How Is the Anglosphere Voting?

Both big Anglosphere countries, the United States and the United Kingdom, have held a national election within less than twelve months. The United Kingdom also conducted a national referndum within this time frame, which may have a significant bearing on the future direction of the Anglosphere. I thought it would be of interest to take stock of what these and other recent national elections might tell us about where the Anglosphere is going.

First, let's construct a simple working definition of the Anglosphere, for this purpose. I am going to define it as follows:

'An Anglosphere country a) speaks English as an official (or dominant administrative) language; b) uses a legal system rooted in English common law; and c) either contains significant settlement from the British (or Western) Isles, or has Queen Elizabeth and her heirs and successors as head of state.'

Also, for the purposes of this post, I am excluding all countries with a population under a million, and Papua New Guinea, the latter because I don't know much about its politics. (I am already stretching my knowledge far beyond what I normally would do in these posts.) Another qualification for inclusion here is that the election must have occurred since 7 September 2013, when an Australian Federal Election removed the last surviving pre-Global Financial Crisis government in the Anglosphere, when the Australian Labor Party lost power.

That gives us, going chronologically, the following elections:

New Zealand    20 September 2014 right-of-centre incumbent won
United Kingdom  7 May 2015 right-of-centre incumbent won
Canada         19 October 2015, centrist opposition won
Jamaica        25 February 2016, right-of-centre oppostion won
United Kingdom 23 June 2016 populist nationalist victory in referendum
Australia       2 July 2016 right-of-centre incumbent won
United States   9 November 2016 populist nationalist opposition won
United Kingdom  8 June 2017 right-of-centre incumbent lost

New Zealand is due an election in September, but otherwise the pattern for Anglosphere governance is set for the next couple of years. The cycle will probably resume again with either an Australian or a Canadian election in 2019, depending on who goes first. The overall trend is fairly clear. After Barack Obama did nothing to the bankers, there has been little appetite for left-of-centre solutions to the fallout from the global financial crisis.

However, the elections since the Canadian election in October 2015 have suggested that voters are fed-up with budget cuts and jobless recoveries. In Canada, Justin Trudeau won by promising more economic growth. In Jamaica, Andrew Holness proposed unleashing the power of the market in place of IMF mandated austerity. The hair-shirt economics of Malcolm Turnbull's government was rebuffed in Australia, although the governing Liberal-National coalition still clung (by one seat) to a majority in the House of Representatives. Trump followed Holness in proposing that a government of American business leaders could transform the country and restore jobs that went missing after 2008.

Last Thursday's UK general election has continued this trend. It's fairly clear that the promise of more money for social welfare struck a chord with enough of the voters to dispell convincingly the prediction that Labour under Jeremy Corbyn was a runaway train back to 1970s-style stagflation.

Reading analyses of the voting, like Robert Ford's piece in The Guardian, suggests that Labour mobilised two distinct and apparently irreconcilable groups -- (a) social-democratic Leave voters and (b) Remainers seeking to block Theresa May's 'hard Brexit, if we must, but Brexit at all costs' approach. The latter may have reason to be happier than the former, and it is hard to regard this coalition as a stable one.

It does appear that hard-line Leavers, of any social class, have turned to the Conservative party. The Conservatives are shameless enough to shake the magic money tree in order to rob Labour of the social-democratic Leavers, at the same time as they are alienated by Remainers trying hard to push Labour in a 'stop Brexit' direction.

Having noted that, the one thing to be sure about is that events will render everything I have written here out-of-date sooner or later. There are too many variables in play -- the global growth picture is not good, the attitude of the EU27 is going to play an important role in shaping public opinion in the United Kingdom, radical Islamic terrorist attacks could change the popular mood.

However, all the Anglosphere polities should note that at present if you want to get elected the time has come to set aside expressions like 'magic money tree' and talk about how your election is going to secure jobs and a social safety net people can believe in. The mass of people have reached the limit of reducing expectations to deal with the Global Financial Crisis.

Revisiting an Old Film Friend

1956 was a bad year for the Anglosphere. The Suez Crisis brought to a head a number of troubling trends that had been going on since before the Second World War. However, on 26 November 1956, a few weeks after the Suez Debacle, one of the greatest cultural artefacts of the twentieth-century Anglosphere began production. That's the starting date the Internet Movie Data Base gives for The Bridge on the River Kwai, which starred Obi-Wan Kenobi (Star Wars), Max Schumacher (Network) and Quintus Arrius (Ben-Hur). The director was David Lean. The film was released in 1957, and went some way towards mending the disruptions of 1956, at least culturally.

The film was produced by Sam Spiegel, an unlikely denizen of the Anglosphere. He was born in Galicia, in Austria-Hungary, and wound up in Hollywood after the Nazis came to power in 1933, although he had been there before in the 1920s. Spiegel, however, loved London, and starting in 1951 used his production company based there, Horizon Films, to produce three very important films (Kwai, The African Queen and Lawrence of Arabia), and several others that are at least interesting (Suddenly, Last Summer, The Swimmer, Nicholas and Alexandra). The screenplay was credited to two writers who had been blacklisted for connections to the Communist Party. While Michael Wilson found refuge in France, Carl Foreman lived in England for some two decades before returning to the United States. (Foreman was one of a number of blacklisted media workers who found refuge in Britain, a topic that seems under-researched from the Anglospherical perpsective.)

A happy coincidence of events led to me discovering that my wife had never seen the film, despite having been with me some twenty years, and so we sat down with the DVD. I have seen this film repeatedly over the years, but probably no more than once during our time together. I've got to a point where I'm counting down the years, and re-watching films I know well is something I do with some resentment, but this seemed a good excuse to reacquaint myself with an old friend.

For me it is probably the best film of all time. If you asked me to rank all films on technical accomplishment, I have seen none better. This is not to say it is my favourite, but the best. But I was reading reviews of it on criticker.com and I am disturbed by some of the criticisms of it. They fall into three broad categories:

a) The film is too long/too slow. Anyone who asserts this just doesn’t understand what cinema is about. The film’s story demands all that time. Better to claim it is too short than too long, too fast than too slow.

b) The film is disjointed, with the POW drama and the action commando mission. Anyone who asserts this doesn’t understand what the film is about, and has overlooked the fact that Jack Hawkins got second billing in the opening credits, ahead of Alec Guinness. There are four masculine prides at work -- Colonel Saito’s vs Colonel Nicholson’s, and Commander/Major Shears’ vs Major Warden’s (that surname is telling). Each character's pride must be balanced against the other three, and the commando mission is necessary to add more depth to the conflict between Saito’s ‘bushido’ and Nicholson’s ‘Geneva Convention’ and Shears’ life-saving opportunism. Warden's own warrior code, a blithe disregard of the moral content of his actions, contravenes in respective ways the direction Saito, Nicholson and Shears give their lives.

c) Various cultural criticisms. The most valid one is about the treatment of women. But this is a film about masculinity, and in fact female characters were only added at the producer’s insistence. (For such a patriarchal country, America's cultural industries have paid a lot of attention to attracting women into the audience, or at the very least a male-constructed version of women.) Given that Sir David Lean was required to work with them, he didn’t do so badly in presenting how the purely masculine world perceives women, at least in the 1950s. The complaints about the Japanese getting short shrift is, I think, understandable in the circumstances. The war had ended a mere twelve years earlier. The Japanese did not yet have their fearsome reputation for industrial prowess (one that has been harder to sustain since the 1990s), and were still very much remembered most for their cruel way of waging war, and their role as an 'aggressor state' during the 1930s. The well-publicised Rape of Nanking had only happened two decades earlier. It shouldn't stretch our thinking so much to believe that the supposed incompetence on display here is a consequence of Saito in particular, and not Japanese engineering in general.

Finally, it's worth noting that the film, in its context, can be interpreted as more than just an anti-war film, but in fact an anti-atomic-war film. I don't think any of the criticker.com reviewers spotted this. I certainly didn't for many years and viewings.

The film, with its American, British and Canadian characters, is very much a distillation of the Anglosphere in its own time. For various reasons, we should re-read texts like this with an eye to this dimension. It will help explain so many of the active currents which will affect not just Anglosphere futures, but the future of the planet.

