UK’s problematic empire state due its day of reckoning

This is clear to everyone outside of the Tory insider class. As people suffer hardship, anxiety and worry about the basics of life, Tory ministers boast that the UK is “leading the world” and finding its forte as an international leader for democracy in Ukraine by standing up to Putin’s aggression.

Such triumphalist rhetoric has been on the increase for the past few decades – gaining legitimacy in the aftermath of the Falklands War 40 years ago this month when high Thatcherism began to get into its stride. This continued with the era of Blair and New Labour, then the Tories under Cameron and now Johnson.

Beyond the personalities of the leading figures of UK politics, it is seldom asked why this has happened and been allowed to happen. It should be asked because the answer goes to the heart of what the UK is, what it has been and is likely to be for the foreseeable future.

The UK has never put the wellbeing and concerns of its people first and foremost. Being what academics such as historian David Edgerton and democracy campaigner Anthony Barnett, along with myself, have called an empire state has had profound consequences not just internationally but domestically.

The British empire state at first examination looks like it is about military projection, continual military intervention and a reverence for Britain’s past when it was a global imperial force. But it was also the mobilisation of society, resources and people to support this idea to the exclusion of the care of its citizens.

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The British Labour Party and the centre left shied away from the nature of the British state and its impact on society, democracy and progress through their history. Thus, the historian Ian Cobain has found that the British armed forces have been actively involved in military action in every single year since 1914 – maintaining, then dismantling Empire and then clinging to the wreckage.

Tony Blair said to his advisers, after the handover of Hong Kong sovereignty in 1997 to China: “We shouldn’t lose any more territory. Britain needs to be big. Look at a map. Britain is so small.”

Boris Johnson has waxed lyrical several times, including during his time as foreign secretary, that the UK has been involved in “the invasion or conquest of 178 countries – that is most of the members of the UN” – and that is because the UK is a “warrior state”.

Yet this project, and associated disinterest with the citizens of the UK, reveals itself time and again in the contempt the political classes have for domestic concerns and policy. This empire state and its philosophy are present every day in Britain in ways so ubiquitous that they rarely attract comment.

The City of London emerged as a major finance centre, divorced from the domestic economy, to fund empire, colonial trade and slavery. To this day it does not support the UK economy, but engages in global trade, speculation and offshoring which “crowd out” the needs of business here – a situation so entrenched no Labour Government has ever tried to change it.

British citizenship is constructed as a racial entity with the mythology of empire and “imperial citizenship” only finally abolished in the Nationality Act of 1981, a law which ended the legal concept of “colony” and the British Empire – which ceased to exist in statute on January 1, 1983, the 40th anniversary of which is coming up. Underpinning all this is the survival of that feudal relic the monarchy. This is not an apolitical institution but the apex of the British state and after the 70-year reign of the Queen the wheels are coming off the institution.

It is not just personalities. Andrew and his shameless behaviour; the continual excuses for the late Prince Philip’s racism, sexism and bigotry; Prince Charles and his endless lobbying of government; and William and Kate’s recent disastrous trip to the Caribbean.

It is what it represents. William and Kate went to the Caribbean and could offer nothing but a couple of platitudes about empire and slavery while representing Britain’s collective crimes.

This brought forth terrible optics harking back to Britain’s imperial past, but in Jamaica, Belize and Bahamas, protests and the rising tide of republicanism showed countries that want to free themselves from the crown.

Apart from the UK, only 14 states have the Queen as its head – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and various countries in the Caribbean. There is not one African or Asian state among them. This historical monarchy is in retreat and will soon be reduced to the UK alone – and where it may not last that much longer.

The legacy of empire and the empire state continue to shape Britain. There is the defence of what historian Caroline Elkins in Legacy of Violence calls “legalised lawlessness”. Not only that at home, it gave resonance to the populist racist language from Enoch Powell to Thatcher and Brexit.

Elkins puts it: “Fifty years after ‘Rivers of Blood’, Powellism is alive and well today, and how ideas of nation, sovereignty, purity of citizenship, and British exceptionalism underwrite the Conservative Party’s platform, tangling Brexit, the Empire, migrant workers ‘stealing’ British jobs, and Britain’s unique ability to go it alone.”

Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, put it bluntly in the run-up to the Iraq War: “The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of law and open co-operative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era – pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.”

The nature of this empire state, its view of the world in the past and present and its take on the UK domestically is problematic and selective – for all the triumphalist rhetoric with regard to the Ukraine and on the world stage.

The end of this state of affairs at home and abroad would be a positive change for the people of the UK, those places where the Queen is still head, the Commonwealth, and how the UK finds a global role which stands for democracy, solidarity and international law – qualities the UK has sadly contributed to weakening over recent times and for a large part of its existence.