The rise and fall of the ‘good’ British Empire

Can we prevent the partition of Britain?

There’s a joke going around Irish WhatsApp that goes like this: ‘An Irishman, Englishman and Scotsman sit down for a historic summit regarding their ancient grievances.’ The image shows the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Humza Yousaf, newly elected First Minister of Scotland.

That three men of South Asian ancestry now lead those three nations is something which even ten years ago would have seemed implausible; a generation further back simply bizarre. And that doesn’t take into account Britain’s most senior directly elected politician, London Mayor Sadiq Khan.

What makes it stranger is that Mr Yousaf, of Pakistani origin, and Sunak, of Indian descent – although both via British East Africa – will be engaged in deciding the future of the Union. As one wit put it, ‘We can at least appreciate the irony of an Indian and Pakistani coming to blows over the issue of partitioning Britain.’

Yet although both Scotland and England are now led by men with roots in the subcontinent, that is where the comparisons between the two countries end. Yousaf might like to mimic American race talking points, but he presides over a country which is overwhelmingly white and will remain so (although we’re still awaiting the latest census results); the southern kingdom is in contrast now very multiracial, and projected to get more so – a process accelerated by the Tory Government.

Britain has undergone a demographic revolution since the Second World War, a transformation into a multicultural society. Out of the ashes of the British Empire the country’s rules ended up creating a new empire at home, one where this time they could be the good guys. Just like the first British Empire, this one might be called Anglo-Indian, with the two leading parties partly aligning along old divisions between Hindu and Muslim. Like the first empire, this new diverse rainbow of nations entails strict new blasphemy codes, even if now dressed up as hate speech.

Yet this great change has hardly affected Scotland. The two countries have diverged along different paths, and this is perhaps one reason why it may prove hard to hold our multicultural empire together, although it’s a cause liberal defenders of Britishness are loath to admit. Where once the countries were brought together by Protestantism, the English language and empire, now the new ‘good’ British Empire drives them apart, while the English language is a global source of division.

Many conservatives take pride in Britain’s dazzling diversity at the top, not just of Sunak and Yousaf but a cabinet with roots in our Asian, African and Caribbean colonies too: it is testimony to the success of Britain’s institutions, they argue, as we await a multicultural coronation in the coming weeks. Yet this sort of diversity has been a feature of crumbling empires down the ages, multi-ethnic states ruled by often benevolent, tolerant monarchs, aided by their loyal community representatives.

But in the case of the great land empires, these societies were hampered by what we’d now call ‘identity’ politics, a constant tussle for prestige and status which made government slow, cumbersome and reactionary. The peoples of these empires felt little connection with any shared institutions aside from the monarch; the state and its functions didn’t belong to ‘them’, as it did in the more monotone but freer lands of north-west Europe. Democracy, of course, was out of the question.

Britain was a sea empire, which enabled it to be both a tyrant in Asia and a liberal democracy at home, one where most people barely thought about its overseas possessions. Yet the Empire certainly played a part in the establishment of a common British identity, along with Protestantism, language and military victory, and in a more subtle sense of racial identity shared by the English, Lowland Scots and Irish Protestants. The Welsh, Scots Highlanders and Irish Catholics were secondary peoples, although as time passed the sense of Britishness became more inclusive and tolerant. By the time Ireland came to negotiate its bloody exit from the Union, the British representatives spoke Welsh around the table.

As was once said, British identity was based on military success abroad and political stability at home, and was unsurprisingly therefore strong, reflected in the lingering and pronounced sense of Britishness once felt in communities scattered in Canada, Australia, Africa and Argentina. The visual strength of the Union Jack, which has since even evolved into a fashion icon, was a reflection of that.

But as the former sea power was turned into a new land empire, so its new rulers came to feel a new sense of imperial mission. It could no longer be just a country, for which ancestry is the defining characteristic of membership; it had to be defined by its mission. Krishan Kumar wrote in Visions of Empire that empires come to develop a ‘universal “mission” that justified their rule and expansion, and in which all peoples of the empire could participate. Often that took religious form – Islam, Orthodoxy, Catholicism; sometimes it was secular, as in the French mission civilisatrice.’ Today we have ‘British values’, by which schools inculcate children from a variety of backgrounds with the beliefs of 21st-century liberalism – tolerance, diversity and human rights.

