June 2016 vote for Brexit.

  10

  Fantasy, Anguish and Working Through

  On 13 July 2016, the day she became prime minister, Theresa May announced that ‘As we leave the European Union, we will forge a bold new positive role for ourselves in the world, and we will make Britain a country that works not for a privileged few, but for every one of us.’ She vowed to fight ‘burning injustice’ which meant that ‘If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white.’ She understood that ‘if you’re from an ordinary working class family […] you can just about manage but you worry about the cost of living and getting your kids into a good school’.1 This combined a number of promises that were in tension with each other. Brexit would break the shackles that supposedly prevented Great Britain from acting as a sovereign power on the world stage and permit her to ‘take back control’ in order further to restrict immigration. Restrictions on immigration in the name of monocultural nationalism were one of the main Tory levers for defending the interests of the white working class. However, those same restrictions inflicted ‘burning injustices’ on non-white populations who were increasingly considered to be illegal immigrants. These contradictions did not appear straight away but gradually they would be exposed.