Article 50 Day: Bursting a Balloon

'Prince: I know my duty; you are all undutiful:/Lascivious Edward,--and thou, perjur'd George,--/And thou, misshapen Dick,--I tell ye all/I am your better, traitors as ye are:--/And thou usurp'st my father's right and mine.
King Edward: Take that, the likeness of this railer here [Stabs him]
Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III): Sprawl'st thou? take that, to end thy agony. [Stabs him]
Duke of Clarence: And there's for twitting me with perjury. [Stabs him]
-- King Henry VI, Part 3, Act V, Scene 5

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Probably for some today's Shakespeare quote will be the one on the eve of Agincourt in Henry V, but I prefer to think of #Brexit as a civil war like the Wars of the Roses. This episodic affair arose out of the ending of a cross-Channel empire in France, and concluded with the victory of Henry Tudor, helped by France, over Richard III. Shakespeare here refers to the death of Henry VI's heir, Prince Edward, Watching the murder in this scene is Henry VI's wife Margaret, daughter of a French king. Edward can stand in today for the young people of Britain, who favoured a European future. I have sympathy for them, but for old codgers like me the cultural links with the Anglosphere were being loosened too much under the reign of the mad kings of Brussels. Kith and kin lay abroad across the oceans, not the Channel, for most of us until relatively recently.

Which brings me to a continent I visit too infrequently in this blog, Australasia. Some time ago, I set aside an alarmist article by a former Australian foreign minister, intending to comment on it. I was reminded of it by the recent appearance of a blog post by Ben Wellings of Monash University on the same theme. Now is a good time to deal with this 'Anglosphere Illusion'.

Let me start with former foreign minister Gareth Evans, who writes:

The basic problem for Anglosphere advocates is that none of the candidates for membership of this new club are likely to have the slightest interest – geostrategic, economic or political – in joining it.... the truth of the matter is that the UK has brought nothing of [geostrategic] significance to the region’s defense since the fall of Singapore in 1942....Anglosphere connections mattered a lot for Australians and others in the days before the UK joined the European Common Market. The severance of those ties was painful for our dairy and other industries, but for Britain hard-headed self-interest understandably prevailed....Probably the hardest truth that Britain’s Anglosphere dreamers must confront is that there is just no mood politically, in any of the candidate countries of which I’m aware, to build some new global association of the linguistically and culturally righteous.

 These are three very valid points: (1) Britain is a geostrategic Lilliput; (2) old economic links are gone, (3) Australians have moved away intellectually (and possibly spiritually) from the Mother Country. Now for a look at an earlier blog post on The Conversation:

The British Commonwealth of Nations achieved some economic coordination, but it was not a free-trade area. Members offered each other tariff “preferences” in which they lowered duties....Without central institutions it was hard to promote uniformity and resolve disputes. Between 1932 and 1936 Britain’s empire and Commonwealth trade did rise from 33% to 37% of imports and from 41% to 47% of exports...[After the war] Dollar shortages and exchange controls in the “Sterling Area” channelled trade towards Commonwealth members. In 1953, they accounted for  49% of UK imports and exports.... By 1972...Britain’s EEC trade had overtaken its Commonwealth trade despite the French president Charles De Gaulle twice vetoing UK applications to join the community....The experience of the 1930s illustrates that there are limits to supranational economic cooperation without some pooling of sovereignty.

 Again, the key points are (1) the Commonwealth does not have an economic role, (2) the broader economic situation trumps any 'cultural' unity. We can interpret these as variants of Mr Evans second point. Finally, we come to the post that was my springboard for writing this blog post of my own:

The disappointing UK trade mission to India, where Indian officials showed scant interest in a free-trade agreement and instead wanted fewer restrictions on the movement of Indians to the UK, showed the hard road ahead....The main risk for Australia is that Brexit comes at a moment when – after many years – Australia will soon start FTA negotiations with the EU. For Australia, Brexit is the diplomatic equivalent of moving into a shared house with a divorcing couple. In signalling with alacrity that “Australia will be there” when it comes to an FTA with the UK, Australia must not seem too keen – lest we become embroiled in a messy divorce between the UK and the EU.

 So here the key point is 'Britain can expect no favours' based on past connections, a variant of Mr Evans' third point. The question is, do all these objections leave any grounds for optimism? The answer seems to me to be a qualified 'yes'. I would focus on two aspects from the quotes I have provided here. Andrew Dilley of the University of Aberdeen, in the second citation, illustrates the problems with the Commonwealth as an economic institution. I would suggest that the first step is simply for a 'coalition of the willing' to start envisioning future arrangements that could solve disputes without imperilling sovereignty in the way the EU did. After all, we have the existing example of the EU, for one thing, to show what works and what doesn't.

Furthermore, though the 'Golden Age' of UK-Commonwealth trade grew out of some specific conditions, so did the British 'pivot to Europe' during 1957-72. To some extent, it was a reversion to a natural pattern. In 1913, UK trade with Continental Western Europe amounted to 38.5 per cent of its imports and 29.6 per cent of its exports. Canada, Australasia, Southern Africa and South Asia amounted to 22.6 per cent of imports and 31.6 per cent of exports. More importantly, in 2015 UK exports to Continental Western Europe excluding Switzerland amounted to 30.6 per cent of the total; imports from the same countries amounted to 41.4 per cent. Going by this historical pattern, leaving the EU may well have little impact on British exports, and something like 3 per cent of imports might shift to Commonwealth sources, or elsewhere. (BTW, this is roughly what those opposed to EU entry in the 1960s said, roughly -- our Commonwealth partners would lose a market for their exports.) Far from being of, as Mr Evans put it, 'the slightest interest', that's a lot of money. Surely the EU's difficulty is indeed Australia's (and the rest of the Commonwealth's) opportunity.  The lesson of China stands out here. Imports from Mainland China in 1913 amounted to a minuscule 0.3 per cent and in 1959 stood at 0.5 per cent. In 2015 they stood at 10.4 per cent. Who saw that coming in 1959, let alone 1913? (My 1913 statistics come from a draft UN report you can access here.)

 The second point is the Indian desire for 'fewer restrictions on the movement of Indians'. Leaving the EU will free the British government's hands somewhat on this, and also with regard to the 'white Commonwealth' countries that include many descendants of emigrants from Britain and Ireland. For India and South Asia more broadly, as well as the Forgotten Anglosphere in the West Indies, we have the reverse -- Britain has received people, and the family ties shared by all these countries potentially could help Britain with the immigration it will continue to need. Another 'coalition of the willing' could start thinking about how people could circulate around these countries, which might help with trade. This would strengthen previously existing links between families and other institutions that do share a common heritage. Mr Evans' sense that the ties will continue to weaken is a self-fulfilling prophecy unless people work to keep them up. The same is true of any family.

 This is not to say that some kind of future arrangement will 'replace' the EU on any level. Thinking that is even more 'pie in the sky' than anything I have written above. Britain has learned some hard lessons about 'the free movement of people' in an era of austerity, as any conversation with a teacher or social worker employed in one of the affected areas might highlight. And the economic dislocation is going to be severe, a self-inflicted recession on par with 1991-2, possibly. Welcome to the Brave Old World of post-war Conservative economic policy.

Nonetheless, the idea of an 'Anglosphere Illusion' is... overblown just as much as its proponents assert that some kind of Commonwealth Free Trade Area would be. The reality is going to lie somewhere between the two positions, and probably to the advantage of the Commonwealth countries.

Why I Am for #Brexit

Tomorrow will see the British people being given the same chance as they had in 1975 to vote on membership of the European project that began life as an attempt to co-ordinate economies in order to reduce the risk of yet another European-wide war and has been transformed over two-and-a-half generations into a superstate. The thing that they voted for in 1975 has changed dramatically over the subsequent forty years. It is a very different decision.

The campaign, on both sides, has been a disgusting display of fear-mongering and prejudice, punctuated by the assassination of a member of parliament by a neo-Nazi. We are all the poorer for what has happened.

