Empire Song

The Sunday Times's claim that the BBC was considering dropping Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory from Last Night of the Proms in response to complaints by the Black Lives Matter movement was a repeat of an earlier Daily Mail story in July that was thoroughly rubbished as nonsense at the time. That this fake news was recycled only six weeks later tells us a lot about the working practices of the press, and even of the BBC itself, which appeared just as keen as the Sunday Times to drum up rage-clicks. In short, there is no historical memory involved when it comes to the "culture wars". If a claim is debunked, it can be revived in short order because its purpose has nothing to do with truth. It's a conspiracy theory, after all. There are people who still swear blind that kids in the 1980s were taught to sing "Baa Baa White Sheep" in state primary schools in London. Joining the bandwagon, the Prime Minister has now decided to decry this as a "general bout of self-recrimination and wetness" and insist that "it's time we stopped our cringing embarrassment about our history". Anyone familiar the man's own Bunterish attempts to write history will find this laughable.

A paradox of popular history is that the further an event recedes into the past the more people celebrate it. They don't forget, but equally they don't remember. We're currently seeing this with empire, but we've experienced it for some years now in respect of World War One. As the survivors have left the stage, so too has their bitter experience and warnings against a repeat of such folly. Bereft of first-hand witnesses, the media space is increasingly occupied not just by professional historians with conflicting or nuanced views but various species of gobshite and fool, from MPs to newspaper columnists and rentaquote minor celebrities. Once the last World War Two veteran is dead, we can expect the poppy hysteria of Remembrance Sunday to get even worse, only stopping just short of a full-on Nuremberg rally. By 2060, the Iraq War will probably be remembered as a heroic struggle undermined by foolish politicians and inept senior officers. Assuming cinema is still a thing, it could well produce a cross between The Charge of the Light Brigade and Zulu.

Formal empire was largely over by 1966 (Zulu came out in 1964), which means the dwindling body of first-hand witnesses of Britain's colonial administration are mostly in their 70s or older. Empire's contemporary champions are younger, often much younger. But where do they get their ideas from? Despite being shallow, most TV history has been alert to the sins of imperialism, while the education system has (when it bothered to focus on the subject) been reasonably judicious (this was why Gove felt the need for a more patriotic curriculum, after all). The answer is that it has been the press, including kids comics (which were still celebrating imperial glory and the derring-do of World War Two well into the 1970s and whose vocabulary has clearly influenced Boris Johnson), the tabloids (which have been variously anti-Irish, anti-French, anti-German and anti-immigrant as political salience and the international football fixtures have required) and rightwing broadsheets, such as the Telegraph and Times, which seem to be forever running 'Was empire really so bad?' pieces by the likes of Niall Ferguson or articles condemning the martyrdom of Nigel Biggar.

The press's fascination with empire is not just rightwing sympathy. The Conservatives were the original anti-imperialists before the pivot masterminded by Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s, and oversaw much of its dismantling in the 1950s and 60s under Harold Macmillan. Though empire became associated with patriotism, the reverse was never true, as George Orwell was fond of noting (his modern epigones have tended to be less forthcoming on this point as it would mean exploring the liberal roots of British imperialism). Equally, it is simplistic to imagine that empire is simply a serviceable euphemism for xenophobia and chauvinism: a reliable resource for when Britain was "top dog" and colonial subjects knew their place. After all, as the Windrush scandal reminded us, "multiculturalism" and ethnic diversity are largely the products of empire too. The idea of empire - and an idea is all it is for the vast majority today - speaks to a more fundamental desire for national significance and an associated fear of insignificance. In this respect, Kipling's Recessional is perhaps more representative than his more famous The White Man's Burden. Dominion over palm and pine will go the way of Nineveh and Tyre.

But just as important are the structural factors that affect the newspaper industry. To dominate a domestic market, it helps to build a cohesive public - of one mind in matters great and small - hence the ready recourse to nationalist rhetoric and the promotion of a narrow culture (deviance is to be deplored) and even a common vocabulary (again, few of Orwell's imitators appear keen on the parallels between Journalese and Newspeak). Part of this is the idea that the press "speaks for Britain": that it presents the British view to the wider world, whether expressed in the sterotypical language of the public bar or the Pall Mall club. Though the division of society into the good and the bad is the meat and drink of newspapers, from rightwing tabloids lauding workers over shirkers or liberal papers fussing about political virtue, this always runs the risk of alienating significant portions of the market (consider the way the Guardian is currently alienating the left). Nationalism (or internationalism for liberal titles) offers a subject that is unifying rather than divisive, even if the collateral damage of xenophobia and bigotry is considerable.

Empire provides an expanded scope for a newspaper to strut about as a national proxy, insisting on its own virtue while lecturing foreigners from a position of assumed superiority. This is not just a British failing. Consider the US "Yellow Press" during the Spanish-American War (memorably fictionalised in Citizen Kane), or the New York Times at almost any point during the American imperium. The British Empire, even in memory only, provides the largest stage for geopolitical strutting the world has ever seen. To be able to use it as the basis for pontification about foreign affairs (note the many columnists who still imagine the UK has unique insights into the Middle East), and to employ it to make unflattering comparisons between the generations as part of a critique of contemporary domestic policy, it is necessary to minmise guilt for colonial crimes. Were the British press ever to truly face up to the reality of empire (and in the case of the liberal media, its role in promoting it), it would have to forgo its pretensions to any superior judgement. It would become modest, even parochial. 

One reason why the press was largely anti-EU was that it saw the gradual pooling of sovereignty as the loss of its own authority. Despite the language barriers, ever closer union would have meant that the voice that mattered in Europe would be located somewhere between Le Monde and Bild, making the British press increasingly peripheral (or, more accurately, the English press, as it wouldn't be a new experience for Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish media). Had we voted to remain in 2016, it's likely that the rightwing tabloids would have increasingly disdained substantive politics, in the manner of the Daily Star, while the rightwing broadsheets would have doubled-down on their obeisance to the US right and thus become increasingly irrelevant. It's possible that papers like the Daily Mail and Times could have executed a volte-face to become pro-EU, centre-right stalwarts, in the manner of La Croix or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, but this would have required a crushing victory for 'Yes'. As it is, their current baiting of the "liberal elite" in the form of the BBC is less a continuing victory dance and more the anticipation of post-Brexit anxiety. In that light, the glories of empire offer a reassuring (if entirely imaginary) fixed point in a changing world.