Alasdair Palmer: The Happy Traitor
However, he does not explain how “amnesia” about the consequences of empire rests happily alongside our purported obsession with the world as it used to be, painted red. It is tempting to pour Brexit supporters into a pot marked “nostalgic half-wits”, and many people who should know better have failed to resist that temptation, but it doesn’t begin to tell the story of why so many voters chose to leave the EU.
It is possible they made their decision for reasons that have nothing to do with the loss of empire. For those who have grown up after the Second World War a debate about “empire” is not something that keeps them up at night.
Besides, not all imperial thinking is deluded. Sanghera is unconvinced by Philip Hensher’s argument, expressed in October 2001, after the war in Afghanistan, that British rule might well have been more beneficial for the Afghans than centuries of tribal warfare and instability. But is it not possible that Hensher was expressing an inconvenient truth?
The triumph of modern India suggests that not every aspect of imperialism — “investment and the exchange of ideas … a tradition of parliamentary democracy and some kind of substantial infrastructure”, as Hensher argued — is to be despised, however unfashionable that view may be.
There is one important feature missing in Empireland. An investigation of multiculturalism in Britain must touch at some stage upon the failure of so many Muslims to adjust to life in prosperous, overwhelmingly secular Western societies where Islamic law is not supreme.
The evidence is abundant: the arranged marriages, the genital mutilation, and (as we have seen during the past year of pandemic) the inability of so many people within that community to understand basic English. Above all, as all those criminal convictions in the past decade have shown, there is the sexual grooming of white girls in northern towns by gangs of (mainly) Pakistanis.
Nothing has done more to undermine the aim of genuine multiculturalism than the reluctance of a significant minority of people within an entrenched world to become Britons. Moreover, they have occasionally been encouraged by self-proclaimed anti-racists who consider separateness to be a proud symbol of identity.
No good can come from squatting like dwellers in a polyglot boarding house, President Theodore Roosevelt said of those “hyphenated Americans” who crossed the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. It is a point Sanghera might have sought to amplify.
His book is worth reading, though it could possibly have been more readable had he been born somewhere more exotic. Walsall, perhaps.
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