Brexit buggered Britain celebrates the Queen – OPINION – Politicsweb

OPINION Brexit buggered Britain celebrates the Queen

Andrew Donaldson |

08 June 2022

Andrew Donaldson says that nostalgia is a fascinating narcotic

A FAMOUS GROUSE

NOSTALGIA, it is so often said, is not what it used to be. But after the Platinum Jubilee weekend, it certainly seems a bitweirder. This was a deep wallow in yesteryear that demanded the suspension of critical faculties. Reality itself appeared to suffocate under the weight of purple cushions, bunting, new-fangled trifle, corgi orgies, crocheted crowns, star-studded variety concerts and, to top it all, that bear,Paddington.

The Guardians sketch writer, John Crace,nailed itwhen he suggested this wasnt a country celebrating its monarch so much as one making a virtue of its own collective psychosis. Commenting on the TV coverage of Sundays events, Crace said: We were repeatedly told that everyone in the Commonwealth loved Britain and the Queen. At no time did anyone attempt to address Britains difficult history of empire. This was a white-washed island story. One for the biscuit tins.

As a republican, I should add, I have spent the past week resolutelyunbuntedno Union Jacks fluttering herebut this is not to suggest indifference on my part to that collective psychosis; nostalgia, after all, is a fascinating narcotic.

As it happened, it was Brenda, asPrivate Eyefirst referred to the Queen more than 50 years ago, who appeared to offer an invitation for a retrospective trawl through her 70-year reign. As the weekend approached, wed hear Maam on several occasions on the telly recalling advice shed received from Winston Churchill, her first prime minister: The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.___STEADY_PAYWALL___

In HMs case, there is a lot to look back on. Thirteen prime ministers followed Churchill: Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Harold Wilson, Edward Heath, James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. There may even be another one quite soon. But that is a matter for another day; this is about the old stuff.

At the time of her coronation, in June 1953, there was a suggestion that the young queen was about to lead Britain into the sort of gilded era associated with an illustrious predecessor with the same name. Clement Attlee, the Labour leader and Churchills predecessor as PM, put it thus: It is our hope that Her Majesty may live long and happily and that her reign may be as glorious as that of her great predecessor Queen Elizabeth I. Let us hope we are witnessing the beginning of a new Elizabethan Age no less renowned than the first.

The big difference here is that the first laid the foundations of an empire, while the second presided over its swift dismantling four centuries later. There was much that would be let go. Mark Twainsaccountof HMs great-great-grandmothers diamond jubilee celebrations (Following the Equator, 1897) includes this pithy summation of the Victorian eras imperial acquisitiveness:

Great Britain has added to her real estate an average of 165 miles of territory per day for the past sixty years, which is to say she hasadded more than the bulk of an England proper each year, oran aggregate of seventy Englands in the sixty years.

Twain was so bowled over by the scale of the pageantry of the jubilee parade that passed before dumpy Victoria in the Strand that he gave up the idea of describing it in words. It was to be a spectacle, the American wrote, for the Kodak, not the pen. Still, he had a bash at it. Representatives of all the worlds nations, he said, seemed to be represented: Africans, Indians, Chinese, Pacific islanders they were all there, and with them samples of all the whites that inhabit the wide reach ofthe Queens dominions.

There were notable exceptions, Twain felt. Cecil Rhodes was not in the procession; the charteredcompany was absent from it. Nobody was there to collect their share of the glory due for their formidable contributions to theImperial estate. Even Dr Jameson was out, and yet he triedso hard to accumulate territory That immense new industry,speculative expansion, was not represented, unless the patheticshade of Barnato rode invisible in the pageant.

Its worth noting that the mining magnate Barney Barnato had perished at sea on June 14, 1897, eight days before Victorias jubilee parade. Twain, who had visited South Africa in 1896, declaring its politics as an inextricable tangle, was scathing in hisassessmentof Rhodes:

He raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabele and gets worlds of Charter-Christian applause for it there he stands, to this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an Archangel with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half. I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

Between 1945 and 1965, the number of those who lived under colonial rule as a result of the actions of men like Rhodes fell from 700 million to just five million. However, as empire crumbled, the Commonwealth flourished. As the head of the 54-nation body, comprising of mostly former British colonies, the Queen has been tireless in promoting the organisation and its relevance in international affairs.

This has not been easy, and over the years shes hosted some proper dirtbags, whether from the Commonwealth or further afield: Robert Mugabe, Ugandas Yoweri Museveni, Xi Jinping, Syrias Bashar Al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, Romanias Nicolae Ceausescu, Donald Trump, Zaires Mobutu Sese Seko, Indonesias General Suharto, Kazakhstans Nursultan Nazarbayev the list is a long one.

One favoured anecdote concerns the state visit by the Nigerian military leader Yakubu Gowon shortly before the 1975 coup that toppled him. It seems that, as HM and her guest shared an open coach ride in the Mall, one of the horses broke wind, engulfing the coach in a malodorous stench. Sensing Gowons discomfort, the Queen apologised profusely. Thats perfectly all right, Your Majesty, Gowon replied. I thought it was one of the horses.

