June 10, 2020 - 7:00am
Right about now the divisions of Brexit, a sort of soft civil war in which Britain’s relationship with the European Union served as a symbolic proxy for both class conflict and concerns over immigration, were supposed to be healing. Instead we seem to be diving straight into another culture war, this time over the monuments to Britain’s imperial legacy.
Unlike Brexit this one is expressly centred on racial and ethnic difference, and that is not good news for political stability.
The American political scientist Donald L. Horowitz, drawing on studies of post-colonial conflicts in Africa and Southern Asia, characterises the outcome of these disputes as one where:
This seems like a reasonably accurate depiction of the politics of the United States, where the symbolic sector has become the central battleground of political disharmony. The New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project, for example, aims to re-centre American history around the institution of slavery, replacing one national myth with another in an act of symbolic politics rather than of journalism as conventionally understood.
Within the UK, the most potentially momentous political divisions were already those of ethnic politics, though not hitherto those of race. The very existence of the United Kingdom is placed under threat by nationalist independence movements in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and to a lesser degree in Wales. The survival of the British state should not be taken for granted.
The irony here is that the monuments to British imperialism threatened with removal, by either mobs or by clipboard-wielding functionaries, are also symbols of the shaky British state itself. The United Kingdom was created by the empire as much as the other way around, imperial expansion being the shared project that tied English and Scottish elites into a unified whole.
Irrespective of the morality of their actions, statues of Clive of India or of early modern slave traders are symbols of the historical process by which black or Asian Britons exist as communities in this country. Churchill, arch-imperialist though he was, has really become a symbol of the post-imperial state, with Britain’s resistance to Nazi Germany becoming the central plank of postwar British identity, equivalent to national liberation movements in other countries.
Britain’s BAME communities share with Ulster Protestants the rare distinction of identifying themselves as British first and foremost, yet mostly reside within a nation, England, that primarily identifies itself as English rather than British. The eclipse of Britishness by Englishness as a political identity is a relatively recent and vastly under-discussed process, and its endpoint is unknown.
If there is to be a national debate on Britishness, race and identity, then, it should take into account the broader political faultlines of the United Kingdom. Britishness is already seen by many as a more inclusive identity than Englishness: the long-term effects of expunging the symbols of the British state in such a heated and emotive manner may be unpredictable, and not necessarily positive.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“I don’t know what happened to make the WHO so implacably opposed to vaping.”
Lobbying, bribery, corruption spring to mind.
But lobbying by whom, and to what end? Could tobacco companies be paying off the WHO to protect their markets, particularly in developing countries?
Quite likely – countries with tobacco growing industries, perhaps even the high tax benefit from cigarettes in other countries.
Most UN organisations are rife with this sort of thing.
I would think so and not just in developing countries. It would seem obvious that tobacco companies would wish to discredit vaping, especially if it encourages people to quit smoking entirely.
There’s no reason the tobacco companies can’t dominate the vaping industry as well. They have the raw materials!
Of course, but it’s a diminishing market since it’s a halfway house to stopping rather than a long-term addiction like gaspers.
The only people who actually want to vape are those who already smoke cigarettes and want to stop.
No-one in their right minds would vape if they weren’t smokers in the first place.
The tobacco companies tried bubblegum flavoured vape – clearly aimed at young people who probably haven’t smoked cigarettes – but I think those are banned now.
Vaping clearly represents a major threat to them, hence the lobbying and bribery.
The Chinese are heavy smokers, just sayin.
India is a great country but its politics and governance are more than usually awful. Arbitrary and evidence-free government decisions are commonplace, as with this ludicrous ban on e-cigarettes.
The Indian government owns 28% of ITC, its main manufacturer of cigarettes, bidis and other tobacco products. Shares in stocks in that corporation are soaring.
See my post. $$$$$$$$$$
Yes smokers pay a lot of tax. They must continue to get ill or even die to pay for the NHS.
Well, sure, this is kind of true, but only in the sense that every public health institution has been incompetent on COVID well past the point where they made things worse rather than better. The WHO has been absolutely mind-bendingly terrible on COVID and the only thing that “saves” it is the fact that most other large public health bodies reflexively follow it, so it drags them all down to its level.
