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October 23, 2024 - 1:00pm
The race to become the next secretary-general of the Commonwealth once again threatens to pitch transnational legitimacy against national sovereignty. Reporting this week suggests that the leading contenders for the senior post all support pressing Britain to pay reparations for its historic role in the Atlantic slave trade.
It is an ironic turn of events. Many Tory-leaning Brexiteers looked fondly on the Commonwealth as offering a vast and rich hinterland of international trade and cooperation, which Brexit Britain could substitute for a Napoleonic bloc in Europe tottering under the weight of its own arcane regulations. By contrast, the Commonwealth has the benefit of being more organically connected to British history, incorporating more dynamic and faster-growing nations than the sclerotic economies of Europe, and tying Britain to the old imperial dominions of Australia, Canada and New Zealand. These latter states would constitute the lynchpin of the CANZUK bloc, envisaged as a global Anglosphere alliance that would bind together the English-speaking, free-trading liberal democracies of the world.
Given that the culture wars developed in the Anglosphere, it is natural that the premier Anglophone transnational organisation in the world cannot escape the grievance-based politics of identity. Castigating the old imperial powers for their historic role in slavery offers a bottomless reservoir of moral authority for elites in poor developing countries — so many of which emerged from the ruins of the British Empire — with which to distract their populations from their own domestic failures, while dangling the remote prospect of reparations.
From the British perspective, though, to imagine that the European Union is the only transnational organisation to threaten our national independence is to misconceive the ways in which member-states have substituted for nation-states since the end of the Second World War. Membership of international organisations has been one of the key means by which governing elites have sought to repress domestic demands and popular expectations, citing permanent commitments to allies and institutions in place of old-fashioned diplomacy based on the national interest.
The Commonwealth was established in 1931. But it is no accident that its modern iteration of all countries being “free and equal” came into being in 1949, during the same era as other leading member-state organisations: the United Nations (1945), Nato (1949), the European Convention on Human Rights (1953), and of course the European Economic Community (1957), the forerunner of the EU itself.
The notion that the modern British nation bears any guilt or moral responsibility for slavery is ridiculous. Nonetheless, the reason transnational organisations such as the Commonwealth and the EU continue to function at all despite such manifestly absurd politics is because they are embedded within member-states, anchored in powerful constituencies which have a direct interest in deploying transnational authority to repress the popular demands of their fellow citizens. For the liberal professional classes in Britain and the wider West, the history of imperialism and slavery provides a means to delegitimise mass democracy as incorrigibly corrupted by racism. Now the Commonwealth will provide them with another prop to do this.
With increasing pressure for Britain to leave the ECHR, the recent Commonwealth ruckus shows that the battle over national sovereignty and transnational authority is far from over. Whatever the fond imaginings of Tory Brexiteers, the Commonwealth is in truth another decrepit legacy organisation of the 20th century, much like the EU and Nato.
Brexit Britain stands in a uniquely strong position to draw on the legitimacy conferred by its popular assertion of national sovereignty in 2016 to show that it can stand without needing the crutches of member-statehood used by other countries. The British Government should use the popular legitimacy conferred by Brexit to carve out a new kind of diplomacy and foreign policy, firmly rooted in the national interest rather than using membership of transnational organisations to bridle our national self-assertion.
Many critics of Brexit derided it as nostalgia for the British Empire. In truth, national sovereignty has always acted as a solvent of transnational and imperial rule, stretching back to Henry VIII’s break from the supranational authority of the Papacy in 1534. It would be entirely appropriate for us to continue this glorious British tradition by Brexiting from the decrepit globalist legacy of the British Empire itself.
Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is author or editor of eight books, as well as a co-author of Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (2023). He is one of the hosts of the Bungacast podcast.
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SubscribeThis is an interesting argument. But I don’t think it would be diplomatically wise to exit the Commonwealth at this juncture. It has its problems, true, but it is also useful. Certain people within the organisation may bang on about reparations for slavery etc., but this is nothing more than virtue signalling, by a small minority, who know that there is little prospect of it ever happening. In other words, it’s a politically safe thing to do. Therefore, on balance, it would make more sense to remain in the Commonwealth than to leave it, especially as Britain ever being ‘forced’ to pay reparations by it is very remote indeed. On the other hand, it will take political leadership to stare this nonsense down. Not being part of the Commonwealth won’t stop these demands, as they come from all over the place, both within and outside of Britain.