The choice is whether the people of the UK want to be part of the EU under the terms negotiated by David Cameron, or whether to leave the EU altogether. Do not pretend that these new terms put the UK at the heart of Europe. Cameron has negotiated away much of the ability of the UK to influence the future direction of the European Union. There is no chance that this will change for the foreseeable future unless you believe that the Conservative Party will lose its majority in the next election, and a pro-European alternative emerge.

It gives me no pleasure to say that in my opinion the best choice for future generations of Britons is to vote for #Brexit. I am forced to associate with people whom I frequently regard as wrong. But in this case, whatever their reasons for agreeing with me in this binary choice, theirs is the correct position when the matter is viewed as a whole. I will briefly explain why.

The campaign to vote Leave has been a fearsome display of 'othering' that conceals the fact that the United Kingdom needs immigration. But the reality is that the UK can control that immigration more easily if it does not contend with the free movement of people throughout Europe. Having left, the UK will be in a position to improve access for people from Commonwealth countries.

Let us be realistic -- the people of the UK will tolerate a number of immigrants. But this number is an absolute one. If you want a whiter, more culturally Western population, vote for Remain. A victory for Leave will mean UK immigration will be browner and more likely to include those of non-Christian faiths. But in this the UK will look more like its kin in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

As a part of Europe, the UK government has allowed those connections to diminish, although the people of the UK have done a better job of keeping them going. This is exactly the point that was made at the beginning of the UK's long debate over the EU in the time of Harold Macmillan's government (1957-63). The postman arriving at the homes of Britons brought letters from family in those former settler colonies on a frequent basis, while the emerging economies of newly independent countries in Africa and Asia would suffer from joining a Common Market that would place tarrifs on their agricultural goods. We cannot exactly go back to those days, but these links are not extinct, merely atrophied because of the UK's membership of the EU.They can be reactivated, but it will take time. They will not replace the EU. It is a politico-cultural community, not an economic one.

Meanwhile, the campaign for Remain has created a horror story about the economic future for a UK outside the EU. Much of this is grossly exaggerated, and neglects the fact that the UK, by not being part of the single currency, is already not at the centre of European economic decision-making. Because the UK remains part of the World Trade Organisation, and because the UK is an important market for the EU, trade with the EU will continue under no worse trading conditions that the UK has with any other country that is part of the WTO, but not part of the EU.

The EU will do all in its power to make the UK suffer the worst possible terms of trade, because it is the EU that is afraid of its future should the UK leave. If the UK makes a successful transitions within the WTO but without the EU, then other countries will certainly follow. We only need to look at poor Greece, whose citizens attempted to defy the EU within the single currency, to see how frightened the EU leadership is of members trying to adjust the terms of their relationship with this ugly economic monolith.

We also hear about how workers will lose all their rights, and how the NHS will go unfunded. Well, these are political decisions, and asking a foreign authority to guarantee your rights or the funding of your health service seems to indicate that you don't deserve them. These are things I am in favour of -- the rights of workers to minimums standards and a well-funded national health service free at the point of access -- and I am willing to take the risk that the British people can be convinced these are valuable things in and of themselves, and not just because of a treaty with foreign powers. And, let's not forget, what the EU gives to workers in the social chapter, it can also take away when it adopts measures to protect the interests of big business.

The rest of the Remain argument can be boiled down to 'the EU is not that bad, really, in terms of democracy'. Oh, but it is. The one time the EU project was derailed was when the French and the Dutch voted against the proposed European Constitution in 2005. And all the EU leaders did was to negotiate a treaty at Lisbon to impose much of the constitutional arrangements anyway. The EU is not democratic in any meaningful way, but a conspiracy against the ordinary people of Europe by their own governments in order to facilitate a continental economic policy because it suits big business.

Let us not fool ourselves. There are people working to reform this appalling entity, but there is no mass movement to do so, and there hasn't been since the 'democratic deficit' became an issue a generation ago. Anyone who thinks the EU can be meaningfully reformed from within is ignoring the dynamic of history.

The one strong argument deployed by Remain is the constitutional one. There is a grave risk that a vote for Leave will cause Scotland to go its own way, in the hope of staying part of the European project, and a lesser one that Northern Ireland might follow suit. But the Union is already in doubt, and there is no guarantee that Scotland would vote to continue the Union in five or ten years. I will say this: if a vote for Remain would guarantee the Union would continue for another ten generations, then I would set aside all my doubts and vote Remain. I do not believe this is so.

The world is a very different place than it was in the 1950s, when the Soviet Union and the United States threatened to turn Europe into an atomic battlefield. The EU is having far more trouble with coping with this change than the UK could acting alone.

Voting Leave is to take a tremendous risk. But voting to Remain is to lock the UK away in a cage that will see it continue to lose touch with its historical relations, to risk seeing the economy trapped in the disaster that is the single currency's austerity regime, and to distort the relationship between UK Labour and UK Capital by placing a higher referee over them that is not subject to direct democratic accountability by the people of the UK. This is probably the last chance the UK will have to withdraw in my lifetime. I hope it takes it.

Did Americans Invent the Commonwealth of Nations?

Eric Nelson is a professor at Harvard University who has written a book that examines a neglected aspect of the ideologies underlying the American War of Independence. If you want a taster, you can listen to an interview with him that is part of a series of podcasts under the rubric 'Ben Franklin's World'. It is about an hour long.

During the course of the podcast, he reminds us that the political problem the war of independence solved was more than one of the relationship between the colonies and the government in London. In fact, it was as much one of an Anglospheric one in that the Colonists tried to raise questions about the relationship between the British monarch and parliament. Nelson explains the constitutional history of Britain either side of the civil wars that took place in the British Isles in the middle of the seventeenth century. Nelson has reminded us of the fact that some colonists perceived the struggle not to be one between colonial assemblies and King George, but in fact as one between colonial assemblies and parliament. The colonists, in other words, saw the colonial assemblies as equals to the parliament in London.

In this sense at least some of the colonists were enunciating a version of Responsible Government, avant la lettre. Responsible government, of course, was the basis for the granting of dominion status within the empire, and the ideology of the British Commonwealth of Nations holds that present or past loyalty to the Crown unites free and equal polities. While pre-1776 British North American colonial administrations did not assert an authority to conduct an independent foreign policy (except in regard to American Indians, perhaps), the Patriots who blamed parliamentary over-reach for the crisis did assert the authority for their assemblies and governors to conduct an independent domestic fiscal policy.

The answer to my headline question, of course, is a definite 'no'. But the ideological debate during the American crisis does appear to foreshadow subsequent constitutional developments within the British Empire.

False Facts

I may have never before seen a statement quite so misleading in a quasi-official publication subsidised by a national government as the following from thecanadianencyclopedia.ca

Although officially neutral, Britain had supported the Confederate states in the American Civil War

The context of the statement is the cancellation in 1866 of a trade treaty between Britain and the United States signed in 1854 governing trade between British North America and the USA.

I wonder what Abraham Lincoln might have had to say about the efforts of Britons to oppose the Confederacy?

Mr Lincoln, in a letter dated 19 January 1863...replied with the words that are inscribed on his statue: 'I cannot but regard your decisive utterances on the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country. 'It is indeed an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom...Whatever misfortune may befall your country or my own, the peace and friendship which now exists between the two nations will be, as it shall be my desire to make them, perpetual.'

Lincoln in this passage refers to the workers in Lancashire cotton mills support for the war against slavery, despite the fact that they were undergoing terrible hardship because there was no work. The mills' cotton normally came from the states that had seceded, those states (and the Union blockade) had restricted the export of the cotton, so the mill workers had no work. You can read more about the affair in this BBC.com News post. You can also listen to an In Our Time episode about the Lancashire cotton famine. The Union was without doubt the favoured side of the British people in the war, although opinion among those whose job it is to worry about Britain's national security saw some advantage in a United States divided into two.

