If anything, Britain is owed a debt for its imperial and colonial endeavours, argues Daniel Hannan in the Mail. “Our species benefited hugely from the industrial revolution, the abolition of the slave trade and the defeat of Nazism.” Here’s an excerpt.
Some senior retired mandarins, including the former Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill, have just produced a report, ‘The World in 2040’, which is aimed more or less explicitly at an incoming Labour Government.
It sets out their vision of how Britain should conduct itself as a “medium-sized off-shore nation”. In essence, they think we should be humbler, readier to pool our sovereignty and less hung up on our past.
They want Britain to be more engaged on climate change, and “to share rights in multinational institutions with emerging powers”. Perhaps most strikingly, they propose renaming the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office and abandoning its headquarters, the handsome Victorian palace on King Charles Street designed by George Gilbert Scott.
“Modernising premises – perhaps with fewer colonial-era pictures on the walls – might help create a more open working culture and send a clear signal about Britain’s future?”
It is not clear whether that ungrammatical question mark is an attempt to ape the rising intonation of young people or whether the authors know, on some level, that what they are asking for is risible.
For one of this country’s greatest assets, embodied in that building’s grand staircases and marbled meeting halls, is its story. Few nations have done more, down the years, to promote human rights and the rule of law.
When we talk of countries becoming more developed, we mean (though we are too polite to put it this way) that they are becoming more like us. In other words, that they are acquiring free parliaments, independent courts, uncensored media and secure property rights.
The report’s authors write that “former colonies are making increasingly vocal demands about the need for reparations from colonialism”.
Well, perhaps so. But where do you suppose they got that idea? In no small measure, from British universities and British cultural representatives. Our self-flagellating wokery has been picked up overseas, with the striking result that there is far more resentment about British colonialism now than there was at the time or during its immediate aftermath.
Although you would not think so today, most of Britain’s colonies were brought to independence without a shot being fired in anger – something no other empire has managed. Yes, there were tragic exceptions, notably Cyprus, Kenya and India.
But, even in India, when the colonial flag was lowered for the last time in 1947, assembled representatives of the new Government sang Auld Lang Syne with tears in their eyes.
In recent years, a cartoonish version of history has been promulgated in this country, and exported around the world, in which Britain is cast as the villainous Alan Rickman of the global drama. As a result, many people in former colonies fulminate against an imagined version of British colonialism in a way that their grandparents, experiencing the real-life version, never did.
I don’t enjoy having to write these things. I have always been sceptical of the British Empire on liberal grounds. But the idea that Britain owes a debt to the places it modernised would have astonished Victorian officials, who saw colonies as an administrative headache, but who felt under pressure from missionaries, abolitionists and assorted humanitarians to assume responsibility for new tracts of land.
If the British Empire was an attempt at financial exploitation, it was a spectacularly inefficient one, for taxes in Britain were always higher than in her colonies.
If anything, Britain is owed a debt. Our species benefited hugely from the industrial revolution, the abolition of the slave trade and the defeat of Nazism.
Worth reading in full.
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