Why was Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the Labour Party?

 Why was Jeremy Corbyn suspended from the Labour Party?

By Jennifer Scott
BBC News online political reporter

Published

30 October 2020

IMAGE COPYRIGHTAFP

image captionJeremy Corbyn has been a member of the Labour Party since he was 16

Jeremy Corbyn joined Labour 55 years ago as a teenager and led the party into the last general election.

But the Islington North MP has now been suspended, pending an investigation.

We can't tell you what the result of that will be, but we can explain why the party says the decision has been taken...

• Labour suspends Corbyn over anti-Semitism reaction
• Starmer defends Corbyn suspension from Labour
• A guide to Labour anti-Semitism claims

Since 2016 - a year after Mr Corbyn was elected leader - Labour has been plagued by allegations of anti-Jewish racism by some of its supporters, mostly on social media.

Anti-Semitic abuse is against the law - and in May last year the body that polices human rights and equalities in the UK launched an investigation into Labour's handling of complaints about the behaviour of some of its supporters.

On Thursday, the Equalities and Human Rights Commission published its report, saying Labour had broken the law, which you can read about here.

The Commission put some of the blame on "serious failings" under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the party.

But it was not the conclusion of the report that led to the former leader's suspension, says Labour.

Instead, it was his reaction to the findings.

How the suspension happened

The report was published at 10:00 GMT on Thursday. Around 30 minutes later, Mr Corbyn put out a statement.

He said anti-Semitism was "absolutely abhorrent" and "one anti-Semite is one too many" in the party.

But he then said: "The scale of the problem was also dramatically overstated for political reasons by our opponents inside and outside the party, as well as by much of the media."

After another 30 minutes or so, Mr Corbyn's successor as Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, made his own statement.

He said those who believed the issue of anti-Semitism in the party had been "exaggerated" or were a "factional attack" were also "part of the problem and... should be nowhere near the Labour Party".

Sir Keir told the BBC on Friday that he had informed his predecessor of what he planned to say and was "deeply disappointed" that Mr Corbyn's comments appeared to contradict his statement.

Back to Thursday, and after the new leader's speech, Mr Corbyn sat down with a TV reporter to be asked about the EHRC's findings.

He was questioned on Sir Keir's statement and whether he stood by his own response that the issue had been "dramatically overstated".

Mr Corbyn repeated that "one anti-Semite is too many", but then said the number of complaints had been "exaggerated".

Six minutes after the clip aired, Labour released a statement saying they had suspended Mr Corbyn from the party.

It read: "In light of his comments made today and his failure to retract them subsequently, the Labour Party has suspended Jeremy Corbyn pending investigation."

Sir Keir clarified on Friday morning that it was Mr Corbyn's comments about the "exaggeration" of anti-Semitism that was the main reason for his suspension.

He said it was not his decision, but that of the party's general secretary, David Evans.

However, Sir Keir said, while "difficult", it was the "right action" and he fully supported it.

Speaking after his suspension, Mr Corbyn said he would "strongly contest" what he called a "political intervention".

He added: "I've made absolutely clear that those who deny there has been an anti-Semitism problem in the Labour Party are wrong.

"It's also undeniable that a false impression has been created of the number of members accused of anti-Semitism, as polling shows: that is what has been overstated, not the seriousness of the problem."

What happens next?

Now, this is the part we are not so clear on.

We know there will now be a disciplinary procedure within the party under its governance and legal unit.

The decision of any further action against Mr Corbyn - such as expelling him from the party - or his reinstatement, will be taking by Labour's National Executive Committee, not the leadership.

After many years of having a majority on the left of the party, allies of the new leader have a slim majority on the NEC.

But Sir Keir has said he will not interfere in the process.

So, we will just have to wait to see the conclusion of the Labour Party investigation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54746452

21 Oct 2020 The EU’s bad faith needn’t deprive us of a good deal - MUST READ

 AS A retired Higher Courts Solicitor-Advocate (Criminal Law), I shall do my best to enlighten you as to the latest Brexit negotiations and legalities.

John Hayter

-

October 21, 2020

Theresa May negotiated with Brussels and allowed them to run rings round her. Boris Johnson took up the baton and, under pressure, accepted a Withdrawal Treaty that was imperfectly negotiated by Government lawyers and had holes in it. Add to the mixture the bad faith of the EU negotiators and we have the present stand-off.

