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The
Legacy of Empire
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
July 20, 2005
LONDON - Returning to London after
a month away what astonishes me most is how sotto voce is
the debate that links the bombings and Britain's 'pillion
passenger' role in the American-led war in Iraq. Apart
from a few predictable voices, most political
contributors have maintained a kind of becalmed dignity,
concentrating attention on defeating the homegrown
terrorists.
This is all very well. It is
decorum at its best. The upper lip may be pierced by an
earring or two but it does not easily quiver.
But there comes a point when
Britain has to take its head out of the sand because the
whole sorry, very much intertwined, mess of the ongoing
war in Iraq and the mushrooming of Islamic terrorism
seems to be out of rational control.
There is no debate, for instance,
about the legacy of empire. By that I don't just mean the
double crossing of the Arab Palestinians by Lawrence of
Arabia and his patrons in His Majesty's Foreign Office,
which led to the Arabs believing they had been promised a
homeland if they supported the British drive against the
Ottoman Empire. Nor do I mean the Balfour Declaration
that laid the foundations for perpetual Jewish and
Palestinian terrorism. I am thinking of something more
recent but nonetheless equally tragic.
I grew up in Oldham, once the
parliamentary constituency of Winston Churchill and
centre of the great spinning mills of Lancashire and its
neighbor, Yorkshire. It was in this territory that
William Blake coined his poetic description of "the dark
Satanic mills".
I remember well the men marching
off to the mill like the matchsticks figures in L.S.
Lowry's evocative paintings, carrying their lunch in tin
boxes, whilst the women stayed at home, scrubbing
everyday with white stone the front steps of their little
row houses. (God forbid we should jump on one as we ran
home from school.) There wasn't a non-English face to be
seen, apart from the odd Ukrainian refugee.
We all knew that this was the tail
end of the industrial revolution - that the mills could
not keep on spinning in the face of cheap Asian
competition. But protectionism was muscular. This way of
life had to be defended at all cost. Desperate mill
owners, determined to cut their costs, decided in the
early 1960s to run night shifts and to man these they
sent agents to remote Pakistani villages to recruit
workers. Never mind that Pakistan had its own burgeoning
and highly competitive textile industry. Just as the
British a century and a half before had cut off the
thumbs of Bengali weavers to allow Lancashire's textile
exports a competitive edge in British-ruled India, the
natural laws of economics were there to be interfered
with and manipulated.
Over the next twenty years the
Pakistani trickle into Lancashire and Yorkshire became a
flood. Any protest movements that arose - precursors of
Live8 - that lobbied the government to reduce its textile
trade barriers so that the most competitive Third World
producers could thrive, were rebuffed. We were told by
government policy makers that too much was invested in
Britain's textile industry for it to be allowed to wither
on the vine.
One politician, Enoch Powell, the
ex professor of Greek and Conservative cabinet minister
terrified everyone when he went on a campaign to end
immigration, foreseeing that British streets one day
would be like "the River Tiber, foaming with much blood".
But, as William Deedes, a former cabinet colleague wrote
recently, his rabid style of speech making "forced
everyone in authority to make light of all the problems
Commonwealth immigration was creating."
Not even Pakistani cut-price night
shift labour could keep the mills competitive forever.
Gradually, Britain was pushed by its commitments to free
trade to dismantle its protection of textiles. During the
1990s these northern cities were hollowed out,
unemployment rose to catastrophic levels and there were
ugly race riots with Pakistani second and
third-generation youths pitting their petrol bombs
against the police.
It is in this world the suspected
suicide bombers have grown up. Cause and effect, you
might say.
The British in their dealings with
empire and its leftovers have not just once but too often
shied away from making the causal links. The British are
in Iraq, partly out of loyalty to their old ally America,
but partly because they are still trying to shape the
politics of the oil-rich Middle East, as they have tried
to do for a century. But all they have done is to stir
the pot of hatred and bigotry and now it's clear that the
chickens have not been boiled but have come home to
roost.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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