You’ll have seen the news from Britain, that a number of ‘Republicans’ intending to peacefully demonstrate at King Charles’s coronation procession were arrested by the police before even getting their placards up, on the grounds that they ‘might’ cause trouble; and this after the leaders’ having squared their intended actions with the police weeks before the day. Rishi Sunak thinks this was OK. Coronations – and monarchy itself – are of course very British. (If you don’t like them, said the vice-chair of the Conservative Party a few days ago, then you should ‘emigrate’.) It follows that trying to protest or disrupt them in any way is ‘unpatriotic’.
Now: I don’t know what parts of Britain’s history our self-styled ‘patriots’ are particularly proud of; but if it doesn’t include popular protest then their list is seriously deficient. Of course our tradition of protesting is not nearly as impressive as France’s – a fact which was a cause of xenophobic pride in the 19th century (it showed how giddy the French were) – but there has certainly been a great deal of it over the years, on behalf of a number of causes, not all of them what we might regard as ‘progressive’, and most of them failing to achieve anything much; but many of them helping to speed things up in a way that leaving these issues to Parliament probably wouldn’t have done. Votes for men and for women are the obvious examples. Decolonisation may be another. Not that I want to claim that popular opposition to colonial misdeeds was the – or even ‘a’ – major factor behind the fall of the British Empire in the middle of the last century; but it was there, albeit unnoticed by many left-wingers today. As well as an ‘imperial’ Britain there was always an anti-imperial – or at least a deeply critical – one, which certainly contributed to her retreat from her colonies from the 1940s – or even earlier – on.
Anti-imperialism was of course the subject of my first book, Critics of Empire, published in 1968; and in subsequent books I’ve argued that indeed anti-imperialism, as a general philosophy, was invented in Britain, in a way that imperialism itself certainly wasn’t. (See British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t, 2016; and Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots, 2022). If we’re into ‘national pride’, and all the other ‘patriotic’ stuff, isn’t that something we Brits could be ‘proud’ of’? Even Charlie boy, in his purple robes and golden carriage; if he thought about it a bit. (He seems a thoughtful fellow.) In this sense, arresting republicans in the Mall for just being republicans, is almost the most unpatriotic thing one could imagine. We Brits are surely better than that; at least in patches.
Porter’s Pensées 
Hello there Dr Porter having grown up in the sixties the main impression the Empire made on me was that it no longer existed, not the red maps at least. In Northern England, I had the same sort of feeling as you about the monarchy vs republicanism – everyone was aware we had a Queen of course but many found her voice and intonation in the Queen’s Christmas speech to be exceptionally boring. In the end I think I grew to appreciate QE2 as a kind of High Commissioner Diplomat who seemed very popular outside the North not least in former colonies… Something I still find quite difficult to reconcile. 🙂 Oh and London looked to me like a kind of imperial museum not at all as important as it still considered itself to be. 😉 Looked rather like Vienna…
These days I think if the Empire had any sort of value it was likely as a unifier of conflicting princedoms and/ or tribes in vast regions of previous anarchy and chaos, the most important of which are thriving democracies today. While other regions are still anarchy and chaos except those ruled by dictators. When I think of India, OK it was unified then divided into India and Pakistan but there was a coherent modern national infrastructure with a unified legal system, authorities, democratic structures, English-speaking media and a pretty homogenous system of national defence that doesn’t go to war with itself. There’s the modernisation aspect for good or bad. I’ve heard the remark “Britain created the modern world” quite often on the web although I wouldn’t go quite that far.
When I sat in Dr Porter’s “Britain and the World” course at Hull Uni I think I was more sort of Marxist-leaning as a Northerner of working-class background (at a time when that still existed in higher education). But in my own modest way I might have been one of your successes there. 🙂 At any rate, I’m pretty a-political (and balanced!) now and feel that the Northern Rust Belt is still a rust belt – in or out of the EU. Remains to be seen whether the UK can revive some modest kind of CANZUK and TPP trade given that the Northern ports that serviced that are now defunct, like the Manchester Ship Canal, Leeds-Liverpool canal and associated former industries lol. B t w never thought that Sweden would be in the EU at the same time the UK was out.