What thecanadianencylopedia.ca must refer to are the Alabama Claims. The basis for these claims were the raids of five ships that were built in British yards but sold to the Confederate States' Navy. These raids sank over 150 'Northern ships' in the course of their commerce raiding during the War Between the States. Given that Britain remained officially neutral throughout the war, the question of whether ships built by private British interests for foreign buyers that put to sea in an unarmed state raised technical legal questions far removed from the blatant Union abuse of British neutrality in the Trent affair. That the British government did not want to get mixed-up in a private transaction cpncerning the Alabama following such a presumption on the part of the American navy can at worst be regarded as a bit of tit-for-tat diplomacy. In the end, the British prime minister and foreign secretary both accepted that they should have stopped the Alabama putting to sea, in the same way that the President Lincoln disavowed the actions of the US naval officer in the Trent affair.

In fact, the Alabama claims led to an attempt by the United States to dismember Canada, suggesting that British Columbia, parts of western Canada between the Rockies and Manitoba and a portion of Nova Scotia might be appropriate return for the losses to the US merchant fleet. Of course, one won't find American territorial ambitions in Canada mentioned. Having lived there for several years there are moments when to my mind there seems to be an ideological war in Canada against Britain, which I neither understand the necessity for, nor believe all of its practitioners fully understand the potential consequences of it.

Of course, having worked in publishing for many decades I know what happened here. There was a word limit and a more nuanced description of the fraught state of Anglo-American relationships during 1861-72 was compressed to the point that it became wrong. Still, one would expect it to have been corrected in the last listed revision of the original article, last July.

In hoc vexillo vinces

New Zealand has begun a process to decide whether to keep the old 'blue ensign' or to substitute another design. The voting will be a two-step exercise, first to select from a set of alternative designs, and then to have a run-off between the winner and the current flag. There has been some controversy over a consultation exercise about alternative designs that received many submissions opposed to the process generally, and specifically to the need for a different flag. The first round will conclude on 11 December.

Of the four Commonwealth settler colonies, two have already changed their flags. South Africa's current flag dates to 1994, after the old apartheid regime had been brought to an end. However, South Africa had more traditional British Empire flags in the shape of a red ensign, then a blue one, until in 1928 a flag that was less obviously related to the British one was adopted. The flag debate was tinged with controversy, as the change was seen as an attempt by descendants of the original Dutch settlers of the Cape, the Afrikaners, to reduce the visible significance of the Imperial tie, while raising that of the old Boer republics. The annoyance of the British-descended settlers was tempered by placing a smaller-sized Union flag in the central white stripe.

Canada, by contrast, replaced its old red ensign with a design that eliminated the symbolic representation of the British connection altogether. The Maple Leaf Flag was not the first choice of the prime minister who pushed for this change, but the parliamentary flag committee offered it as a compromise. The new flag was the product of a particular generation of Liberal party politicians who came to maturity between the world wars. It is important to remember that this period was marked by Canada moving from an autonomous domininion to a fully-fledged independent member of the international community following the Balfour Declaration of 1926. Besides this political transformation, Canada was also undergoing a significant economic change. Between 1922 and 1930 the US supplanted Britain as the largest holder of Canadian foreign debt. Yet the symbols of the old Imperial connection remained, despite being emptied of any practical authority. The challenge to the symbols began after 1945, with Britain burdened by the debt of the war against Nazi Germany and in retreat from the most prestigious parts of its empire in South Asia.* C P Champion's book on British Canada during the middle 1960s suggests that they symbolic recognition of the end of British authority over Canada allowed Liberal Canada to assemble a nationalistic narrative of a rise from mere colony to vibrant post-dominion. However, at the same time this narrative's climax coincided also with serious political questions about Britain's long-term commitment to any of the settler dominions. The crumbling facade of Imperial leadership was being torn down by the US assertion that Britain was strictly a European power, and one that should be in the Common Market, itself committed to 'an ever closer union'.

Despite the tremendous success of the Maple Leaf Flag as a national symbol, the retirement of the old red ensign in Canada does raise some questions about whether the accompanying narrative was genuinely appropriate to Canada. It is hard to divorce it from the Liberal party's older political agenda of trying to make Canada more like the United States than like Britain. As the power of the United States grew during the nineteenth century, Britain became wary of antagonising the country and arguably neglected Canadian interests in treaty negotiations with the administration in Washington. A commitment to ensuring the independence of Canada through military action grew inconvenient as the European balance of power was threatened by a Germany frightened of an encircling alliance, thus suggesting that the American analysis of Britain's true place in the world was far from unsound. The victory over Germany in 1918 can above all be presented as a victory of the Britain, its empire and the dominions. However, during the decade after that victorythe empire had unravelled, with the dominions asserting more independence and India achieving a national cohesion it perhaps did not possess in 1757. Canada did not need a national liberation struggle. Britain quite willingly handed over increased autonomy whenever asked by the Canadians, culminating in the repatriation of the constitution, when the Thatcher government ignored the link between provinces and the British Crown in order to privilege the demands of the federal government. What has been described as 'the other Quiet Revolution' was as much about creating an imagined community as any myth about Founding Fathers or the Norman Yoke. Reviewing Canadian history it can seem that the Past, in J H Plumb's formulation, is as much a tool of liberation as it is of oppression. In this Liberal narrative, throwing aside the maternalistic symbols of the Mother Country allowed Canada to be 'itself', and led to decades of fretting over Canada's national character, which has still not stopped.

Flags are vital national symbols, and it is not my place to comment on the New Zealand referendum more than to place it in context of comparable moments within the Anglosphere. However, I would say that changing the flags in South Africa and Canada raised very real issues that in the former case were only resolved in time for the current banner, and in the latter have not been solved in any practical way still, although the problem is gradually going away. And all that is a blog post for another day.

PS-In researching this post I was surprised to find out who the current largest foreign direct investor in New Zealand is Canada has almost as much as Australia and the US combined. Britain, by contrast, has less invested than Hong Kong.

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* We should be wary of interpreting Indian independence as a sign that Britain was beginning a general retreat from empire. At this point some British politicians believed that the empire could persist in some form in other parts of the world, especially Africa.

Araby Calling

Ian Bremmer, a professor at New York University, posted a link to a graphic using Brookings Institution data, and graphically credited to The Independent (a British newspaper) and Statista, showing the top locations claimed byTwitter users supporting ISIL.

I thought it was interesting that the two leading Anglosphere countries stand out on a list of Near Eastern ones. I haven't done the exact maths, but as a proportion of population the United Kingdom Tweeters are about twice as many as a proportion of the population as the US ones. You can find the full report here. I'd hoped to find more data for other Anglosphere countries, but there was no table beyond the countries in the graphic. I do wonder how Canada, Australia and New Zealand fared in this ranking. Of course, this is self-reported data, so there are questions about how trustworthy it is.

Is this another small example of how Britain has more in common with its settler colonies than with its European neighbours? Six per cent of the Tweets were in French, the third-highest ranked language behind Arabic and English. So why doesn't France appear somewhere? Or maybe the rankings mean nothing at all. Just something to think about.

Before the Teds

The other day I caught Simon Heffer's televised essay on British war films of the 1950s. Although originally from 2013, it had been rebroadcast in August and showed up on the BBC's iPlayer for about a month. In the way of these televised essays about culture, it was a bit superficial in that Heffer would show us a clip from a film, followed by an interview with a personage associated with it, and then would lead us to his conclusion. There was no attempt to explore alternative interpretations. This is fair enough given an hour to play with, and a requirement to cover the whole of an era running from about 1951 until 1961. (I did think he could have made a bit more of Jack Hawkins and The League of Gentlemen.)

I would like to pick on one point Heffer made. He introduces the idea that from 1951 (perhaps not so coincidentally the year the Conservatives returned to power) to about 1955, the British war film reigned supreme over a country that was 'at ease with itself', as Sir John Major put it. Then came the scourge of American rock 'n' roll, which unleashed the barbarous Teds, who liked nothing better than to rip up cinema seats to a rock 'n' roll soundtrack of films like Blackboard Jungle The British war film reinvented itself somewhat in the face of this threat, but the great dams of British culture had been breached, and the hedonistic Sixties spoiled much that was good. (For some reason, partisan columnists like Heffer always overlook the hedonistic Eighties, made possible by their beloved Mrs Thatcher.)

The problem for this aspect of Heffer's thesis is that the pass may have already been sold to American culture before Bill Haley rocked around the blackboard jungle. When reading a book like Dominic Sandbrook's Never Had It So Good, one is regularly reminded that the guardians of British culture stood constant watch against the threat posed by America. (Another interesting book on this topic is Adrian Horn's Juke Box Britain, which starts the story of the American threat during the years of the Attlee government.)

