“The greatest peril of Imperialism lies in the state of mind of a nation
which has become habituated to...deception and which has rendered itself
incapable of self-criticism.”[1] J.A.
Hobson, “Imperialism: A Study.”
Immediately following
his successful appearance on BBC’s ‘Question Time’ programme, the author and
journalist Owen Jones dedicated his weekly
column in the ‘Independent’ to lambast the current UK political spectrum. He
rightly noted the almost complete banality of consensus of the three main
parties on the major issues of the day. From financial regulation, austerity to
foreign policy, it is literally a case of tweedledum and tweedledee when it
comes to their respective political positions. Yet, there was something all
very déjà vu about the article. It simply read as though it was based on a
reading of Peter Oborne’s book, ‘The
Triumph of the Political Class’ published several years ago on the
conformity of the ruling class. Oborne, who clearly belongs to the moderate (culturally,
at least) side of the Conservative Party, bemoaned the decline of traditional
British oppositional politics and its supplantation by a technocratic,
careerist ‘modernising’ class who rarely substantially disagree or venture
outside the Westminster bubble. Owen has every right to partly rehash this
argument even if it is executed with a good dose of left-wing spice.
In contrast to this contemporary
dreary state of affairs Owen conjures up the Labour politicians of yore and
specifically, the “leading lights” of the first majority Labour government of
1945. These “leading lights” are in his “dewy eyes” Prime Minister Clement
Atlee, Nye Bevan – “founder of the NHS”, Ernie Bevin – “Britain’s representative
on the global stage” and the humble “errand boy” Herbert Morrison.
Jones is rightly
concerned that a third of politicians at the last general election intake in
2010 were privately educated unlike Clement Atlee, who was educated in a manger
next to goats, horses and a flying pig or was old ‘Clem’, as he was
affectionately referred to, educated at Haileybury private school. The school which
was originally purpose built as a “training ground for generations of those
destined to govern
British India” by that bastion of conquest, loot and impoverishment, the
‘Honourable’ British East
India Company.
As for Bevin, according
to William Roger Louis in his magisterial “Imperialism at Bay”, there were
“sceptics” who doubted whether he could maintain the interests of British
imperialism but as he assures us, if “they had been privy to the secrets of the
British government they would have confirmed the impression of Bevin as the
inheritor of the imperial legacy from Churchill.”[2]
Indeed, Jones is
clearly oblivious to the fact that Bevin unleashed the counter-insurgency in
Malaya 1948. The insurgency was largely conducted to protect British interests
against independence guerrillas and to safeguard profits from the Malayan
rubber and tin industry for British capitalists. In the late 1940’s and early
1950’s Malayan raw minerals were the “biggest dollar earners” in the Empire.
The international earnings of these minerals according to one Lord in
Parliament, “have very largely supported the standard of living of the people
of this country and the sterling area ever since the war ended…” before going
on to add, “What we should do without Malaya , and its earnings in tin and
rubber, I do not know”.
In order to combat any
threat to British standard of living which clearly entailed the financing of
the nascent British welfare state, Bevin
waged war on Malayan rebels. The war included using the forerunner of the
cluster bomb, the fragmentation bomb; forced resettlement programs of half a
million people and other aspects of chemical warfare. Many of the military strategies
employed by the British in this counter-insurgency or “emergency” as they
called it were later driven barbarically to their logical conclusion by the
United States in Vietnam.
But rest assured,
according to Jones, Nye Bevan resigned when Hugh Gaitskill introduced
prescription charges in the National Health Service. Bevan was a man of
“uncompromising conviction”.
It was also under Bevin
that the majority of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, between November
1947 and May 1948 under what was then Mandate Palestine. The British had issued
the Balfour Declaration in 1917 endorsing full and total assistance to Jewish
immigration and colonisation of Palestine. For the British Empire, a Jewish
state in Palestine was one way of pre-emptively minimising any threat to its
interests in the Suez
Canal.
However, Bevin “the
union leader,” was not content with the colonisation of Palestine with European
Jewry. He had also toyed with the idea of colonising Libya with European Jews. An idea, to be fair, which seems to have been
floated by Winston Churchill during the Second World War.[3]
Bevin’s successor as
foreign secretary Herbert Morrison, the former “errand boy”, also distinguished
himself with a ‘cunning plan’ (as Baldrick from Blackadder
would say). After Mohammad Mossedegh’s dastardly nationalisation of the British
owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), “leading light” Morrison concocted a
plan to overthrow the democratically elected Mossedegh.[4]
The plan successfully manifested itself two years later but only after the
British humbly cut the Americans in by guaranteeing them a 40% take on Iranian
oil profits. After this coup d’état, AOIC changed its name to British Petroleum
(BP).
When British
imperialism was military crushing, raping and castrating its way through Kenya
under the pre-text of fighting the Mau-Mau rebellion in the 1950’s, not one of
Owen Jones’s “leading lights” proffered a contrarian ‘dewy-eyed’ squeak.
By virtue of exalting
members of the immediate post-war Labour majority government as a yardstick by
which to measure the current crop of Labour politicians Owen Jones does nothing
more, than at best, reveal his total indifference to the victims of this Labour
government’s foreign policies. At worse, could Jones be revealing something
more sinister than this? Is Jones implying that as long as the British white
working and middle classes are sufficiently supported economically by the
British state it doesn’t matter how many ‘wogs’ are slaughtered and exploited by
Her/His Majesty’s Government in foreign lands for this righteous end?
Yet social imperialism,
that is the socio-economic amelioration of the peoples of the imperial
metropolis at the expense, indeed exploitation and subjugation of the people of
Africa and Asia runs deep in British history. J.A. Hobson in his book on
“Imperialism” quotes an Indian economic historian:
“Under the pretence of
Free Trade, England has compelled the Hindus (Indians) to receive the products of
the steam-looms of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Glasgow, etc., at mere nominal
duties; while the hand wrought manufacturers of Bengal and Behar, beautiful in
fabric and durable in wear, have had heavy and almost prohibitive duties
imposed on their importation to England.”[5]
The net effect of this
policy in the early decades of the nineteenth century, according to Hobson, was
the “irreparable ruin” of Indian industry. Also, keep in mind that the raw
materials and finance of England’s industry in this period was most likely
originally accrued on the backs of the captured and shackled African laboured plantations
in the Caribbean. Albion’s gentlemen needed to be employed, fed and “Rule
Britannia” must be sung with heartily blood soaked gusto.
Jones is correct when
he writes that we are living in “turbulent times” but what adjective would have
been used to describe these “times” if it wasn’t for the United Kingdom’s
artificially concocted Persian Gulf principalities and their despotic nepotistic
rulers pouring their “investments”
into the UK.
The London
Stock Exchange, Carilion, British Aerospace, La Senza, football teams,
racing horses and hundreds
of thousands of jobs are all intimately connected to the divide and rule
spoils of Arabia.
The undeclared bailout
of the British economy by Britain’s favoured Gulf despots is not given, excuse
the pun, the appropriate credit in these “turbulent times”.
Jones rightly lampoons
the vacuity of David Miliband but the real historical fact is, his “leading
lights” would have happily welcomed him into their company as one of their own
after his performance during the Blair years and since.
[1]
J.A. Hobson, “Imperialism: A study”, Unwin Hyman, London , 1988, pg. 211
[2]
W. R. Louis, Imperialism at Bay, Oxford University Press, Oxford , 1977, pg.555.
[3]
ibid. pg. 58-64 and pg. 555-560
[4]
Stephen Dorril, ‘MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations” London , Forth Estate, 2000, pg.561-562
[5]
Hobson, op. cit., pg. 292
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