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Well, not for the first time, let me quote Ogden
Nash, who wrote
Let us pause
to consider the English
Who when they pause to consider themselves
Come over all reticent and tinglish…
Or words
to that effect.
Not any longer, it seems. Because
now that the so-called United Kingdom
has a new Prime Minister, he has been roundly denounced by the leaders
of three of his adherent nations, Welsh,
Scots and Irish Parliamentarians who, appear to excoriate his every manoeuvre, leaving only the English standing
alone astride the battlefield, as it were. Horatius at the bridge might be
another apposite quote, if only I could remember it.
Many descriptions could be applied to Boris Johnson, but reticent and
tinglish are not two of them (even if tinglish was a word). When he was elected, I tended to believe that
when the electorate woke up to what a buffoon he is, there would be an
immediate contrary reaction against him. But I have been listening to him since
he became Prime Minister, and it has reminded me of one thing: these upper-crust
Englishmen have been especially educated for
centuries with the objective of governing the Empire, and just because
the only Empire left to them is this group of smallish islands off the coast of
Europe, it doesn’t follow that they have abandoned the governing habits of centuries. One can
tell from the casual street interviews conducted by the BBC, that Johnson’s
cheerful optimism, following the years of drift and indecision under Theresa
May, has already begun to impress the public, so if it should happen that he is
able to manoeuvre himself into an election at a time of his choosing, it would
not surprise me at all if he should sweep back into power. The Labour Party
suffers from the honest leftism of Jeremy Corbyn, who, as has now been
documented from many sources, been the target of a brutal onslaught of unreasoned criticism such
as has probably never before been seen in the politics of the nation.
I was working as a reporter in London
for The Montreal Star when Prime
Minister Harold Macmillan and his acolyte Edward Heath decided to try to join
the European Economic Community in the early 1960s. Their reasons were, in
essence, acquisitive, although they
never admitted that in public. The fact was they had emerged from the Second
World War in a pathetic state, although basking in the admiration they received
for the brave fight they had fought against the Nazi war machine, for two years
standing alone among the world’s great powers, except for the support of those
distant cousins in what were originally colonies, but had gradually become
self-governing entities who, grouped together, became known as the Commonwealth.
In the days of Empire, Britain, while
widely accepted as the originator of the idea of democratic government, had
been also, in its relations with its foreign subjects, always ready to bare its
teeth in a vicious snarl, a willingness backed up even as late as the 1950s and
1960s by the indiscriminate use of brutal force used to put down the various
insurrections raised against its rule. During these years, for example, the Mau
Mau rebellion of the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya was brutally beaten into submission
by aerial bombing followed by mass incarcerations, and mass public hangings of
miscreants. The dedicated,
specially-trained civil servants who carried out these British brutalities
seemed seldom to be worried by the niceties of freedom of expression and the
like. I have previously described how a wonderful young Kikuyu who was a fellow-student
with me was brutally forced by Colonial Office officialdom into suicide. His
crime was that he had been mentioned in the trial of Jomo Kenyatta --- at that
moment of 1953 under trial in Kenya, accused of leading the Mau Mau rebellion
--- where he was alleged to have been
forced before his departure for study in Britain to take the Mau Mau oath. The
colonial Office officials arrived at the adult education college we were attending in Scotland, with a demand that my
friend Henry, one of the sweetest little men I have ever known, confess, which,
being entirely innocent, he refused to do. No compassion in those boys: they
went after him for the kill.
In those post-war days, the raw
materials provided by the colonies --- African, Middle Eastern, Caribbean and
Asian --- fed the industrial machine in the
home country, and in return, by imperial fiat, these colonies also provided
the premier market for the goods manufactured
in Britain. But by the 1960s this method
of so-called Commonwealth preferences was no longer providing Britain either
with the guaranteed markets, nor the guaranteed supplies of materials that they
needed. So, without so much as a by-your-leave, Macmillan, who loved the big gesture,
decided to jettison the Commonwealth connection and replace it with the more profitable
European trade connection. A Swedish study
at the time showed the facts and figures of this change in Britain’s trade,
although they were not that readily available to the British public. They were losing money from their Commonwealth
connection, so they simply decided to wave goodbye. It was fruitless for such
doubters as Hugh Gaitskell, at that time leader of the Labour Party opposition,
to remind the government that hundreds of thousands of young men from countries
like New Zealand, Australia, Canada and even South Africa, not to mention other
colonies like those in the West Indies, had rallied to the British cause in two
world wars, in both of which they gave
their lives while the Europeans meekly surrendered, and the United States stood aloof as the years
rolled by.
When it came down to it, this meant
nothing to the men who controlled the United Kingdom government. They were
ready to join, and to hell with the Commonwealth. At that time, in 1963, President
De Gaulle of France, himself a man who loved the grandiloquent gesture even
more than Macmillan, shut Britain out by delivering a decisive no. This gave
the Commonwealth countries a few years to adjust their economies to the British
perfidy. And of course Britain joined the EEC, as it was then known, along with
Ireland and Denmark, in 1973.
Many people have observed since then
that Britain has never been an enthusiastic member of the European Union, as it
is now known, and as one listens to all the broadcasts emanating from the TV,
especially from the BBC during this week, one can immediately grasp the truth
that the standoffish British attitude is as lively as ever. It is extremely striking that almost without exception, the leaders of
the member countries of the EU speak English, many of them perfectly, as if they have been deliberately preparing
to play a role in bringing Europe together, whereas the Englishman, of no
matter which background, who can speak French, German or Spanish at all is a
rarity.
I recall from my days as a resident of Britain reading
on a newspaper billboard the declaration of a huge storm. “Continent cut off,”
declared the headline. Not the off-shore island of Britain cut off from the
mainland, as was in fact the case, but the continent was cut off from the
island. Just a way of looking at the world that, the other week, caused Jean-Claude
Juncker, one of the European leaders these days, to remark wittily that “everyone understands
English, but no one understands the English.”
And so say all of us…..
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