Porter’s Pensées

The Guardian this morning reports an ‘epidemic’ of sexual harassment cases in British universities. What defines an ‘epidemic’? More, surely, than the handful that are enumerated in its tables on page 7. To take the three British universities I have been most closely associated with, and just the ‘staff on student’ category: Cambridge (with a very large student body) reports six cases in five years; the University of Hull (medium-sized) two in the same period; and the University of Newcastle another two. I really don’t think these figures qualify as an ‘epidemic’. Of course there will be many cases that remain uncovered; but to set against these there will be at least a few trivial or false accusations. I was the target of one of those once.

In all my years of teaching in several universities, although sexually predatory lecturers were a staple theme of TV dramas (like The History Man), I never heard – officially or through rumour – of a single genuine case of sexual harassment; until the very end of my time at one of them, when I had to deal with it, as Head of the Department that both the teacher and his post-graduate student victim were members of. That turned out to be a subtle and complex case, which took up most of my time in my last year. (It was I who was put in the dock, to determine whether I had handled the case properly when alerted to it by the student. I had; but it was a trying time for all of us. It was one of the factors that  decided me to take early retirement shortly afterwards.) But that was unique, in my experience – of forty years.

I did know of a couple of young lecturers who developed romantic attachments to students, both of which culminated in marriage. Very early on I even had an affair with a student myself, who was – believe me (or not, if you like) – the one who ‘came on’ to me, and who threatened to kill herself when I tried to break it off. (I’m not proud of that.) That was considered to be OK then, so long as I didn’t teach her and wasn’t in any way responsible for her grades. Now it wouldn’t be tolerated, and I would studiously avoid it, on the grounds that the simple differences in our ages (I was just five years older than she) and our statuses made the relationship unequal, and so intrinsically abusive. But those were different times (this is the late 1960s), when we were more relaxed about these things. As an older and better man now, and much more aware of the enormous pressures on young women, and the difficulties they used to encounter in getting their charges taken seriously, I’ve come to totally accept the ‘unequal’ argument.

But I am worried about how widely the definition of ‘harassment’ can be taken these days. Sometimes, if a girl or woman has been ultra-helpful to me (generally in sorting out my i-phone problems), I ask if I can give her a kiss on the cheek as a token of my gratitude. (I should make it clear that I’m a wrinkled, grey-haired oldie, and so no possible physical danger to any young woman.) In England they seem to like that. I like it when they do it to me. But I tried it in a Swedish phone shop the other week – just the request – and she treated me as if I was a rapist. Then the same thing – the same reaction – in another shop a few days later. No wonder the Swedes are so stiff and formal (my friends excepted). The sex-police have taken all the innocent pleasure from their lives.

Then, of course, there’s the whole matter of entirely false accusations, many of them ‘historical’, perhaps to wreak revenge on men like me. It does happen. You never know, it could still happen to me. I wonder if I’ll be allowed to blog my innocence from a prison cell?

If the Devil has all the best tunes, it seems to be the losers who have all the best laughs. Trump’s victory has produced a treasure-house of wonderful anti-Trump jokes and mockery, on television, in the press and (especially) on the internet, beneath whose weight you would have thought any normal person would have crumbled. Of course I may be getting a skewed impression of the balance of satire in the USA, with mainly liberal Facebook friends, and those clever people at Facebook obviously choosing to feed me only with items I’m likely to respond to positively. I could be missing out. Are there any Right-wing jokers or impressionists to compare with, for example, John Oliver and Alec Baldwin? Does Fox do comedy? Or is it all beetle-eyed hatred and crazy conspiracy theories on that side of the fence? (See Trump’s latest tweets: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/03/04/trump-accuses-obama-of-nixonwatergate-plot-to-wire-tap-trump-tower/?utm_term=.a1145b44acd4.) For someone like me, over the pond, these are just as entertaining. (They may not be to Americans.) Both the jokes and the conspiracy theories serve to make more palatable to many of us what is happening in America. But, seriously: doesn’t the Right do satire these days? Or rather, satire that is intended as such?