)
Its stance on vaping is exactly what you’d expect to see from the WHO given its track record. This isn’t some weird aberration, the WHO is always like this. Misinformation pours out of it on a near daily basis. COVID is the textbook example, especially anything China-related, but it’s not just that. This is an organization that mounted an investigation of the lab leak theory which it had to renounce days later when people pointed out they hadn’t actually investigated anything. It claimed there was no clear evidence COVID was transmitted person to person, even though human-infecting CoVs always are. It stated outright to a BBC journalist that the there was little evidence masks worked but the messaging had changed due to political lobbying. Their last great outing on the world stage resulted in an article in Der Spiegel titled “Reconstruction of a mass hysteria: the Swine Flu panic of 2009”. Their chief at the time gave a speech in which she argued swine flu should be exploited to fight for “changes in the functioning of the global economy,” and to “distribute wealth on the basis of” values “like community, solidarity, equity and social justice” – and that was before they got an actual former communist as their chief!
The WHO is a disaster zone and should be scrapped. It took an entirely manageable medical problem and turned it into a global catastrophe due to its complete takeover by a hard left ideology that has learned it can manipulate people through an artificial fear of death.
(Oh, good article by the way, very important topic and I wasn’t aware of how big the difference is!
I couldn’t agree with you more about the WHO. . It has become over-politicised and the people running it, down to goodness-only-knows what level, are too compromised for it to just do a bout of navel-gazing and miraculously emerge ‘reformed’. The whole thing should be scrapped.
Quite apart from anything else, a global health bureaucracy, oddly enough, behaves like any other global bureaucracy does. Since its turf in this case is health, the more global health problems there are, the bigger the empire it builds.
If they’re coming for vaping (I’m a vaper), what about alcohol? Surely more harmful than vaping?
Don’t give them ideas.
What about vaping alcohol flavour-rum & bacardi that sort of thing?. The drinks industry would not like that
It hasn’t been perfect during Covid by any means, but it hasn’t been conspicuously worse than a lot of other institutions. First, is this a serious statement? And second, what kind of defense is it to say “others were worse.” WHO is the tip of the spear globally. It’s the same place that did its best to pretend China was not the source of the virus. It parroted the Chinese claim that there was no evidence of transmission of the virus between humans. That it’s off base on vaping does more to demonstrate consistency than leadership, and the wrong sort of consistency at that.
The bureaucratic mind.
If freedom of the individual is so important, why do we have to waste time and money persuading people that they shouldn’t smoke?
Imagine that all UnHerd contributors were smokers and governments around the world were trying to stop us from smoking. Outrage and more outrage!
We can still have laws to protect people who choose not to smoke from the dangers of passive smoking.
Exactly! Enclosed spaces like bars and restaurants should be able to define their own policies – advertise “Smokers’ Bar!” if they want – as long as no one is forced to work there and the policies are gradually implemented to allow those who took their jobs with the understanding they would be working in a smoke-free environment can change jobs.
It’s the HCN, CO, PNAs etc that are dangerous in smoke, not the nicotine. So vaping should be strongly promoted as a smoking alternative if the WHO wanted to actually, you know, promote health.
I think it is the Puritan strain which runs through much of the public health establisment that accounts for much of the hostility toward vaping. They get high on their prohibitionism and can’t stand that a fun smoking substitute might be available.
The WHO has shown itself to be easily captured by Chinese interests. Has Big Tobacco also bought its acquiescence?
My take as a pot smoker (not a tobacco smoker) is that there is something about vaping that is unconsciously associated with weed smoking. And that this visual association is enough to implicate the device. Between that and the tobacco industry it doesnt have a chance.
Sure the WTO is seriously flawed, but it’s hardly high brow to point this out.
Here’s why.. https://www.who.int/news/item/17-08-2016-michael-r-bloomberg-becomes-who-global-ambassador-for-noncommunicable-diseases
Hmm. Not a very balanced article. I’m a Canadian doc. The national committee I was on a few years ago, as part of its public health mandate, looked into the question of: is vaping an on-ramp to or an off-ramp from cigarette smoking? The answer is BOTH. Over time most places where vaping is common (mostly amongst youth) have seen cigarette smoking rates rise, indicating it is more of an on-ramp than off-ramp. (a huge number of new cigarette smokers started with vaping and moved up)
As with every question of societal policy, the scientific stats and research on vaping cannot answer the question of whether we should ban it. That is a question of civil liberties, and how much control we think the government should have over individual lives. People are free to do many risky things. Should they be allowed to vape as well?
I hate vaping as much as smoking. A friend vaped in my flat, telling me it was not as bad as passive smoking exposure. Even though he vaped by an open window, I started coughing which lasted all evening and well into the next day!
So it is not better than real cigarettes.
Vapers and smokers are banned from my home.
Don’t you just hate auto-correct. Instead of vape, it’s ‘corrected it to taped or raped!! Dumb robot!
On my IPAD I can turn off auto-correct.