These are the difficulties:

1: The Northern Ireland Protocol of the Withdrawal Treaty raises the risk that there will be barriers to trade between Northern Ireland and Britain. Without a trade agreement, the protocol will apply. In that case, for goods transported from Britain to Northern Ireland, there will be customs controls and checks and further regulatory checks for agri-foods and other products to ensure compliance with EU rules. Even EU tariffs will apply for some goods.

But in the Withdrawal Treaty the EU promised to recognise Northern Ireland’s integral place in the UK’s internal market. It pledged its best endeavours to facilitate the trade between Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK, avoiding controls at the ports and airports of Northern Ireland to the extent possible.

The EU promised to develop ‘in good faith’ agreements giving effect to this relationship, to come into force at the end of 2020. Unfortunately, the EU negotiators have refused to negotiate in good faith and failed to meet their commitments. They have even threatened to refuse to list Britain as a country from which they can accept food imports. This is despite Britain already complying with all relevant EU laws and promising to notify the EU of any changes in its regulations, in common with other countries approved for food imports by the EU.

Refusing to list Britain would mean a food blockade between Northern Ireland and Britain, which would be a clear breach of the EU’s commitments in the Withdrawal Treaty.

2: Britain does not wish to be governed by EU state aid regulations. Under the Northern Ireland protocol, the UK must notify the EU of any subsidies that could affect trade between Northern Ireland and the EU single market.

Brexiteers believe that ambiguity in the protocol could be exploited by the EU to interfere with subsidies for businesses in Britain which have only a limited link to Northern Ireland. The Government intends to address this by making clear that EU state aid rules apply only to Northern Ireland.

3: Another issue is the requirement that Northern Ireland businesses must complete export summary declarations when they send goods to Britain. This is incompatible with the promise that the province will enjoy unfettered access to the UK internal market. The government will legislate to waive this requirement.

4: Another issue is ‘at risk’ goods heading into Northern Ireland from Britain, which could enter the single market (via the Irish Republic) and must be subject to tariffs.

Goods shown to have been consumed in Northern Ireland can have the tariff rebated, but this will be an administrative nightmare adding to costs. The Government will hand ministers the power to determine the goods ‘at risk’.

5: On January 9, 2020, the European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act 2020 was passed. It contained Section 38, which says that nothing in this Act derogates from the sovereignty of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The 27 member states agreed to the terms of the Withdrawal Act as it was given Royal Assent on January 23.

The EU has used Northern Ireland for strategic and tactical reasons in the negotiations to demand that Britain remains in the Common Fisheries Policy. The EU wants to turn the screw until the Government relents in its pursuit of independence and sovereignty.

Given the failure of the EU to negotiate in good faith and its threats to Northern Ireland, the Prime Minister can legitimately argue that Britain is not breaching its commitments in international law, but the EU is.

Brussels is also undermining the Good Friday Agreement, which guarantees that Northern Ireland’s constitutional status cannot be changed without its people’s consent. If there is no deal, the Government will legislate in the Internal Market Bill and a future Finance Bill to disapply parts of the Northern Ireland protocol.

And so the EU leaders can either negotiate in good faith and conclude the trade agreement they once said they wanted. Or they can accept a no-deal outcome, in which the UK will defend its territorial integrity.

The Internal Market Bill must be supported by Parliament. It readies the country for Brexit and makes a good deal more likely.

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-eus-bad-faith-neednt-deprive-us-of-a-good-deal/

27 Oct 2020 No one wants a return to the Troubles – except the EU

 ONE has only to look at the contributing authors to John Longworth’s newly published report on the Withdrawal Agreement with the EU to know that The Australian Deal – Another Impossible Dream is a must-read. 

It sets out why, if there is no agreement with the EU, reverting to an ‘Australian Deal’ is not an option and why the only viable one is to reject the Withdrawal Agreement/Northern Ireland Protocol.

Adrian Hill

-

October 27, 2020

In good old plain English the authors tell us not to be taken in by Mr Johnson’s blithe words in the face of the trade talks collapsing and leaving without a deal: ‘I have concluded that we should get ready for January 1 with arrangements that are more like Australia’s, based on simple principles of global free trade.’

