The Prerogative of the Harlot

“Power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages”.

Ringing words from Conservative Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1931 (though they were written by his cousin, Rudyard Kipling). He was denouncing the Press Barons, influencers of events answerable to no one for the consequences. However, the denunciation applies with equal force to a great many others.

Baldwin (right) said it
Kipling (his cousin) wrote it

Take, for instance, a former boss of mine.

He’d founded the company I joined, basing himself on one brilliant product idea. It was, indeed, that brilliance which drew me in. It didn’t take long to discover, however, that the brilliance had stopped with the initial idea. There had been a short period of growth of the business, but then the company had stagnated, and now it was well into the inevitable next phase, decline.

That meant that radical change was needed. That’s what I thought I’d been brought in to undertake. Within a year, it became clear I was doomed to fail.

Nothing happened in the company without my boss’s say-so: no modification of the product, no phase of development work, no sales decision, no sales presentation even. Indeed, his domination of every aspect of the company was such that a naïve observer might have supposed any failure was down to him.

Not so. I was assured on the best of authorities, indeed the only authority that mattered at all in that business, that my boss knew exactly what needed to be done and was straining every sinew to make it happen. Sadly, he was surrounded by people of crass incompetence. Worse than incompetence. Some of the errors were so flagrant that they seemed deliberate, positive and treacherous against the business. Software developers who took unforgivable shortcuts or simply made elementary errors. Sales staff who demanded information and shared it with potential customers even though that could only put them off ordering from us. People like me who had the gall to question his every move and prevented him achieving the progress his efforts merited.

In fact, he exercised autocratic authority, but the responsibility for any failure was down to anyone but him. Power without responsibility. It was a harlotry I couldn’t bear and I left. Though, to be fair, had I not jumped I would certainly have been pushed soon after.

This was all petty stuff. A few people were inconvenienced in their careers. An insignificant company faded towards well-deserved oblivion. A man prey to an authoritarian streak was presiding over the collapse of unearned ambitions.

Now, though, consider a much more substantial backdrop for such behaviour.

A by-election in a massively safe Conservative seat, Sleaford and North Hykeham, has just elected another Conservative. No surprise there. What is more concerning is that Labour, which came second in the General Election eighteen months ago, came fourth this time around. Vernon Coaker, a Labour MP, commented that in the by-election, “everything was about Brexit”.

Indeed. In another by-election, in Richmond a week earlier, the Liberal Democrats had overturned a huge Conservative majority by firmly opposing Brexit. It is the issue of the day. But Labour, sadly, has no coherent position on it. At best, it criticises the government’s handling of the Brexit process. But it seems to have no clear position on the substantive issue: are we for or against Brexit? Will we only accept a soft Brexit – in which we stay in the Single Market or at least the Customs Union – or a hard Brexit in which we cut all such ties?

No one knows because no one in the leadership is saying.

So we drift from catastrophe to catastrophe. The Sleaford result was completely in line with national polls, which put the Conservatives well up on their General Election result and Labour well down.

Now it’s possible to be as naïve as I was about my boss. Some of us might conclude that if Labour is unable to develop any kind of leadership over the one great question that is agitating the minds of voters, then that’s down to the leadership. Or, more to the point, its lack of leadership.

Again, though, that view turns out to be wrong. The backers of the present leader, Jeremy Corbyn, never tire of telling us that he’s outstanding. The problem is he’s let down by those, like the Parliamentary Labour Party, or others who have no confidence in him and who are therefore ‘red Tories’ or ‘Blairites’. On their shoulders and their shoulders alone lies the blame for Labour’s parlous position.

Corbyn and his circle of admirers insist that they have a mandate from the membership. That allows them to dictate our way forward while we just have to swallow our objections and get on with helping them achieve a glorious future for the country. If glory escapes them, however, be sure that it isn’t down to them. They have power within the Labour Party, you see, but no responsibility.

The prerogative of the harlot through the ages.

Indian Independence, and how it helped free Britain

Richard Lederer, in his Anguished English, quotes a student who believed that the sun never set on the British Empire because the Empire was in the East, and the sun sets in the West.

An American, the Revered W. B. Brown, suggested that the sun never set on the British Empire because God didn’t trust the Brits in the dark.

Both statements have some merit. 

We’re all watching blood-curdling events unfolding in the Middle East at the moment, as Islamic State militants terrorise their region to build themselves a new country that crosses the recognised borders of Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. But where did those borders come from? Why, from the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. In the middle of World War One and without even waiting to beat the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the British, represented by Sir Mark Sykes, signed a secret agreement on how to divide up Turkish possessions in the Levant with the no more trustworthy French, represented by François Georges-Picot.

Sharing out the spoils of the Ottoman Empire

In other words, a lot of blood is being spilled today because of a devious deal brokered by the British and their fellow conspirators. It seems that letting them operate away from scrutiny was never a good idea. It was indeed wiser to keep the Empire in the sunlight.

As for its Eastern nature, it’s true that the main centre of the British Empire, the jewel in its crown,  was India. While I was preparing my recent Countdown to War series, it was curious to read a 1914 Manchester Guardian reference to Britain as an “Asiatic power”. It seems a strange notion today, but back then the possession of India and its other Far Eastern holdings, certainly made Britain an Asiatic power and a major one at that.

The fact that the Empire was best not left unsupervised meant that being a British colony was hardly a matter for self-congratulation in India. Just how serious a misfortune it was is perhaps best illustrated by the events surrounding the ending of that status. 

Rather than leaving India to the Indians, and allowing them to sort out their internal difficulties, including sectarian ones, Britain partitioned the country first. So the Muslim majority areas were hived off, eventually forming Pakistan, even to the extent of giving that country two separate wings with 1600 km of Indian territory between them.

To ensure that an independent India could not block the partition, Pakistan was granted its independence a day earlier. India was faced with a done deal, which it was forced to accept despite fighting four wars with its neighbour to undo it.

Partition also sparked the world’s largest migrations, involving some ten million people. Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan to India and Muslims travelled the other way. Conflicts between the groups left anywhere between 200,000 and a million dead. Eventually the two wings of Pakistan fell out, and a short but destructive war led to East Pakistan winning independence as Bangladesh.

Refugees on the move as a result of Indian partition

And yet, was there any point in partition? There are more Muslims in India today than there are in Pakistan. They are one of the many disadvantaged minorities of the world’s largest democracy. Had the Muslims of Pakistan and Bangladesh remained inside India, sheer numbers might have ensured better treatment for such a large minority. It would also have spared the world the creation of two failed or failing states.

Kipling and his ilk thought of the British presence in India as shouldering the white man’s burden. It strikes me that the burden was British and it was carried by the Indians. Except maybe that by imposing it on the Indians, we in Britain bound ourselves to keeping our country authoritarian and imperialistic, to our own loss. I remember the late Tony Benn, the radical Labour MP, describing England as the last colony of the British Empire. So the independence of India was the beginning of a process to free us from our self-imposed yoke too.

The White Man's Burden: the question is, who was carrying it?

That’s why today, 15 August, I celebrate the 67th anniversary of Indian independence with my glass raised to my many Indian friends and colleagues. I wish them enjoyment today and prosperity in the future.

And breathe a sigh of relief that, however Eurosceptic it may be, my homeland has at last accepted that it is a second-tier European state, and not an Asiatic power with global reach.

Jawaharlal Nehru's first address as Prime Minister of an independent India

Even though, with a few islands scattered round the globe, technically the sun still doesn’t set on the British Empire...