Island Stories

Britain and Its History in the Age of Brexit

David Reynolds

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780008282356
• eBook ISBN:
  9780008282332
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: History

1

Decline

Of every reader, the attention will be excited by an history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire, the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind.

Edward Gibbon, 1788[1]

Thus began the final paragraph of Edward Gibbon’s magnum opus The History of the Rise, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Volume one had appeared in 1776, just as the American colonies declared independence from Britain and proclaimed themselves a republic. The sixth and last volume was published in 1788, a year before ancien régime France was engulfed by revolution. Its fratricidal anarchy would spawn Napoleon’s continental empire.

Gibbon’s chronicle of the Pax Romana became a literary classic during the nineteenth century, as Britain saw off the Napoleonic challenge and grew into a global power – spanning the world from India to Africa, from the Near East to Australasia. By the end of the century the term Pax Britannica had entered the vernacular. But there were also creeping fears of imperial mortality – captured by Rudyard Kipling, the bard of empire, in his fin de siècle poem ‘Recessional’:

Far-called, our navies melt away;

On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre![2]

An 1879 Punch cartoon by John Tenniel shows John Bull the ox carrying the world’s woes on his back – Russia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Scotland (a recent financial scandal in Glasgow), a striker and a gleeful African warrior from the costly Zulu Wars.

Britain’s Victorian and Edwardian leaders sought strategies that might save their unlikely empire from a Roman fate. How best to deal with jealous rivals? By military confrontation, or selective appeasement? The first could sap the nation’s wealth and power; the latter risked letting in the barbarians by the back door. They also wrestled with the Roman tension between libertas and imperium, of civic virtues supposedly corrupted by militarism and luxury. Would British imperialism undermine political liberty at home? Conversely, would a freedom-loving people have the backbone to resist the jackals of the global jungle? These dilemmas became acute during the era of the two world wars.

On a larger canvas, Gibbon’s Rome has provided a template for telling the story of Britain’s changing place in the world over the last five centuries in terms of a great empire’s rise, decline and fall. This held a perennial, almost mesmeric fascination for a political class that modelled itself on imperial Rome. Under this narrative, however, lurk problematic notions of empire. Should it be understood as a clearly defined possession – eventually ‘lost’ or ‘surrendered’? Or was it like an increasingly outmoded and ill-fitting suit of clothes, which was finally tossed aside? This chapter looks more closely at Britain’s changing global role and at related shifts in the country’s power and prosperity – arguing that the Gibbonian concept of ‘decline’ is deeply misleading. In doing so, it also highlights a recurrent pattern of British political rhetoric from the late nineteenth century right up to the present. Politicians have frequently couched their campaigns to change national policy within a dramatic ‘declinist’ narrative of the recent past. Here are a few examples.[3]

Ideologists of ‘decline’

Joseph Chamberlain has been described by historian Peter Clarke as Britain’s ‘first leading politician to propose a drastic method of averting the sort of national decline’ that he ‘saw as otherwise inevitable’. Chamberlain was also the first to do so in a style of populist nationalism crafted for an era of mass politics. He and his followers posed a ‘Radical Right’ challenge to mainstream Toryism, preaching what has been called a gospel of ‘messianic catastrophism’.[4]

Chamberlain was a self-made Birmingham businessman who got rich as a manufacturer of screws, before moving into politics in the 1870s as a reforming Mayor of Birmingham (‘Radical Joe’) and then as a member of W. E. Gladstone’s second Liberal Cabinet. His ego and energy splintered not one but two parties – first the Liberals in 1886 because of his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland, and then the Conservatives in 1903 over ‘Tariff Reform’. Quite what that phrase meant was almost as elusive as ‘Brexit’ in our own day, but at its core was Chamberlain’s conviction that the rise of competitors such as Germany and the United States must be met by abandoning the Victorian precepts of ‘free trade’ and imposing tariffs in order to protect British industry and to consolidate the empire. Only this strategy could save ‘the weary Titan’ who ‘staggers under the too vast orb of its fate.’ He told the colonials, ‘We have borne the burden for many years. We think it is time that our children should assist us.’ The alternative was decline into ‘a fifth-rate nation’ – another Venice or Holland. ‘All history is the history of states once powerful and then decaying,’ Chamberlain told a political rally in 1903. ‘Is Britain to be numbered among the decaying states: is all the glory of the past to be forgotten? … Or are we to take up a new youth as members of a great empire, which will continue for generation after generation the strength, the power and the glory of the British race?’[5]