There were the visits by South Africans. When Thabo Mbeki led a delegation to the UK in May 2000, I blithely suggested to colleagues in the media that they approach the Palace with inquiries about missing teaspoons and other items of silverware. However, I was assured that the then health minister, the late Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, was not travelling with the president.

I was genuinely baffled when Jacob Zuma cracked the nod in March 2010, and wondered whether Accused Number One had been invited to Buckingham Palace solely at the behest of Prince Philip, the Queens late husband. After all, the Duke of Edinburghs amused fascination with the exotic is legendary.

The ANC wasapparently enragedthat the British press were not suitably deferential in reporting on the visit. Butternut, described by one newspaper as a sex-obsessed bigot and a vile buffoon, complained to theStarthat he was fed up with being judged and sneered at by a country with a hypocritical attitude towards its former colonies.

It was different, of course, with Nelson Mandela. The Queen and Madiba wound up on first-name terms. She calls me Nelson so I call her Elizabeth, he said of their relationship. But their first meeting wasreportedlyquite awkward. Mandela had apparently gatecrashed a Commonwealth meeting hosted by HM in Zimbabwe in 1991, at a time when the British government still viewed the ANC as a terrorist organisation. The Queen made light of the situation, thereby avoiding what could have been a diplomatic disaster, according to a Channel 5 documentary.

Nostalgia is by definition a fundamentally anti-progressive phenomenon, one that has been on the rise in recent years. The belief that the past was a better place is profoundly nationalistic, and is the very stuff of populism. It was the force behind the invasion of Ukraine, a yearning for the past glories of the Soviet Union.

It drove Trumps campaign to make America great again. In South Africa, we see it in claims of those who insist life was better under apartheid, and we see it in those revolutionaries who yearn for a return to the Struggle, that fabled era that was betrayed and disappeared with the drawing up of the Constitution.

The survival of the monarchy depends on such nostalgia. Brexit-buggered Britain, now a plucky island nation facing extraordinary odds once more, thrives on it. But, elsewhere, the schtick is wearing thin. As Elizabeth IIs reign draws to a close, questions on the Commonwealths future arise.

Wealthier members, like Canada and New Zealand, still retain the Queen as their head of state. However, the new Australian PM, Anthony Albanese, has announced that he intends severing ties with the Crown and making his country a republic. This follows indications by at least six Caribbean member states that they plan on removing the Queen as their sovereign after Barbados became a republic last year.

Removing Brenda from your postage stamps and currency does not however amount to a departure from the Commonwealth, which is after all an organisation in which the worlds smaller countries can make their presence felt. In 2018, Prince Charles was appointed his mothers designated successor as the head of the organisation. Its not going to be easy, following in her footsteps, and there may be a yearning for the good old days when Maam was at the helm.

Travel bugs

There is chaos at the airports, and British holiday plans are in disarray. Simply put, there are more flights than short-staffed control centres can handle. Government here has blamed the aviation industry for failing to replace the jobs they shed during lockdown. The industry, in turn, blames government for refusing to loosen Brexit-related immigration rules to allow the transfer of European workers to deal with UK shortages. Its a mess, with flights being cancelled even after passengers have taken their seats now almost a daily occurrence.

One take-off, however, the authorities hope will proceed as planned and without incident is next Tuesdays 7000-kilometre haul from the UK to Rwanda the first flight in the governments controversial plan to relocate asylum seekers to the central African nation where,according to the Home Office, they willbe able to rebuild their lives in safety.

There is some disagreement about this, and charities that support asylum seekers are reportedlydocumenting a number of suicide attemptsamong those threatened with deportation. As an Iranian due to be off-shored on TuesdaytoldThe Guardian: This is not what we ever expected of Britain. We all fled our home countries for one reason only because our lives were in danger. We hoped that coming to the UK would save us but it looks like we were wrong about this.

Those ingrates who have escaped the horrors of Yemen or Syria or wherever only to be relocated in Rwanda should understand they are participating in a world-leading project. Following in the footsteps of Speke and Burton (to the source of denial, so to speak), they will not only overhaul the broken asylum system and break the evil people smugglers business model but are likely to generate further discussion on home secretary Priti Patels disdain for refugees and her penchant for smirking at the less fortunate.

More turbulence

There is justifiable anger at the cack-handed questionnaire that Ryanair has been handing out to South African passengers to prove their nationality before allowing them to board aircraft in the UK and Europe.

According toreports, the budget airline has been telling SA passport holders they will be turned away unless they complete the test, which is only available in Afrikaans. Travellers who spoke to theFinancial Timessaid they were humiliated by the exam, which Ryanair said had been prompted by an increase in cases of fake South African passports.

The questions are indeed troubling. Passengers were asked, among other things, to name the current president, list three of the countrys official languages and to identify the countrys largest city. Little wonder, then, that in her hard-hitting analysis of the controversy, the BBCs Southern Africa correspondent, Nomsa Maseko, admitted thatshe could only answer fiveof the tests 15 questions.(Thats a passmore than 30 per cent correct!)

Here at the Slaughtered Lamb (Finest Ales & Pies), the regulars were easily able to come up with more relevant posers: When a Metro cop is thirsty, how much money does he or she want? How many times have Carl Niehauss parents died? What is the Zulu word for elbow? Any South African not knowing the answers shouldnt be allowed to leave the village, let alone be jetting around Europe.

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