Satire of course has a very long and distinguished history. It has often been banned by the authorities it is directed against, for fear of the harm it may do to them; and still is in some dictatorships. There’s no question of that in America, of course, with its noble free speech traditions – at least so far. So Oliver, Baldwin and Co are here to stay.

Whether they can actually damage Trump is questionable. Hurt him, certainly, with his trademark narcissism and thinnest of skins. They obviously annoy him, more than a grown-up man ought to be annoyed. He’ll be blaming it on the liberal intelligentsia – the ‘fake press’, and all that – which is one of his main political and personal targets, if not the main one. His problem is that to be really funny, you have to be bright, which rules out most of his followers, apart from the Machiavels. (Sorry; elitist.) But it’s difficult to see even the cleverest satire, in itself, seriously undermining his preening self-confidence or damaging his government, with Congress stacked up on his side (for the moment) as well. The greater danger is that it might so enrage him as to provoke him to do something even more outrageous than he already has. And it’s he, remember, who has his finger on the nuclear button. That’s not funny, or even satirical. It’s scary.

I’m resting my hopes, if conservative Republicans don’t turn against him, on the CIA and the FBI to subvert him clandestinely. I never thought I’d say that, after what I’ve written about the malevolent interventions of the secret services in both Britain’s and America’s political histories. But in this case, her spooks may be the last defence America has of the best of its values, as well as – as in the past – the worst. Maybe MI6 can lend them a hand. One of them, ex-agent Christopher Steele, has already contributed. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump–Russia_dossier.) If MI6 want to call me back after all these years (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/03/02/my-james-bond-years/), I’ll be happy to chip in. Now that would be satirical.

‘A tunnel vision nationalism, which focuses only on independence at any cost, sells Scotland short.’ That was Theresa May at the Scottish Conservative Party Conference yesterday. I misheard it at first, assuming she was referring to Britain and Brexit. The same argument could be applied to the latter, surely. Or is this just a narrow debating point?

Like many others, and even though I voted to remain, I dismissed many of the Remainers’ arguments at the time of the Referendum as scare-mongering; just as I thoroughly suspected most of the Brexiters’ arguments for their brave new internationalist world. As things are turning out, however, I’m starting to think the Remainers had something. If only they hadn’t gone on about the perils of Brexit, and had made a more positive case for the EU itself – deeply flawed, certainly, but still more hopeful than the isolationist and nationalist path we’re about to tread – they might have stood a better chance.

God what a mess! And mostly Cameron’s fault: to bet our whole national future on a single throw of a dice! Not Corbyn’s fault, incidentally, as some are saying. He made a rational case for Remain, which however wasn’t widely reported. Other villains are Boris and Gove, who, despite the falsity of their reputations, in my view, as intellectual heavyweights, are bright enough (just) to have known better, and devious enough to be reasonably suspected of sordid political calculation in the choices they made.

Personally I don’t blame Farage. He’s a reactionary idiot, a throwback to more blimpish times, who is appearing even more idiotic as he puts his great triumph behind him. He’s doing himself no good by sucking up to Trump, though they are obviously soul-mates. Behind Trump, too, there are more blameworthy people: in particular the Republicans who allowed him to rise to the political surface, as Jonathan Freedland argues in the Guardian today: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/03/donald-trump-villain-republican-party-blame-russia. Well, that’s their problem; or rather, a problem that only they can solve.

Britain’s problem looks insoluble. We can’t apparently flout ‘the people’s will’. That’s despite the fact that the people’s will was sought at just one tiny moment in time, when the people themselves were hugely dissatisfied over other things, which they chose to blame on the EU, under the influence of grossly deceitful propaganda; and without any chance of reconsidering their verdict on the basis of the experiences we’re going through now, and cooler and more informed debate.

