NEW LABOUR, OLD BRITAIN
Seamus Milne has written a great piece on the whole move to the right. Here’s an extract: “Britain not only conveniently still forgets the crimes of its imperial past, but it has also again begun to romanticise its colonial achievements and declare them a proper source of pride. BARELY a generation after the ignominious end of the British empire, there is now a quiet but concerted drive to rehabilitate it, by influential newspapers, conservative academics, and at the highest level of government. Just how successful this campaign has already been was demonstrated in January when Gordon Brown, chancellor of the exchequer and Tony Blair’s heir apparent, declared in east Africa that “the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over” (1). His remark, pointedly made to the Daily Mail - which is leading the rehabilitation chorus - in the run-up to May’s general election, was clearly no heat-induced gaffe. Speaking four months earlier at the British Museum, an Aladdin’s cave of looted treasures from Britain’s former colonies, Brown insisted: “We should be proud . . . of the empire” (2). Even Blair, who was prevailed upon to cut a similar line from a speech during his first successful election campaign in 1997, has never gone quite this far (3). Brown’s extraordinary remarks passed with little comment in the rest of the British media. But the significance of a Labour chancellor’s support for what would until recently have been regarded as fringe rightwing revisionism was doubtless not lost on his target audience. This is a man who, despite his neoliberal enthusiasms and tense alliance with Blair, has always liked to project a more egalitarian, social democratic image than his New Labour rival. His imperial turn will have given an unwelcome jolt to anyone hoping that a Brown government might step back from the liberal imperialist swagger and wars of intervention that have punctuated Blair’s eight-year premiership. By the same token, his determination (in advance of his own expected leadership bid) to wrap himself in the Union Jack - dubbed “the butcher’s apron” by the Irish socialist James Connolly - will have impressed sections of the establishment whose embrace he is seeking. Brown’s demand for an end to colonial apologies was part of an attempt to define a modern sense of British identity based around values of fair play, freedom and tolerance. What modernity and such values have to do with the reality of empire might not be immediately obvious. But even more bizarre is the implication that Britain is forever apologising for its empire or the crimes committed under it. As with other European former colonial powers, nothing could be further from the truth. There have been no apologies. Official Britain put decolonisation behind it, in a state of blissful amnesia, without the slightest effort to come to terms with what took place. In the years following the British army’s bloody withdrawal from Aden in 1967, there was little public debate about how Britain had maintained its grip on a quarter of the world’s population until the middle of the 20th century. Lobster on Milne Milne in Guardian.