Well no, it’s not that simple, Prime Minister. Under such an exit, the UK would not be leaving ‘without a deal’, but rather with the baggage of the already ratified WA and its associated NIP.

Which is exactly why people like me who had to deal with Northern Ireland at the worst times of the Troubles – there’s a euphemism for tribal and religious warfare – regard Mrs May’s approach to the British voters as nothing less than shameful, indeed frankly despicable, because she set out to cheat us right from the start and encouraged her civil servants to do the same. 

As the report explains in clear language, the Withdrawal Agreement is an international treaty. Thus we are bound to respect its terms – even with Article 38 – unless we simply revoke it, and the best time to do that is before New Year’s Eve. 

One can argue that once Monsieur Barnier realised that Mrs May and her Remain faction in the Tory Party were willing to betray the people who voted to leave the EU, having pulled off the Withdrawal Agreement, the EU no longer needed a trade deal. 

Their trade surplus was safe, the gradual takeover of Northern Ireland was assured – thereby vindicating Martin Selmayr’s amputation strategy to weaken the UK – and that left only Scotland as a target. 

For the effect of the Withdrawal Agreement is to turn the clock back far beyond 1916 to before 1745. A foreign power once again meddles on the British mainland. I can remember the last time, when they did it with bombers, doodlebugs and rockets. When I hear Boris and Rishi saying they can afford to pay millions for people to visit pizza restaurants but they can’t afford proper armed forces, perhaps they need a reminder – as do some Scots – what open warfare is like in their own country.

Almost certainly the European Commission lawyers drew up most of the Withdrawal Agreement and its Northern Ireland passages. I can’t imagine that Boris Johnson, when Foreign Secretary, would have signed off a hold-up which doesn’t sound like advice from the FCO legal advisers. The parts on Northern Ireland are an obvious Trojan Horse designed to begin isolating Northern Ireland from Great Britain. 

This goes against the current of Anglo-Irish relations during my time as a diplomat including more than four years in North America.

My job once took me to Northern Ireland and the border. We had very good co-operation with the Republic and the border at first was still largely open. The hardening came later and proved very unpopular. 

All through the Troubles the British and Irish governments carried on business as usual between our countries; this included the Common Travel Area and the joint tax office. The only zone of rivalry was over inward investment, and competition was fierce though friendly.

After Bloody Sunday there was a three-day siege of our embassy through a riot in Merrion Square, the heart of Georgian Dublin. Around 20-30,000 people were involved, armed with explosives and petrol bombs. Some of the Gardai suffered broken bones defending the British Embassy from the mob.  

These were grim times with murders of our ambassador with his secretary, Lord Louis Mountbatten, his grandson and a local teenage boy, many soldiers and policemen as well as innocent men, women and children. At the worst there were 40-50 bombings and 80-100 shooting incidents a day. You could smell the tension. No one with any sense wants to go back to that bleak hatred. 

Except the European Union.

That’s why they were kept out of the peace process. As a part of the Good Friday Agreement the Irish Parliament voted to remove Articles 2 and 3 of their constitution which laid claim to the whole island. This recognised the legitimacy of Northern Ireland and was a crucial stride towards bringing peace. Enter Mr Varadkar with Monsieur Barnier and his German bosses, stumbling around the china shop in their jackboots.

A former commander of our forces in Northern Ireland once likened  province politics to a mobile hanging from the ceiling – touch it gently, otherwise it flies all over the place, instantly out of control.  

I never fail to be amazed by how sheltered and shuttered otherwise intelligent people can be when gazing at the blindingly obvious right under their noses. 

Can none of our Cabinet imagine the TV pictures should the EU Commission force the Republic to put up hard customs and immigration posts marking the European Union frontier along their side of the border while our side stays wide open for every man, woman, child, cow, dog and donkey on the island? 

Just think of the American television news pictures. TV crews will film on both sides of the border – that’s the story – bingo, global news. There will be dozens of camera teams. The European Union know they’ll be a laughing stock and also look rather nasty, bullies who poke their noses into ordinary people’s lives, who inconvenience mothers doing the school run among the country lanes – hence all their desperate ploys. Irish matters are big stories for the media all over North America; I ran the British Information Services there for four years. Believe me, during and just after a presidential election, there’ll be a lot of flak whizzing across the Atlantic. Whoever wins. 

