The Post-Imperial Hangover

THE BRITISH LEFT INDIA 78 YEARS AGO, AND since then a lot has happened on both ends of the long-run­ning Anglo-Indian relationship. No one can argue that India has done worse in the intervening years; life expectancy, levels of literacy, GDP and the total population have all risen. But what about Britain? What happened to the mother country when the jewel in the crown was handed back?

Britain had been in a long, disguised decline, but it was only after 1945 that economic exhaustion finally hit home. By then, India was no longer a source of profit for British industry; the trade balance had reversed in the 1930s, marking the final phase of a long process of diminishing economic returns; after the East India Company took on government in 1765, it never made easy money in India again, though individuals somehow managed to.

Britain then held on to India mostly for geostrategic reasons, but partially because of the constant sense of cultural superior­ity that the colonial relationship fostered. The end of that rela­tionship was a cultural catastrophe for the British ruling classes, which have never rediscovered the sense of pride and mission that ruling India bestowed upon them.

India took on new characteristics under British rule, but now only resembles the India of 1765 in details. The India of digital services, moon shots and rampant consumerism owes less to the British than to full-spectrum involvement with the modern world in the late 20th century. In some ways, India engaged with modernity with a much cleaner slate than Britain, which retained a heavy cultural investment in the past; it seemed lus­trous in the way that the present was not. Once the empire had gone, in Britain the only things that were allowed to be glorious were the weather, and the occasional cover drive from the likes of Denis Compton.

After 1947, the British entered a long dark corridor of uncer­tainty, when it became unclear what there was to be proud of about being British. For a long time Brits, of all levels of educa­tion, were prepared to hold on to the idea that we had brought railways and Westminster-style institutions to the rest of the world, and that courage, tenacity, magnanimity and a sense of fairness defined the British character. But without the theatre in which to play out these great virtues, everyone seemed a little diminished, and a long period of painful soul-searching began, especially when it became clear just how many venerable institu­tions in Britain were deeply involved in the slave trade and had profited directly from it. The roll call of guilty parties ran right across the nation’s cultural life, from the royal family, through universities, to the many stately homes built by wealthy families.

But some plucky Britons had always fought against such nega­tive thoughts, determined to reassert old-style, imperial British­ness as a great cultural achievement. This project began in the 1960s with a wave of anti-immigrant feeling, as large numbers of people from Commonwealth countries began to come to Britain to accept low-paid or unskilled work. This was an enormous af­front to many working-class people in Britain who had never seen a non-white person apart from in a newsreel. For many it was not just a matter of disliking strangers, it was being confronted with people they had been accustomed to despise, or at least to consider as sitting on a lower rank on the ladder of life. But realities were inexorably changing.

After 1945, Britain was left with an outdated industrial base which had been created to service captive markets abroad. With those markets gone and the old equipment still in place, Britain lost its competitive edge, as foreign investors rebuilt the economies of the defeated powers. While heavy industry in Britain gradu­ally dwindled, many proud breadwinners were forced into redun­dancy, which seemed a poor return for winning two World Wars.

India had never been a true rival to Britain, whereas Germany had long been a major national competitor, and by the 1960s was thriving in a way that her erstwhile conqueror was not. Falling so clearly behind the former Axis powers was a sharper and more constant humiliation than the loss of empire, and was grimly inescapable.

Gradually, post-imperial Britain became not a net exporter of goods but a net importer of people, firstly from the Common­wealth, then from the European Union (EU), and finally from troubled or failed states across the Middle East and Africa. Despite the relatively low level of immigration to Britain, and especially the proportion of immigration which is illegal or uncontrolled, 21st-century Britain has become obsessed with the idea of inva­sion by foreigners.

Anyone conscious of Indian history can only smile at this, knowing that it is not numbers that matter in the matter of inva­sion. It is organisation among the invaders, and disunity among the invaded that will always count for most in the final reckoning. But narrow-minded students of British history have no such wis­dom to fall back on. All they have is alarmism, massively magni­fied by rightwing media determined to support political parties with an anti-immigration stance.

Immigration is now the issue of highest concern for many British voters. Nobody wants to be pushed out of their country, or wants their needs to be ignored in favour of people they feel are less deserving. Nobody likes the idea of incomers gaining access to public funds when they have contributed nothing to them. But the concerns of ordinary people about the pace and depth of change which leaves their local neighbourhoods unrecognisable to them is as nothing to the near-insanity that has gripped sec­tions of the British rightwing which seem to have lost all sense of proportion.

