Couldn’t Ms Hirsch summon a smidgen of gratitude?
Despite having every privilege, the latest darling of the Left to denigrate Britain is different from those intellectuals who gloried in disdaining this country. Her views threaten racial harmony, says STEPHEN GLOVER
The hatred of British intellectuals and writers for their own country has a long pedigree. It is usually combined with a misguided conviction that everything abroad is better.
More than 200 years ago, the young William Wordsworth celebrated the French Revolution. however, the starryeyed poet soon became disillusioned with Robespierre’s blood- soaked Reign of Terror. In the end, he became a staunch conservative.
During the 1930s, intellectuals such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the London School of economics, ignored Stalin’s genocide in the Soviet Union and extolled his supposed achievements.
Around the same time, Professor harold Laski, also of the LSe and a chairman of the Labour Party, was unconcerned that Soviet prisoners had their teeth smashed with iron bars, and couldn’t see much difference between ‘the general character of a trial in Russia and this country’. Nothing much has changed. The novelist Martin Amis once grumbled that he would ‘prefer not to be english’, and cited the ‘Philistine’ Royal Family and the British public’s ‘ obsession’ with celebrity as reasons for turning his back on his country. having decamped to New York, he softened his views, and recently confessed that he ‘missed the english’.
A starker example of an intellectual who hated many aspects of Britain, and tended to think the best of our Soviet enemy, was the celebrated Marxist historian eric hobsbawm.
As a life-long member of the Communist Party, he held a flickering candle for Stalin’s Russia — notoriously saying the ‘sacrifice of millions of lives’ would be worth it for a communist utopia.
he also argued that ‘Stalin imposed order ... the police state can be the rule of law.’ It was British society that was ‘morally unacceptable’.
Now there is a new disgruntled, Britain- hating intellectual on the block. Afua hirsch may seem a slighter figure, but she is feted as the darling of the trendy Left.
her recently published book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity And Belonging, has been favourably, sometimes ecstatically, reviewed.
There is no doubt hirsch is an attractive and superficially plausible figure. I am sure she is well-meaning, and I suspect she is rather nice. But what she writes and says about race and identity could foment bitterness and division.
For there is this important distinction between her and the cavilling intellectuals who came before. Afua hirsch, who is of mixed race, lambasts contemporary Britain and its past through the prism of race.
She is far from being alone, of course. In her evisceration of Britain’s imperial past, she joins the Indian writer Shashi Tharoor, who has depicted British rule in India as virtually Nazi, and the Nigerianborn, mixed-race historian David Olusoga, who has written about the ‘dark side of British history’.
A few weeks ago, Olusoga — one of the three presenters of the BBC TV series Civilisations — said that Winston Churchill was involved in activities which could today be considered war crimes. Olusoga, like Shashi Tharoor, holds the great wartime leader chiefly responsible for the Bengal famine of 1943-44, in which millions of Indians died.
Unsurprisingly, Olusoga has hailed hirsch’s book as a work ‘for our divided and dangerous times’.
For her part, she jumped to Olusoga’s defence in the Guardian, drawing a pretty silly parallel between the ‘lies’ of Vladimir Putin and our own historical ‘myths’.
This week, she was at it again, in the Guardian, arguing after Winnie Mandela’s death that this ‘freedom fighter’ was a flawless heroine.
The Mail was criticised for describing her as a ‘blood-soaked’ bully (which she undoubtedly was). hirsch even claimed outrageously that British people had an ‘ambivalence about apartheid’, the wicked system of racial segregation that only came to an end in 1994.
So who is this celebrated new denigrator of Britain? Afua hirsch was born 36 years ago in Norway to a Ghanaian mother and a father who was the son of a Yorkshire woman and a German- Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany welcomed to this country as a child.
her contemptuous view of Britain’s past was perfectly conveyed by an article she wrote suggesting that horatio Nelson should be toppled from his column in Trafalgar Square because he was a ‘white supremacist’.
What had Nelson done wrong? he defended his slave- owner friends in Parliament — not, of course, a good thing to do, especially as this was shortly before the slave trade was abolished in the British empire in 1807.