Bloody Cameron. Whatever – apart from the sense of natural superiority they inculcate in them at Eton – persuaded him that he had the wisdom to be a good  prime minister? By his enabling of ‘tunnel vision nationalism’ in Britain, he may well have ruined his own nation, and lit a fuse – first Trump, then Le Pen, then that Dutch bloke, then… – to scramble the whole world order; for what that was worth.

There’s an interesting report in today’s Guardian – https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/mi6-returns-to-tapping-up-recruit-black-asian-officers-alex-younger-interview – that MI6 are reverting to their old policy of ‘tapping up’ likely recruits, in order to achieve greater ethnic diversity. In this case it’s in order to net more black and Asian agents. They did something like this in the 1960s; but at that time in order to widen their recruitment socially. I was one of their targets. I came clean on this in my LRB review (19 Nov 2009) of Christopher Andrew’s The Defence of the Realm, his authorized history of MI5. Here’s an extract from that.

[Before then], to preserve confidentiality and esprit de corps, MI5 only recruited on the basis of personal recommendation, and consequently from its own class and type. This applied even to the female registry clerks, who as a result were far more debby than clerks anywhere else. In the mid-1960s, when Labour MPs started complaining of this, the Secret Services made some effort to broaden their pattern of recruitment. I know, because I was targeted then. A grammar-school oik, with no imperial connections, but hopefully tamed and smoothed by my Cambridge experience, I was ‘talent-spotted’ by one of my college dons, and sent to be interviewed by a Rosa Kleb-like figure in a decaying Carlton House Terrace apartment. She asked me my politics; I said ‘Labour’. ‘Not a communist?’ ‘No.’ ‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ So I passed that interview, and was scheduled for a second sometime later; but then withdrew when my postgraduate research grant came through.

The extraordinary thing about this event, however, is that I had no idea at the time that I was being recruited for one of the Secret Services, until many years later: when I started working in this historical field; the don died and his Obituary for the first time publicly revealed his work for MI5 in the Second World War; and I raised my new suspicion with Christopher Andrew, who had just published his Secret Service (1985: a kind of prequel to this book). ‘Where was the interview?’ he asked. I told him. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘that was MI6’ (or IRD: I forget which). Apparently they would have told me this at the second interview. I could have been unusually naïve (I’m sure the Public School recruits were more worldly-wise), but I wasn’t alone. According to Andrew’s new book, several new recruits to MI5 still didn’t know whom they were working for until several weeks after they started. Now that’s what I call secrecy.

Of course, I might be lying here. It is, after all, what spies do. I could have merely pretended to withdraw, and agreed to work clandestinely for the secret services among all those dodgy radicals in academia. We know how left-wing they are:  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/03/02/eight-ten-british-university-lecturers-left-wing-survey-finds/.The East German STASI, as it happens, did have a spy in the Economic History department at Hull, who was only unmasked when the wall fell. I obviously missed that one. So I could have been an incompetent spy. There were plenty of those. But you can never know for sure.

The LRB Blog has just posted another of my pieces on the Trump/Sweden affair: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2017/03/01/bernard-porter/sweden-who-would-believe-this-sweden/. Most of it has already appeared here, apart from the embedded links.

I visited Rinkeby today, a suburb of Stockholm 90% of whose inhabitants are of foreign origin, and where there was an incident the other night involving young men throwing stones at the police while they were in the process of arresting a suspected drug dealer. This came a couple of days after Donald Trump, in a speech, had referred to a non-existent incident in Sweden the night before, apparently involving immigrants, and which he mentioned in the same breath as recent Islamicist terrorist attacks in Paris, Brussels and elsewhere. ‘Sweden!’ – spreading his arms out – ‘Who would believe it? Sweden!’ Exactly. No-one did believe it, and it was much mocked subsequently. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2017/02/19/swedish-trumpery/.)

But then came the Rinkeby incident, which, despite the inconvenient fact that it happened after his speech, was taken to justify it retrospectively. The Swedish far-Right took it up immediately, told the Americans about it, and two of them – prominent members of the nationalist Sverigedemokraterna party – even contributed an op-ed along these lines to the Wall Street Journal: https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-is-right-swedens-embrace-of-refugees-isnt-working-1487807010. A Swedish minister is due to respond within the next day or two.