You’re absolutely right in suggesting that exiting the Commonwealth (Cexit?*) wouldn’t stop those countries with political capital to gain from making reparation demands from doing so; it might even make them more determined.
The author’s “Tory Brexiteers” sneer is also way off the mark, and just a trope to hang his own point on. When he finally gets to it, it seems he’s keen on the UK being free to make our way in the world without the restrictions imposed by membership of the EU. In that regard, it’s almost as if his sneer was intended as a kind of apologia for his view, in the same way that someone might vote for Trump whilst saying they despise him.
For my part, the breakup of the Commonwealth wouldn’t be anything to regret. It’d finally put an end to the continual harking back to a past that – whilst at least as good for the development of the ‘free world’ as anything else that’s ever happened – now needs to be consigned to history. The death of QEII last year signalled the final chapter, and the visit of the current monarch to Australia is just embarrassing.
*sounds like something the trans lobby might be in favour of.
Britain should keep the Commonwealth and be proud of it. What other former imperial power (Russia, Japan etc) have their former colonies wanting to continue in association with it after they’ve become independent? None, really. It must say something about admiration for the British legacy and a desire to continue a connection.
As Keir Starmer said to me, “If the Aborigines don’t like Australia, why don’t they go back to where they came from?” Not really. He has never met me. But we all know that that is what he thinks. I only ever met Sir Peter Ustinov once, but one of the things that he said to me was that what really worried him about Australians was not that they were all descended from convicts, but that some of them must have been descended from warders. The loss of the Empire meant that we had nowhere to which to send a potential British Hitler to live out his days as a minor law and order official. So, as was always inevitable at some point, we have ended up with one of them as Prime Minister.
Meanwhile, the world moves on. Narendra Modi is not in Apia for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, because he is in Kazan for the BRICS Summit, where a resolution is at least approaching even of the dispute between India and China over Arunachal Pradesh, currently in India, and over the Aksai Chin plateau, currently in China. In 2020, that had led to their first fatal confrontation since 1975.
While the big boys of BRICS are able to amuse themselves at the fall of Andriy Kistin as Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, its Starmer or its Kamala Harris, for flagrant corruption on a glorious scale, the talk of the dowagers at the CHOGM tea party is apparently of reparations. Those might cause more problems than they solved, but the loan to compensate the slaveholders was so enormous that every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom was still paying it off until 2015, 182 years after it had been taken out. Yes, not until 1833. Not 1807. It was only last year that saw the two hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the British Anti-Slavery Society. The ban on the slave trade in 1807 had done nothing to stamp out slavery itself, and indeed victory over Napoleon had given Britain additional slave colonies.
It was time to open the Bible again. The claim that Scripture did not condemn slavery as such was made by the defenders of that institution, who generally had a pecuniary interest in it. But the idea that everyone thought that for the first eighteen centuries of Christianity’s existence is simply false, and it is very telling that the abolitionists were castigated and mocked specifically for taking the Word of God too seriously. By taking it so, then they were unable to believe that the different “races” were different species with different origins, as was widely believed by the theological conservative-liberal elitists of the day.
The suggestion that until some very late date no one had thought that slavery was unbiblical and un-Christian is bound up with the suggestion that there was no opposition to it in its heyday, but that simultaneously England and then Britain had taken it up purely for the pleasure and honour of stamping it out. In fact, though, we were not even the first country to abolish slavery, since that was Haiti, after the only successful slave revolt in history. We have still not yet been free of it for as long as we practised it. And while it is true that it could never officially exist in the Imperial Motherland because “the air of England was too pure” for it, from where did English Common Law arrive at that conclusion? Out of that thin air itself? Or from Christianity?
The beneficiaries of the slave trade remain at the heart of the British elite. There is no doubt that the monarchy was heavily involved in the slave trade for, it bears repetition, longer than the period from its abolition to the present day. But Starmer has set his face, not only against reparations, which is an argument, but even against apology. The Atlantic slave trade was the foundation of capitalism, and Starmer believes that in turn to be an iron law of nature, simply non-negotiable.