Some of them have begun to talk about how we are no longer living under the rule of law but under ‘the rule of lawyers’—an extraordinary claim. Lawyers don’t make laws. Lawyers bring cases, and where do they take them? To courts. And who presides in courts? Judges. We live under a common law system where parliament makes laws and judges interpret them, and case law is as much the law of the land as statute law. So the idea that lawyers are somehow subverting parliament is completely untenable, and undermines faith in the system we have lived under for about eight centuries.

More widely, there is a persistent mindset on the right of Brit­ish politics that we are somehow still special, and that we can do everything on our own. It was largely this attitude that produced the demand to leave the EU. Why, it was asked, have we shackled ourselves to the awful French and Germans, people we have re­peatedly defeated in war, and whose legal systems display legacies of tyranny which are entirely missing from our own, beautiful arrangements?

This sort of thinking is part of the idea that Britain stood alone against fascism in 1939. This idea is not just popular with the older generation who actually fought in that war; it’s an easy trope that anyone can pick up on. But it is wrong. True, we had no allies in 1939, but Britain stood at the head of a worldwide organisa­tion, and the populations of all kinds of countries, not least of British India, were on our side throughout the war, and made material contributions to the victory.

Yet the strange mixture of triumphalism and victimhood that make up most of Britain’s post-colonial hangover are persistent. Just a few days ago, an independent MP named Rupert Lowe, formerly of Re­form UK, our largest nationalist populist political party, raised the alarm because he had spotted a migrant boat off the coast of East Anglia. A posse of doughty patriots then ran down to the shore to repel them. But it turned out that the ‘migrants’ in the boat were raising money for charity by rowing from Land’s End to John O’Groats. It would be almost impossible to make up a misunderstanding so ridiculous, but it makes a certain sense if you can see how portions of the British population have been driven to near-madness by fear of foreigners.

BRITAIN DOESN’T TAKE more migrants than other Euro­pean countries, so the idea that mass migration is a result of empire is not true. Germany and Sweden have taken many more migrants, and neither had an empire. It is the negative attitude to migration that is the legacy of empire, and although it is only a small minority that feels strongly enough to take militant action, the downstream effect of the strident voices is seriously affect­ing our national politics, moving some of our politicians into militant xenophobia.

This was not the attitude in the years immedi­ately following the end of empire, as evidenced by the fact that Commonwealth citizens were initially granted the right to settle here, and even to vote. This latter privilege is still on the books, and is a source of worry to many on the hard right of politics.

The backwash of empire is still multiform. Just as Britain anglicised India in various ways, Indian influence flowed back and introduced new attitudes and fashions, from food to yoga, and a kind of spirituality far outside traditional An­glicanism. We can see all of this in our high streets, our health cen­tres and the discography of The Beatles. Most modern Brits, were they to be transported back seven decades, would probably find their country a dull, monochrome place, with curry and reggae nowhere to be found, and the shops all closed at 5PM.

Most of the racists who at­tack migrant hotels in modern Britain are probably unaware that the man who invited West Indians to come and work in the National Health Service (NHS) was none other than Conservative Health Minister Enoch Powell, a man who, 10 years later, delivered the fa­mous “rivers of blood” speech, predicting carnage in Britain and that “the black man” would hold “the whip hand” in “fif­teen or twenty years”. Though many still fondly remember that speech, it was neither well-intentioned, nor remotely prescient. Apologists for Powell like to say that the inter-communal bloodshed he had witnessed in India at the end of colonial rule had persuaded him that the same thing might easily happen in Britain, and that he was warning against that possibility. Whatever his motivation, he has been proved wrong. Britain does not have inter-communal violence. It has, in some areas, a violent resistance to outsiders rather than clashes between established communities.

Britain did not take easily to its diminished status after 1947. Above all, Britons loved the men that India had made of them, allowing them a range of qualities from heroism to benevolence. As a theatre for both, India held mythic status in the minds of upper-class Brits. Nothing quite like that has appeared to take India’s place, and sadly, much of that feeling of lost superiority has festered and filtered down to the least impressive among us, whose only outlet for their rage is to directly attack the weakest and most vulnerable people they can find.

Britain now stands alone outside the EU. Whatever high-minded virtues membership of that commu­nity once bestowed upon us, whatever sense of larger purpose we may have gained, has also now evaporated. We still wish to be splendid in our iso­lation, but we also seem to want to be rancorous and mean-spirited. We have, in effect, been rebar­barised. The responsibilities of empire—govern­ing other people at a distance—constantly posed problems that required serious reflection upon ethical values and did a great deal to promote liberal ideas, at least domestically. But once cut free of the need to care for anyone else, the least worthy parts of British society were left without concern for others, particularly in the foreign sphere.

Our imperial virtues were supposed to make us like the Romans. In shedding those lofty ideals, we are losing our wider vision and becoming more like ancient Britons.

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