Chamberlain’s aim was to shore up Britain’s power base in an era of rival empires by protecting its existing manufacturing industries. For him, structural economic change was unacceptable: it would mean replacement by ‘secondary and inferior’ industries, causing ‘individual suffering’ to the working man without ‘any real compensation to the nation’. ‘Your once great trade in sugar refining is gone,’ he declaimed mockingly in another speech in 1903: ‘all right, try jam. Your iron trade is going; never mind, you can make mouse traps.’[6] But although Chamberlain’s populist crusade for tariff reform briefly caught the public imagination, it soon burnt out. The main effect was to divide the Conservatives and pave the way for the Liberal landslide of 1906. Chamberlain died, bitter and disillusioned, in July 1914 – a month before the Great War began. Ironically, during the 1920s and 1930s, the very restructuring and diversification he deplored would transform the Birmingham area. Chemicals and electrical engineering, aviation and motor vehicles not only rejuvenated the Midlands economy but also prepared Britain to wage a second world war in the era of airpower.[7]

Winston Churchill was another politician who, in later life, became obsessed with Britain’s decline – doing so, like Chamberlain, when in opposition and with one eye on gaining power. Conviction and calculation conjoined. After a spectacular political rise on either side of the Great War, culminating in Chancellorship of the Exchequer at the age of 50, the premiership seemed within Churchill’s grasp. But then, for a decade from 1929, he was cast out into the political wilderness, regarded as a wilful opportunist too mercurial for inclusion in the National Governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain – Joe’s son. To attract attention he campaigned loudly on various causes, from Edward VIII in the Abdication Crisis to air rearmament against Germany. It is the latter for which Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’ are now best remembered. But the underlying issue for him – and the one that sustained the rest of his life – was Britain’s decline as a great power.

Churchill’s crusade, however, took a very different form from Chamberlain’s. He was and remained a staunch Free Trader who had broken with the Tories over tariff reform. Churchill’s vision of Britain’s greatness centred not on the white-settler colonies that Chamberlain wanted to weld into an imperial economic bloc, but on India, which young Winston had experienced first-hand as a soldier fighting for his Queen Empress. In 1931 the Conservative party adopted a policy of giving India ‘dominion status’ within the British Empire – potentially setting it on a course of devolution and independence similar to that already conceded to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Incensed, Churchill broke with the party leadership and embarked on a four-year crusade against what became the Government of India Act of 1935. Now virtually forgotten in British history, this was the biggest parliamentary struggle of the 1930s – eclipsing in time and passion even the issues of Germany and rearmament – for which Churchill rolled out some of his most extravagant rhetoric.

Inveighing in February 1931 against the ‘nauseating’ sight of ‘Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace … to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor,’ Churchill claimed that India was ‘no ordinary question of party politics’ but ‘one of those supreme issues which come upon us from time to time’, like going to war against Germany in 1914. A month later he warned that ‘the continuance of our present confusion and disintegration will reduce us within a generation, and perhaps sooner, to the degree of States like Holland and Portugal, which nursed valiant races, and held great possessions, but were stripped of them in the crush and competition of the world. That would be a melancholy end to all the old glories and recent triumphs.’[8] The root problem, in Churchill’s opinion, was a failure of national will since the Great War. ‘The British lion, so fierce and valiant in bygone days, so dauntless and unconquerable through the agony of Armageddon, can now be chased by rabbits from the fields and forests of his former glory. It is not that our strength is seriously impaired. We are suffering from a disease of the will. We are the victims of a nervous collapse, of a morbid state of the mind.’[9]

If willpower alone was what counted, Winston would have won the battle over India. But he led a diehard minority within the Tory party. What’s more, his vehemence and obduracy not only estranged him from the party leadership; it also undermined his credibility on more consequential matters. His description of the Indian nationalist leaders as ‘evil and malignant Brahmins’ with their ‘itching fingers stretching and scratching at the vast pillage of a derelict empire’ was striking, but it was ‘not likely to make comparable descriptions of genuinely evil men credible’.[10] Churchill’s hyperbole about India helped keep him in the political wilderness. Only with the onset of a second German war was he brought back into government.