The history of the influence of American pop before 1953 is the absence of 'pop chart' information. But have a listen to The Stargazer's 1953 #1 'Broken Wings'. I would suggest it isn't so far removed in character from American hits like Jo Stafford's 'You Belong to Me' or Les Paul's and Mary Ford's 'Vaya Con Dios'. One of the two founders of The Stargazers was Dick James, whose short American obituaries did not go far enough in explaining how he was a key figure in British music, with a performance lineage going back to Henry Hall. The Stargazers were founded in 1949 (or maybe 1950), a half-decade before Heffer's arrival of Americanisation.

And let's leave the trad jazz fad of the postwar period with just a mention, or this post will get far too long.

The sort of popular 'historiography' on display in Heffer's programme is simplistic, and arguably reflects more of a focus on a kind of 'living memory'. Heffer's parents will certainly have remembered the 1950s scaremongering about the Teds. He and I were born a matter of weeks apart, and Teds were still a bit of a 'thing' in the 1970s and 1980s. It might be more interesting to think about the fears of Americanism in 1950s Britain in the context of the American presence from 1942 until 1944. Are we seeing a fear of allies turning into occupiers? Or are people like Heffer and myself projecting into the past concerns about the way globalisation is destroying the local, at least how it is viewed through the kind of mass culture distributed by major corporations?

A Note Prompted By the Passing of Gough Whitlam

[NB — The extended hiatus from last autumn was a result of my wife's cancer returning. It is a long story, and I prefer to keep it short. We finally got a firm diagnosis of the extent of her problem just before Christmas. We are hopeful that she will be with us for a few more years, but it was still disturbing news and only now is my life beginning to return to what could be called 'normal'.]

The death of Gough Whitlam three months ago reminded the world of Australia's 1975 political crisis. The crisis became fodder for those who see the secret hand of the CIA or the United States at work in so many curious incidents around the world. However, it also brought into question the relationship of the Commonwealth Realms to the British royal house. It is fair to say that the the question of the continued presence of the monarchy in Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada is going to become a significant over the coming decade. The Queen may yet reach 100, and defy such a prediction, but the probabilities suggest we will be hailing King Charles III before too long. Whether the 'white dominions' of Canada, Australia and New Zealand will be willing to continue with the link to the House of Windsor is a matter certain to be raised. Each of these will, I suspect, return answers that suit their own particular circumstances at that moment. So in this post I am going to consider two political crises that raise important questions about a change from dominion status to one of a republic.

Australasia is certainly where my knowledge and familiarity of Anglosphere history is weakest. Nonetheless, I am going to risk floating a comment because Whitlam was a very interesting political figure not just in his own country, but within the broader context of Anglospheric political trends. Whitlam in one sense was a 'Blairite avant la letter (or, better, Tony Blair was simply a Whitlam clone, part of Rupert Murdoch's Australianisation of Britain). Eric Hobsbawm famously in 1978 proposed that the historic role of the industrial proletariat as the decisive force in the revolution against the capitalists' power was coming to an end. While neither the British nor Australian labour party was in any way Marxist, it is fair to say that they both were organisations rooted in that industrial proletariat. This constituency had repeatedly failed to deliver parliamentary majorities for twenty-three years, and Whitlam looked to other sources of electoral power for the party. He found them in a variety of socially liberal causes, such as race, unfair pay for women and the urban and suburban constituencies poorly served by the welfare measures of the Australian state. While Labour parties were not "sound" on these issues, tending to put the interests of a largely male skilled and semi-skilled workers above all others.

Thus, when Whitlam came to power in the 1972 election, he put just as much weight on a policy agenda that appealed to middle-class liberals who wanted to ameliorate the hardships of disadvantaged groups at home and abroad. Whitlam's basic outlook was to promote welfare clientelism — a dole handed out to the unfortunate. Rather than focus on the hard task of attacking the foundations of international capitalists' power, Whitlam preferred the easier task of attacking the 'colonial' remnants in the Australian state, at a time when Britain's Establishment for over a decade had been eagerly shedding as much of these legacy responsibilities as it could without causing offense.

During 1974 and 1975, Whitlam found himself in an economic and political crisis of some severity. Confronted with an apparent political deadlock, the Governor-General appointed by Whitlam, Sir John Kerr, made use of reserve powers completely on his own initiative. These sorts of reserve powers are inherent in all constitutional arrangements where the head of state is intended to be a figurehead somewhat above politics.

Canada has in its history a similar confrontation between a prime minister and the reserve powers held by a head of state who represents a monarch resident overseas. The "King-Byng" affair is, I imagine, largely forgotten outside of Canada, and based on my own experience living there for six years seems largely forgotten within Canada, too. (Canadians are a people who prefer to forget their past, even to discard it altogether.) We see something similar happen here, except with a key difference. After the general election of October 1925, Governor-General the Viscount Byng of Vimy allowed the incumbent prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to have the first attempt at finding support in the House of Commons. Arguably Byng should have given the Conservative party, which had won the most seats, a go before King. However, Byng could be seen as accepting his prime minister's advice, which is how constitutional monarchies should work. After King had clearly lost his support in the Commons in June 1926, Byng declined to follow his prime minister's advice for a dissolution. The question that Byng had to answer was 'who spoke for the electorate?'. King's government was threatened with censure by the same house that had supported him nine months earlier, which saw King's party not even possessing the most seats. The October mandate had been inconclusive, and the largest party had not been given a chance to find a majority in the House of Commons. Whichever course of action Byng chose to adopt, he would have alienated a large number of Canadian voters. In fact, Byng handed the Conservative leader a poisoned chalice. The Conservatives could not secure a majority either, and a dissolution took place in a matter of days. King's party won a slim majority in the 1926 election.

In both cases, replacing the office of a vicegerent governor-general representing a monarch resident overseas would not have changed the dynamic of the crisis. In both cases the essential problem was between the government and the parliament. The head of state was required to arbitrate, and in both cases chose not to follow the advice of the prime minister. However, in both cases there were perfectly sound political reasons to take the course of action that was followed. Kerr needed to find a government that was capable of getting a budget sorted out in the midst of an economic crisis of the incumbent government's creation. I don't see how an elected Kerr could have failed to reach the same decision, nor is there any evidence that the relationship between Australia's monarchy and Britain's came into play here. Likewise, an elected Byng would have faced the same problem that an appointed Byng did.

In neither of these two crises did the 'colonial' position of the dominions come into play. Nor would a 'republican' polity have changed the crises in any way. Both are examples of how people in pursuit of power are prepared to kick at the foundations of their constitutional order, without really thinking about the long-term risk to the political system. In other words, image trumps reality when the stakes are highest.

A Hanoverian Succession?

One hundred years ago today, half of the Anglosphere went to war with the German Empire. It probably bears repeating that there was neither debate in Parliament, nor consultation with the Dominions. A few men in London had a few meetings, and issued an ultimatum to the government in Berlin during the morning of 4 August 1914. The other half of the Anglosphere had no immediate intention of joining this conflict, even though the occupant of the White House, Woodrow Wilson, was one of the most Anglophile presidents in American history. One could argue that the First World War was the inception of the Anglosphere, the moment when the idea of an English-Speaking People really became something with practical effect, despite the long debate that took place before the United States went to war. The Dominions, through their armed forces, acquired identities that were no longer mere creations of distance, prone to fragmentation by the scale of their countries, but focused on a continuing national project that required social mobilisation to an unparalleled degree. Not only could they claim to be separate, but they could now point to an effort that deserved equality. Britain began to accept that it was no longer the centre of the Anglospheric universe, but simply had a claim to be primus inter pares.