Of course it’s pretty much nonsense. Crimes and mini-riots happen here in Sweden very occasionally, as everywhere, but no-where near as frequently or seriously as in the USA. It is difficult to connect them with higher immigration; their incidence has in fact declined since the Swedes started letting most of their refugees in. We don’t know the precise extent to which immigrants are involved, as the Swedish police keep no ethnic details, although of course it’s likely in Rinkeby: not only because it’s a largely immigrant community, but also because of the rate of unemployment there. I imagine that unemployed young Swedish blonds are just as likely to commit crimes or throw stones at the Polis as, say, brown-skinned Somali.

Nor can the incidence of rape in Sweden be tied to incoming foreigners, as is often claimed by the far-Rightists. (The argument is that the Moslems’ culture tolerates it more.) If Sweden has a higher number of reported rapes than other countries, that’s because of the very broad way ‘rape’ is defined here (as Julian Assange will find if he does ever consent to be extradited to Sweden), and the way rapes are reported. (For example, if a woman accuses her husband of raping her every night of the year, it’s counted as 365 crimes, rather than one, as elsewhere.) Again, statistics don’t confirm that this is an especially ‘foreign’ crime. Then again, politically- or religiously-motivated attacks – the ones Trump was referring to – are mainly the province of Swedish neo-Nazis, and directed against Islam. (I’ve witnessed one.) Trump was simply – but dangerously – wrong. Kajsa and I are very angry.

My visit to Rinkeby was quite pleasant. It’s a clean, modern and even fairly prosperous-looking suburb. There are no signs of the mayhem that happened a few nights ago. It has the same social amenities as everywhere else in this very socially-aware country. The State has put a great deal of work into looking after and integrating the refugees. Yes, everyone looks African or Middle Eastern; many of the women are in hijabs, niqabs and burkas; the young men are standing or sitting around in groups talking: but very happily, it appeared to me. They were friendly when I approached them. In fact happiness was my main impression of them, albeit a superficial one, I realise. (I wasn’t there long.) But of course why wouldn’t they be happy, after what so many of them had gone through before arriving?

I talked with one or two of them. They had no idea that their suburb had made such an impression internationally, and were surprised. Yes, the other night’s incident was bad, a couple of cars were damaged and some shop windows smashed, but no-one was seriously injured, and it was soon over. It seemed to be no big deal. Certainly not big enough to fuel Trump’s and the Right’s paranoid anti-immigrant agenda; nor to be worth taking up column-inches in the prestigious Wall Street Journal.

Getting older, we forget things. I had either forgotten, or never knew, that Ged Martin, another British imperial historian (mainly of Canada), came from the same neck of the woods as I. In retirement, he has now turned to researching and writing the history of Havering (mainly Hornchurch and Romford, in what used to be Essex), despite not having lived there for more than 50 years, and now residing in southern Ireland (lucky man). He was also an almost exact contemporary of mine at Cambridge, where I knew him – though not well. His ‘Havering History Cameos’ are here: http://www.gedmartin.net/index.php/martinalia-mainmenu-3/235-havering-history-cameos. Getting older, we also become nostalgic. I’m hugely enjoying these pieces. I thought I’d get in touch with him, but I can’t find an email address. If he picks this up, through Google perhaps, he might drop me a line.

John Saville, the distinguished Labour historian, also came from Gidea Park. Both he and Ged, I think, went to the local Royal Liberty school. (I went to another one.) There may be others. David Irving was at my school, but I don’t know whether he was a Haveringite. (I hope not.) The editor of the Essex volumes of the Victoria County History, WR Powell, lived in Harold Wood. I wonder whether there were more? Did we all have anything in common that might have derived from the locality? If so, we might be grouped together as ‘the Havering School’. It could give the place some cachet. Maybe the Havering Tourist Bureau – if there is one, which I doubt – could organize visits to all our homes. Mum’s old house would get a blue plaque. She’d have liked that.

