Empire strikes back: why former colonies don't need Britain after Brexit

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Empire strikes back: why former colonies don't need Britain after Brexit

https: //www. theguardian. com/business/2018/mar/10/empire-strikes-back-why-former-colonies-dont-need-britain-after-brexit

By Salil Tripathi

9 March 2018|| The Guardian

The countdown to leave the European Union began in the British summer of 2016, but nobody in the country seemed to know in which direction they were headed. Those who voted to leave don’t know what kind of future they would like; those who voted to stay don’t know what they can do to stop the process they are certain will create only misery. British politicians from the two major parties – Conservative and Labour – aren’t helping.

The Conservatives are led by a prime minister who voted to stay and seems reluctant to leave the EU; Labour is led by a man who never wanted the UK to join the EU, and must somehow convince voters who wish to remain that he can strike a better bargain.

A decisive vote would have made the politicians’ job easier. But just over half (52%) voted to leave, and nearly half voted to stay. Britain sees itself as a trading country – the EU began as the Common Market with free movement of goods, capital and people across national borders. Leaving would be easy, some politicians said; there would be new trade deals with the United States and China, as well as with the Commonwealth. Ministers spoke eloquently about re-establishing old ties with Commonwealth countries.

This showed the triumph of naive hope over experience, based on the misguided assumption that the Commonwealth countries were eager to forge new ties with Britain, instead of strengthening ties with the EU, the world’s second-largest economy.

Like a divorcee on the rebound, Britain is now desperately seeking to woo its old flame, the Commonwealth, even as its 51 other member states are not exactly sure what Britain wants, and whether Britain is what they need. They have all gone their separate ways. Canada, for example, is keen to protect the North American free trade agreement, which US President Donald Trump wants to revise, if not tear up. Australia and New Zealand have long seen their future in the dynamic Asia-Pacific region. India is growing, but wishes to be seen as a major power at the head table, and would not wish to jeopardise its ongoing negotiations for a trade agreement with the EU for a pact with the UK. British politicians are going to find it hard navigating fresh agreements with dozens of countries and rewriting many laws.

Resurrecting relationships with the former colonies is not going to be easy. Many in Britain feel nostalgic looking back to empire; those in the former colonies don’t always carry such happy memories. Some countries, such as Singapore, have surpassed Britain in per capita income and growth, and they see little need to indulge the UK. For many others, the core premise of the Commonwealth brings back memories that are not necessarily warm. […]

One way to look at the British referendum to leave the EU is to see it as a leap backwards into a past that existed more in imagination than in reality. The yearning for the Commonwealth – expressed in the speeches of Boris Johnson, the then foreign secretary, and Liam Fox, the international trade secretary – sounds peculiar. It is nostalgia in its most basic sense: evocation of the past without the pain suffered or inflicted. Johnson and Fox have spoken confidently of deepening trade relationships with the Commonwealth based on shared ties, assuming that those ties can seamlessly replace those with the EU.

The era when Britain enjoyed favourable terms of trade with the colonies was very different, and it relied on the unequal power relationship inherent in the colonial set-up. There were rules, but Britain set them. It was the time when Britannia ruled the waves – and waived the rules when it wanted. The East India Company is mistakenly called a free-trade pioneer; it was more like a buccaneer that established control backed by the strongest naval power of the time, and conscripted soldiers drawn from the colonies.

Many Britons believe the empire was a good thing. A 2014 YouGov poll of 1, 741 people across Britain showed 59% felt the empire was something to be proud of and only 19% thought it was something to be ashamed of. Almost half the respondents felt the colonies were better off for being colonised; only 15% felt they were worse off. Not surprisingly, the Harvard academic Niall Ferguson tweeted those results, saying “I won” because he believes the empire was, on balance, a good thing for its subjects. To me, those statistics actually showed how poorly history has been taught in Britain.

Regardless of British wishes, the once-subject nations are no longer supplicants. Prime minister Theresa May was in for a rude shock in November 2016 when she raised the topic of a free-trade agreement with her Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. Instead of agreeing enthusiastically, as a maharajah in the 19th century would at Queen Victoria’s durbar, Modi wanted something in return. He wanted more visas for Indian students and easier migration. May could not agree: reducing immigration was one of the prime drivers for those who voted to leave, and no British politician could go back to her voters saying that instead of Poles, Italians and Bulgarians, Britain would now welcome Pakistanis, Indians and Bangladeshis. Modi said fine – and there was no deal. […]

One of the major legacies of the British empire is a body of laws that curb civil liberties. Many Commonwealth countries have identical sections of the penal code, drawn from the Indian Penal Code of 1860. These laws prevent public assembly, restrict free speech, have provisions to try people under sedition charges, and cover sexual morality – in particular, in outlawing sex “against the order of nature”, which implies homosexuality but covers an undefined swathe of intimate relationships between consenting adults. In a 2008 report, Human Rights Watch traced the origin of many of the laws outlawing sodomy to British rule. To its credit, the Commonwealth is trying to get member-states to undo those laws, but many states remain reluctant, citing “traditions” and beliefs. As the Ugandan gay rights activist Frank Mugisha told me recently, homosexuality is African, homophobia isn’t. Even as the “mature” democracies in the Commonwealth – Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – seek to make the laws and practices in the Commonwealth more “humane”, they face resistance from Asian, African and Caribbean member-states that want to assert their sovereignty, even as they perpetuate colonial-era laws.

Many of those laws helped the new nations establish control and order, and curb dissent. They’ve outlived their utility, but they persist. These laws enable the states to restrict political opposition and stop “deviant” behaviour. As with the colonial era, it is rule by law, not necessarily the rule of law; it keeps people divided into neat boxes, preventing alternatives from emerging. Such methods enabled colonial powers to establish control in the past, but participative democracies need new laws.

The Commonwealth can atone for the empire’s brutal past by supporting activists, human rights defenders, and non-governmental organisations in the former colonies. Those civil society groups engaged with human rights, sustainability and education are the latter-day equivalents of Gandhi and Nehru, seeking freedoms from their own governments which have adopted colonial-era powers, and act like the former masters.

This won’t be easy. The countries that make up the Commonwealth do not necessarily share interests – they do share a language, but it is not the only language they speak. Some have twisted the fine traditions of English law into forms scarcely recognisable if placed next to the original. Strengthening the civil society in Commonwealth countries is one necessary step. The other is to educate a new generation of Britons about the past to prepare them to become better global citizens when they meet people whose nations were once part of the empire.

Salil Tripathi is a journalist, human rights campaigner and chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of PEN International.