Humanity - Equality - Destiny

As preparations begin in earnest for the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, while Canada prepares to boycott the Commonwealth Conference in Sr Lanka, and while The Gambia has just withdrawn from the Commonwealth because of British criticism of her human rights record, we need to be quite clear what the Commonwealth is, and what the Commonwealth is not.

The Commonwealth is a social and cultural institution. It has not been a military alliance in the post-War period, and the basis on which it was one during and before the War is unrecognisable from its character during almost, if almost, the whole of the period since 1945.

Two of its members went to war with each other as early as 1947, when, in King George VI, they both had the same Head of State. Six of its members, five of them headed by the Queen, invaded another one, also headed by the Queen, under American command in 1983.

The Commonwealth never was much of a trading bloc; there were always huge exceptions to things like Commonwealth Preference. Any aspiration in that direction ended with British accession to the European Communities. Forty years ago. By and under the Conservatives.

And it has not stood still in the intervening period. Those who used to want the United Kingdom to withdraw from it, but who now see it as some kind of alternative to the EU, are living in the most extraordinary fantasy world, in which India, or Canada, or Australia, or any of a host of other countries might be even vaguely interested in such an arrangement.

Mention of Canada and Australia reminds one that those countries which retain the same monarch as we have (there are other monarchs in the Commonwealth, as there always have been), do so for their own reasons, which have no bearing on us. After all, how are we affected by that decision of theirs? How were we affected when any previous Commonwealth Realm became a republic in the conventional sense? For example, Sri Lanka? Or The Gambia?

Nor is it true that those mattered hardly, if at all, to us, whereas Canada, Australia and New Zealand have essentially British cultures. Does Lynton Crosby manifest an essentially British culture? Not according to UKIP, for a start.

A country in which, in the Australian case, the Southern English working class got a kind of homeland of its own, unrestrained by the mores or even by the accents of certain other sections of British society, did not have such a culture even when its inhabitants were predominantly descended, mostly in the very recent past, from the inhabitants of these Islands. But even that is no longer the case: fewer than half of Australians are now of British or Irish descent. They keep the Queen because that works for them. It has nothing to do with us.

Australians, New Zealanders and white South Africans are also the biggest stayers-behind in this country once their visas have run out. Yet Lynton Crosby sent no un-British vans screaming "Go Home" into their centres of population in London, and they have them.

Sex-selective abortion seems very largely to have been imported from the Commonwealth's principal centre of population, the Indian Subcontinent. Not that I doubt that our own upper classes have recourse to it, without troubling the National Health Service or, in another sense, the Daily Telegraph, just as certain media outlets may scream at a 15-year-old girl on a council estate who has a baby, as a few of them do, but not a 15-year-old girl on a country estate who has an abortion, as a lot of them do.

Nor has sex-selective abortion anything to do with Islam; practising Muslims are probably the section of either British or Indian society least likely to seek an abortion under any circumstance. Like caste discrimination, this kind of thing, historically and doubtless often still manifest as female infanticide, has almost unimaginably deep roots on the Indian Subcontinent and continues to be practised to some extent within most or all groups there.

People whose families have been Catholics in Goa for five hundred years, or Christians of various kinds in Kerala for at least three and possibly four times that long, are known to practise caste as a matter of course. If this does not also go on, then I should be extremely surprised.

But born again Commonwealth enthusiasts, who once shared Margaret Thatcher's scorn for it because of South Africa or Enoch Powell's simple scorn for it, are particularly keen on an economic and strategic alliance with India, which they fancifully suppose would continue to regard Britain as an equal or even a senior partner, nearly seventy years after independence.

Enjoy the Commonwealth Games. Enjoy all manifestations of the Commonwealth as a social and cultural club. That is what it is. That is pretty much all that it has ever been. And that, with which there is nothing wrong and a great deal right, is all that it is ever going to be.