Förresten har du lärt at prata svenska? Pratar numera danska för at jag bor och arbetar i Köpenhamn. Hvis du forstår dansk så endnu bedre. De taler og staver bare ikke så godt som svenskerne. All that since European and Scandinavian studies were closed down in Hull and the lecturers are either retired or passed on.
You may remember me as the postgraduate who made rather a big noise about national socialism at Hull which I understand went through the entire senate… 😉 But there you are, always choose the broad factual basis of history not the romantic one. 🙂
I do remember being remotely sad that the 13 American colonies won their independence after Wolfe had united much of North America. These days I’d be quite happy if Scotland and especially Northern Ireland would get Indyrefs and vote however they want to vote. No point in having a country of constituent countries which no longer wish to be so.
B t w thanks for the ‘first’ in “Britain and the World.” 😉 (Hull 1979-80).
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Peter – sorry to have not replied before, but I was hospitalised – nothing too serious – and so distracted. I do remember you, and what you told me you’d discovered about the Swedish Social Democrats, and the row at Hull over that. Since then I’ve become part-Swedified myself, and got to meet Maija Runcis, a Latvian friend of my sambo Kajsa’s, who published about this – controversially – a few years ago. Do you know her? If you’d like to come up to Stockholm we could put you up, in our summerhouse in the archipelago, and maybe arrange a meeting – if you’re still interested. In any case it would be good to meet again after all these years, and to learn what you’ve been up to in Denmark.
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Bernard – hello there! Sorry to read about your hospital treatment and hope you are recovering well. 🙂
I saw Maija’s book about the sterilisations a while back and there’s been a lot of activity concerning the ‘folkhem’ concept and population policy in recent years.
American sociologists and historians have published widely on the ‘folk’ / ethnic / agrarian aspect of SD policies and German historians (one in Stockholm) have published comparative analyses with ‘volksgemeinschaft’ (‘folk community’) in prewar Germany. The one as a democratic populist concept, the other as a ‘dictatorial’ concept (cf. Volkswagen, literally a ‘folk wagon’).
I identified the main origin of these studies as the work of my friend and researcher Dr Weston, Lund who sadly passed away a few years back. He pioneered much of the revision of Swedish history back in the 80s. His talks informed me of the main lines of S Dem policy from 1933 which were a clear response to the electoral successes of Hitler’s National Socialism, overtaking the German Social Democrats with a ‘classless’ national appeal. The response to this was naturally motivated by fear of a similar development in Sweden (which we have evidently seen more of in the rise of the Sweden Democrats).
The main lines of policy were loosely organised under 1) the Corporate State / state corporatism in parallel with parliamentary elections, 2) folkhush@llning – a populist/ neo-mercantilist economic policy and 3) quantitative and qualitative population policies – which is where Maija seems to be focussed. 🙂
So you see I do still keep up with developments lol and I’d be very interested to visit at some point and possibly meet Maija. Thank you for the invitation! 🙂
I’m in England for the rest of the summer visiting Dad, my Mother sadly passed on earlier this year just short of their 70th wedding anniversary. So, much to take care of there but Dad is doing well in the circumstances at 91. 🙂
Should be back in Copenhagen in October though. I have a son there, Peter Frank, who was 30 this week and doing very well as a media programmer. 🙂 I did have a stint teaching 3rd year globalisation and European Integration at Handelshojskolen Copenhagen (they were rather surprisingly unsurprised there by my Swedish research lol) but the pay couldn’t compete with translation income which also involved far less reading heh.
Best wishes Pete 🙂
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Dear Bernard, I think “Critics of Empire” remains an important book which has stood the test of time well. I guess one of the main historiographical shifts has been to emphasise the role of imperial networks more, but that doesn’t diminish its value.
Being a fan of Billy Bragg and EP Thompson, I appreciate your desire to see the British radical tradition given prominence (warts and all, I should add). This raises a curious feature of the current vogue for defending the British Empire: it is based not so much on celebrating critics, secular or missionary, who challenged imperial misrule, as on exculpating its leading protagonists such as Rhodes and Milner. This, I think, stems from its Conservative (big C) roots and its typically catch-all dismissal of any critique of the British Empire as anti-Western and Marxist, as though the Cold War had never ended. Of course, I know you were criticised, most unfairly in my view, by one postcolonial historian, but I think the current crop of defenders of empire (Biggar, Sumption et al) have little in common with your own outlook. At least I hope so!
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