Churchill never modified his opinions about India, empire and decline. Even in the darkest days of the Second World War in April 1942 – as Hitler’s Afrika Korps advanced on Cairo and the Japanese conquered Burma – he deplored any concessions to Indian nationalists. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt breezily informed Prime Minister Churchill that the British should concede self-government to India, on the lines of the Articles of Confederation under which the new United States had initially been run after independence in 1783, Churchill replied that he ‘could not be responsible’ for such a policy and even threatened to make it a resignation issue.[11] In November 1942 he warned defiantly: ‘We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.’[12]

On this, Churchill proved as good as his word. But not because liquidation did not happen; only that he did not have to preside over it. For that lucky escape, he had the British electorate to thank: they voted him out of office in July 1945. What one might call his ‘second wilderness years’, from 1945 to 1951, allowed him to watch from the sidelines and criticise with impunity Clement Attlee’s Labour Government for its ‘scuttle’ from India and Burma in 1947. Some of his predictions had prescience – for instance that ‘any attempt to establish the reign of a Hindu numerical majority in India will never be achieved without a civil war’ – but, as in the 1930s, they were blunted by his jeremiad of decline and his lamentations about lack of will. ‘It is with deep grief that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire with all its glories, and all the services it has rendered to mankind. I am sure that in the hour of our victory now not so long ago, we had the power to make a solution of our difficulties which would have been honourable and lasting. Many have defended Britain against her foes. None can defend her against herself.’[13]

In similar vein, campaigning for the premiership again in October 1951, Churchill denounced Attlee’s six years as marking ‘the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world’ since ‘the loss of the American colonies two hundred years ago.’ He asserted that ‘our Oriental Empire has been liquidated’ and ‘our influence among the nations is now less than it has ever been in any period since I remember.’[14] Back in office, however, the ailing Churchill did not fight the tide. He saw little choice but to approve the withdrawal of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone in 1954, arousing the anger of a new generation of Tory diehards, which opened the door to Egypt’s nationalisation of the Canal two years later.

Although Tories have been particularly prone to narratives of decline, something of the sort also underpinned Labour’s election victory of 1945. The party’s manifesto ‘Let Us Face the Future’ was rooted in a historical narrative of lost greatness – this time not about empire, but about social promise betrayed by wilful politics.[15] ‘So far as Britain’s contribution is concerned’, the manifesto argued, ‘this war will have been won by its people, not by any one man.’ (The Tory campaign featured Churchill.) The Great War had similarly been a people’s victory, Labour went on, but afterwards the people had allowed ‘the hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’ (Stanley Baldwin’s famous phrase) to craft ‘the kind of peace that suited themselves’. And so, despite winning the war, ‘the people lost that peace.’ By which Labour meant not only the Treaty of Versailles, but also ‘the social and economic policy which followed the fighting’.

In the years after 1918, those ‘hard-faced men’ and their political allies kept control of the government, and also the banks, mines, big industries, most of the press and the cinema. This, said Labour’s manifesto, happened in all the big industrialised countries. So, ‘The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men.’ They acted solely in the interest of their own private monopolies ‘which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.’

Similar forces were at work now in 1945, the manifesto warned. ‘The problems and pressure of the post-war world threaten our security and progress as surely as – though less dramatically than – the Germans threatened them in 1940. We need the spirit of Dunkirk and of the Blitz sustained over a period of years. The Labour Party’s programme is a practical expression of that spirit applied to the tasks of peace.’ On election morning, 5 July, the pro-Labour Daily Mirror told readers: ‘Vote on behalf of the men who won the victory for you. You failed to do so in 1918. The result is known to all.’ The paper devoted most of its front page to reprinting a Zec cartoon first published on VE Day in May. This showed a weary, battered soldier holding out a laurel wreath labelled ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’. The caption read: ‘Here You Are – Don’t Lose it Again.’[16]

This narrative of the lost peace, torn from the hands of the people by greedy capitalists, was sharpened by bitter memories of mass unemployment during the 1920s and 1930s. Together they informed Labour’s campaign of nationalisation after its triumph in 1945. The flagship policies of bringing the commanding heights of the economy – industries such as coal, steel, utilities and railways – into public ownership and providing a stronger social safety net through the welfare state and the National Health Service were presented as repayment to the people for their sacrificial efforts during two world wars in a quarter of a century.

Once built, however, Labour’s edifice became a central target of the declinist narrative of another Tory three decades later: Margaret Thatcher, Prime Mini...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise for Island Stories
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: Brexit Means …?
• 1. Decline
• 2. Europe
• 3. Britain
• 4. Empire
• 5. Taking Control of Our Past
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by David Reynolds
• About the Publisher