All of these developments relate to what one might call the 'lost cousin' of the Anglosphere, Germany. Given any opportunity, I vigorously promote the idea of thinking about an alternative to the Anglosphere that I call 'the Hanoverian Complex'. The United States was founded, not out of Britain, but out of the realms of King George of Great Britain, Ireland and Hanover. German-speakers were a major stream of immigration into the United States, and the era of 'Liberty Cabbage' (a re-christening of sauerkraut) during the First World War threw something of a cloak over just how prominent German was in the United States was before 1917. In this, parts of the United States fitted into what might be called a German-sphere. Even up to 1914, Germany remained something of a geographical expression. There was a king in Bavaria until 1918, and it is better to write of the German armies going to war in 1914. Bavarian, Saxon and Wuerttemburger forces all had distinct identities from the 'Prussian' force that overwhelmingly predominated. Just as the war divided the Dominions from London, the conflict united German states to Berlin more thoroughly than had been accomplished by the Franco-Prussian war. The German-Speaking people came together as the English-Speaking one drew apart.

Germany, Britain and the United States have had an odd triangular relationship during the past two hundred or so years. Germans were important emigrants both to the United States and to the British dominions, while Queen Victoria was a determined Germanophile. (Her daughter-in-law, Alexandra of Denmark, was quite hostile towards Germany, and arguably played an important role in changing British attitudes.) Changes in this triangular relationship, initially broadly friendly, at first glance coincide with the accession of Wilhelm II as German emperor. Wilhelm, whose mother was the daughter of the German-descended Victoria and her German husband, literally possessed a 'love-hate' relationship towards Britain, and his pursuit of extra-European expressions of German political power clashed with the United States' own taking up of 'the White Man's Burden'. In the five years before August 1914, the most important episode of this from the perspective of Washington, DC, came in German attempts to influence the course of the Mexican revolution, which had started in 1910 and turned into an ongoing civil war after a coup in 1913. Tension between the two also arose in China, another site of a revolution that offered an opportunity for Germany and the United States to expand their influence. For the British, German economic competition and Wilhelm's bellicose rhetoric, as well as plans for a much bigger German navy, made for an uncomfortable neighbour. On 4 August 1874, relations between the three countries were certainly cordial, if not friendly. Forty years later, Germany was perceived with grave suspicion by the English-Speakers. What remains constant is that the English-Speakers shared an opinion at both moments.

So, thus, we come to the article that stimulated this post, Simon Jenkins' request for Britons to set aside their fascination with wars against Germany. Jenkins wants Britons to face the future, which requires remembering the friendly Germany, and not the one that was responsible for the massacre at Dinant, the sack of Louvain and other German attacks on civilians in 1914, let alone the worse business of 1939-45. The problem is that Germany appears to have been run in 1914 by a group who perceived themselves to be victims of a plot to keep their Empire from its proper role as primus inter pares in Europe, a view complicated by the fact that they believed that Russia's power could only get stronger. It is not unreasonable to connect the conduct of German soldiers in Belgium and elsewhere with this same paranoid outlook. This paranoia has turned into something of a self-perpetuating phenomenon, as the ”Stab-in-the-Back Myth” or the controversy over the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt and the 1960s' student protest movement which spawned the terrorist Red Army Faction and Revolutionary Cells can all be seen as symptoms of attitudes that were shaped around the turn of the twentieth century. Of course, it doesn't help halt the self-perpetuation when foreigners readily turn to reminders of a guilty past when angered by German policy.

Jenkins was profoundly wrong to apologise to the Germans for English-Speakers' worship of the First World War. Not only was the war was possibly the single most important event in shaping the Anglosphere, but “the problem with Germany” is really a German problem. German leaders needed to recognise that history moves slowly, and their fears in 1900 were a long way from being realised. It is the Germans who need to break out of that self-perpetuating persecution complex, and they need a certain resilience in the face of crass equations of German assertiveness with Nazi aggression. Who is to say, at this point, that they aren't already on a path to becoming more like the Germany of Bismarck, which recognised how to maintain the dignity of and knew the limits to great power status?

In another way, though, Jenkins was right that Britain may need to move on from its victories over Germany. Arguably, to adopt the mood of Berlin 1914, the Anglosphere as we know it is falling apart. The United States could already be inescapably headed out of it and into Latin America. Many Canadians seem embarrassed about their Anglospheric roots, see more in common with the United States than the 'Mother Country', and seem likely to opt for a globalised identity. Only Australia, New Zealand and Britain still value a shared cultural identity, although I am too far from Australia to judge that with any accuracy. One notes that one day Prince George of Cambridge is due to ascend the British throne, and by that time perhaps Britain will be wiser to embrace the 'Hanoverian Complex' rather than the 'Special Relationship'.

Adam Smith, 'Marxist' (or Karl Marx, 'Smithist')

I was reading an article from The Atlantic that used some of the splendid tools that Google has made available to researchers to trace the beginnings of the word 'liberal', as a word conveying a political philosophy.

In it, I came across the following:

If all nations, Smith says, were to follow “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation,” then they would be like one great cosmopolitan empire, and famines would be prevented.

The Smith referred to is one of the founding figures of what might be called 'Anglosphere Ideology', Adam Smith.

What struck me, though, was the idea of internationalism expressed here. Marx argued that the working class must think globally if it was to carry out its inevitable task of supplanting the capitalism. Smith seems to be arguing the same for the capitalist class to accomplish his liberal agenda.

Think about this for a moment. In 1774, 'nations' and their borders were still somewhat protean concepts compared to what they would become in short order. Most people in Europe (and the Americas), in fact, were loyal to a structure under which nationality was represented by a specific individual. Borders simply marked the limits of this individual's authority, and the point where the authority of another individual reigned. Smith is envisioning a world where the ability of that individual (and the associated administrative structure) to reward and deny on the basis of preference will be severely restricted. 'All that is solid melts into air' indeed.

The capitalists in fact succeeded in subverting their contemporary structures of authority to establish their 'dictatorship' over the way societies are organised. I imagine Marx looking on the world today from the Valhalla of Political Economists rather grimly while at the other end of the banqueting table Adam Smith has a broad smirk of self-satisfaction.

Rich Differences

The Guardian a few days ago had a news story that included a list of the five richest families in Britain. I knew the Duke of Westminster's family had long been the richest in the country, but the appearance of the Cadogan's got me thinking about what different sources of wealth between the richest five British and the richest five American families might tell us about the different historical trajectories followed by the two countries, especially their two economies. While I like to think of them as more alike than different, as an historian it is my job to look for evidence that challenges my view. Sports is a good one. Maybe rich people are, too.

The Cadogans are the oldest family in terms of being rich and influential. They have links to Cromwell's parliamentary army, the Duke of Marlborough (the Churchills) and the Glorious Revolution and service in the Napoleonic Wars. Their wealth rests on London property, inherited after marrying the Sloane heiress in 1717.

The Grosvenors are like the Cadogans in their fortune resting on ownership of parts of London. However, at the time the Cadogans were marrying into London property, the Grosvenors were based in Cheshire. It was the first marquess of Westminster whose development of Belgravia and Pimlico on the edges of Westminster who really founded the family fortune.

There is about a hundred-year gap between the Grosvenors and The Hindujas in terms of launching a family fortune. The Hindujas were originally from Sind, and the business began in Bombay, but they were active in the traditional trade across the Arabian Sea between Persia and Bombay. In 1919, the Hindujas set up in Tehran, and in the 1950s and 1960s Iran became central to their money-making. After the fall of the Shah in 1979, the Hindujas moved their base to London, although most of the business activities remained located in India and the Near East. One can think of the Hinduja wealth as a creation of the trading network shaped by the British Empire. In this sense, the Hindujas are very unlike the Cadogans and Grosvenors.

The Reubens are like the Hindujas, in that they are something of an Imperial legacy. They too started in Bombay, and then made their way to London. The difference is that they did that a lot earlier, with the family arriving in the early 1950s, not long after India's independence. They were traders, and benefited from London's rapid reassertion of its position as the most important global financial centre despite the tremendous debt left from the Second World War, the transformation of the US dollar into the world's reserve currency and the continued decline of Britain's economic position relative to other states. Rich by the 1980s, they did well out of the end of the Cold War, although they are said to have terminated their links with Russian businessmen in the early years of this century.