Learning this has all been a bit of a shock for me. I loathed and despised Hornchurch – my bit of Havering – and never thought anything good could come out of it. I even thought it devalued me. The outer London suburbs seemed the dullest places in the world, mainly because they had no local character or identity, like provincial towns, or rural villages, or even central London, could boast. They were in-between places, purgatories, neither one thing nor the other, which one simply had to endure before passing on to the more characterful Heaven or Hell. (In my case, Hull.) The accent was awful: neither proper Cockney, nor rural Essex. (Today it’s called ‘Estuary English’.) Once I escaped from Hornchurch, in 1960, I never went back, except occasionally to visit Mum before she moved up North. To my friends at Cambridge I used to pretend I came from somewhere else. ‘East London’ had more cachet, in an inverted-snobbish kind of way, and wasn’t too far from the truth. I’ve always hated ‘suburbia’, ever since.

Obviously this was a grotesquely unfair prejudice. People aren’t entirely moulded by their physical environments, and in any case Hornchurch may have been less dull than it seemed to a pretentious little twerp like me. Perhaps it was adolescence. Do young people often wish they lived elsewhere? I ought to go back – though not to live there, obviously (God no!); and perhaps join Ged in his efforts to colour in the place. From the vastness of the Empire to the parochiality of Hornchurch: it’s a curious academic journey, for both of us. But it could bring me down to earth.

It’s a sign of the times, I imagine; but apparently classic dystopian novels are selling like hot cakes just now – 1984, Brave New World, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which I’ve only just got round to reading. I don’t know why it’s taken me so long. I’m a great fan of cerebral Sci-Fi, and my favourite Sci-Fi writer is another woman, Ursula Le Guin – The Left Hand of Darkness (featuring gender-shifting humanoids), and The Dispossessed. A movie version of The Handmaid’s Tale is coming out in April. I mistook it for another film showing in Stockholm just now, The Handmaiden, which isn’t the one. Luckily I found that out before I bought the tickets. It’s an ‘erotic, psychological drama set in Japan’. At my age, I can give that a miss.

The Handmaid’s Tale is extraordinarily good at drawing the reader into Atwood’s frightening world of women cultivated merely as wombs, under a claustrophobically totalitarian regime run according to Mayflower Puritan – or Christian Taliban – rules. (This is Le Guin’s great virtue, too: her ability to convey complete empathy with totally alien societies. Is it a woman thing?) I found myself immersed, almost drowned, in Atwood’s world. And I’m a man.

In one way, however, I found it slightly dated politically – as if that matters. Religious tyranny might have seemed the most likely form of fascism in 1980s America, when the book came out; but it would seem to have little in common with our present nationalist, nativist, populist and anti-rational kind. I suppose the sexism in the book might ring a bell; and if you think that pussy-grabbing is an essential aspect of modern-day Trumpery, which I’m prepared to hear argued, you may find the book resonates. But any religious aspect to most of our modern American and European proto-fascisms – apart from the ‘pro-life’ thing in middle America – escapes me for the moment. Of course, it could come; and The Handmaid’s Tale may be looked back on in the future as just as prescient as 1984 seems today. In any case, it blew me away.

Americans have long had a problem with Sweden. Trump’s invention of an Islamicist terror attack there a couple of days ago is just the latest example. It wasn’t just a question of news distortion, though it seems clear that the television programme that gave him the idea – Fox News, of course – was grossly misleading and misinterpreted. (See https://www.aol.com/article/news/2017/02/20/filmmaker-criticized-for-reporting-that-spurred-trump-s-sweden-c/21717885/.)

