Being principled is great. In the right cause

It’s not enough to have a conscience.

We all tend to respect honesty and principle in politicians. Well, we don’t get that much opportunity to do so, since in the age of spin and soundbites, it’s hard to find a politician that displays much of either. Which perhaps makes us all the more admiring of those who do.

But honesty and principle, like courage, have much in common with a gun: what matters isn’t so much the thing in itself, as where it’s pointing. It would be hard to deny that Margaret Thatcher showed great courage, resolution, pure grit, but she used it to destroy communities up and down the country. Back in 1970, I taught in a mining village in South Yorkshire; today the population has fallen by over a third, and rates of unemployment or invalidity are frighteningly high. The price of the crushed miners’ strike…

Maggie: grit and courage misapplied

I can think of no better example of misapplied honesty and principle, analogous to Thatcher’s misapplication of courage and resolution, than the case of Robert E. Lee. He occupies a place of honour today, for many, as one of the great generals of history, although he fought, indeed became the leading military figure, on the Confederate side in the American Civil War. That’s the defeated side, and generally now felt to be the wrong side (except by a few diehards in the southern US).

That meant he fought on the side of states defined by slavery – it was their one common point – although he called it “a moral and political evil” and personally freed his slaves. He fought against the Union, although he considered the so-called right of states to secede as “idle talk.”

So why did he fight on the slave-holding Secessionists’ side?

His father, “Light Horse Harry” Lee died a disgraced bankrupt, but in his youth he’d been a dashing cavalry commander in the army George Washington led to fight for independence from Britain. The father had claimed “Virginia is my country; her will I obey, however lamentable the fate to which it may subject me.” Virginia came first.

Likewise, Robert Lee, the son, claimed “if the government is disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people, and save in defence will draw my sword on none.”

So Lee turned down the opportunity to take overall command of the forces of the Union to which he was ostensibly committed, even though it was offered to him not just by a Northerner, the President, Abraham Lincoln, but by the Commanding General of the Army, Winfield Scott – who was a Virginian like Lee. Indeed, another Virginian, George H. Thomas, had a distinguished career as a general on the Union side, and a distant cousin of Lee, Samuel Phillips Lee became an Admiral in the Union navy.

Many admire Lee’s commitment to the principle that he could not fight against his own country, which he saw as being Virginia rather than the United States.

I however have real trouble with that notion. He was undoubtedly a man of conscience, and it’s apparently honourable to live by one’s conscience. But surely the admiration ends when doing so leads to your fighting for two bad causes, secession and slavery, especially if you believe in neither?

Robert E. Lee: principled and honest,
but for the wrong cause – which he didn't even believe in

It’s like Thatcher’s courage. It would have been wonderful, employed in furthering a good cause. it was lamentable when used for a bad one.

It isn’t abstract principle that counts. It’s the concrete application made of it.

Have the Tories converted to anti-Imperialism? But stayed true to the idea that the rest of us should pay?

The Conservative Party has always been the party of Empire, rejoicing in the grandeur of Britain’s imperial past. So it takes some courage for that party, of all parties, to turn its back on that juicy part of our island story.

Before, however, we get carried away with admiration for this refreshing change in viewpoint, we should bear in mind that they probably don’t realise that’s what they’ve done.

In his annual speech at the Mansion House in the City of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer this year announced his commitment to keeping the government budget in surplus. Not just on his watch but, with legal backing, for all governments to come. That sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? Stop borrowing – sounds like good housekeeping. Wipe out debt – got to be liberating.

George Osborne
In his Mansion House speech, he disowned Britain's imperial tradition

Curiously, though, it’s the opposite of what, for Tories, put the Great in Britain. Which was the building of an Empire and becoming a world power. 

When the process started, at the end of the 17th century, the British national debt was pretty much zero. But by 1763, the end of the Seven Years War when Britain won pre-eminence in India and North America, the debt had grown to £123 million – £21 billion in today’s terms.

Now that’s not much compared to the current British national debt, which is £1.56 trillion. However, today’s figure represents 82% of GDP; the figure in 1763 represented an eye-watering 156% of GDP.

By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain had won undisputed world leadership, the debt stood at 237% of GDP.

It seems it was by incurring debt that Britain became Great. At least in the terms Tories understand greatness, equated with dominance over others. Interestingly, the worst setback to Britain’s growth as a global superpower, came when it tried to reduce debt.

From 1765 onwards, Britain decided that it was time that the colonies it claimed to be protecting in the Seven Years War, should help it defray some of its expenses. Over the next five years, it attempted to impose a series of taxes on its North American possessions. But that only led to increasing bitterness among the colonists, flaring up into first resistance, occasionally violence, followed by open war in 1775 and a Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Finally, in 1783, Britain’s attempt to reduce its debt on the backs of the North Americans, led to its definitive loss of the colonies. And at a cost of £250 million, to boot – over twice the amount of the debt in the first place. 