A clean Brexit would stop such scheming in its tracks and have many other advantages, so why are we still taking the Withdrawal Agreement as anything other than a hostile act of diplomacy intended to punish the United Kingdom and drawn up by Germany’s Brexit team? As my old boss in Canada, John Wilson, Lord Moran, said when the Falklands were invaded: ‘One day, Adrian, someone will put a match to the Foreign Office.’ Maybe we should add the EU Commission’s fancy building in Brussels.

I have pointed out before that we know the French navy – a Nato ally – spent this summer escorting rubber boats loaded with illegal immigrants to within safe reach of East Sussex and Kent beaches. Macron’s government in effect colluded with a people-smuggling gang led by Iranians. 

We also know another Nato ally, Germany, pursues a strategy called political amputation against the UK by encouraging Dublin to make a grab for Northern Ireland and the Scottish Nationalists to separate – although one wonders how both intend to cover their potential national debts.

The strategic risk involved for the rest of the UK is deadly. For the first time in three hundred years we face a real danger that a hostile foreign power will be able to land unopposed and set up shop on the mainland of the British Isles. 

I suggest it’s time for our politicians to wake up and stop pussyfooting. Treat the Scottish Nationalists and the German-ruled EU bloc as what they are: treacherous subversives. In classical diplomacy, both attempts at amputation are hostile acts, barely short of open warfare.  

Both are perfectly adequate reasons to revoke the Withdrawal Agreement and keep our money. I have said it before and say it again: diplomacy has rules. Standards of courtesy are demanded even between hostile nations. We have not made an exception for Putin’s Russia nor the earlier Soviet Union. We should not make an exception either for Angela Merkel’s European Union.   

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/tcws-brexit-watch-no-one-wants-a-return-to-the-troubles-except-the-eu/

Misremembering the British Empire

 How did the British become so blinkered about their nation’s imperial history?

By Maya Jasanoff

October 26, 2020

The records of Britain’s imperial past have been distorted or destroyed.Illustration by Alexander Glandien

On a cloud-spackled Sunday last June, protesters in Bristol, England, gathered at a statue of Edward Colston, a seventeenth-century slave trader on whose watch more than eighty thousand Africans were trafficked across the Atlantic. “Pull it down!” the crowd chanted, as people yanked on a rope around the statue’s neck. A few tugs, and the figure clanged off its pedestal. A panel of its coat skirt cracked off to expose a hollow buttock as the demonstrators rolled the statue toward the harbor, a few hundred yards away, and then tipped it headlong into the water.

The Black Lives Matter movement has accelerated a reckoning across Europe about the legacies of slavery and imperialism, nowhere more urgently than in Britain, which presided over the largest empire in world history. The Colston statue stood on Colston Avenue, in the shadow of Colston Tower, on Colston Street, around the corner from Colston Hall. Scratch almost any institution with roots in Britain’s era of global dominance and you’ll draw imperial blood—from the Rhodes Trust, established by the fervent expansionist and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes, to the British Museum, whose founding collection was funded by profits from Jamaican plantations worked by slaves, and the Booker Prize, launched by a food company once notorious for its exploitative practices in the cane fields of British Guiana. Every year, the Queen honors hundreds of citizens with the Order of the British Empire. (A 2004 parliamentary committee recommended changing the name to the Order of British Excellence, to no avail.)

Public discussion in Britain about the imperial past has pivoted on a reductive question: Was the empire good or bad? The Labour Party has pledged to “ensure the historical injustices of colonialism, and the role of the British Empire” are “properly integrated into the National Curriculum,” while Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, decries a “cringing embarrassment about our history.” A March, 2020, poll found that a third of Britons believed that their empire had done more good than harm for colonies—a higher percentage than in other former imperial powers, including France and Japan. More than a quarter of Britons want the empire back.