The fact remains that more than any man, apart perhaps from the Duke of Wellington, Nelson saved this country from the tyranny of Napoleon and French domination. And he gave his life in that great cause at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Despite her obvious intelligence, it seems not to occur to the onetrackminded hirsch that the British naval hero deservedly has a place in many hearts. So far as she is concerned, the British empire was exploitative and racist, and all other considerations must be blotted out.
In her eyes, many of our national heroes and reputed great men — from Isaac Newton to the 17thcentury philosopher John Locke to Nelson to Churchill to Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts — were nasty racists.
That’s not all. She also wants us to face up to the reality, as she sees it, that Britain is a racist society in which many immigrants and nonwhite citizens have to put up with an intolerable degree of prejudice from the white population.
her book is often flabbily argued and breathtakingly one-sided. But more to the point, it is also potentially dangerous.
I fear that if it were taken seriously, it could lead to a dramatic deterioration in the relatively harmonious race relations we have in this country.
The bizarre thing is that the woman who remorselessly flagel- lates so many aspects of Britain is one of the most fortunate people alive, and has enjoyed some of the greatest benefits this country has to offer.
her hard- working parents scrimped and saved, and provided her with an upbringing in leafy Wimbledon that was by hirsch’s account idyllic.
She grew up in ‘a lovely spacious house [with] a garden with fruit trees and swings, summer holidays walking in the Alps, a private education’. Oxford University and a degree in Politics, Philosophy and economics followed, and then training to be a barrister.
AND although she insists Britain is a racist society, she produces scant evidence of having suffered much discrimination herself, though she asserts that, as a child, her partner (who is of Ghanaian ancestry) was continually on the receiving end of racial slurs in much rougher Tottenham.
One experience which understandably still rankles for her was being barred as a teenager from a boutique in Wimbledon by the manager, who declared that ‘black girls are thieves’, and suggested that her presence might put off other customers.
But this disagreeable experience with an obviously unpleasant man who was a racist seems exceptional. Nonetheless, nearly 20 years passed before hirsch — who is nothing if not hypersensitive — summoned the courage to go back to the boutique.
If there were more racist incidents in her life in which she was a victim, one could more easily understand why she should have developed such strong feelings of alienation from this country. But she enjoyed a gilded and blessed upbringing.
Most of us fortunate enough to have such advantages are grateful to the institutions that nurtured us. For most, love of one’s country — if it is a peaceful and happy one — is the most natural of instincts, like love of family.
Unfortunately, not for Afua hirsch. Feeling a stranger in her own country, and longing to find an identity, hirsch takes herself off to Senegal in West Africa in the hope of discovering identity and purpose. But things don’t work out because Senegal is poor, sometimes violent and lacking in opportunities. So she scuttles back to familiar territory to reprise her old grumblings.
Instead of counting her blessings that she doesn’t have to spend the
rest of her life in Senegal, Hirsch becomes, if anything, even more dissatisfied with Britain.
A new preoccupation is Meghan Markle, whose mother is African-American.
In a stunningly wrong-headed article, she accused the Press of criticising Prince Harry’s fiancée because of her mixed race heritage, and argued that the upper classes and Royal Family have a history of ‘blatant racism’.
Talk about whipping up a storm where none existed!
There are occasional accolades in her book for historical figures. William Wilberforce, who did more than anyone to bring about the abolition of the slave trade, is given a small pat on the back.
But Hirsch doesn’t give any credit to the Royal Navy — the same Navy of Horatio Nelson — which between 1815 and 1860 freed tens of thousands of slaves who were being shipped across the Atlantic.
Nor is any mention made of the British sailors — possibly as many as 20,000 — who died in this noble endeavour. Hirsch simply declares that ‘by 1840 there were more slaves crossing the Atlantic than ever before, and British investors and businesses were among those profiting’.
It is the one- sidedness of her book that so appals.
She quotes the Jamaican black activist Marcus Garvey, who said that ‘a people without the knowledge of their past history is like a tree without roots’.
That’s true. But in trying to work out her own roots, Hirsch recklessly tears up the roots of British history in a way that seems almost intended to cause offence.
In the course of her obsessive search for her identity, and her constant excoriation of this country’s past, she shows little regard for the natural sentiments and loyalties of her fellow white citizens, who she accuses of suffering from ‘national amnesia’.