But there’s a history of this kind of thing. If it’s not crime, rape and atrocities caused by immigrants, then it’s gloom, alcoholism and high suicide rates, attributed to Sweden’s welfare state. In many Americans’ eyes, these national characteristics define the place. The following piece in today’s Guardian is good on this: https://www.theguardian.com/cmmentisfree/2017/feb/20/sweden-donald-trump-crime-muslim-immigrants. Living in the USA, as I once did, I came across this over and over again. I once read in a newspaper, for example, that the Stockholm murder rate was higher than Chicago’s. Most of these ‘facts’ were as grotesquely unreliable as that.

In recent years, ‘Nordic Noir’ may have been partly to blame. (An American friend of mine, a distinguished academic, once told me he was putting off a trip to Sweden after reading Stieg Larsson’s Millenium trilogy. I’ve tried to keep him away from Midsomer Murders, lest he cross England off his list too.) Some Americans also appear to think that Sweden is cold and dark all the year round. Then of course there’s the misery-laden culture: August Strindberg, Ingmar Bergman and so on (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/12/07/scandi-gloom/); and the Swedes’ reputation for taciturnity. Swedes don’t seem to have much fun, unless they’re drunk. All untrue, of course. (Well, mainly.)

But the chief reason for this common American image of Sweden must go deeper. It’s rooted in the Americans’ whole dominant national culture, which predisposes them to believe it. From this point of view, Sweden as it is – as I know it to be – must be, frankly, impossible. Its people are – generally – law-abiding, moral, hard working, happy and prosperous. Crime is low, and productivity high. Sweden can be generous to refugees, without more than the minimum of social disruption. – And yet: religious attendance in Sweden is probably the lowest in Europe; its penal policy liberal; its prisons sparsely populated; its welfare provision surely enough to deter all enterprise; its trade unions powerful; its working days short and legal annual holiday allowances hugely generous; no-one carries guns (except for hunting); children are looked after by the State from a very young age; health provision and higher education are free; classes and the sexes are roughly equal (for most of them); and taxes are pretty high, certainly by American standards.

By Americans’ economic, religious and penal criteria, all this should spell disaster for the country. Which is what makes it difficult for them to accept all the rosier pictures that occasionally come out of Sweden: the ‘Swedish model’, and all that. And which led Trump to conclude that, if Sweden was admitting all those Muslim refugees – this was what he was talking about – the country must be suffering for it. There ought to be a jihadist massacre there. In other words, the wish, or the theory, or the prejudice, is father to the thought. (Or to the ‘alternative fact’.)

Some Brexiteers seem to want to resurrect the old British ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ as a free-trading area to replace the EU. Here, for some perspective, is an essay on it I contributed many years ago to an online (Oxford) Encyclopaedia of British History. I think it still holds up. (Embedded links are to other entries in the same Encyclopaedia.)

Commonwealth of Nations. The husk of the old British empire, an accidental by-product of history. The only thing its member states apart from Britain have in common is that they were once her colonies, though Mozambique, not a former colony, was admitted in 1995 as a special case. Not all her ex-colonies are members: the future USA for example liberated themselves before the idea was thought of; some colonies, like Burma and British Somaliland, declined to join from the beginning; and the Irish Free State, South Africa, and Pakistan were once members but later (in 1949, 1961, and 1972 respectively) left. Nevertheless the present Commonwealth comprises Britain and most of her old empire: around 54 states, scattered over all the inhabited continents, with a population estimated (in 1994) at 1.4 billion.

The term ‘commonwealth’, in this context, dates from the turn of the century, and grew out of the realization that already several of Britain’s older-established colonies were self-governing in all essential respects. To call them ‘colonies’, or collectively an ‘empire’, appeared to undervalue their real independence, and the new word was felt by some to express better the form the empire would take: a union or federation of equal nation states, united for the common good of the whole. An important catalyst for this transformation was the First World War. This had the dual effect of reminding the dominions of their continued subjugation to Britain in some ways—when George V committed the whole empire to the war it was without formal consultation with them—while at the same time emphasizing their importance and sense of individual national identity. By the time the next world war came around, each dominion was allowed to decide for itself whether it would join in. (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were generous with their contributions; South Africa, many of whose whites felt more affinity with the Nazis, less so.) This development was not to everyone’s liking, however. Enthusiasts for the ‘commonwealth ideal’ had generally envisaged the dominions taking an equal share in the formulation of policies that would then be common to them all. Instead it took an entirely different turn, and came to mean that they would have equal rights to separate policies of their own.