Asking, today, whether empire was good or bad is, as a historical matter, about as useful as asking whether the Atlantic Ocean is good or bad. When, what, where, for whom? Britons have been left ill-equipped to say. Unlike most other European countries, Britain stops requiring students to study history when they reach the age of fourteen, which leaves little room for nuance in a national curriculum designed to showcase “our island story.” The public narrative about Britain’s imperial past matters because it is keenly felt to license present injustice. “Our collective amnesia about the legacy of our colonial past is not getting any better,” the writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch observes in her podcast “We Need to Talk About the British Empire.” “We’re engulfed in a sense of denial.”

How did the British get to be so blinkered about their own history? In “Time’s Monster: How History Makes History” (Harvard), a probing new book, the Stanford professor Priya Satia argues that British views of empire remain “hostage to myth” partly because historians made them so. In 1817, the utilitarian philosopher James Mill provided a template when he published his three-volume “History of British India,” which became a textbook for colonial administrators. Civilization evolves in stages, the logic ran; Britain had reached a higher stage than its colonies; therefore Britain had a moral duty to lift them up. Mill soon got a job drafting dispatches in the East India Company’s London headquarters. (Mill’s eldest son, John Stuart, who at the age of eleven had helped correct the book’s page proofs, joined him at India House as a junior clerk in 1823 and stayed until the East India Company was dismantled, in 1858.)

Satia, whose earlier books described British surveillance of the interwar Middle East and the eighteenth-century origins of a British military-industrial complex, is well attuned to the echoes of historical scripts. Mill’s basic premise that imperialism brings progress reverberated in a series of moral claims. The parliamentary act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade, in 1807, was held up as proof of the British Empire’s commitment to freedom, effacing its shameful past as the largest slave trader in the eighteenth-century world. Colonial independence, in the twentieth century, was depicted as the culmination of a selfless mission to spread democracy, something “given” or “granted” to colonies, rather than something long denied by force. The Second World War became the British Empire’s triumphant last stand as the bulwark of global liberty in the face of fascism, eliding Britain’s violent suppression of anticolonial resistance. “In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs,” Niall Ferguson wrote in 2002. “Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire’s other sins?”

“Time’s Monster” joins a dense body of scholarship analyzing liberal justifications for empire. By the early twentieth century, critics were growing skeptical of British claims about progress. Consider Edward John Thompson, who travelled to Bengal in 1910 as a Methodist missionary and befriended the anticolonial poets Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal. The Great War, in which Thompson served as an Army chaplain in Mesopotamia, soured him on the much touted promises of British civilization. He started writing history to expose the unsavory truths that propagandists had left out. In “The Other Side of the Medal” (1925), a revisionist history of the Indian rebellion of 1857, Thompson described British atrocities passed over in earlier accounts. It was time, he said, to “face the things that happened, and change our way of writing about them.”

In an incisive recent study of anticolonial dissent, “Insurgent Empire” (Verso), Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of English at Cambridge, places Thompson in a long line of critics of imperialism. She and Satia agree that public outcries against injustice—such as the brutal suppression of the 1865 uprising at Morant Bay, Jamaica, and the 1919 Amritsar Massacre, in which soldiers under British command fired into a crowd of nonviolent Indian protesters—often amounted to a scapegoating of individuals and the laundering of the nation’s conscience. Yet, through a process of what Gopal calls “reverse tutelage,” colonial subjects consistently pressed their British interlocutors to adopt more radical stances against empire. One might see Thompson as a sort of real-life Fielding, the British teacher at the center of E. M. Forster’s “A Passage to India,” who learns from the Indian doctor Aziz that, in Gopal’s words, they “would have to be allies in the project of driving the English out of India before they could be friends.” “Insurgent Empire” demonstrates how often critics have hacked at the pedestals of imperial pieties, and how consistently voices outside Britain have inspired them. Nine decades ago, the Scottsboro case prompted anticolonial activists to confront racism; five years before Colston tumbled down, Rhodes Must Fall, a student movement at the University of Cape Town, inspired an affiliated campaign at Oxford to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes and “decolonize” the curriculum.