Mike Ashley is a post-Thatcher creation, and his achievement resembles that of Sainsbury of Victorian Britain (a dynamic period with a few fortunes built by those of humble origins), in that he transformed retail into a fortune. He made his money selling sportswear to Britons and buying up other businesses. His business interests really expanded during the long 1994-2008 economic boom that transformed Britain out of all recognition from the 'sick man of Europe' of the 1970s and 1980s. Ashley's family background is relatively humble, compared to the other four names on the British side of this list.

The Mars family name will be familiar to all Britons via the Mars bar, the British equivalent to America's Milky Way. The founder, Frank Mars, is a bit unusual in this list for having experienced a business failure with his first efforts in 1911. He tried again in the 1920s, and launched a British subsidiary in the depths of depression in 1932.

Fred C. Koch, founder of The Koch family fortune, like the Mars, has ties to Britain. In the 1920s he worked at an oil refinery in Kent, until in 1925 he moved to Wichita, Kansas, to found his oil refining business. Legal troubles in the US ensured that he found markets for his refining process outside the United States, which ended up shaping his political views. Koch Industries was founded in 1940, and later expanded from its core engineering business to become an oil and chemical conglomerate.

The Pritzker family is traditionally associated with the Hyatt hotel chain, although they were not the original owners of the original Hyatt. In fact, the family is from Chicago, and started their ascent to wealth as lawyers and investors. They also made quite a bit from traditional manufacturing through their ownership of what became the Marmon Group. Their accumulation began in earnest in the late 1950s and early 1960s, although the original Pritzker investments date back to the mid-1950s

The Waltons should need little introduction here, as their Wal-Marts are everywhere. The first Wal-Mart opened its doors in 1962.

The Duncans of Houston, Texas, offer the classic Texan story of wealth, based on oil and gas. However, they did not make their money from drilling oil wells, but by ownership of pipelines and storage facilities. They are also among the newer wealthy families. Dan Duncan spent some years working for another company before setting up for himself in 1968.

So can we draw any conclusions from this list of names? Not conclusions, perhaps, but there is one key observation. It is interesting that (with one exception) the American list reflects the post-1945 economic history of the United States, whereas the British list represents three very distinct phases of the kingdom's history. Put together, in the way I like to treat Anglo-America, though, and the really interesting point is that the British list is far more multi-cultural than the American one. And I would have expected that.

Tony Benn's Anglo-American Dimension

Tony Benn has died. When I arrived in Blighty, back in the late 1970s, he was a key figure on the political scene. I was not a fan of his. But it was sort of a knee-jerk response. He wanted to remove the Queen's head from the postage stamp. This is a notion I still find repellent; but with the sale of the Royal Mail, I don't see it as so important any longer.

What the obituaries reminded us was that Benn married an American woman. Caroline Middleton DeCamp met Tony Benn at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1949. She had been Vassar '45 and Cincinnati '48 and went to London to do a Master's degree at UCL, itself a somewhat radical foundation. Mrs Benn had an enduring belief in the principle of 'comprehensive education', the idea that schools should not select their pupils on the basis of ability, but largely by where they reside in relation to the school's buildings. From the obituary I linked above, here is a memory from Clyde Chitty, her colleague in the war against selective schooling:

Caroline saw the British education system with a foreigner's eyes. She hated British divisiveness and elitism, and, when her own children were at Holland Park comprehensive, she wanted the best for them, and for the school - and for that best to be extended to all. Utterly informal, with that American vitality, she was classless. With her, there was none of that "presence", that sense of being with someone important. She could relate to anyone.

Of course, Britons loved to believe that American life was not divisive or elitist, and I hope they know better now.

The comprehensive educational system has certainly done nothing to overturn the divisive and elitist nature of British education. What happens now in Britain is that one selects more on the basis of family income. If one can, one pays a higher price for a house with good schools. Sometimes, it probably makes more sense to buy a cheaper house and spend the money saved on sending your child to some kind of private school. I know from experience that getting one's child into a decent secondary school in London is a highly competitive process, and that people will go to all kinds of lengths, either legitimate or not, to improve their child's chances. And, I'm afraid to say, the same has been true of Canada as well. At the primary level in London, it's a lot easier to find a good school, because they are smaller. The Law of Unintended Consequences works powerfully, and should make us less eager to attempt simple administrative reforms to correct injustice.

Perhaps with the help of his wife, whom Benn confessed to be a source of advice, Benn proved an 'early adopter' of television as a means for politicians to address the voters in a direct way that previously had not been possible. From the late 1970s onwards, he looked to extra-parliamentary politics to act as something of a counterweight to the whipped-in majorities of the House of Commons, and then the loss of legislative authority to external transnational organisations such as the European Commission. In this, Benn may have detected that the 'separation of powers' under a modern Westminster regime really relates to groups outside parliament. Months of pressure by organised campaigning are required, which is beyond the patience of most people. This mixture of technology and grassroots organisation is especially American, going back to the days of the Populists and the Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century. This circumvents the kind of elitist log-rolling that one tends to associate with Tammany-Hall type regimes, but which also captures the older Westminster model on display in Namier's analysis of the eighteenth-century epoch of parliamentary government.

As well as being married to an American, Benn apparently also found some support there during his campaign to renounce his peerage, according to this excellent memoir of him by the member of parliament for Stoke-on-Trent Central, Tristram Hunt. This article is worth reading with some care, because one can see in Benn's career a kind of emblematic arc of the decline of national parliaments in a world where trading arrangements between countries has gradually taken authority away from legislators and put it into the hands of judiciaries or quasi-judicial organisations, often of a trans-national character. Benn's sharp shift leftwards in the 1970s can be seen in this light as the moment when he recognised that 'moderation in pursuit of national self-determination', to coin a phrase, was a vice, and it was natural for a man in his political position to shift towards the autarkic 'socialism in one country' of the Alternate Economic Strategy of the Labour left. The AES was to a great extent a throwback to the Labour recipe of the 1945-51 Atlee government, which was remarkably successful on its own terms. It was at this point that Benn found himself on what could be called 'the wrong side of history', at least for the rest of his lifetime. He ended up waging a steady guerrilla campaign against his vision of American foreign policy, ably summarised in The Guardian's obituary.

The Bennite worldview presented a well worked out analysis according to which the IMF, the World Bank and multinational corporations ran the global economy. The European commission and the establishment governed Britain. Spin doctors and pollsters dominated politics. "I did not enter the Labour party … to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris," wrote Benn. The US was an imperial power that had pursued a policy of world domination since the second world war, and that policy was based on a doctrine: "A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world."

Yet Benn's effective criticism of the Eden government during the 1956 Suez Crisis served American interests, and also that American world domination he has condemned since the 1970s. This fiftieth anniversary summary of the crisis' signficance in world affairs, from The Independent, captures how Britain's ability to act in its interests could be undone where it contradicted the interests of its closest ally. Quite possibly the Americans did the British a favour, in the long-term, in 1956. Probably Benn would have seen it that way at the time. This thirty-year-old article from the always-excellent History Today suggests that this view was wrong, and that the interests of both Britain and America might have been better served by a policy more supportive of Britain's anti-nationalisation stance. Remember, the current woes in Egypt stem from the actions of the descendants of that same clique of officers that have been in charge since Nasser led them there.

The irony of Benn's career is that the forces he supported at its beginning, those working towards the so-called democratisation/Americanisation of Britain, have been exactly the same forces he found destroying Britain's political and economic independence in its middle and at its end. We always think we can pick and choose from the menu, but history proves this is rarely the case. The framework that the United States has erected in the latter half of the twentieth century is remarkably similar to that put up by Victorian Britain, which occupied a near-identical role as global economic arbiter. We may swear allegiance to different things (the Queen, still on some postage stamps, on one hand; a flag on the other), but our cultural outlook — which includes the foundations of property law and its effect on the organisation of the economy and trade — remains identical.

UPDATE: One more thing: in doing the reading for this post, I came across a reference to the title that Mrs Benn suggested for Labour's 1964 election manifesto. She proposed 'The New Britain', which worked its way into the final title. Eight years earlier, Adlai Stevenson ran for president under the slogan 'The New America', possibly based on a memo of Arthur Schlesinger's. Of course, it's probably just coincidence.