‘Imperialist ideologies are universalistic, not particularistic’, Kumar wrote. ‘Imperial peoples do not, unlike nationalists, celebrate themselves; they celebrate the causes of which they are the agents or carriers. Imperial nationalism plays down membership of a “mere nation,” with its tendency toward self-congratulation and self-importance; but it does so in order to insist on a higher form of nationalism, one that justifies the nation in terms of its commitment to a cause that goes beyond the nation.’ Britain is now an empire, and Britishness is ‘defined by what we do’.

But this modern idea of Britishness is pretty weak. During the 2014 Scottish referendum the No campaign made appeals to the continued Union based on ideas of sharing resources, of nations with common interests and liberal beliefs who are best working together. These were largely internationalist arguments that could just as easily apply to membership of the European Union, which so many English unionists then opposed two years later.

The arguments made by the No campaign sounded like an unhappy spouse weighing up the possible expenses of a divorce, and the most compelling patriotic case for Union came from the maverick George Galloway. Otherwise the word ‘British’ was barely heard, let alone any appeals to shared military victories of the past; that would be distasteful since Scotland, despite its outsized role in the Empire, is trying to turn King’s evidence on its former partner in crime by presenting itself as a victim of imperialism.

Such interpretations of British patriotism would make many people uncomfortable, and besides which so many of the great Anglo-Scottish triumphs were won at the expense of people whose descendants now make up a sizeable share of the population in England, and whose narrative must now also be considered.

The new Britishness is inclusive, designed to fit a multicultural society. As Sir Bernard Crick, designer of Britain’s ‘citizenship curriculum’ put it, ‘to the immigrant, Britishness is essentially a legal and political structure… When the immigrant says “I am British”, he is not saying he wants to be English or Scottish or Welsh.’

And as British identity has become more inclusive, so it has gone into steady decline, so that by ‘2006 even English people were 24 per cent less likely to describe themselves as British instead of English’. Such was the rise of English identification that, by 2011, just 14 per cent of white Britons identified as British first, compared to 64 per cent identifying as English.

Although this trend has no doubt been accelerated by Scottish nationalism, identifying as English is a statement of identity in a multicultural imperial society in which ‘British’ has become a much more neutral – and weaker – term.

There is a correlation between people who identify as English and those with negative views towards diversity, part of a wider English/British divide in values. Almost three-quarters of people who call themselves English voted Leave, compared to just 43 per cent who identify as British. That is why the last bastions of Britishness are in Northern Ireland and the most liberal areas of London.

English has yet to be deracialised in the same way – although some ethnic minorities do identify as such – and so is much preferable to the alternative of ‘white British’, the miserable term the authorities wish us to tick. Since the media has spent the last fifty years telling us that ‘white’ entails bad, racist and oppressive, an obsession which in the last ten years has reached fever pitch, it hardly makes it an attractive identity.

As they have come to stop identifying with Britain, the English have naturally become less interested in events to the north, the SNP inspiring a feeling of apathy rather than hatred.

If you were the sort of English-British person who identified as a citizen of the world, you might instinctively support the SNP’s progressive nationalism against a state which historically had the largest empire on earth. Scotland’s nationalists pride themselves on being more like Scandinavian progressives than their reactionary neighbours, even if Scottish public opinion on immigration is pretty much exactly the same as opinion in England. What to some English liberals is a progressive nation escaping a small-minded conservative Brexit regime could also look like an overwhelmingly white country separating from a failing multicultural federation with an uncertain future.

But if you were the sort of person who felt a strong sense of attachment to your country, whether you saw it to be Britain or England, you would likely be far less animated by the break-up of the Union than by multiculturalism itself. London is now 36.8 per cent ‘white British’, following a rapid transformation over the past five decades which is still ongoing. In contrast to such a dramatic and drastic change, what happens in Scotland hardly seems of importance, and older Tory cries that the ‘SNP will end the country we love’ seem comically misplaced and irrelevant.

Most English liberals would like to keep the Union, although they struggle to articulate why the Scots might wish to stay. Perhaps it is because for them the only real horror is English nationalism, not just because they find their fellow English often so distasteful but because majority nationalism has always been the greatest threat to empires.

‘The danger of nationalism’, Kumar wrote, comes not just from the subject peoples ‘but, perhaps even more, of the ruling people themselves. The moment the ruling people start stressing their own national identity, whether as Turks, Austrians, Russians, English, or French, that is the moment empire begins to decline. The paradox of empire is that it at once creates nations, often where they have never existed before, and at the same time has to act vigorously to suppress them. The national principle denies the imperial principle.’

It is for that reason that Scottish nationalism is indulged as just one more form of identity politics in this new empire of ours – this bickering family of nations. The real danger lies with the English.