Of course, it would be stupid to deny that the British did bad things. The trouble is that Hirsch judges the past entirely through a morally superior 21st- century lens. Couldn’t almost anyone born before about 1900 be made to appear racist by modern standards?
The Empire was, after all, a huge enterprise spanning three centuries, encompassing the evils of the slave trade in its early days, and the introduction of modern medicine, legal systems, sanitation and parliamentary democracy towards the end.
THE past, moreover, is almost always far more complex than Afua Hirsch is willing to concede. For example, she lashes the British for the 19th- century Ashanti Wars in what later became Ghana — her mother’s birthplace — and tells us that the wicked imperialists turned her family into ‘refugees’.
But the slave- owning Ashanti were in many respects the aggressors, and the British were protecting the indigenous people on what was then the Gold Coast.
Rather than following in the footsteps of other blinkered propagandists, Hirsch would do well to read what the great Nigerian novelist and Booker Prize-winner Chinua Achebe wrote in his final book.
Although a life-long anti-colonialist, he accepted that the Empire had positive aspects. ‘The British governed their colony of Nigeria with considerable care,’ he wrote. ‘There was a very highly competent cadre of government officials imbued with a high level of knowledge of how to run a country ... It is important to face the fact that British colonies were, more or less, expertly run.’
Hirsch refuses to recognise that the British brought good governance to large parts of Africa — and, it might be added, Christianity, which now thrives there as nowhere else.
I have visited hospitals in exBritish Africa — in which continent I have perhaps travelled more widely than Afua Hirsch notwithstanding her forays to Senegal and Ghana — built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by high- minded Christian missionaries. Weren’t these a wonderful contribution? Hirsch doesn’t mention them.
This trashing of our history might not matter very much if Hirsch were just another Guardianista lazily propounding her prejudiced views over a pot of yoghurt and muesli.
Yes, we could just ignore her, but Afua Hirsch is celebrated in some quarters as a leading intellectual, whose views on race and history are increasingly being taken seriously. I find that an alarming thought.
FOR I can think of nothing more destructive of the comparative racial harmony we enjoy in this country than the false argument she makes — which is that non-whites have been victims of racism in every nook and cranny of Britain’s past, and continue to be so in the present.
Needless to say, Hirsch is not unique. The successful ‘ grime rapper’ Michael Omari, known as ‘ Stormzy’ ( also of Ghanaian descent), not long ago laid into Theresa May.
He called her a ‘ criminal’ who had not only smeared the victims of the Grenfell Tower tragedy as ‘savages’, but also starved them of cash.
‘Yo, Theresa May, where’s the money for Grenfell?’ he asked in a song. ‘ You think we just forgot about Grenfell? You criminals, and you’ve got the cheek to call us savages, you should do some jail time, you should pay some damages, you should burn your house down and see if you can manage this.’
His political affiliations are his own concern. But wouldn’t it be more seemly to show some appreciation for the country that has given him the opportunity to develop his talents?
As I say, I don’t at all suggest that Hirsch is a bad person. There is nothing nasty or unpleasant about her. I should far rather have lunch with her than with Eric Hobsbawm or ‘Stormzy’.
The fact remains that she provides a potential springboard for a thousand grievances.
On the one hand, she attempts to persuade non-whites that they have been remorselessly persecuted down the ages, while on the other she risks inflaming whites by turning their heroes into villains, even to the point of pulling down the statues of historical figures.
The irony of her position is that she could look at her life in a really positive way, citing herself as a role model for how people from all backgrounds can succeed in this country.
Couldn’t she summon a smidgen of gratitude for the institutions that have nurtured her? Or for the country that provided a home for her German- Jewish grandfather who escaped as a child from the Nazis? Perish the thought!
As for her partner (who wisely advised her not to write this book, but was ignored), he succeeded in overcoming poverty and deprivation in Tottenham, went to university and embarked on a legal career. Another inspiring story, if only Hirsch could grasp it.
As George Orwell noted, there is a long and ignoble tradition on the Left of rubbishing Britain.
Infused as she is with the politics of race, Afua Hirsch has gone a step further in propagating the destructive notion that this country, past and present, should be a source of shame.