Cultural Exchange

While Tim Roberts' article on parallels between nineteenth-century Anglo-American relations and twenty-first century Sino-American relations might at first glance seem, at the least, not outrageous, a deeper consideration of what this article is telling us, and what is going on today might make us think about all this a bit differently, especially in a cultural context.

Six of the first fifteen U.S. presidents spent time early in their careers in Britain, educating them about British ways, different from much of China’s ruling elite’s experience of the United States only from afar. Besides this, though, many nouveau riche Chinese people today cross the Pacific and enjoy downloading Desperate Housewives and The Walking Dead, postmodern versions of ambitious Jacksonian Americans’ tours of Britain and reading their Shakespeare and Dickens.

As anyone who has visited Abraham Lincoln's house at Springfield, Illinois, will recall, busts of those two celebrated authors are on prominent display in his sitting room. And so, we think, this Anglo-American cultural relationship is now a thing of the past. Our future rests with cultural exchanges rooted in East Asia, as opposed to finding auduence appeal in the trivia of a 'fossilised' ruling elite. I would beg to differ. The recent marking of the fiftieth anniversary of the appearance of The Beatles on Ed Sullivan's show with a special programme should remind us that this cultural exchange between Americans and the British is a tidal thing, sometimes ebbing and sometimes flowing. At the moment, it is ebbing, but study PBS' weekend schedules carefully before deciding that we have finally reached the point where the 'pivot to Asia' has ensured this enduring cultural link is finally broken. The relationship is not what it was, but it never has been. For example, and sticking with the world of film, think of how many Britons appear in key roles in the cast of Lee Daniels' The Butler — Oyelowo, Pettyfer, Redgrave and Rickman. And who plays the sheriff in The Walking Dead, apparently beloved of the Chinese elite? That Anglo-American link remains strong, even as Britain is no longer the Britain of Americans' imaginations.

'British' flags?

I have two other posts that I want to write, but reading this on The Guardian's web site stimulated me to start here. (The other two are also spun from Guardian links, largely because it hasn't retired behind a paywall yet.) Flags generate a lot of emotion, because they are understood as a coded message of community or oppression. The question, from a cultural historian's perspective, is whether they represent The Past, in J H Plumb's interpretation, or whether their tendency to appropriation and use in fashion (google 'union jack underwear' or 'soviet flag fashion' for examples) make them mutable symbols of a common heritage.* In this case, a suggestion to replace New Zealand's traditional 'blue ensign' (a common design for flags of constituent lands of the British Empire) with a silver fern on a black field has been made. On the one side, there is a flag that encapsulates the New Zealand 'past' from the settlement of the New Zealand Wars to the present. On the other, a flag that represents New Zealand's cultural signature to the rest of the world, sporting prowess on the rugby pitch. (Although some of us might be fond of New Zealand wine even moreso.) I guess there are some youngsters out there who might even think it has something to do with a successful video game franchise. Plumb interpreted The Past as a kind of dead hand on the body politic, one that scientific history would lift away to allow a more mature society with no need of a paternalistic elite to evolve naturally. In this he reflected the era in which his book was written, the Swinging Sixties which promised to modernise nineteenth-century British institutions. Of course, Plumb's work has become a tool to be used in another, somewhat different context. In a discussion of Plumb's work on History News Network, one finds the following statements:

Instead of Plumb’s vision, however, we have the ascendancy of a past that is audacious in its confrontation with history. The dogmatic Christian worldview that he believed was discredited by the philosophes and by later scholarly and scientific inquiry is now passed off as being not only determinative for religious believers but also for the nature and destiny of the entire nation....The future envisioned by the founders was not pluralistic, not dynamic, and certainly not complex: it was dogmatically Christian

In this, we see two 'pasts' clashing. There is the unwelcome 'Christian' past that the author objects to, and the supposedly pluralistic vision of the founders. I would suggest that the founders were rather more Christian, and rather less pluralistic, than the author implies in this article. Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color makes a point at the start of highlighting the 1790 naturalisation law that envisages an America of 'free white persons'. Think about that 1790 context: the only substantial reservoir of 'free white persons' who might immigrate to the United States was the overwhelmingly Christian Europe. On the basis of that fact, one could equally argue that the Founders in practical terms envisaged a country with a substantially Christian European outlook. This outlook was changed because Americans, in practising their citizenship, wanted it to be changed. But I would add a further note, which is that while Plumb's vision may not apply in the United States, it is in rude health in the rest of the Anglosphere, because there is no conflict of different The Pasts. And so back to flags. It may be that the New Zealand flag no longer reflects a New Zealand of the future, and the time has come to change it. But before that decision is taken, remember that there were many New Zealanders in two world wars who fought and died under that old flag, and it was that common experience that remains a vital part of New Zealand's past, attaching it to a broader community that shares substantial settlement from the British Isles, some experience of monarchical government and a system of government that drew on Westminster as a model. All of the countries to which this applies have been moving away, since 1973 if not earlier, from a British heritage and towards an Americanised future. The United States was the first to break with the Union Flag as a pattern, and it took almost two hundred years before Canada took a similar step. New Zealand may be next on the cab rank, but as the prime minister points out in the article, is this really such an important issue? Does one really want to go down the American road, where different The Pasts make civic life a miserable arena in which government itself becomes a dirty word and Christian religion a tool of division? _____________ *Of course, the real answer is 'both'.

Lava me, Domine, ab iniquitate mea?

The messy truth is that a country’s economic specialism is, if not ingrained, then certainly the expression of its particular history, culture and circumstances. It is path-dependent, and hard to change with anything as temporal as public policy. Political maturity lies in recognising that Britain’s specialisms are in services, especially banking, and some sophisticated corners of industry. Its competitive advantages are openness, ease of doing business, world-class universities, the English language and – here is the warning to Westminster’s increasingly hectoring and interfering politicians – a lack of ministerial caprice.

That's from an opinion piece that appeared in the Financial Times last week. What it presents is a properly conservative understanding of public policy. Before more radical groups in the United States hijacked the word 'conservative', it was broadly understood in the English-speaking world as a political stance that recognised change was an inevitable fact of life, but that change could be channelled, rather than dammed. Gradually, as change flows around the landscape, natural erosion alters shapes. Treating change as water, rather than as a shattering earthquake or volcanic eruption, limits the stress on the surrounding built environment. Even so, I find the article imperfect. The fact is, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 challenged the structure into which the British economy had been shaped during an era that began with the rise of the EuroDollar market, and really took off with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. The water-levels were rising, but policymakers in Britain neglected to construct all the requisite barrages and weirs needed to deal with the coming flood.

But, continuing this blog's move away from 'war' and towards culture, the article does suggest that Cultural History is a guide to big issues of public policy. One could argue that the contrasts between the Church of England, the Church of Scotland and the Roman Church in Ireland go some way towards explaining the different attitudes towards the European Union in those countries. Scotland's presbyterian national church keeps much closer to its European models than England's. The English were less keen to let go completely of elements of the Catholic church and made for themselves a hybrid that foreshadowed the cultural hybridities of the passing Post-Modern Age. This Post-Modern movement of hybrid forms was one that English popular culture stood in the forefront through its musical contributions. The American media are noticing a similar process has been going on within their own country, a process that is highlighting an obsolescent perspective on racial problems, but once again calls into question the nature of a cultural entity called 'America'. (As if Americans could ever escape questions of their essence.)

For historians, the problem is that while History is lived going forwards, History is written looking backwards. In looking at how hip-hop culture is used by non-blacks, it at least superficially resembles the familiar 'appropriations' of White America, going at least as far back as Minstrelsy. Only time will tell if that is indeed the case, but applying the traditional concerns about 'appropriations' may not itself be helpful. It certainly did not readily apply to the white English working class males who gave us 'pop music'. If the old racial system is eroding, there is the potential that a new hybrid is emerging, one that could be more fair to all participants.

And, while Janan Ganesh is quite right to argue that Britain's enduring history of a dominant financial sector is not actually a problem to be fixed, but as a crucial part of the solution, he is wrong to highlight politicians as capricious administrators breaking with British traditions. They are responding to a real demand for changes that may, in fact, be impossible to deliver without creating some kind of 'Church of England' hybrid.