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Friday, 28 August 2020

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.

9 comments:

  1. Kipling's Recessional is perhaps more representative than his more famous The White Man's Burden

    "Recessional" is an extraordinary piece of work - the third verse still makes me shiver, particularly given when it was written. As for "The White Man's Burden", the most important words in the present context are the previous two - speaking on behalf of Britain(!), Kipling calls on the USA to "Take up the white man's burden". There's a distinct implication that Britain isn't going to be carrying the 'burden' forever.

    Kipling was a remarkable writer; I'm often tempted to defend his poetry, in particular, against the contemporary tendency to dismiss it as imbued with racism, imperialism and militarism, and as such worthless. But, while I'd love to be able to deny these charges outright, all I can really say is that it's more complicated than that. There's certainly more going on in the "barrack-room" poems than a simple jingoistic celebration of the British Army and their various conquests. But, however much space he gives to the horrors of Empire ("Snarleyow", "Danny Deever", "The Young British Soldier") - and the griefs ("Ford o' Kabul River"), and the doubts ("The Widow's Party"), and the disasters ("That Day", "My Boy Jack") - in the end Kipling does always come down on the same side; the right side, for his audience of the day, and pretty much the wrong side for us now. The idea of an underlying anxiety about the Empire - whether it would last, whether it was worth defending, whether it had been worth the cost - is interesting here; perhaps the interesting thing about Kipling is that he had the anxieties of his certainties, and gave full expression to them. But he still had the certainties.

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  2. «Though the division of society into the good and the bad is the meat and drink of newspapers, [...] always runs the risk of alienating significant portions of the market (consider the way the Guardian is currently alienating the left).»

    That is a good argument, but newspapers are also their master's voice and that may be a greater motivator than going for popularity (e.g. "The Guardian").
    But there is another purely commercial consideration: most newspapers see advertisers, not readers, as their customers, and advertisers are less interested in wider readership and more interested in market segmentation aligned that of their products.

    This means that newspaper editorial policy often aims to be popular *within a target demographic*, and therefore their main strategy is to pander to whatever tastes that target demographic has, that is to a large extent they follow public opinion (but only that of their target advertising segment) rather than form it. Often they don't care much about being read by people outside their target advertising segment.

    Of course it is an overlap of motivations; for example recently at the "Daily Mail" the violently anti-EU editor was replaced "from above" by a mildly pro-EU one, I guess as its masters realized that their globalist interests were not being well-served and euroscepticism was no longer an innocent pastime, but had real economic consequences.

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  3. You are correct that newspapers see advertisers as their actual customers, but by the same token this means that they are selling readers (or demographics) and their curation of those readers is political as much as it is commercial.

    The Guardian used to be more left-leaning when it was full of public sector job ads. It now carries much the same ads as the Times and obsesses about haute couture and expensive restaurants. That isn't because the readership has changed, but because the Guardian is deliberately trying to change its readership.

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  4. «the Telegraph and Times, which seem to be forever running 'Was empire really so bad?' [...] it helps to build a cohesive public [...] Were the British press ever to truly face up to the reality of empire»

    Maybe, but I guess that many people here already understand already that empires are not always nice and generous to their colonial subjects (plenty of them were part of its enforcement teams), and are well aware that indirectly they benefited from that, so cohesiveness could be built also around a fully jingoistic "we were top dog and made by hook or by crook the rest of our empire grovel" feeling.

    My impression is that the empire mania and like WW2 heroics mania are both related to the great skeleton in the closet of english culture, that is being sometimes now discussed (even if JM Keynes mentioned it in passing many decades ago): that England was soundly defeated in WW2, just like France was, and would have had to surrender to the Germany and Japan in 1941-1942 without the overriding help of USA funds and USSR manpower, and once those entered the scene the english contribution became a sideshow, like the canadian or brazilian ones. Those USA funds also required a thinly veiled surrender to the USA, a surrender with very few terms, pretty similar to an unconditional one, that also required turning UK colonies over to the USA to become their protectorates.

    Thus the obsessive recounting of sideshows like commando operations or the dambusters or the Bletchley decrypters have the purpose to pretend that it was not the flood of USA money and the millions of USSR dead that won the war against superior enemies (except of course fascist Italy, mismanaged by a dark operetta buffoon who screwed up everything including his country's armed forces).

    Similarly the nostalgia of empire seems to me mostly another way to use a flight into the memory of when the English Empire really was stronger than the USA one, when the strategic enemies of the Navy were the French and USA ones, and it could beat them, to compensate and forget the harsh reality of that defeat by the Axis and of that surrender to the USA, to forget the depth of USA control over UK politics, and its armed forces, security services, and diplomacy, by remembering when it was the English Empire that had dozens of military bases abroad, and not England that has dozens of USA military bases.

    BTW There is a rather smaller WW1 heroics mania because while defeat by Germany and Austria-Hungary was also inevitable without the arrival of USA funds, this was well disguised, and the USA was at the time still taking over whatever remained of the spanish empire, and the USA elites were still waiting for a better moment to take over the english one.

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  5. «The Guardian [...] now carries much the same ads as the Times and obsesses about haute couture and expensive restaurants.»

    Ahhh I had not really noticed that, but indeed this a good observation.

    «because the Guardian is deliberately trying to change its readership.»

    My impression as written before that for "The Guardian" just like for the "Times" there is a dialectic between the propaganda goals of their masters and the commercial reality of trying to minimize the losses involved in propaganda.

    I'll start with the "Times", that has changed over the year style towards becoming more of a thatcherite tabloid: I think that was mostly because of editorial direction from Murdoch, and there is enough evidence of that influence. Then within that reality the business side of the newspaper has to find the advertising segment compatible with the readers who like that editorial direction.

    There is less evidence of security service and Mandelson Tendency influence over "The Guardian", but I reckon that its editorial direction had markedly changed for some years with a line mostly very pleasing to MI5/MI6, the Likud party, and Peter Mandelson, and perhaps the change in its target advertising segment is something that the business side had to do in response, or the business side did that independently because of other reasons.
    So I think that at least in our times usually for vote-moving or at least opinion-making publications changes in editorial line are made by their masters, and drive changes in advertising segment, or the latter happen indpendently, rather than changes in advertising segment drive changes in editorial line.

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    1. There is ample evidence of the Guardian cooperating with SIS in recent years, notably the cave-in over Snowden. The only difference between Rusbridger & Viner is that she doesn't publicly agonise over it.

      It continues to find space for banal columns by Blair & his epigones, and its prosecution of the antisemitism case against Corbyn has more than compensated for its scepticism about Israeli policy on the West Bank & Gaza.

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    2. But the difference is that evidence that Murdoch influences the editorial line of his newspapers and sells that influence to politicians eager to obtain it is explicitly documented; that "The Guardian" is largely a mouthpiece for the security services, the likudniks and Mandelson is not overtly documented, but as you (and myself) do, it must be inferred by the arguments and commentary that they privilege, of which there are indeed ample examples.

      As to “cooperating with SIS” in some cases, perhaps under duress: it is not quite the same as diligently repeating whichever line the security services seem to be pushing (something that many other newspapers seem to as often as "The Guardian", I remember a case where 1/3-1/2 of the front page of "The Times" was taken by a verbatim reprint of a security service press release).

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  6. I think it's Niall Ferguson, right-wing historian, rather than Neil Ferguson, epidemiologist. Good thoughtful posting otherwise!

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