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January 18, 2005
Gordon's volte face?
Something like sixty years of left wing loathing for the British achievements as a colonial power and of their hatred for all things British have been severely damaged. Someone close to the top of the present government has dared to contradict the mantra of decades; it comes close to actually admitting that they are wrong.
No less a person that our very own Iron Chancellor, the curmudgeonly Gordon Brown has declared that it is time we stopped being ashamed of the Empire, that we should stop apologising for it, and recognise that it achieved a great deal of good! Pass the smelling salts; I think I am in shock!
Of course, it could well be that he has suffered, like St Paul, a "Damascus Road" experience. Visiting Africa can do that to dyed in the wool left wing types. Confronted by the reality of the poverty, the filth, the corruption, and the decaying infrastructures, infrastructures built by the Colonial Powers at the expense of the tax payers of those powers, it can provoke a complete revision of what a person may have previously perceived to be the "evil" of colonialism. It is always convenient to blame the colonial powers for the ills of Africa, and, in part, there is some blame. There are very definitely two distinct aspects that the colonial powers did mess up. The first is the way they carved up the territories to create the states that exist today. They ignored the tribes and tribal boundaries, and the result is the current situation in places like Rwanda and Burundi or Zimbabwe where traditional enemies are now alternating in power (except Zimbabwe) and practicing genocide on the "other" tribe.
The second is what really brought the colonial period into disrepute: the direct intervention from the capitals of empire and the imposition of Civil Service bureaucrats on the Colonies. These whallahs overturned traditional structures which the original colonial governments had used to rule by and imposed the vision of the capital. Whatever the capital did they imposed locally, whether it was appropriate or not. The native peoples who, under the original arrangements had enjoyed a measure of respect and freedom, suddenly found themselves brushed aside, barred from important offices or worse, allowed to hold office provided they did as they were told by some cretin sent out to get him out of somebody's hair in the capital or to keep him out of harms way because he couldn't be trusted at the centre of the empire.
Fortunately, though, there were enough people with a more just and fair concept of how to deal with and develop the locals to mitigate the worst of this damage and eventually hand over working countries to the local populations. Most of the problems arise in the countries where there was no "transition" and the hand-over was to people who had never been given the opportunity to work their way up the structures and work out the rules of the game.
That said, visiting many of the former colonies in Africa one frequently hears from the "people in the street" that things ran better, or were less unstable under the colonial government. Recently a left leaning government think-tank and a group of emminent academics have suggested that Africa could be saved by another dose of colonialism. The chances are that they are right - provided no one sends any of the usual Whitehall Whallahs to run it!
For myself, I am encouraged that, at last, the Chancellor is showing signs of appreciating that our history is not as dark as he and his party have always painted it. There is more to be proud of than to be ashamed of, and it is time we started to celebrate those achievements rather than continue the self flagellation that so many wet liberal and left wing types prefer. The empire was built on trade and it flourished as long as that trade flourished. Once it became an exercise in governing rather than trading, it began to fall apart.
I suspect, though, that the Chancellor, in challenging the accepted version of the Labour Party's vision of our history, has possibly put himself out on a limb. He may find that the hardliners in his own party are now lining up with saws to cut it off. Damascus Road experiences can produce that sort of effect as well. Ask St Paul!
Posted by The Gray Monk at January 18, 2005 10:45 AM