Therefore, rather than give the usual answer about Britain’s having stamped out slavery, Starmer has to say that there had never been anything wrong with it, or at least not when Britain had done it. To say otherwise would be to raise almost endless questions, beginning with why the water of England should be so impure, yet at the same time so expensive. There is a mounting case for the kind of tactics that were employed against the slave trade. What if we all just refused to pay the exorbitant water bills that went straight out in dividends?
And yesterday’s proposal by 30 MPs for a two per cent tax on wealth above £10 million, held as it was by people who invested it at interest rates of four per cent or above and who would therefore not even notice while the rest of us regained £24 billion per year, is one of several proposals for just reparation indeed. The taxation of unearned income at the same rate as earnings, as was the case under Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, could easily abolish the two-child benefit cap, restore the £20 per week uplift to the Universal Credit two in five claimants of which are in work, and extend that uplift to disability benefits. Merely taxing each of Britain’s 173 billionaires down to one billion pounds per head would raise £1.1 trillion, an entire year’s tax take. And so on.
Just my opinion : Comment brevity is underrated.
As is comment sanity.
Definitely the caffeine spider.
See how many people with assets of more than £10m or how many billionaire we have next week.
The two child benefit cap is a moral good. There are those people who have no more children than they can afford and those that think everyone else should pay or even have children as and when to support the benefits lifestyle.
3 out of 5 Universal Credit claimants are our of work. Typically this is a lifestyle choice
Is this bold and dynamic Brexit Britain of which Prof. Cunliffe writes the same Britain that can’t hold on to a Prime Minister for more than a couple of years, secure its borders, control its national debt, build a train line from London to Manchester, prevent sewage from flooding its rivers, or keep its public toilets clean?
Ah, but can’t you just feel the popular legitimacy? If there is one thing the British government has gained because of Brexit it is popular legitimacy. Right? . . . Oh, really. . . . Oh, dear.
Yes, it’s a great consolation for the second-rate health service, too.
Yes – borders effectively controlled by the ECHR, another supranational authority that proves the core message in the article. The “bold and dynamic” part of Brexit, which I admit doesn’t yet exist, is something made possible by finally escaping the clutches of the rotting political corpse in Brussels, and it will happen as soon as Britain’s political class recognises that corpse for what it is instead of treating it like a comfort blanket.
Do you also blame the ECHR for the national debt, the sewage, the HS2 debacle, and the inferior health service?
Brexit everything. The un. NATO. The commonwealth. The ECHR.
The un doesn’t do anything apart from create ridiculous policies and walk out on its actual job. If the un did its actual job we wouldn’t need nato.
Nato has done a good job of p*sing off russia, it was not well prepared for the invasion of Ukraine and nobody has got the b*lls to mobilise it anyway. Mostly because that could start a nuclear war. So we can’t use it incase we get nuked, but we will do pretty demonstrations with it anyway and let the US boss everyone on foreign policy. Obviously we can’t brexit that yet incase we have to fight a war that could have been stopped by the un but as mentioned, they don’t do their job either.
The ECHR protects the rights of people illegally entering the country, trampling on the rights of the people that actually live there.
If the commonwealth is going to buy into all this social justice nonsense from America and start demanding reparations money it’s going to cost a fortune. Tell them to b*gger off.
Totally agree. Smaller governance is better governance.
I think it a bit unfair after all this time to demand reparations from the commonwealth countries for the benefits this country has bestowed on them.
They should be paying us.
Cricket and trains are great and all but I really don’t think they miss the rape, theft, murder and enslavement.
Are there comparisons of the levels of rape, theft, murder and enslavement over fifty plus years ago when the British were in charge versus the levels prevailing today in now independent Commonwealth countries? I’m fairly certain I’ve read news stories that suggest rape, theft, murder and enslavement have not gone out of fashion in various Commonwealth countries despite the British leaving.
They kept the cricket and the trains. And lots of other really good sh*t.
And we still do really good stuff, in fact the very Internet you are using now, was invented here.
I’m sorry we are so awesome.
They not only kept the cricket, they got better at it than you are.