What happened to this critical strand in the history of the British Empire? Satia finds an unexpected answer in Thompson’s son, Edward Palmer Thompson. As a boy, he saw the stream of writers and activists who passed through the family’s home, outside Oxford—Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, T. E. Lawrence—as a source of exotic stamps for his collection. When he was a young man, returning from service in the Second World War to complete a degree in history, he rebelled against his father’s Byronic ideals and engagement with Indian affairs. He joined the Communist Party, took a teaching job in Leeds, resigned from the Communist Party, co-founded The New Left Review, and wrote about the lives of working-class radicals—to rescue them, he said, from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”

E. P. Thompson’s “The Making of the English Working Class” (1963) is one of the most influential works of modern history. Its method, “history from below,” has had an incalculable international impact, not least in recuperating the histories of colonized people. Yet, in Satia’s view, Thompson himself personified an insular turn taken by historians of his generation, who, as Britain’s global power waned, focussed intently on the local. Histories that ignored British imperialism, she suggests, contributed to historical illiteracy as much as histories that defended it did.

Insularity, though, hardly describes postwar Britain’s other preëminent historian, Eric Hobsbawm. A secular Jew born in Alexandria and raised in Vienna and Berlin, Hobsbawm, a lifelong Communist, wrote panoramic histories that unfurled the international ramifications of British industrialization. And empire was an ever-present frame for the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, another co-founder of The New Left Review, who came to England from Jamaica as a Rhodes Scholar, and argued that “the very notion of Great Britain’s ‘greatness’ is bound up with empire.” In the nineteen-nineties, practitioners of a “new imperial history” (including Hall’s wife, Catherine, a distinguished feminist historian) picked up this thread and stitched the stories of the British Empire and the British Isles together again.

Historians, whether mythmaking or record-righting, draw on sources that are themselves shaped by historical pressures—and these, too, played a role in distorting the picture of the imperial past. For while Thompson and his contemporaries were performing their acts of archival recovery, the imperial officers of the British government were doing their best to leave little for posterity to find.

On a showery Friday in August, 1947, citizens of the new nation of India crammed into the ceremonial avenues of New Delhi to celebrate their first day of independence. “Jai Hind! Jai Hind! ” they cheered as the new tricolor was run up the flagpole, and a rainbow broke over the clearing sky. But for days beforehand, it was said, a haze of smoke had blanketed the city: the British were burning government documents en masse, lest anything that might compromise His Majesty’s government get into the wrong hands.

At the empire’s late-Victorian apogee, Rudyard Kipling had enjoined his compatriots to contemplate the ruins of fallen powers with humility: “Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, / Lest we forget—lest we forget!” In the event, an apter motto for Britain’s imperial retreat was “Best we forget.” In one colony after another, as the former Guardian journalist Ian Cobain details in his 2016 book, “The History Thieves,” the British went down in a blaze of documents. A reporter in Cairo during the Suez Crisis recalled standing on the lawn of the British Embassy “ankle deep in the ashes of burning files.” Twelve days before Malaya’s independence, in 1957, British soldiers in Kuala Lumpur loaded trucks with boxes of records to be driven down to Singapore and, a colonial official reported, “destroyed in the Navy’s splendid incinerator.” In 1961, recognizing that “it would perhaps be a little unfortunate to celebrate Independence Day with smoke,” the Colonial Office advised the governor of Trinidad and Tobago to get an early start, and told him that he could also pack files into weighted crates and drop them into the sea. In British Guiana, in 1965, two women hovered over a forty-four-gallon drum on the Government House grounds carrying out what their boss described as “the hot and wearing work” of cremating files. What colonial officials didn’t destroy, they hid. In Nairobi, nine days before Kenya became independent, four packing crates of sensitive papers were hustled into a plane and flown to London Gatwick, where a government official supervised their transfer into storage. These, along with thousands of other colonial files, ended up stashed behind the razor wire of Hanslope Park, in Buckinghamshire, an intelligence facility dedicated to communications security—that is, to keeping secrets.

“Erasing history” is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures. But taking down a statue isn’t erasing history; it’s revising cultural priorities. Those who pulled down the Colston statue were, in a way, making history—by insisting that public space reflect the values of postcolonial Britain, just as citizens of former colonies have renamed, removed, and reframed imperial symbols. (In the nineteen-fifties, a British diplomat in India discouraged the idea of sending dismantled monuments to England, wondering “what use a series of somewhat weather-beaten and not uniformly first-class statues could be put to in the United Kingdom. I thought we had too many already!”)