Ironically, this was the result of attempting to do the exact opposite – reduce debt – or, in other words, to pursue the very policies of their Tory successors today. The policies championed by George Osborne. 

It’s strange how attempts to make brutal reductions in national debt can backfire – adding to the debt, while at the same time denying the nation success in achieving its goals.

On the other hand, many of us on the left are glad to see the end of Empire. It did little for the common people of Britain, and was often gained at the price of their sacrifice – if the colonised peoples suffered most, the poor of Britain were frequently not far behind in undergoing privations imposed by imperialism: they provided the foot soldiers for the forces on which it rested, and for the industries that kept them operating.

You might think that as a result we ought to be pleased by Osborne’s decision to take the anti-imperialist route of reducing national debt, instead of the road to national greatness that traditionally involves incurring more.

The trouble is that one thing will not have changed, between the phase of growing Empire and Osborne’s latter-day conversion to anti-imperialism. Between Tory drives to incur debt or to reduce it. To extend British power or to reduce it.

It will, as ever, be the ordinary citizen who will foot the bill for their policies.

Military force: limited, however great it may be

It’s hard to understand what prevents the United States understanding that, faced with a popularly supported insurrection of a majority of a population, even the most powerful military force on earth can only ever gain a temporary advantage.

What happens is that an occupying military force tends to alienate even those who are initially sympathetic to its aims. Foreign soldiers aren’t good at distinguishing between their enemies from their friends within a civilian population. They tend, therefore, to treat them all as hostile. And treating people as hostile generally means treating them badly, imposing martial law, for instance, denying their rights, even confiscating their property, and generally being arrogant, high-handed and brutal.

The result is that disaffection grows. What might have been a relatively small, localised antipathy quickly spreads, so that ultimately large swaths of the population are at least passive opponents, so that even if they don’t join the active insurgents, they don’t resist them and may even succour them. This affects every part of the occupied nation. Even those who are drafted in to support the occupiers, in some kind of locally recruited military force, lose their stomach for the fight or even worse, turn against their erstwhile allies.

They’re often quick to spot what’s happening themselves. Here’s a comment from one officer in a locally raised militia, on the behaviour of his supposed allies, and its effect on alienating the support they were initially offered.

… the people in general are becoming indifferent, if not averse, to a government which in place of the liberty, prosperity, safety and plenty, under promise of which it involved them in this war, has established a thorough despotism.

What’s got me thinking about these things?

It could have been the fall of Ramadi in Iraq. Units of the national army, exhausted and their enthusiasm worn thin, eventually collapsed in the face of the advance of ISIS, which occupied the large and strategically vital city earlier this month. There are reports of a counter-attack making some progress, but there’s clearly a hard battle ahead. Meanwhile, the civilian population is suffering the brutality that comes with ISIS rule. The Dubya-Blair assumption that all they had to do was overthrow Saddam Hussein by military force, to usher in a friendlier and democratically-inclined regime in Iraq, has been exposed as massively misguided.

The ruins of Palmyra: memento of an Empire
Now occupied by ISIS

Alternatively, the fall of Palmyra in Syria could have prompted my thoughts on this theme. Palmyra is one of the great cultural centres of the world. At one point, it stood at the heart of an Empire which for a time resisted the power of the Romans. The remains of that culture are a precious world heritage. ISIS have occupied that city too and, though they’re promising to respect the ruins, there’s no guarantee that they will. And meanwhile the civilian population is suffering the brutality that comes with ISIS rule.

But in fact it was neither of these events that got reflecting on the hopelessness of using military force to crush an insurrection.

Amazon’s streaming video service is currently offering viewers a series called Turn: Washington’s spies. Well acted and constructed, it also opened my eyes to an aspect of history that I knew little about: George Washington’s highly professional use of a spy ring against the British in the American War of Independence. It focuses on the so-called Culper ring that spied on the British in occupied New York.

Jamie Bell in the role of Abraham Woodull
a key figure in the Culper ring of spies

As it happens, the series, though entertaining, also suffers from some of the flaws of any soap. A narrative that would have been far more believable had it stuck to the historical record moves increasingly away from it as the series advances, until it becomes frankly implausible. So I’ve turned to the book on which it’s based, Alexander Rose’s Washington’s Spies. And I’ve found it fascinating.

You may have noticed that the remark I quoted earlier was a little archaic in its style. it comes from the book, and the person quoted was a loyalist – i.e. pro-British – officer in a Militia unit. He voiced his complaint in 1779, and what he was lamenting was the way the British, then probably the most powerful military nation on Earth, were driving loyal supporters like himself into the arms of those they regarded as rebels.

Benjamin Tallmadge
As a younger man, he ran the Culper ring, reporting to Washington

Which is why the Americans really ought to know better. They’ve been on the receiving end of the alienating behaviour of military occupiers. And they were able to turn it to their favour, to gain the ultimate victory.

The British, too, who lost their colonies through their own blundering actions, ought to have learned their lesson. Over two centuries ago.

And that brings me back to the intervention of both nations in Iraq.

What on earth were we thinking of?