Let’s leave the Commonwealth

There is no point in being a member just to be browbeaten about our past

This piece was originally published for The Critic in late October

One of this author’s favourites from the rich history of British cartoons has to be David Low’s “Very Well, Alone”. The defiance of the singular Tommy, his fist raised against both the approaching night of barbarism which had just engulfed Europe, is about more than post-Dunkirk defiance. It speaks to the ordinarily boyish, occasionally bloody-minded and often stupid sanguinity with which Britons had, for hundreds, of years, treated every turn of fate. This was why the Englishman, as Santayana put it, “carries his English weather in his heart wherever he goes, and it becomes a cool spot in the desert, and a steady and sane oracle amongst all the deliriums of mankind”. “Very Well, Alone” was more than just a title. It was a national way of being.  

But whatever “Very Well, Alone” was, it was not accurate. Leslie Illingworth’s “Back to the Wall” offers a more realistic depiction of events. Britain, represented by Churchill (clad as John Bull) is backed up against a wall, bayonet fixed. Although as defiant as Low’s Tommy, he is not as alone; over the top of the wall, fighting men of the Commonwealth — Australians, Canadians, South Africans, Indians and Africans — are clambering.

But the Commonwealth is not what it was. All three candidates to be the new Secretary General of the association, Ghanaian foreign minister Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, Gambian foreign minister Mamadou Tangara, and Senator Joshua Sepita of Lesotho, have said they support the idea of seeking financial reparations for slavery and colonialism from Britain.  

This article is not to contest the idea of “reparatory justice” — although the author is entirely against it. Rather, it is to point out that if the Commonwealth is to become a vehicle for badly-run nations to leverage questionable but fashionable grievance politics and anti-British sentiment for handouts from Britain, then Britain should leave.

To many conservatives, this may come as a radical proposal. The Commonwealth is not the EU; it is our own creation, the participant nations bound together by shared histories, struggles and language. The case for retaining membership is, as put across by John Milbank, that leaving “would be tragic. Empire in the widest sense is so superior to nation-state and Britain is itself imperium.”

It is hard not to have some sympathy with this view. The story of the Commonwealth is easy to characterise as one of Cecil Rhodes, Robert Clive and Rudyard Kipling — of annexation, exploitation and the White Man’s Burden. But this, like most of the historical arguments of leftists, is borne of an abject lack of understanding of the complexities of the past or a willingness to yoke history to the service of today’s political causes. Milbank’s view far better underlines the complex reality — that the Empire, already having existed and intertwined nations together, means the Commonwealth as an insoluble part of our national story as it those of our former Dominions, and that leaving in response to what may prove to be a temporary political trend would mean a great loss for Britain.

This is innately tied up with the vision of the Commonwealth put across by “Back to the Wall”. As I’ve already written in these most august pages, Empire soldiers fought in many of the wars that created modern Britain, and it is hard for any Briton not to be sentimental about the unflinching solidarity the young lions showed the old to defeat his foes. This romantic afterglow is as much about the lambency of the history’s most noble act as the Commonwealth itself; as AN Wilson wrote, “there was a genuine glory and a dignity to the story of the old hero returning to slay some dragons before, bloodied and weakened, he and his Victorian world sank into the regions of twilight.”

But in my experience, romance is always fiction.

Since the Long March through the institutions, an ever-greater number of the institutions small-c conservatives rightly value for their goal of preserving our culture and national story are now run by, in Burke’s words, “men formed to be instruments, not controls”.

There is no reason inherent in conservativism to surrender control of, or subsume ourselves to, a set of institutions thus yoked. As James Vitali writes:

Conservatism is and must be more than an antipathy to change. It is distinct from mere “orthodoxy” — it defends certain customs, institutions or arrangements for a reason, not simply because they exist.

We must revere institutions in the functions that belong to them; if those functions are no longer fulfilled, then we need not revere the institution.

This is particularly important given the hectoring and anti-British strain of thought that now runs through many of them. Preaching hostility, even hatred, of Britain and its history is fundamentally dangerous not only to our social fabric, but to their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. It would be stupid to assume that any institution showing hostility towards the average Briton for the history of the country they love would receive anything but hostility in return. To quote Burke again:

On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons, so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is incapable of filling their place.

If the Commonwealth is to continue down its current path then our membership will come up against the interests of our nation and our citizens. They must come first; the primary duty of any government is to them, not to some incoherent and indefinable notion of “the global good” or “righting historical wrongs”. But by giving any ground on the idea of reparations — even of non-cash forms — Starmer has already given too much ground to a narrative that, as Robert Tombs puts it, “is not merely one-sided but a caricature of the past”. 

In the 19th Century this country defined what we mean by liberty, freedom and human dignity, then enacted those principles by imposing abolition on an unwilling world. In the 20th Century, this country spent its last full measure of strength to create a world that upheld those values. Yet in the 21st Century this country has been asked to do nothing but apologise. Yet our place as the muscular, pioneer abolitionist is a history to be proud of. The story of “reparatory justice” has already been told in the feats of our arms; facta non verba.

It would be as historically illiterate as the Empire reductionists we criticise to claim the Commonwealth emerged from a benign past, the happy product of Santayana’s “sweet, just, boyish master”. We hope, first, that it can be restored to the role in which our reverence is grounded. Anagnorisis is always an unhappy event; but if change proves impossible we are not bound to be members, and we should leave. Perhaps, in time, Low’s cartoon will prove prescient — very well, alone.