This privilege was established in the early 1920s, after disputes within the Commonwealth over the Washington naval conference of 1921–2 and the Chanak affair in 1922. In 1923 Canada became the first dominion to conclude a treaty with a foreign power (the Halibut Fish treaty) without reference to Britain; and the pattern for the future—of independent partnership—was set. It was formalized by an important pronouncement of the 1926 imperial conference, defining dominion status; and by the 1931 statute of Westminster, which confirmed the dominions’ legislative autonomy. For the moment this only applied to colonies of European settlement (the full list at that time was Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, Eire, and South Africa), and not to the ‘non-white’ colonies. That changed in 1947, when the newly independent nation of India was admitted to the Commonwealth. That established the character of the ‘multiracial’ Commonwealth as it exists today.

As decolonization progressed, the other ex-colonies followed. Most old imperialists regarded this process with pride. Some of them indeed saw the new Commonwealth as the culmination of the empire, the goal to which its evolution had been directed for a hundred years or more. In a way it was, for there had always been a strong tradition of what was called ‘trusteeship’ in British imperial thought. It was also widely hoped that the Commonwealth might prove to be a powerful political and economic force in the world, all the more powerful for being free, and so revive Britain’s flagging ‘great power’ status and role. Labour ministers were prone to this as well as Conservatives. For this reason the Commonwealth has been criticized for seducing Britain away from her continental neighbours, during the years when western Europe was evolving an alternative supranational structure of its own.

The idea that the Commonwealth could be a kind of empire-substitute, however, was soon shattered. The newest members regarded their hard-won national independence jealously, and were unwilling to co-operate together merely to give Britain a further lease of international life. There were sharp clashes between members, arising from past memories that were hard to eradicate, conflicting economic interests, and differences of principle, especially over the issue of apartheid, which forced South Africa to leave in 1961. (It rejoined in 1994.) Widely dispersed as they were, and differentiated in almost every possible way, it would have been remarkable if the member states had easily and naturally cohered. So the Commonwealth became much less than the united ‘third force’ in the world that the imperial optimists had envisaged; something quite different, though still worthy of respect.

As it stands now, it is totally unlike any other international organization of states that has existed before. It has a secretariat, and a secretary-general (set up in 1965), but little else in common. It has no power, no united policy, no common principles, and no shared institutions. There used to be a common citizenship, with Britain allowing unrestricted entry to all Commonwealth citizens, but her Immigration Act of 1962 put an end to that. Most member states are parliamentary democracies, but not all. Most have retained English legal forms, but not all. Most play cricket, but not all. The single constitutional feature common to all member states is that they acknowledge the British monarch as symbolic head of the Commonwealth, but fewer than half recognize her or him as the head of their own states. It was once thought of as an economic unit, a potential free (or preferential) trade area, but that was never convincing, and collapsed when Britain joined the European Economic Community in 1973. Another blow was the raising of British college fees for overseas students in 1979. The interchange of bright young people had been a valuable way of fostering Commonwealth solidarity. That was no longer felt to be a priority, however, in the narrowly utilitarian climate which prevailed at that time.

Nevertheless the Commonwealth still serves a purpose, as a forum for informal discussion and co-operation between nations of widely disparate cultures and material conditions. That function is served by a host of specialist Commonwealth institutions (the Commonwealth Institute in London, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, the Association of Commonwealth Universities, the Commonwealth of Learning, and so on); and by biennial conferences of Commonwealth heads of government. The ideal it represents still flickers, albeit fitfully. Only time will tell whether the Commonwealth is a mere footnote to history, or the beginning of a new chapter.