Thank you for your comments and critique. It is nice to have a thoughtful challenge to my article.
I don’t mean to suggest that there is a widespread open clamour for empire in the UK. There are only a small number who spout off such sentiments and a few tabloids encouraging it. We can debate whether people like Farage and Golding or media outlets like GB News and the Daily Mail are pro-empire, but I am thinking about the political pandering to a general sense of “Britain is in decline” with the implication that it was greater when it was an empire. I am thinking of, for example, when GB News uses its slogan, “'The UK is the greatest country in the world, our monarchy is something to be proud of.” What is the underlying symbolism of that?
Your excellent description of the preoccupation with sovereignty reminds me of a documentary I watched, I forget the title, that made the same main points about the roots of the British sense of separateness form the rest of Europe. I definitely understand that a degree of separateness and a concern for sovereignty is an organic historical reality for Britain, and not necessarily negative.
One of the issues I am working on as a philosopher is an understanding of political reductionism, what some people call “oppositional politics.” This article was within that project, and I have written a book on the overall terrain. In that vein, such statements that the British Empire was overwhelming positive or overwhelmingly negative are unhelpful denials of the complexities of reality. Such statements serve political ideologies rather than what I think is the proper aim of politics: to improve life for people. The mud slinging over the monarchy are obstacles to real dialogue.
But the debate about the monarchy is very much tied in with empire. It is partially, but more than that it is about the reality of the monarch as symbol of Britain. That’s why I make the points about how people put their beliefs onto the monarchy and comparing the British monarchy with the other European monarchies. I think there’s a reason why the other countries don’t have internal debates over the role of the monarch, but Britain does. Britain maintains a paternalistic attitude of superiority toward the rest of the world. That attitude was behind Brexit and so much else in British politics. As an American who grew up steeped in the US version of that attitude, I can see it clearly in Britain.
The extreme anti and pro-monarchy camps aren’t really arguing about the monarchy, it’s a proxy for their political reductionism about Britain’s place in the world. Once, the sun never set on Britain. Now …
The Right (much of it anyway) isn’t dealing with the geopolitical reality that now the UK doesn’t have much power or influence beyond its borders. It still doesn’t accept the Commonwealth as other than Mother Britain and Her children. It isn’t dealing with the legacy of Empire and that’s why it refuses to allow any criticism of Britain, especially the monarchy. Respectfully, Sunak and Cleverly (plus Braverman) can’t be pointed to as addressing the problem when they are complicit in the government’s hostility toward legal immigrants to the UK from Commonwealth countries.
None of this absolves the political reductionists on the Left from their absurdities. Attacking the monarchy and trying to disrupt the coronation are self-serving but ultimately empty gestures. They aren’t dealing with the legacy of Empire; they are attacking a straw man of the Right—opposition for its own sake rather than positive action to improve life for people. That’s why I call them the Fake Left.
What we can do to face up to history (and not just Britain, also the US and other nations) is to have honest, open conversations about what happened, what effects arose, and how people are affected today. And we need to look at the reality of corporatism, which is the biggest legacy of colonialism. Only then can we move forward.