Burning documents: now, that’s erasing history. By eliminating written evidence of their actions from the archival record, British officials sought to manipulate the kinds of histories that future generations would be able to produce. E. P. Thompson, who struggled for years with the “secret state” to get details about his brother’s death during a covert wartime operation, would not have been surprised by the extent of government duplicity. “Reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge,” he said. Colonial officials in Uganda, rifling through their files to figure out what to destroy, came up with a name for the process of erasure. They called it Operation Legacy.

The secret stash at Hanslope Park was revealed only in 2011, during a lawsuit brought against the British government by victims of torture in colonial Kenya. (The case was based in part on oral testimony gathered by my Harvard colleague Caroline Elkins.) What came pouring out from the so-called “migrated archives” were records of systematic, wide-ranging, stomach-churning abuse. These accounts flew in the face of the popular British myth that—as a Home Office guide for the U.K. citizenship test currently assures us—“there was, for the most part, an orderly transition from Empire to Commonwealth, with countries being granted their independence.”

“The problem with weighing pros and cons is that it presumes there is a point at which the story is over, the accounts are closed, and we can actually tot up the balance,” Satia writes. But the reckoning continues. In 2018, it emerged that dozens of immigrants of the “Windrush generation” (named for a ship, the Empire Windrush, which brought Caribbean migrants to the U.K. in 1948), who had legally settled in Britain between 1948 and 1973, had recently been deported by the Home Office because they couldn’t prove their status. Their landing cards—often the only record of their legal arrival—had been destroyed in a procedural culling of the archives in 2010.

In 2002, the privately funded British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which aimed to present the imperial age from multiple perspectives, opened in Bristol after more than a decade of planning. In a slant rhyme to the end of empire, it closed its doors six years later and went into liquidation amid sordid reports about the unauthorized sale of loaned objects. The chairman of the museum’s board of trustees said, “I think the time has not yet arrived for the proper story of Empire and Commonwealth to be told.”

Satia joins Gopal, Hirsch, and a growing number of historians—many of them scholars of color—in trying to change that storyline. A fuller history of empire and its legacies requires, in part, what Gopal calls “a sustained unlearning.” This approach is gaining momentum, at least symbolically. Two days after Colston fell, a crane in London’s Docklands hoisted the effigy of another slave trader off its plinth, as Mayor Sadiq Khan launched a review of all public landmarks. The University of Liverpool announced the renaming of a dormitory commemorating Prime Minister William Gladstone, who was the son of a slaveowner and, in his maiden speech in Parliament, in 1833, had argued in favor of compensating slaveowners for emancipated slaves. The governing body of Oriel College, Oxford, voted to remove the controversial statue of Rhodes that, four years earlier, it had affirmed keeping in place, while Imperial College London, endowed by Rhodes’s South African mining cronies, removed its motto, Scientia imperii decus et tutamen: “Scientific knowledge, the crowning glory and safeguard of the empire.”

What shall be learned instead? Satia, taking inspiration from the work of Urdu poets, calls on historians to step away from narratives of moral progress and seek fresh ways to connect the present and the past. A good example of what that might look like in practice is University College London’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-Ownership. The center (which Catherine Hall chairs) has compiled a database of every slaveowner in the British colonies at the time of emancipation, in 1833, and has wrinkled the sanctimonious tale of British abolitionism. Its researchers have shown that government payouts to slaveowners following emancipation seeded fortunes inherited by generations of prominent bankers, writers, engineers, and politicians—sustaining slaveowners’ privilege right down to the present. Last year, the University of Glasgow, scrutinizing its own imperial gains, announced a twenty-million-pound project to explore the history of slavery and its consequences, in partnership with the University of the West Indies, whose vice-chancellor, Sir Hilary Beckles, has been at the forefront of the Caribbean reparations movement. A myth countered, a history deepened, and a gesture of recompense. There may never be an end to reckoning, but such beginnings might help historians imagine broader forms of recovery and repair. That, too, could be a kind of progress. ♦

Published in the print edition of the November 2, 2020, issue, with the headline “Operation Legacy.”

Maya Jasanoff is a professor of history at Harvard. She is the author of three books, including “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/misremembering-the-british-empire