Which is brilliant. Good for them. Theres nothing wrong with that. It will keep our cricket team on its toes, won’t it.
It looks like they need keeping on their toes in Rawalpindi right now, though in Stokes’ case you’d settle for him keeping on his feet.
We were right to stop them doing it even if the miss it
You want to try that again, slick?
I never understand why the Left, accuse everyone they don’t like with rape. Yet when there is undisputed evidence of rape committed by the causes they support.eg Hamas Oct 7th, they deny it! Makes no sense to me.
The aqueduct? Oh, wait! That was the Romans!
The Commonwealth countries can ask, demand and have a hissy fit if they choose to, the UK government must say no. That’s it, end of story, however Lammy will want to spaff several billion on virtue signalling his wokeness.
There must be no money and no apologies for the actions of our ancestors, any sign of weakness and the demands will be never ending.
Good article and all true. But the biggest ‘Brexit’ of all….the one that poor old Blighty most desperately needs is an exit from the yoke of the ‘progessive’ university-sheep-dipped professional class that has slithered its way to the top of each and every one of our institutions (all the way from bleeding heart-charities to the criminal justice system). I’m not holding my breath.
Sounds like someone’s university application was laughed out of the registrar’s office!
I realize that it is painful for you to acknowledge but putting poorly educated clowns (like you) in charge of institutions just isn’t a very good idea!
Crikey! Have you seen the kind of people who get into university nowadays? Even you would probably make it!
Well North Staffordshire University anyway
I think CS is referring to the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Hull….
Copy all comments on here before posting them, and paste them into draft emails or wherever.
Considering almost all those Commonwealth countries with non indigenous people have a higher standard of living than their original African countries it would be very odd for the UK to pay reparations.
West African nations whose ancestors sold Africans to slavers should pay reparations.
…the Black African Elites of most West African states are provably descended from the Black African Rulers who cheerfully sold other Black Africans to us (and others) on the Gold/Slave Coast (Step forward the Oba of Benin)…and very few Commonwealth Rulers in the Caribbean are without a trace of European (ie slaveholding) ancestry. So rather than say “No”…let’s by all means have a “grown-up” discussion…which covers ALL the facts…
…not least of which, we departed most of our Colonies leaving behind functioning democratic government, modernising infrastructure (from railways to universities), honest courts and coppers maintaining law and order and armed forces under political control and sufficent for self defence…and growing wealth, life expectancy, and health…
…in addition to offering the opportunity to move here, to live, work and be educated (somewhat restricted now, but still easier and with greater rights than most would-be migrants…like getting the vote)…
…so let’s by all means facilitate the Cost/Benefit analysis OVERALL…which would be complex…but by no means unmanageable.
And then, in about a decade…lets start a discussion, with respect to a Data-based proposal on who “won” and who “lost” from the Empire and Commonwealth…and who bears greatest responsibility for anything that happened AFTER we left…
…and then, in about twenty years…we might owe them a tenner…
Let’s not forget the lives and equipment lost in the effort to suppress global slavery after you Brits had seen the light.
It’s often forgotten that ‘the Commonwealth’ has a real political influence in the UK in the form of voting rights given to ‘Commonwealth citizens’ who can take part in our elections and referendums on the basis of having a short-term residency visa. This leads to absurdities such as Indian or Canadian students at UK universities being able to vote in the Scottish Independence or EU referendums, while long term residents from the EU (with jobs, spouses, houses, children) were barred.
Such voting rights are rarely reciprocated for UK citizens in Commonwealth countries.
Whether we remain in the Commonwealth or not, the concept of ‘Commonwealth citizen’ should be written out of UK law.
Whatever may have been the wrongs of slavery, the trans-Atlantic trade in African slaves (the only slave trade that anyone seems to care about) did have one vastly positive consequence. It brought into being the island nations of the former British West Indies; they would not have existed, their peoples would not have existed, had it not been for that trade.
Yet they want us to apologise for bringing them into existence? They want us to pay unimaginable sums of money on top of the vast sums already expended in suppressing the slave trade and in abolishing slavery itself within the Empire?
Mere insolence. Yes, it’s time for Britain, and all the Canzuk countries, to exit this ridiculous hangover from happier times.